Essay1850
The Law (La Loi)
Frédéric Bastiat
What happens when the law itself becomes the instrument of plunder? Bastiat wrote it in the year of his death, and it reads like a commentary on today.
Mises Institute (gratis)Read
Codex
Waarom Block #9 does this.
Block #9 isn't just about prices. This page collects the texts everything else rests on: the whitepapers of the most important protocols, the manifestos of the people who saw privacy as a right, and the books about money, power and freedom. Everything links back to the original source, read it yourself, don't take our word for it.
Whitepapers
9
Original protocols
Manifestos & essays
8
Cypherpunk to Bastiat
Books
13
Money, state and networks
Oldest text
1850
The lineage runs further back than crypto
The system we don't want
Our editorial stance, in short
Money is the infrastructure of your life. Whoever issues it decides what it's worth; whoever controls the payment rails decides what you may buy, and from whom. For centuries that was an abstract debate. Since payments went digital, it's a practical one: an account can be frozen, a transaction refused, an amount programmed with an expiry date or a spending condition.
We aren't against banks, against governments or against rules. We're against the idea that you need permission to own, to save and to pay. A system where one party holds the switch is a system where freedom is a favour. Open protocols reverse that: the rules live in code anyone can read, and no one can change them unilaterally.
That's why we publish prices and context, criticism and explanation. Bitcoin is not an investment we're pushing, and self-custody is no promise of profit. It's a choice about who holds the key. Everyone deserves to be free, and freedom starts with understanding how the money system actually works.
30 texts · chronological · last reviewed on 17 August 2026
Book1944
The Road to Serfdom
Friedrich A. Hayek
Hayek's warning that central planning, even with good intentions, devours freedom. Written during the war, and the reason we can name «the system we don't want».
University of Chicago PressRead
Essay1945
The Use of Knowledge in Society
Friedrich A. Hayek
Why no one, no minister, no algorithm, knows enough to steer an economy. Prices are information, and that's precisely why an open market works.
EconlibRead
Book1946
Economics in One Lesson
Henry Hazlitt
One lesson, applied twenty times: don't just look at what you see, but also at what isn't happening. The best vaccine against bad economic headlines.
Mises Institute (gratis)Read
Book1949
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
Not a book about money, but about what remains of a person when everything they do is seen and recorded. Programmable money makes that scenario technically feasible.
PenguinRead
Essay1974
Anatomy of the State
Murray N. Rothbard
A cool dissection of what a state is and how it sustains itself. You don't have to agree with everything to become sharper from it.
Mises Institute (gratis)Read
Whitepaper1983
Blind Signatures for Untraceable Payments
David Chaum
The starting point of digital cash: payments can be auditable AND anonymous. Chaum foresaw the surveillance state before the internet even existed.
Nakamoto InstituteRead
Manifesto1988
The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
Timothy C. May
The prediction that cryptography would change the nature of corporations, taxes, and government control. Written at a hacker conference, forty years too early and yet spot on.
Essay1991
Why I Wrote PGP
Philip Zimmermann
Zimmermann was investigated for years for giving encryption to ordinary people. His defense is the shortest lesson on why «I have nothing to hide» is not an argument.
Manifesto1993
A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
Eric Hughes
«Privacy is not secrecy.» Two pages explaining why you should write code yourself if you want freedom, instead of asking for it.
Book1994
The Creature from Jekyll Island
G. Edward Griffin
The origin of the Federal Reserve, told as a chronicle. Controversial and polemical, read it critically, but read it, because it set the tone for an entire movement.
Reality ZoneRead
Manifesto1996
A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
John Perry Barlow
Written in Davos, addressed to «governments of the industrial world». Still the sharpest formulation of why networks are not inherently state-owned.
Book1997
The Sovereign Individual
James Dale Davidson & Lord William Rees-Mogg
Predicted in 1997 that digital, intangible wealth would erode the power of the nation-state. Some chapters read like a description of the present.
Penguin Random HouseRead
Whitepaper1998
b-money
Wei Dai
Ten years before Bitcoin: a sketch of a community where contracts are enforced by mathematics instead of by violence. Satoshi cites it as the first reference.
Whitepaper2002
Hashcash, A Denial of Service Counter-Measure
Adam Back
The proof-of-work that Bitcoin adopted, originally conceived against spam. Imposing costs on abuse without appointing a central gatekeeper.
hashcash.orgRead
Essay2005
Bit Gold
Nick Szabo
Szabo reasons back from the question of why gold worked as money and constructs its digital equivalent. Indispensable for understanding why scarcity requires computation.
Nakamoto InstituteRead
Whitepaper2008
Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System
Satoshi Nakamoto
Nine pages describing how to send value without a bank, judge, or license. Everything that came after refers back to this document.
Book2008
The Ethics of Money Production
Jörg Guido Hülsmann
The moral question rarely asked: is it fair that a small group can create new money? Free and fully available.
Mises Institute (gratis)Read
Whitepaper2013
CryptoNote v2.0
Nicolas van Saberhagen
The foundation of Monero: paying without your entire financial history being publicly and permanently searchable. Privacy as a default setting, not an option.
getmonero.orgRead
Whitepaper2014
Ethereum Whitepaper: A Next-Generation Smart Contract Platform
Vitalik Buterin
The idea of using a blockchain not just for money but as an open computer on which anyone can publish agreements that no one can revoke.
Whitepaper2014
Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin
Ben-Sasson, Chiesa, Garman e.a.
The academic work behind zero-knowledge proofs in financial transactions: proving a payment is correct without revealing who pays what.
z.cashRead
Book2015
Digital Gold
Nathaniel Popper
The journalistic history of the early years: the people, the quarrels, the bankruptcies. A useful counterweight for those who think this was a straight line.
HarperCollinsRead
Whitepaper2016
The Bitcoin Lightning Network
Joseph Poon & Thaddeus Dryja
How to handle millions of small payments off-chain without relinquishing control of the final settlement. Scalability without permission.
lightning.networkRead
Book2018
The Bitcoin Standard
Saifedean Ammous
The history of money from shells to central banks, with the question of what happens when money becomes scarce again. The most widely read book in the sector.
saifedean.comRead
Whitepaper2020
Nostr, Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays
fiatjaf e.a.
Publishing without a platform: your identity is a key, not an account that someone can close. The same logic as open money, applied to speech.
nostr-protocol (NIPs)Read
Book2020
The Price of Tomorrow
Jeff Booth
Technology makes everything cheaper, while policy wants inflation at all costs. Booth shows why these two forces don't go together.
thepriceoftomorrow.comRead
Book2021
Layered Money
Nik Bhatia
Money as a pyramid of layers, from gold to central bank to commercial bank to app. It helps to see which layer you're actually on.
nikbhatia.comRead
Book2021
The Blocksize War
Jonathan Bier
The account of the conflict that revealed who truly governs an open protocol: not the companies, not the miners, but the users running their own node.
blocksizewar.comRead
Book2023
Broken Money
Lyn Alden
Why the monetary system works the way it does, explained via the speed of information versus the speed of value. Sober, technical, and without proselytizing.
lynalden.comRead
Book2023
Mastering Bitcoin
Andreas M. Antonopoulos
The technical handbook, free to read online. Anyone who wants to understand what's behind a transaction starts here, not with a YouTube explanation.
bitcoinbook (open source)Read
How to read this list
Start with the four pieces under Start here: the Bitcoin whitepaper for the technology, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto for the attitude, The Law for the political question and Broken Money for today's system. Together they're an evening's reading, and the rest follows naturally after that.
We don't stand behind every sentence in every book. Some titles are polemical, some predictions never came true. They're here because they shaped the debate, not because they're right. Prefer to learn the technology step by step? Head to Crypto explained or to our research notes. Missing a text that belongs here? Let us know via the editorial team.
External links open in a new window. Block #9 hosts no copies of copyrighted work; books link to the author or publisher, free works to the rights holder who publishes them.