Vijay Selvam is a corporate lawyer and financial services expert with nearly twenty years of experience across the United States, United Kingdom, and Asia. He spent more than a decade at Goldman Sachs and has also held leadership roles in the digital assets industry, advising on the evolving regulatory landscape. Selvam is a graduate of Harvard Law School, Oxford University, and Cardiff University.
Principles of Bitcoin: Technology, Economics, Politics, and Philosophy was published by Columbia University Press in June 2025.
What is the book about?
Principles of Bitcoin offers a comprehensive, first-principles-based framework for understanding one of the most misunderstood innovations of our time. By cutting through the hype, jargon, and surface-level narratives that often dominate discourse in the crypto space, the book reveals the true ingenuity of Satoshi Nakamoto’s creation, and its far-reaching implications for the future of money, governance, and individual liberty.
Through an integrated analysis of bitcoin’s technology, economics, political theory, and philosophical foundations, the book argues that only by understanding these dimensions together can we fully grasp its significance. Readers are invited to view bitcoin as a vehicle for personal empowerment, a driver of economic sovereignty, and a direct challenge to traditional monetary systems. The book illustrates how bitcoin stands alone among digital assets as a path-dependent, one-time invention—a technological breakthrough that cannot be replicated.
Principles of Bitcoin is intended to serve as a vital resource for financial professionals seeking a rigorous yet accessible understanding of bitcoin. It is equally valuable for students, independent thinkers, and anyone who finds the subject complex or opaque. By equipping readers with the foundational tools to navigate bitcoin’s many facets, the book aims to be a guide to understanding its transformative potential in building a more decentralized, transparent, and equitable future.
Why did I write it?
I wrote this book because I myself needed a book like this — and it did not exist. When I first encountered Bitcoin in 2013, I dismissed it instinctively. My education, professional training, and experience in high finance had conditioned me to evaluate assets through conventional frameworks: intrinsic value, expected cash flows, discounted future earnings. Bitcoin, to my mind at the time, failed every test. But the truth was that I simply had not tried hard enough to understand it. And besides, there was no credible, accessible resource that spoke my language or gave me the tools to even begin that understanding.
During the ensuing years, while a growing online discourse about bitcoin emerged, it was fragmented, ideological, and often inaccessible — saturated with jargon or imbued with rhetoric that alienated more than it educated. For those of us trained to think in first principles, steeped in rigorous institutional logic, and suspicious of ideological overreach, there was simply no reliable guide into the subject. I needed something that did not evangelize or speculate but explained — something that dissected bitcoin through a multidisciplinary lens and connected its abstract ideas to real-world implications. Eventually, it became clear to me that if such a book did not exist, I would have to write it.
Principles of Bitcoin is the culmination of nearly a decade of grappling with the subject: first dismissively, then reluctantly, and eventually obsessively. It is an attempt to distill what is often a sprawling and chaotic intellectual ecosystem into something structured, principled, and clear. It brings together ideas from philosophy, economics, cryptography, legal theory, and systems design as necessary components of understanding bitcoin holistically. The book is not meant to persuade, but to clarify. It is not a marketing pitch, but a framework for comprehension — especially for those who, like me, found the dominant narratives around bitcoin either incomprehensible or unconvincing. It is a book for those who think in first principles, because bitcoin, more than any innovation I have encountered, demands that kind of thinking.
How did I go about doing this research?
The research for this book was shaped by the arc of my professional career, the gaps I encountered in existing literature, and a drive to understand an innovation that refused to fit neatly into any one discipline.
I leaned heavily on the vantage point afforded to me by more than a decade working at Goldman Sachs, an experience that gave me a deep understanding of traditional capital markets, financial systems, and institutional thinking. My academic training at Harvard Law School, combined with my coursework in investment management and quantitative finance at Harvard Business School, provided a strong foundation in valuation theory, market structures, and macroeconomic frameworks — all of which I had to re-examine in light of what Bitcoin represents.
Professionally, I have had the rare privilege of operating at the intersection of technology, finance, and regulation. While serving as Chief Legal Officer at the first Nasdaq-listed crypto company, I was immersed in the evolving architecture of digital asset markets including their custody models, exchange infrastructure, and regulatory positioning. These experiences allowed me to engage with the subject not just theoretically, but as someone living through its technical and legal complexities in real time.
But much of the work took place far from boardrooms or trading desks. I lived in Singapore when I wrote the book, spending countless hours in its public library system. I consulted works in fields as diverse as Austrian economics, monetary theory, political philosophy and cryptography — often stitching together perspectives from sources that had never been in conversation with each other before. I can say without hesitation that this has been perhaps the most rewarding experience of my life.