Book Review: The Infinite Machine: How An Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum, by Camila Russo
The Infinite Machine: How An Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum tells the story of the technology platform created by child prodigy Vitalik Buterin at 19 years old in 2014. Ethereum has become the world's second-largest blockchain, after Bitcoin, and Ether, its native cryptocurrency, currently trades at around $4,000 per token and half a trillion dollars in market capitalisation, making Vitalik a reluctant multi-billionaire in the process.
The book is written narrative-style. But while it reads like a novel, the author, Camila Russo, a crypto-focused journalist and podcaster, is explicit that no parts were fictionalised. The Infinite Machine presents a historical record, rather than a future view, as its full title might suggest, of the Ethereum co-founders' unified vision (there are eight). To be fair, that would be difficult considering the numerous interpersonal and ideological conflicts between them and others in the core contributor circle in the five years until 2019 when the book ends. By then, the massive ICO mania of 2017 and 2018 has calmed down and Ether is trading at a significant discount to its all-time high of over $1,000. Seven of the co-founders, now crypto-rich, have moved on to other projects.
The Infinite Machine starts, in essence, with a solo Vitalik. He’s building a reputation in online forums while writing for Bitcoin Magazine, developing white papers and collaborating on other people's ambitious Bitcoin-enhancing and blockchain-based projects. He converges on the idea of a decentralised, open-source global supercomputer, effectively a souped-up Bitcoin powered by code-based, auto-executing smart contracts. The book then takes us on a journey, literally around the world, from Bitcoin meet-ups and hacker houses to huge developer conferences and grotty motels. We experience massive cyber hacks and multi-million dollar capital raises, many of which ultimately broke US securities rules. We are led to see ICOs as Ethereum's first killer app and to wonder if, in decentralised finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the platform may have found use cases that Vitalik values. Camila carefully weaves in important events, numerous people, inflection points and debates that characterise Ethereum's past and present.
The Infinite Machine ends with a once-again solitary Vitalik. He's now focused on evangelising Ethereum and solving the platform's most critical existential problems: high "gas" (transaction fees) and scalability. As head of the Ethereum Foundation, Vitalik is leading research, debating platform upgrades, and supporting initiatives for the large, growing ecosystem of developers and entrepreneurs building on top of the platform he conceptualised. It's a compelling story.
The book does an excellent job of providing an introductory roadmap and bookends for anyone that might be crypto-curious. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the vast and often complex information online. Thankfully, Camila rarely glosses over the technology itself. Instead, she simplifies technical terms and uses analogy to explain functional trade-offs, for example, at one point, using a Star Trek illustration to describe a defensive white-hat strategy the team executed in response to a massive hack that threatened the first decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), and indirectly, Ethereum’s momentum and platform integrity. It didn’t work, and the team eventually executed a hard fork of the original blockchain. That decision plagues Ethereum to this day and causes its critics to question its true decentralisation. The hard fork also explains the existence of Ethereum Classic.
The Infinite Machine contextualises a number of buzzwords currently circling crypto (like consensus algorithms, NFTs, DAOs, DeFi, ICOs). It also weaves a high-level historical and cultural fabric that's increasingly hard to unearth as the global community grows in scope and complexity. I came away with a good foundation of key ideas that shape Ethereum (and cryptocurrencies in general), plus some easter eggs as I continue to dig into Web 3.0 and the future of the internet.
Two things were missing for me, though. First, Vitalik still feels enigmatic and, fittingly enough, somewhat ethereal. I'd have liked to ground my understanding of him in a few more meaningful details of his life: specific events that shaped him, motivations that drive him. That said, it's understandable that Camila didn't choose to focus too heavily on him or anyone else, treating the most prominent people fairly evenly, as supporting characters. She decided to make the technology -- Ethereum -- the book's main character, and I think she executed that decision well.
Second, there were disappointingly few women. When they did appear, their portrayal was usually uninspiring. There was Roxana, Mihai Alisie's girlfriend (plus at one point, another unnamed girlfriend of a core contributor) living in the Zug hacker house; Ashley Tyson, who asked reasonable questions about the technology in the very early days and "was never fully satisfied with the half-baked answers she was getting"; Ming Chan, who was essentially villainised for doing her job as ED of the Ethereum Foundation; Taylor Monahan, who built the first user-friendly Ethereum wallet, My Ether Wallet, and received online abuse from the male-dominated community as thanks; and Galia Bernatzi, co-founder of Bancor, a decentralised liquidity pool that raised over $150 million in three hours at the peak of the ICO mania in 2017, but didn't deploy a product for two years.
The fact is, women have played historically important roles in technology development. I’d love to read a book about "the women of Ethereum (or blockchain)". Interestingly, Charles Hodgkinson, one of the eight Ethereum co-founders, created Cardano (incidentally, hyped as one of the potential Ethereum-killers) and named its cryptocurrency, Ada ($ADA), after Ada Lovelace, a 19th-century mathematician, the first computer programmer and daughter of the poet, Lord Byron. More generally, we also know the influential role women played as the first computers.
Overall, I'd score The Infinite Machine 7.5 out of 10. It's a well-researched, engaging and easy read, if a little slow to warm up initially and, from time to time, unnecessarily bogged down in uninfluential side characters.