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

Fascinating journey of a journalist trying to find the smoking gun of the crypto stablecoin Tether. He reveals a lot about the industry as a whole: crypto bros, NFTs, lost savings, scammers, and the real-world harms caused by crypto (evidently Tether is the money dispenser of choice for scammers in Cambodia who entrap then enslave people… if you get one of those “accidental” texts turned crypto-scam, it could be someone being held against their will). You also learn about a crypto-earning phone game that went viral in the Philippines and made money for people… for a while, many of whom lost their savings when it crashed.

Well-written, with quite a few satisfying turns of phrase. There’s a nagging feeling the narrative wasn’t tight enough, and I think that’s because he began with a friend bragging about money he’d made, while the author’s hunch was SCAM ALERT… and yet people are making money. He set it out to prove the hunch right. The collapse might have done that for him, except that it had little impact on the primary target of his investigation: Tether. So there isn’t any closure about what they’re actually doing. Time will tell, but I became invested in his search for transparency.

A good read for anyone curious/uninformed about crypto brotopia as it touches on so many different aspects of it.

This is the book that anyone who deals with scam victims needs to read to understand how the global tsunami of internet scamming works — griftocurrency is not just a harmless table top game played by libertarian, it’s an entire ecosystem built to facilitate exploitation of vulnerable people by predators, who are responding exactly as you would expect: by scamming people out of their savings and by enslaving vulnerable people in poor countries and forcing them to prey on people in rich countries, like small boys forced to work as pick-pockets in Victorian England.

The whole point of griftocurrency is to create a parasite money system that lets people who enjoy and depend on the all the global systems offered by the legit market and tax systems (clean water, food systems, etc) profit from scams tax free, while consuming more energy than many nations to do worthless computing games (“mining” griftocurrencies).

This book doesn't go deep into how crypto works, but rather it tells you enough to have some idea of what's happening on a technical level. What the book really looks at carefully is the hubris of it all, the various characters and chaos that surrounded the crypto boom of the last few years. It is an engaging story, and it doesn't have a super satisfying ending (not the author's fault).