My Review of Digital Is The Cash by Nathaniel Luz
So I have decided to start writing reviews of books I read starting with this one titled Digital Is The Cash by Nathaniel Luz, Dash Lead for Nigeria. The title sounds a little weird or don’t you think so too? Anyway this is the author’s first book and my first book review so let’s see how we both fare.
The book is blockchain/cryptocurrency focused with the cryptocurrency, Dash in view. It starts from the fundamentals, Money. To understand cryptocurrencies and why they are important you have to understand money. It walks through the history of money and talks about the gold standard although it doesn’t go too deep it’s enough for a headstart. It then goes on to talk about banking and finance and how fintech and the blockchain are onboarding the unbanked and improving the financial activities/services of the underbanked through USSDs, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and the internet.
The book won’t be complete without a section dedicated to the blockchain — the fascinating infrastructure behind all cryptocurrencies. The blockchain is explained without the usual technical jargons, 😆 you know what I mean and wallets — software for holding cryptocurrencies are also introduced. Of course, the blockchain would be worthless if it didn’t add value to our lives, I mean who would want to use something worthless or considered so by almost everyone. I bet you don’t store your urine or do you? That aside the benefits of the blockchain were well explained. Finally, Dash and it’s features that make it unique and supposedly better than bitcoin were well broken down. The features include Masternodes, privacy, and speed. I had heard somewhere that Dash was a (Decentralized Autonomous Organisation) DAO, this feature is enabled by the Masternodes as I have been made to understand.
“People want banking services but they do not want to have dealings with the bank.”
As much as I have summarised the book I wouldn’t want to leave the clear point portrayed by the above sentence from the book. It tells us an obvious fact that we can exist and carry out financial activities without ever having to own a bank account. Cool right? Now we can all say 👋 and good riddance to long queues and the ungrateful individual who always follows us to the bank and makes sure our pens go missing.
Some concepts were introduced which I still don’t get a hang of like Proof of Service (PoSe) a mechanism used to monitor master nodes on the Dash network and the question “is Dash subject to chain analysis?” since it claims its a privacy coin — it’s privacy is optional.
If you are a beginner in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space I’d highly recommend it for you as it’ll give you a headstart as you dive into this space. If you aren’t a beginner I’d say you should find a bigger fish to fry elsewhere except you might be interested in Dash and would like to know more about it.
If this was enough for you to get an insight an what this book is all about and to make a decision on whether to read it or not, don’t forget to leave a 👏 .
