Number Go Up
Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR WIRED | LA TIMES | FINANCIAL TIMES | WASHINGTON POST | GLOBE AND MAIL
USED IN EVIDENCE IN THE TRIAL OF SAM BANKMAN-FRIED
In 2021, cryptocurrency goes mainstream. Giant investment funds are buying it. Politicians endorse it. TV ads hail it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knows how it works - who cares when everyone is getting rich? But financial crime reporter Zeke Faux cares: even in fraud, there are standards.
In the Bahamas, schlubby billionaire wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried tells him how he will use his fortune to save the world. In Cambodia, a spam text unearths a horrifying slavery ring fuelled by crypto. Faux buys a $20,000 cartoon of a mutant ape to gain access to a festival headlined by Snoop Dogg, and talks his way onto the yacht of a riddling crypto founder/former child actor (The Mighty Ducks, 1992) who was among the first to see the power of imaginary treasure. In search of an elusive cash reserve at the foundation of the whole system, the incredulous Faux finds himself crossing three continents, as well as the boundaries of law, taste and economic rationality. Shocking and uproarious, Number Go Up is the essential chronicle of a $3 trillion delusion, the greatest bubble in history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bloomberg journalist Faux debuts with a rollicking survey of the crypto world's major players during the lead-up to the November 2022 collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. A crypto skeptic, the author details his travels around the world to better understand what he suspected was "a giant Ponzi scheme," visiting the superyacht of former Mighty Ducks child actor Brock Pierce, who founded the Tether cryptocurrency, the reserves of which, it was later discovered, were being illegally used as a "corporate slush fund" to prop up a crypto trading platform. In El Salvador, where bitcoin was made a national currency in 2021, Faux stopped by the tourist town nicknamed Bitcoin Beach but found its vendors largely hostile to the currency and wary of its volatility. Faux's wry humor amuses (bitcoin mining is "like something out of the world's most boring dystopian science-fiction movie," he writes), and the potent dispatches from locales as disparate as ApeFest, an exclusive Manhattan festival for NFT owners, and Cambodia, where captives in a human trafficking ring were tortured and forced to lure get-rich-quick hopefuls into crypto scams, underscore the breadth of crypto's reach. Snappy prose and solid reporting help this stand out among the recent spate of crypto exposés.
