Reconstructed from the transcript archive

The books they read on air

Between 2014 and 2019 World Crypto Network put books on air in two quite different ways, and the difference turns out to matter more than the booklist does. Two were read aloud, chapter by chapter, one of them with every instance of the word “gold” swapped for “Bitcoin”. Three others were read at home and argued about on camera. This is what was read, in what order, and how we know.

28 reading broadcasts · 8 book-club broadcasts · 4 reading-group broadcasts · 2014-07-24 to 2019-05-18 · compiled 2026-10-15

01Read aloud, chapter by chapter

Both verbatim readings were done by Max Hillebrand, alone, in daily instalments, and both are Mises Institute titles he names and credits at the top of nearly every episode. They are also the only two books in this archive whose reading order can be reconstructed exactly, because he announces the chapter at the start and sums up what he covered at the end. Those two sentences, at both ends of 28 broadcasts, are the evidence for everything in the tables below.

What it argues. Rothbard's hundred-page primer asks how money comes to exist at all, and answers that it emerges from barter as the most saleable commodity — not from a decree. From there he argues that every subsequent government involvement in money, from the mint monopoly through debasement to central banking and the abandonment of gold, is a species of the same act: issuing claims in excess of the thing claimed. It is the compressed, polemical version of an argument Rothbard made at length elsewhere, and it is short enough to read in an evening, which is most of why it has stayed in print since 1963.

Why it mattered to this audience. Because the argument is about a commodity money with a fixed and knowable supply, and in 2018 that description had a new referent. The channel's own playlist note puts the claim at its highest: “Max simply replaces the word ‘gold’ with ‘Bitcoin’ showing how Rothbard has predicted all major events of Bitcoin in 1963.”

And that is literally what the recording is. This is not a reading followed by commentary. The substitution happens inside the sentences, live, as he reads — and not only for “gold”. Rothbard's Crusoe and Friday become Alice and Bob, the cryptographer's stock characters; his “men” become “peers”.

He is candid that the substitution is the whole exercise, and equally candid that someone else reads it better — a nod to Jeff Riggenbach, who narrated the Mises Institute audiobook.

The reading order, as announced on air

Chapter numbering follows the Mises online edition, where the Introduction is part I and “Money in a Free Society” is part II — which is also how he reads it out (“the second part and the first chapter”). Some printings number these I and II instead.

Where it stops. The last instalment is the summary of Part II, and he says so: “today we finally get to finish up on the amazing book — well, the first part of it at least.” Parts III and IV — Government Meddling With Money and The Monetary Breakdown of the West, which is to say the entire historical and political half — were never read. Three later episodes in the same strand (Fractional Reserve, Preventing Fractional Reserve, Gresham's Law) touch Part III themes, but they are viewer questions answered in his own words, not readings, and the channel correctly kept them out of the book playlist.

What it argues. Hülsmann asks a question most monetary economics does not: not whether a monetary arrangement is efficient, but whether it is just. He argues that money is properly a privately produced good like any other; that inflation is best understood as falsification — issuing a certificate for a thing you do not hold — and that the apparatus which makes this lawful (legal tender laws, deposit insurance, bailout guarantees) has no ethical grounding. The book's last section, which the reading never reached, turns to what it calls the cultural and spiritual consequences of fiat money.

Why it mattered to this audience. It supplied the word the channel used constantly. “Ethical money production” had already been an episode title three months before the reading began, and the ethics-first framing — that the objection to central banking is moral rather than merely technical — is the register Hillebrand's own series is written in.

He opens the first instalment by naming the book, its author, its publication date, and the Mises Institute's role, then reads the preface and the entire table of contents aloud — which is how we know what he intended to cover, and therefore exactly how far short he stopped.

The reading order, as announced on air

This one is recoverable to sub-chapter precision, because he names the chapter and the numbered section at the start, and lists what he covered at the end. Chapter 4 is the interesting case: it is a long chapter with eight numbered sections, and it took him five broadcasts, at a granularity he used nowhere else.

Where it stops, and what that leaves out. The last broadcast is 2019-03-09, chapter 8. From the contents he had read out two weeks earlier, that leaves unread: the rest of Part 2 — legal monopolies, legal tender laws, legalised suspension of payments, paper money, and the chapter on the cultural and spiritual legacy of fiat inflation — and the whole of Part 3 on monetary orders and systems. He stops without announcing a stop; the next day's episode is simply about something else. Roughly half the book was read and the series was never resumed.

02Read at home, argued about on air

The other three books were never read aloud. They were homework. This is a genuinely different format and it produces a different kind of record: there is no reading order to reconstruct, only an agreed reading pace, and what survives is the argument rather than the text.

The World Crypto Book Club, 2014

Ten rows in the archive, 2014-07-24 to 2014-10-03, and a format stated in the opening minute of the first one. It is hosted by Thomas Hunt with a co-host he introduces as Nick, and the premise is not economics at all — it is that cyberpunk fiction had already described the thing they were all now living in.

What it is, and why this room. Stephenson's 1992 novel is set in a collapsed United States run by franchised corporate enclaves, with a parallel virtual world called the Metaverse — the book that gave that word its current meaning. Its relevance to a 2014 cryptocurrency channel is almost embarrassingly direct: private jurisdictions, a currency that is not the state's, and identity as something you hold rather than something you are issued. The club picked it first for exactly that reason, and the host's enthusiasm for it is the most unguarded thing in the whole strand.

Two further rows are not broadcasts. “World Crypto Book Club” (2014-08-14) and “World Crypto Book Club #2” (2014-08-15) sit in the audio lane and carry no usable transcript — the files on disk are empty. They appear to be podcast re-posts of the live sessions. They are listed because omitting them would make the row count in this report disagree with the archive, not because they add anything.

What it is. Gibson's first novel, the book that named cyberspace and established most of the furniture the genre has used since: a burnt-out console cowboy, artificial intelligences manoeuvring for their own freedom, corporate extraterritoriality. For this audience the pull is the same as Snow Crash's and a decade earlier.

The pace is a small, real detail about 2014. Setting the week's portion by percentage rather than page number, because the Kindle had stopped showing page numbers, is the kind of thing that only shows up in a transcript:

It ends there. Part 2 is the last World Crypto Book Club broadcast in the archive — the club covered two of Neuromancer's intended four portions and stopped. Nothing in the episode announces an ending; they sign off as usual (“until next time, goodbye Nick”). What they do in the last few minutes is read something else aloud: the closing paragraphs of The Conscience of a Hacker, the 1986 Loyd Blankenship essay universally known as the Hacker Manifesto, prompted by a listener's Cryptonomicon reference. It is the only verbatim reading in the whole book-club strand, and it is of a text nobody had put on the list.

The Bitcoin Reading Group, 2019

Max Hillebrand's second format, and the opposite of his first. Where Bitcoin to the Max was one voice reading a book, the Bitcoin Reading Group is four or five people who have read it separately. He reads exactly one paragraph aloud — the non-aggression axiom that opens the book — and then says plainly what the format is.

He is explicit, the following week, that the book is scaffolding rather than syllabus: the plan is to use it “as a loose starting point for our conversation, but we pretty soon will be rambling along some crazy rabbit hole that we find.” Which is why no chapter-by- chapter order exists for this one. The only numbered chapter named on air in the four sessions is chapter 11, The Public Sector, on 2019-05-11.

A fifth row carries the strand name and is not about this book. “BlockFi & Fractional Reserve ~ Bitcoin Reading Group” (2019-03-30) predates the series and discusses a lending product, not For a New Liberty. It is excluded from the count of four above and listed here so the exclusion is visible rather than silent.

03A sixth book, with no transcript

04Readings that are not books

Three further strands use the same read-it-out format and are kept separate here because calling them books would be wrong. All three are Hillebrand, all three run alongside the book readings, and together they are substantially more output than the books are — which is itself the point: the reading format was a general-purpose tool on this channel, not a literary occasion.

The ZeroLink framework — a technical specification

14 broadcasts, 2018-12-22 to 2019-01-17. A section-by-section reading of the ZeroLink Bitcoin fungibility framework, the spec behind Wasabi Wallet's Chaumian CoinJoin implementation. Structurally this is the closest thing to the book readings — it has an introduction, a protocol walk-through, attack analyses and a checklist, read in order — but its subject is a specification document, not a published work.

The bitcoin-dev mailing list — correspondence

13 playlist members, 2019-03-03 to 2019-05-15; 12 held in the archive. Readings of individual threads from the Bitcoin development mailing list — the SegWit v1 proposal, Taproot, Graftroot, the Schnorr BIP — at considerable length: the SegWit v1 episode runs 51 minutes.

One member of this playlist is a tombstone. Position 5, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRhCQrzUYp8 — ✕ private video; checked 2026-10-15, returns LOGIN_REQUIRED / “Private video”. It is shown rather than dropped so the playlist's real shape is visible. One further member, SXw2CqPc3jc, is listed twice in the playlist by the channel; it appears once in the table.

Bitcoin Optech — a newsletter

48 playlist members, 2018-12-09 to 2019-07-09 — the largest of all these strands, and larger than both book readings combined. Weekly readings of the Bitcoin Optech technical newsletter, numbered to match the issues. Listed in full in the sources rather than here, for length.

05A note on the covers — all five are rendered

06How the quotes were handled

07What this page does not claim

• Episode end-points are established only where a sign-off states them. For the Hülsmann reading he names what he covered at the end of each episode, so the coverage column is evidence. For Rothbard the start of each episode is named and the end is inferred from the next episode's start.
• No claim is made that this is every book ever mentioned on WCN — only every one given a reading or a discussion strand of its own. The sweep behind it is a title match across all 5,703 WCN and Mad Bitcoins rows carrying a video id, plus the membership of 14 playlists; a book discussed inside an episode about something else would not surface.
• Nothing here has been promoted into the show registry. The strand counts above are not WCN episode counts and have not been added to any.

08Sources

Two kinds of material went into this page and they are kept apart, because the separation is the point. Archive is the local transcript corpus and the channel's own playlist metadata — everything in sections 01 to 04. Outside is publisher information used only to describe the books as objects and to settle the licence question in §05. No outside source is used to support a claim about what was said on air, and no transcript is used to support a claim about a licence.