Thread by @anambroid

This is my review for Cryptocurrency - A Trader's Handbook by @cryptorangutang
This book is intended for a complete, 100% raw, virgin trader and wants to arm them with the right tools for the cryptocurrency market.
In summary, it does a hack job.

#cryptobookclub

Let's dig in.
Firstly, the structure - the book has an index with chapters, but it's not really visible inside the book itself. The themes and subjects jump around and the authors seem unfocused.
The text is often interrupted with "we'll cover this later" but doesn't where.

P1 - Basics
Admittedly a hard topic to explain concisely, this is exactly where the book struggles with the above mentioned problems the most.
Many definitions are mangled for simplicity's sake.

P1 - PoW
Take an extreme example
1/Difficulty doesn't increase continuously.
2/Only 1 miner gets the reward, not each.
3/The reward halves every 210k BLOCKS, not COINS, otherwise you'd get an oxymoron /w the next sentence - wouldn't happen every 4 years but 2x as long each time!

P1 - PoS/DPoS/etc.
PoS definition is mangled, especially considering the authors give $NEO as a PoS example. Not gonna even bother.
DPoS gets 1/3 of a page (!!!) while Tangle gets 3 pages and "Proof of Signature" (exotic system used in a single shitcoin) gets a whole page.

P1 - Mining
Probably the worst chapter in the book.
The authors don't even explain what a hash is, while talking about hashrate left and right.
Hashrate is dependent on the ALGO, you cannot compare ETH and BTC for fucks sake.
ASICs get 1/4th of a page, unsurprisingly.

P1 - Security & What coins are there?
Security is OK, except the authors don't mention virtual machines at all unfortunately.
A very nice summary of crypto types follows.
(picture unrelated, speaks for itself)

P1 - Why should we use crypto
Mentions every fucking tokenization idea there is while omitting the most important things - store of value, censorship resistance and decentralization.
A good and simple Ripple investment antithesis in the Banks chapter.

P2 - FA
This chapter offers a bland, uninspired and generic point-by-point fundamental analysis approach.
Will help a complete newbie avoid blatant scams, but doesn't provide much value beyond that.
Lacks concrete hints and tips, maybe a couple of examples of actual analyses.

P2 - TA
Not enough emphasis on horizontal S/R.
Fractals are barely glanced over.
Patterns are OK, nicely covered.
Ichimoku is basically stolen from medium.com/@CarpeNoctom/t…
MA's nicely show the uselessness of Golden/Death cross, not much emphasis on it unfortunately.
cont.

RSI/MACD get an OK basic summary.
BBands get mangled - it's either squeezed or going short/long countertrend at the edge of the bands, which is something John directly discourages in his book.
No mention of BBands double bottoms/tops.
Order book section is naive and useless.

Market cycles are excellently covered, probably the best chapter in the book.
"Taking a trade" offers fairly vague bullet points, could be fleshed out.
"Taking profit" on the other hand is quite helpful because many people (me included) struggle with it. Sets up ground rules.

These chapters are followed by quick one pagers on various themes that might be interesting to complete newbies - they are very short and can be googled easily...
The Exchange overview is just fucking sad - why shill ref links in a book readers already bought from you? Come on.

The authors' proofreaders should be fired. There are many typos and clearly foreigner formulations in the book. This is something that can and should be fixed before releasing a book and asking money for it.
The book has not gone over editing, the form needs a major reset.

Overall, the book is closely specialized towards a newbie reader, while stretching itself too thin. Covers too many bases and doesn't do a good job of it.

The subtitle should read A Quickly Cobbled Guide (not A Complete Guide) On How To Trade Bitcoin and Altcoins
Score: 2/10.