New crypto book Number Go Up by Zeke Faux, a lot like the last one I wrote up, but more focused

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.

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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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Help please - Halving and Price

Hello. New to Bitcoin but have experience investing. I am very confused and even more skeptical about why almost all predictions call for a tremendous price spike following the next halving. In ALL other investment vehicles (including commodities) - “known” events are “priced in” almost by definition. This MUST hold for Bitcoin if it a long term, serious, investment vehicle (store of value, whatever….).
It can be argued that the first and even second halving were FOMO and, other psychological factors and, going forward, will be (should be) the exception rather than the norm. The third halving, well, Bitcoin mooned and is still in plus despite the drastic drop. I am also wary of the Absolute Scarcity argument causing sustained price spikes. this is KNOWN.
Can someone explain the reason the upcoming and future halving events are almost sure fire home runs wrt to BTC price?? It is a known event, it Should be priced in for a legit, albeit new, paradigm

Entered Bitcoin and mined at $1 - Went Bust Three Years Later - Welcome to The Jungle

Bitcoin & crypto's Wild West was preceded by an all-out jungle landscape. However, most seem to believe the opposite.

2011 was literally nothing but danger

And this position is pressed by those copy pasta articles you often encounter that declare, "If only you had invested $1 in BTC early, you'd be so rich--but you're not."

Click-bait garbage.

You did good by NOT entering the space. Most lost big.

BTC REACHES PARITY @ $1

Bitcoin hit $1 parity in 2011. I mined thousands of Bitcoins and negotiated a dangerous landscape, until I didn't. You didn't invest in Bitcoin. You mined it, connected with others, and determined the fastest way to rid yourself of it. We all lived in fear of what was next.

We didn't even know if what we did was legal.

Most people who bet big on BTC when it hit $69,044, and lost everything--don't talk. And neither do the OG's who lost early. That's unfortunate because they're in a position to impart valuable information to new entrants.

I'm writing a few legacy posts (all data & doc supported) to share a clearer picture of those years. I'm no crypto expert or authority. I share what I learned and I hope you gain a better perspective and look beyond the meme-driven narratives that clutter our information cycles.

Early on, your off-market threat risks were:

• Scammers
• Gangsters
• Government

Sometimes, a single threat qualified as all 3.

WAS BITCOIN LEGAL?

Its why you don't hear of more OG millionaire stories. Our main concern was "Is this legal?" We didn't know. FinCen didn't offer guidance until March, 2013. There were few on/off ramps beyond mining.

Casascius coins made BTC physical tokens, but the manufacturer stopped minting because we didn't know if we were criminals or not. And neither did he.

Mike Caldwell terminated production of one of BTC's coolest ideas. And yes, they are real! A piece of Bitcoin history. If you have one, post a pic. I was foolish and didn't keep mine.

Real BTC - Purchase included a transparent film that when held o light, revealed your keys

Cacascius Bitcoins by Mike Caldwell

There were many others, but Mike Caldwell's were top quality. Coin to the far right is worth $663,400 today. I understand his decision. We all did. If FinCen declared BTC illegal, we had no idea what sort of trouble we faced. Otherwise, you might still see these today.

THE MINING WARS

When BTC hit $10, the mining war started.

I ordered an array of rigs from Butterfly & another from Avalon. Paid 2000 BTC. Most of my stack. A major expense, but I was betting on Bitcoin's future.

Butterfly never sent me the equipment and I received Avalon rigs a year later.

Suspicions emerged with this post until it blew up and brought Avalon and Butterfly major trouble

During those months, my existing rigs became obsolete.

We investigated ourselves and learned they were mining with the equipment we paid to have built. By the time I received the rigs, they were half used and becoming fast obsolete.

This was a devastating beat. I was knocked out of the mining game and would need to find ways to buy it.

ENTER MT GOX

I started buying BTC off Gox. They were the only player and hardware wallet equipment wasn't available until August, 2014.

I remember the day I couldn't access my account. Window said to check back at 9 PM. We would never access the accounts again. I lost big with Butterfly & Avalon. That growing sensation gripped me once more.

It was over with this message from MagicTux. Now it was complete. I had lost everything. 3 years of work erased.

https://preview.redd.it/s5ge981q7vpb1.jpg?width=945&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2718aafdff162f58f7a0c23b194ca1c35c83f546

That's just my story.

But there are many like it or worse.

JUSTICE DEPT SWEEP

Many lost all their Bitcoins after Ross's arrest. The Justice Dept used the cover from that event to confiscate BTC from thousands of wallets, not just the Silk Road's.

I stayed out of crypto three years. Everything had been taken from me, and I was filled with resentment. I avoided news because I didn't want to know the BTC price. I returned exactly 3 years later Feb 10, 2017. I started buying ETH at $11, then BTC a year later at $6800. It took me a year because I felt sick buying Bitcoin at those insane prices. But it was moving and I had to get in.

Both seemed so expensive at the time

I resumed the journey in a foreign crypto space.

To make it in crypto, be prepared to make it more than once. This is a dirty business, and it's okay to take losses.

Stay in the fight!

Best of luck to you.🙏

____________________________________________________

The Silk Road is crypto's wildest and most incredible story ever. Its Breaking Bad meets Monty Python. How it hasn't been turned into a motion picture or Netflix multi-part drama is beyond me. It's beyond belief. But things that never happen, happen all the time in crypto. My next post is about Silk Road and how early Bitcoiners had a different outlook and why I know 100% adoption is coming. I'll share that with you.