I recently participated in an AMA on reddit. This was hosted by the authors of the book that is the subject of this blog , "

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order" 

I heard the books first few pages via audible. I am impressed with the opening of the book. The book talks about a girl in war torn Afghanistan who relied on the bitcoin system to accept payments for her movie that she uploaded on a site called film annex that lets people watch user created movies for free. The book's opening also talked about this site, bitlander.com and how the site created  a shop to enable people like this Afghani girl to be able to spend their bitcoins. This girl bought a laptop using the bitcoins that she earned by posting her movie online.Women are not allowed to access their funds in the bank account in Afghanistan since the male members of the family take control of funds in the bank. Bitcoin proves to be a boon to women in Afghanistan because bitcoin does not rely on a user s gender , in fact the user s identity is anonymous. The film annex folks were also able to create a system that would allow this Afghani girl to exchange her bitcoins for gift cards to websites such as eBay , Amazon etc. that ship items to cities in Afghanistan. This is a rather unique application of Bitcoins, I must say and the silicon valley shiny image that I had of bitcoin has changed to one that adds utility to bitcoins in bridging the divide between the privileged and the non privileged. More to come when I finally get the book from our public library . Definitely looking forward to reading this book cover to cover. If you are interested in learning more about the crypto currencies , here is an AMA that the authors of the book recently hosted.