TL:DR Financial journalist looks for the truth behind Tether leading him to meet the scammers of the last bull cycle.
Since books take time to write and publish, they come out in waves after each big crypto cycle. The first bitcoin run to $1,000 at the end of 2013 was followed by a pair of books in 2015.
https://coinmarketcap.com/historical/20131201/
Nathaniel Popper's Digital Gold and Michael Casey and Paul Vigna's The Age of Cryptocurrency that told of the rise of bitcoin. The 2017 bull, fuelled by Ethereum and ICOs inspired Camila Russo's The Infinite Machine and Matthew Leising's Out of the Ether about Vitalik Buterin and his crew of cofounders. Now we have a pair of books on the events coming out the the pandemic isolation and stimulus leading to the 2021 bull and the spectacular crypto collapses of 2022. My last post was about Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman's Easy Money, which had to justify Ben's celebrity involvment and his stupid shorting of the crypto market. https://np.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/15ijxzy/ok_i_read_ben_mckenzie_and_jacob_silvermans_easy/
Financial journalist Zeke Faux's Number Go Up is more focused, pursuing the question that his editor gave him: is Tether backed by anything. After his friend enourages their chat group to buy "doggie coin" and makes enough to take his family to Disney World, Zeke goes out to find if there's anything to crypto, already strongly inclined to believe that there isn't. He starts out at Bitcoin 2021 in Miami that Ben McKenzie also attended. Both authors interview many of the same rogues like Alex Mashinsky and Brock Pierce. As he admits in the podcast I linked at the end, this is not the book to read to understand blockchain. He skips any attempt at a complex explanation and just says the blockchain is a spreadsheet where Zeke has 0.647 coins and SBF has 1,000,000. Then he goes to Italy to find out about Tether's Giancarlo Devasini, who left his career as a plastic surgeon for a series of scammy businesses. Zeke gets a face to face meeting with Bitfinex'ed where Ben just got phone calls. Each of the Tether characters in the chain leaves him frustrated, unable to tell whether it's a pure scam or is backed.
Eventually he focuses more on Sam Bankman-Fried, a heavy user of Tether who might be able to tell him more about the stablecoin. He spends time at the Bahamas offices, shadowing him. He really tears into the effective altruism community and provides more background on William MacAskill's influence. In general where the two books mention the same topics, Zeke goes into greater detail. Although an exception might be El Salvador, where both books use the same reporter/fixer, Nelson Rauda Zablah and interview the same ice vendor, Mario Garcia, imprisoned and brutalized in Bukele's gang sweeps. Zeke also adds trips to the Philippines to see the aftermath of the Axie Infinity boom and crash and to another dollarized economy, Cambodia. Zeke got a message from a scammer, learned about pig butchering and was horrified to learn that many of the scammers have been trafficked to locked compounds where they are beaten and tortured to make them scam lonely foreigners. He sees that it's easy to anonymously trade between paper dollars and Tether in the Cambodian exchanges.
Zeke's biggest personal crypto adventure is buying a Mutant Ape NFT to get into Apefest.
Here's Dr. Scum https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x60e4d786628fea6478f785a6d7e704777c86a7c6/8272
And Zeke's Metamask wallet https://etherscan.io/txs?a=0xfDE68e4ABbE0A25a7a57626956E9A9B844CF4Cd3&fbclid=IwAR2aFsllUgn2fSamhEDhvlMDDEWMWldQmCZIOQOoj9DxL6HsyY0m_7fCklM
And there's a nice section on Razzlekhan and Dutch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DIuPPmY9mw
So of this wave, if you're going to read one of these books, Number Go Up is the better choice. But as Zeke reported and Ben winced, "why is my hero, Michael Lewis fawning over SBF?", you can wait two weeks for his book on SBF and see if it's the real winner.
Zeke's interview with Marshall Kosloff https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_Qy9pZqigI
One interesting thing is that Marshall says that being roughly the same age and growing up with the rise of the web, seeing Facebook for the first time in 2007 immediately made sense and looked cool. Crypto always requires a long story to try to get people interested.
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