# Bitlemmas Books — Next 4 Reviews (Round 2)

- Vote link: https://bare-urw-graphic-min.trycloudflare.com/e/bitlemmas_books_2026_03

Use this doc to collect pros/cons and converge before the vote closes.

## Rank Your Top 4 Books (Next Four Reviews)
- Method: `ranked`

### Candidates
- **Broken Money (Alden)** — A modern, systems-level tour of how money works (as networks + trust boundaries), where chokepoints form, and why settlement layers matter for Bitcoin-grade decentralization.
- **Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Lessig)** — A crisp way to see that architecture is governance: code shapes what is permitted, what is censored, and where power concentrates. Great for evaluating PRIC-style protocol claims.
- **Digital Technology and Democratic Theory (Bernholz/Landemore/Reich, eds.)** — Connects democracy to the digital public sphere: truth-tracking, propaganda risk, private speech governance, and how platform design shapes legitimacy and participation.
- **Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (Hirschman)** — The core model for forks (exit), participation (voice), and stickiness (loyalty). Gives the team shared vocabulary for protocol/community governance without moralizing.
- **Layered Money (Bhatia)** — Clear mental model of monetary layers and custodianship. Helps us see why chokepoints reappear above the base layer, and how Bitcoin-grade constraints shape real-world systems.
- **Mastering Lighting** — Practical lighting craft: how to shape scenes, build repeatable setups, and raise production quality for video/podcast shoots and events without relying on expensive gear.
- **Open-Book Management (Case)** — Practical transparency that increases shared literacy (not top-down control). Useful for Radical Pie ops: make work legible in a way that empowers contributors and reduces capture-by-metrics.
- **Producing Open Source Software (Fogel)** — The operations manual for real OSS communities: roles, process, conflict, and how to ship without burning out maintainers. Complements Working in Public with concrete playbooks.
- **Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources (Ostrom/Gardner/Walker)** — Commons governance with a mechanism-design edge: boundaries, monitoring, sanctions, incentives, and why some rule-sets survive. Helps translate values into enforceable protocol/governance rules.
- **Seeing Like a State (Scott)** — The canonical lens on legibility projects: why standardization/metrics often become control surfaces, and why top-down simplifications fail. Great for spotting centralization traps early.
- **Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Abelson/Sussman)** — The cleanest bridge to 'primitives' and abstraction as a design discipline. Helps us define decentralization as a modeling language (what first-order capabilities we need to build truly decentralized systems).
- **The Art of the Long View (Schwartz)** — Scenario planning as an alternative to roadmaps. Lets us plan seriously without issuer-like promises, and stress-test protocols against multiple futures (fits 'no roadmap' values).
- **The Dawn of Everything (Graeber/Wengrow)** — Counterintuitive history that breaks the 'hierarchy is inevitable' story. Expands the design space for decentralization and gives narrative clarity without needing conspiracy frameworks.
- **The Democracy Project (Graeber)** — Democracy as a lived practice (not a slogan): consensus, participation, fatigue, conflict, and real failure modes. Helps design governance templates that survive contact with humans.
- **The Right to Repair (Perzanowski)** — Ownership vs permission is a repeating chokepoint story: locks, licenses, and capture surfaces. Strong fit for user-owned resources, portability, and 'exit is safety' thinking.
- **Thinking in Systems (Meadows)** — Shared language for feedback loops, leverage points, and unintended consequences. Helps evaluate governance/protocol changes in terms of incentives and system dynamics (not just intent).
- **Understanding Institutional Diversity (Ostrom)** — A general-purpose toolkit for analyzing institutions: rules-in-use, monitoring, legitimacy, and anti-capture design. Helps keep governance 'forkable' and grounded in local enforcement.
- **Working in Public (Eghbal)** — Maintainer-first framing for OSS labor, incentives, and fragility. Directly supports Circle Source: redundancy, privacy, and governance patterns that reduce dependence on single chokepoints.
- **Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in Practice (Poteete/Janssen/Ostrom)** — A practical guide to understanding collective action with multiple methods (not one-size-fits-all governance). Helps us design institutions that are robust across contexts and failure modes.