In the weeks leading up to the Edgar Awards ceremony, I’ll be reading and and reviewing the six books nominated for the “Fact Crime” category. This is the second installment; you can read the first here.
When I saw that one of the books nominated for this year’s true-crime Edgar Award was about financial crimes and not about murder or kidnapping, I heaved a disappointed sigh. That’s really something I should take some time to examine about myself, but the good news is I thoroughly enjoyed Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall, Zeke Faux’s takedown of the crypto bros and unrepentant fraudsters who were behind the boom and bust of cryptocurrency.
The first lines of the book—“I’m not going to lie,” Sam Bankman-Fried told me. This was a lie—give you a sense of Faux’s approach: sarcastic, adversarial, and intimate.1 The investigative journalist spent two years chasing the, as he puts it, “scheming shitwads” running various crypto exchanges from conferences in Switzerland to tax havens in the Bahamas trying to nail down the mechanics of the fraud. Along the way, he stops in El Salvador, a country that adopted Bitcoin as its legal tender to not great effect, and Cambodia, where he discovers a town-sized human-trafficking compound run by Chinese gangsters.
Faux is not written for financial experts. Thankfully. He gives explanations for how crypto works that use simple visualization tools like a two-column Excel spreadsheet and an episode of DuckTales.2 Do I understand how the coins are designed to operate after reading several of these patient and painstaking descriptions? No. But the fact that such simplistic examples capture a financial system at one time dealing in the billions of dollars scares me, as it is designed to.
Faux came into this book project with the sole articulated intent of dunking on one of his friends who made enough money mining Bitcoin during the pandemic to take his family to DisneyWorld. He smelled a scam, and began investigating with the goal of producing a book entitled “Jay is Wrong and Zeke is Right: The Cryptocurrency Story.” Numbers Go Up does end up validating Faux’s suspicions, but as he admits, he had little to do with the ultimate collapse of the industry. For me, the book’s value is in the access he achieves and the engaging way he describes the “mostly men” who were playing with people’s money seemingly in large part for the lolz. There’s a Hunter S. Thompson “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” vibe to the book, though it’s hard to imagine Thompson spending twenty grand on a Mutant Ape NFT named Dr. Scum in order to get into a party on the East River pier. OR IS IT.
Faux’s ultimate argument is that crypto is like a cult whose central tenant is an unshakable belief in the “technology” of sustained and certain price increases. That’s it. And the collapse of Bankman-Fried’s coin and exchange have done nothing to deprogram crypto’s adherents, or to prevent such a rise and fall to happen again.
Read if you like: gonzo journalism, The Big Short-style internet/financial wonkiness, writing a 304-page book for spite, New York Attorney General Letitia James
Some of the selections. I highlighted just for how fun they were to read:
“From the beginning, I thought crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined.”
“Coins, whose names seemed designed to compete for attention by being as stupid as possible.”
“Somehow Celsius had accumulated as much money as a large hedge fund with a business plan that wouldn’t even work for a kid’s lemonade stand.”
I really liked this one!