Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

September 25, 2023 7:53 AM

The last few years of cryptocurrency/web3/NFT mania, with appearances by most of the major players, by Zeke Faux.

Amazon blurb: "The “endlessly entertaining” (Matt Levine) and “ludicrously compelling” (Evan Osnos) account of the crypto delusion, and how Sam Bankman-Fried and a cast of fellow nerds and hustlers turned useless virtual coins into trillions of dollars". Faux travels to the Bahamas, the Phillipines, Cambodia, El Salvador, and Switzerland, among other places.

posted by Halloween Jack (5 comments total)

Reserved at our local library! I look forward to dining heartily on schadenfreude.
posted by Shepherd at 1:05 PM on September 25, 2023

I wanted to let it sit with me a while before I said anything about the book itself, and one point that I wanted to make is that, while the book itself is indeed funny in parts, especially those having to do with the Bored Apes and other NFTs (because they're inherently ridiculous), the core of the book is a deadly-serious search for the truth about Tether, a cryptocurrency that's allegedly been used quite a bit by criminals. This includes interviewing former victims of human trafficking who were forced to participate in pig butchering scams that had the victims on the other end paying in Tether to make the crimes more difficult to trace. High-profile crypto figures such as Sam Bankman-Fried and others do figure in the story, and some of them have already met their downfall, but Tether and its principal figures are still a going concern.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:18 PM on September 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

patio11 was less complimentary about the book
posted by billsaysthis at 8:23 PM on September 29, 2023

billsaysthis, that link just leads back here. If you were linking to this review, it seems generally complimentary, if not unqualifiedly so ("And yet I found it at times exasperating, perhaps because of the narcissism of small differences. I am also a long-time cryptocurrency skeptic, and perhaps if one squints a great deal a professional in financial writing, and it is not exactly the book I would have written.").
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:32 PM on September 29, 2023

I just finished this yesterday. Halloween Jack - my impression was similar to yours. For the first half or so, I was alternately amused and repulsed by the stories of sheer idiocy and reckless, wasteful consumption amongst all these paper billionaires (the NFT chapter is the height of that stupidity), and then we're reminded of the real impacts of this recklessness, both in the chapters in Cambodia and in the discussions about the people who didn't get rich buying ape gifs, but instead lost everything.

One place where I differ with the linked review (which sure, I agree, it would also be nice to have reporting that focuses not just on the ridiculous personalities but also the finance) is in the scene where Zeke calls out Sam Bankman-Fried for the role crypto (and FTX) play in supporting slavery in Cambodia. SBF's reaction is "that's fucked, and I have no idea what to do about it" - the reviewer feels sympathy for SBF, where for me this is where you see that he's a total phony who has willfully avoided looking at the implications of what he's created, and that his whole "effective altruism" schtick makes no actual sense.

I also wanted a little more closure with Tether, but I understand that real life is not a novel.

Also, it took me quite a while to believe that 'Faux' was his actual last name. It seemed too on-the-nose ...
posted by chbrooks at 9:21 AM on September 30, 2023 [2 favorites]