Number Go Up
The “rollicking” (The Economist), “masterfully written” (The Washington Post) 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—hailed by Ezra Klein in The New York Times as one of the “Books That Explain Where We Are” FINALIST: the Edgar Award (Fact Crime), the Macavity Award (Nonfiction), the Porchlight Business Book Award, the SABEW Best in Business Book Award A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times DealBook, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, The Globe and Mail, Irish Examiner, Morningstar, The Verge, Wired In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity—with a dash of FOMO—would morph into a two-year, globe-spanning quest to understand the wizards behind the world’s new financial machinery. Faux’s investigation would lead him to a schlubby, frizzy-haired twenty-nine-year-old named Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF for short) and a host of other crypto scammers, utopians, and overnight billionaires.
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- Some good content for people who want to go down the Crypto Scammer rabbit hole:
Exit Scam (https://www.exitscam.show/) -- Crypto exchange founders rip off their customers so much that it has an actual name, as infamous a grift as the The Money Box or The Big Store. This podcast explores a QuadrigaCX and its founder's likely faked death, digging into a few other crypto scams for parallel examples.
Number Go Up by Zeke Faux (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711959/number-go-up...) -- this book, which reads as a cross between investigative reporting and New Journalism, tracks Sam Bankman-Fried's rise and fall, discusses the NFT grift, and explores the weird, wild world of stablecoins. Turtles all the way down on this stuff.
- Pig butchering gets additionally horrible when you consider the other side. People who actually handle the chatting are kept in inhuman conditions and physically cannot leave. Laundered profits go to criminal bosses at the top (corrupting various local governments, given they constitute a significant percentage of their economies at this point).
See Number Go Up by Zeke Faux for a glimpse into that (and how cryptocurrency, in particular stablecoins, in particular Tether, facilitate it). True, much of book is largely about the weird cryptobro culture and FTX collapse, but research into pig butchering and personal travel to scam compounds was the most visceral part for me.
- Zeke Faux's Number Go Up (https://www.amazon.com/Number-Go-Up-Cryptos-Staggering/dp/05...) started as an investigation into Tether. He found some extremely suspect clues, but he wasn't able to crack it. Hopefully the feds are able to shed some light on it.
- > Lewis gave SBF all the rope he needed to hang himself with, and that was all he needed to do.
Very nicely put.
Book recommendations: Faux Number go up is beautifully reported, in particular on the many scam and trafficking victims, the culture (Bored Ape parties), some of the players (eg SBF, the Tether people, etc.), and the underlying anarcho-capitalist mindset.
On the impact on the underprivileged (that the "check your financial privilege" and "banking the unbanked" predatory inclusion crypto crowd purports to care so much for), the green-washing of Bitcoin, the crypto philanthropy "bad samaritans", Metaverse and Web3, check Peter Howson's Let Them Eat Crypto.
Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman's Easy Money is another non-technical examination of fraud in crypto, El Salvador, and the severe consequences for victims.
- There's quite an entertaining (and sometimes shocking) discussion with the author of Number Go Up about the book https://youtu.be/THdU00jutvo (Zeke Faux Interview with Patrick Boyle)
I'm not sure I buy the thesis of Patrick's article "Crypto Fooled Us Once" on the basis FTX collapsed when SBF stole the clients money. Crypto goes on fine, Kraken, Coinbase and a hundred other exchanges still do business. One crooked exchange less has not put crypto and fooling into the past.
- Zeke Faux's book(1) on crypto pretty much sums up what most people believe: SBF knowingly ran a Ponzi scheme, or at the very least knowingly stole from investors, but that all of them had a knowing hand in it and bear responsibility.
Michael Lewis's book(2) however is much more sympathetic, painting SBF as a hapless nerd with autism, who meant well but wasn't socially adept enough to knowingly commit a crime; he broke the law for a good cause; altruism.
I think the jury is going to have to wrestle with these two ideas, a crime versus culpability of "super smart kids" that got in over their heads. I think therein lies what will be a hung jury.
1. Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux
2. Going Infinite by Michael Lewis
