UNSPENDABLE
Why Bitcoin fails as money.
What would you do with all the bitcoin in the world?
Imagine a lottery offers you a choice. You can have every bitcoin in existence, worth about $2 trillion on paper. Or you can have $2 trillion of American farmland, roughly 340 million acres that farmers would rent from you for about $55 billion a year. The farmland pays you whether or not anyone believes in it. The bitcoin pays you nothing, ever.
Bitcoin began as a promise: electronic cash with no bank in the middle. Seventeen years later, it carries less than one hundredth of one percent of the world’s payments, and almost no one spends it. So the story changed, from cash to digital gold to a reserve asset. With each new story, the price rose and the original purpose slipped further away.
In Unspendable, Ludovic Trottier follows that retreat through the technology, the economics and the people who keep the story alive. He explains why Bitcoin cannot carry more payments without giving up what makes it Bitcoin. Its public ledger strips away privacy and lets coins be refused for where they have been. People on crypto networks spend dollar stablecoins instead of bitcoin. A fixed supply of 21 million coins is not the same thing as value. The fees meant to pay for Bitcoin’s security fell below 1% of miners’ income by 2026, and the mining reward keeps halving. The book also shows how Bitcoin helps people whose own governments have turned the banks against them.
This book is for the quiet skeptic, the reader who senses that something does not add up and gets told to “have fun staying poor.” It takes Bitcoin’s strongest claims seriously, concedes where it meets a real need, and shows where the design and the arithmetic stop supporting the story.
So the story changed
First, electronic cash
The 2008 white paper promised payments with no bank in the middle. Almost no one pays with it.
Then, digital gold
When few people used it to pay, it became a scarce store of value, capped at 21 million coins.
Now, a reserve asset
Companies and governments are urged to hold it. With each new story, the price rose.
Inside the book
Twenty-five chapters in three parts, with an introduction, a conclusion, a reader’s toolkit, a glossary, a timeline from 2008 to 2026, and notes for every sourced claim.
- The Promise
What Bitcoin promised, who decides what it is, and every way the cash promise fails: throughput, privacy, self-custody, competition and the stablecoins that won the use case.
1. The Problem Satoshi Solved (and the One He Didn't) · 2. Nobody Is in Charge (Which Means Someone Is) · 3. Seven Transactions per Second · 4. The Surveillance Ledger · 5. Tainted · 6. Be Your Own Bank (Until You Lose Everything) · 7. Wise Already Won · 8. Property, Not Money · 9. Stablecoins Won What Bitcoin Lost - The Price
Why the price has no anchor, whether the dollar is only belief too, and what holds the price up anyway.
10. The Number That Won't Hold Still · 11. Scarcity of What? · 12. What Two Trillion Dollars Buys · 13. Isn't the Dollar Just Belief Too? · 14. The Price Is the Product · 15. The Buyer of Last Resort · 16. The New Aristocracy · 17. The Maximalist Church · 18. This Time Is Different - The Reckoning
Who pays, the two clocks running under the network, where Bitcoin genuinely helps, and how the story could end.
19. Thirteen Million Ghosts · 20. No One to Call · 21. The Energy Bet · 22. The Clock Is Running · 23. The Second Clock · 24. Where Bitcoin Matters · 25. The Last Halving
Buy the book
| Format | Buy |
|---|---|
| Kindle | Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.co.uk |
| Paperback | Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.co.uk |
| Hardcover | Amazon.com Amazon.ca Amazon.co.uk |
The Kindle edition is also in Kindle Unlimited. Other Amazon stores carry the book too: search for Unspendable Trottier.