All the Devils are here is interesting on the US housing crisis which sparked the last bust. Fiat Money Inflation in France is an interesting short outline of

All the Devils are here is interesting on the US housing crisis which sparked the last bust. Fiat Money Inflation in France is an interesting short outline of a currency which goes horribly wrong due to being debased (opposite problem to bitcoin): White describes a disillusioned public who, under the influence of increasingly self-serving public officials and orators, accepted more and more assignat printings even though the perils of such printings had been documented throughout history... Bitcoin is interesting because it has this hard limit, which means in theory it will reach a point where no more currency is made, and thus it is relatively stable in value. Until them though the value of it will ramp up in relation to real goods and other currencies (deflation). It's a really interesting experiment, though it does heavily reward the initial investors and skews it towards being an investment (and a bubbly one at that) rather than a currency, at least till the hard limit is reached. I do find the question of whether the public could be persuaded to just up the limit and print more bitcoin interesting - I suspect if we had bitcoin as a world or national currency, just like assignats or other currencies, people could be persuaded to print more or otherwise bend the rules for the good of the nation/world/economy.