Just a bonkers book, I thought it was well put together and it had a riveting escalation; things kept getting bigger and bigger. I was especially interested in the hard pivot into how Tether allowed for an explosion in phone scams, which in turn led to a spike in south Asian human trafficking.
The book holds two things in tension; an awful lot of (kind of awful) people have gotten crazy rich on crypto schemes and it’s clearly a house of cards/bubble/scam. It felt hard to listen to the book and not come up with the idea that I should be off getting some of this filthy lucre, even as he outlined the many harms and damages that had been inflicted on all sorts of people. I’d be curious whether Zeke ended up earning much during the several years that he researched this book.
I started a crypto skeptic and I hadn’t changed my mind by the time I got to the end of it. Mostly I was left with a sense of wonder at the sheer audacity; literally billions of dollars of valuation were being propped up by transparently insane business plans and promises. I have heard a number of fairly compelling arguments for what crypto could be good for, but in practice it usually isn’t good at those things (ie. helping access for the unbanked, evading regulation/preserving freedom, allowing easier online transactions, buying shit the government doesn’t want you to (porn/drugs/etc.), avoiding capital losses because the Central Bank is dumb, etc.). The chapter about the videogame which took off in the Philippines was very interesting, and a story I hadn’t heard about before. His examination of El Salvador was pretty interesting, it was nice to hear a story from someone who’d done the on-the-ground reporting there.
Overall, it was a good history of crypto for the skeptic’s side. He doesn’t work very hard to make a compelling case for crypto (because he thinks it’s pretty full of shit), but he does do a good job of backing his own case. I might recommend it for people who don’t have much of a horse in the crypto race, and just kind of want to know what the hell everyone’s talking about … but I suspect that the book would fall on deaf ears if what you’re trying to do is change someone’s mind.
Specific questions:
-Have any of the crypto-enthusiasts on the forum read this?
-Is he factually incorrect or full of crap on some of his assertions?
-Does the past year's bitcoin rise make his conclusions seem wrong, or is it still a house of cards?
