Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

Reviewed by Diario de un Inversor · UpdatedJune 13, 2026

Our review

«Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain» is one of the rare books about cryptocurrency written from informed scepticism rather than speculative enthusiasm. David Gerard, a technical journalist and long-standing critic of the crypto ecosystem, documents with rigour and dry humour the ideological origins of Bitcoin — rooted in the cypherpunk movement and technological libertarianism — and traces the history of scandals that have shaken the sector from Mt. Gox to the first fraudulent ICOs. The book does not deny that blockchain technology exists, but systematically dismantles the grander claims about its applications: smart contracts as substitutes for law, enterprise blockchains as solutions to problems that require no decentralisation. The tone is sarcastic and deliberately polemical, which may alienate readers seeking a neutral analysis. Its primary value is methodological — it teaches readers to ask the right questions before evaluating any blockchain-based proposal. Published in 2017, some of the documented scandals have since been dwarfed by larger ones, but the analytical framework remains fully relevant.

Key takeaways

• Blockchain technology solves a specific problem — distributed consensus without central trust — that most business use cases do not actually have.
• The Mt. Gox collapse, fraudulent ICOs, and exchange failures follow repeated patterns of poor custody and regulatory absence.
• Speculative enthusiasm around crypto has recurrently produced bubbles followed by significant losses for retail participants.
• Before evaluating any blockchain proposal, the key question is: why does this problem actually require decentralisation?

Fact

The book was published in 2017; Mt. Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange of its era, collapsed in 2014 after the loss of approximately 850,000 bitcoins.