Number Go Up
Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
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- 47,99 zł
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- 47,99 zł
Publisher Description
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 Porchlight 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.
Faux follows the trail to a luxury resort in the Bahamas, where SBF boldly declares that he will use his crypto fortune to save the world. Faux talks his way onto the yacht of a former child actor turned crypto impresario and gains access to “ApeFest,” an elite party headlined by Snoop Dogg, by purchasing a $20,000 image of a cartoon monkey. In El Salvador, Faux learns what happens when a country wagers its treasury on Bitcoin, and in the Philippines, he stumbles upon a Pokémon knockoff mobile game touted by boosters as a cure for poverty. And in an astonishing development, a spam text leads Faux to Cambodia, where he uncovers a crypto-powered human-trafficking ring.
When the bubble suddenly bursts in 2022, Faux brings readers inside SBF’s penthouse as the fallen crypto king faces his imminent arrest. Fueled by the absurd details and authoritative reporting that earned Zeke Faux the accolade “our great poet of crime” (Money Stuff columnist Matt Levine), Number Go Up is the essential chronicle, by turns harrowing and uproarious, of a $3 trillion financial delusion.
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.
