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Back to School: 3 Books for Students of Money & Bitcoin

Nik Bhatia

Aug 27

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Dear Readers,

The average age of attendee to my book tour this summer was easily 40+. That means we have a lot of work to do in educating young people about bitcoin.

I receive emails from students on a daily basis. On the rare occasion the student provides legitimate evidence of bitcoin research or is genuinely looking for guidance, I do my best to reply in a timely fashion. Once in a while, I end up as a mentor, mostly trying to get the students to read books, think critically, and watch my YouTube channel to follow along.

Today, I wanted to share with you a post written by one of these students who took the time to read three books I recommended; it didn’t hurt his cause that he is a local and shares my name. Going one at a time, I started with Jeff Booth’s foundational work on technology as a deflationary force. While I knew that my two books would be part of the short list, starting with another author that helped me felt like the right place to go—my goal was to get the student to think outside traditional thinking. Jeff Booth was the right place to start.

His interest in bitcoin and global macro set the tone, and his willingness to read books deserved guidance. Allow me to share you what he wrote—a description of his educational journey as a high school student thinking about an undergraduate degree in finance and curious about bitcoin’s role in the future of money. Here’s a post written by high schooler Nik Singh.

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In Search of Bitcoin & Truth

As a high school student whose immigrant grandparents came to this country and built their wealth through hard work and smart investments, I have always had a passion and deep ambition for creating generational wealth. I’ve consistently heard the usual advice: work hard, save money in a bank's savings account, and eventually it will pay off. At the same time, I was always very fond of technology as it is one of the most versatile tools used in global societies today. As I began high school I started to research how to make my money work for me, so I started to look online for ways to invest. Here, I discovered stocks.

I began researching daily and found the power of compound interest. I started to invest a fixed amount each month into ETFs with an average annual return rate of 8-10%. As I continued learning about the markets, I realized that over 30 years, my investments could potentially grow ten to fifteen times in value. My father has been investing in cryptocurrencies for around 7 years now, but I never truly understood them or why they were relevant to our society. I then thought, why not email local professors who are experts in this topic? That’s when I came across Professor Nik Bhatia. Initially hoping to contribute to his work, he gave me something more valuable: his mentorship. His advice completely changed how I understood finance, especially through the three books he recommended to me. These were The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth, and Bitcoin Age and Layered Money by Nik Bhatia. The books not only opened my eyes to what Bitcoin and cryptocurrency truly are, but explained how history is repeating itself, going back to the discovery of gold. The books challenged almost every assumption I had about money, technology, and the role of our governments in the monetary realm.

I began with The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth. This book shaped the framework for the future of technology for me and its parallel effects with our finances. I had always believed inflation was a normal and expected part of our financial system. Prices go up, wages follow, and the cycle repeats. However, Booth argues the opposite: that technological progress is naturally deflationary, and we should build systems that align with this reality.

Two lessons stood out the most. The first was Moore’s Law, which predicts computing power roughly doubles every two years while costs fall. For example, Booth describes how the cost of a one megabyte hard drive memory has fallen from one million dollars circa 1967 to only a whopping $0.02 today. This was a powerful real world demonstration of how fast technology is progressing and impactful exponential growth can be. As I read, I thought to myself, if technology and computation are becoming rapidly cheaper, why are prices still rising? The answer Booth provided was that central banks must create inflation to sustain a debt based system. However, this did not make sense to me. Not because it was proactive, but because it was logical in our country. That’s when it clicked: the U.S. dollar was built for a world of scarcity, but we are rapidly moving into an age of technological abundance. If the system demands constant inflation to survive, but technology s trending deflationary (Moore’s Law), then it is not a misalignment. It is that our current system is threatening the financial system and becoming more corrupt.

These two lessons, Moore’s Law and the government's manipulation of money do not just expose the problems, they point to the need for a monetary reset. Something that allows us to rethink what money truly is and how it is created so easily if we deem it so valuable. Booth presents Bitcoin as a possible solution near the end of the book. After learning about how governments and central banks exerted so much economic influence, Booth acknowledged that Bitcoin could be a way to avoid this influence. Though I didn’t fully grasp Bitcoin yet, I was intrigued by its decentralized nature. The main lesson I took from this book was not solely how Bitcoin is our future, it was that exponential technological progress drives natural deflation, and our inflation based monetary systems resists this, calling for a new kind of money to reconnect its foundation as technology and finance collide. I remember texting Professor Bhatia a question along the lines of: if no one controls Bitcoin, how can it truly hold power or influence? He told me power and control are needed but Bitcoin could still be included even if finances are separate. Curious about how Bitcoin could function as this new kind of money, I turned to the next book, Bitcoin Age.

Could money truly exist without centralized control? And how could Bitcoin avoid inflation as well? These two questions stayed with me as I read this book. This book wasn't just about digital money, it was about trust and how civilizations have always relied on monetary systems to store and transfer value. Bitcoin was a way to remove the need for blind trust in institutions that had failed the public (Ex. 2008 financial crisis). The main concept was that it was based on a free market, set at a fixed amount of 21,000,000 coins. The fact that it is immune to inflation as it could not be printed. This changed how I think about trust and value. It is not about relying on institutions with big names, but on transparent rules and a secure financial system without political influence. Understanding this led me towards trusting financial systems which adapt to the future and prioritize fairness in a rapidly evolving world, rather than basic stocks. In addition, I learned that Bitcoin is decentralized as it runs on nodes and has no way to change the rules. No single person, company, or government controls Bitcoin. Looking toward he future, these insights have shifted my focus from traditional stocks to Bitcoin and decentralized finance, where value and trust is preserved without centralized control. As I continue to invest, I realized I need to rethink where my money goes and seek something immune to manipulation, designed to function as a new form of “first layer” money. Which leads into the next book, Layered Money, which pieced it all together for me and was my favorite read out of the three.

After learning about what Bitcoin truly was from Bitcoin Age and learning about deflation in relation to technology from The Price of Tomorrow, Layered Money finally helped teach me how Bitcoin is on its way to become a global currency. I learned that our system was built in layers, gold to certificates to government money to digital credit. It reframed Bitcoin not just as speculation, but as a core piece of future financial infrastructure as it was immune to inflation and political control, along with being accessible by countries worldwide. Just like gold served as a universally trusted store of value, Bitcoin does the same. Once people begin to trust its fixed supply, decentralization, and resistance to manipulation, it will become the world's new gold standard. Nakamoto designed Bitcoin based on this structure and made us realize it is not just new technology, it is a return to sound money, principles, and the rebuilding of a digital age.

That insight changed how I see both the history and future of finance and excited me to look at the future of our monetary system: a future with no political influence on my money or central banks failing. Together, these three books taught me to question the system I once took for granted. To see how technology drives deflation, how Bitcoin offers a new model of trust, and how money itself evolves over time. I learned that Bitcoin is not just another asset or investment, it is the future of our monetary system as it is immune to corruption and I am glad to finally understand what this pivotal cryptocurrency is. As I look ahead to college and beyond, I carry with me these new sets of principles of innovation, transparency, and decentralization. These new findings further motivate me to continue a career in finance and look at the best ways to help our monetary system.