Zeke Faux

Eta: SBF convicted! Good news indeed.

I usually don't review books I read for work, but this one is very current and entertaining, so I will make an exception. (There may be more exceptions in the coming months as my work has somehow, at least temporarily, coincided with popular culture.)

Zeke Faux is currently an investigative reporter for Bloomberg, Making financial crime interesting to laymen is his beat, and he is very good at it. The in-your-face Ponzi scheme that was the NFT market, and the larger but less comprehensive Ponzi scheme that is the cryptocurrency market make for a seriously fun caper tale, though unfortunately one that funded brutal governments and human trafficking rings and left many gullible people destitute.

This book represents more than 5 years reporting on the strange underworld of crypto with its massive drug ingestion and sad parties filled with lonely people with bad hygiene and a propensity for believing in magical thinking even when they knew things were based on lies because they were the ones telling those lies. As it happens, Faux picked well in identifying two of the men he wished to focus on. Sam Bankman-Fried has become crypto's most infamous huckster. This brilliant, depressed narcissist is a perfect poster boy. Faux gives him more dimension than most of what I have read, and I was thankful for that. It added a lot to my understanding of how this unshowered, rumpled, matted man-child could also be a monumentally ballsy thief. I wish we could have learned more about his inner circle (who are all currently testifying against him), but we get a little very interesting info. Who knew such evil lurked in the hearts of math camp attendees? The other focus was on Giancarlo Devasini who somehow ended up a crypto billionaire and CEO of Bitfinex and Tether (the last man standing in crypto.) Devasini is the sketchiest person in the world as far as I can tell. (He quit being a plastic surgeon to open a business creating and selling counterfeit DVDs for Bitcoin on the dark web.) There are other major players, but these two get the most time and with good reason. Another place Faux goes is to talking about the celebrity huckstering of NFTs by people from Snoop Dog to Jimmy Fallon to Paris Hilton to Tom & Giselle. They brought the ruin of ugly monkey NFTs to the common man and made millions doing so. Shame on them. Speaking of which, a thing I really liked was that he included info about how many people invested in crypto, and especially in NFTs, for the "community" it brought them. That broke my heart. Wagering your last red cent to feel part of a group is a truly tragic brand of loneliness. That was something I had not thought about before and it made me think of all of this differently.

I like what he did here, and enjoyed every moment of it. I have read a lot about crypto over the past 5 years, and this is the most fun read by a mile. I have a couple beefs though. First, in trying to make the blockchain understandable he offers a TLDR definition of the way blockchain works that is simply wrong. I think it is misleading, and makes it easier to bring home his point that the crypto stuff was obviously a ruse. That isn't fair to the people who bought into to something far less seemingly ridiculous than what he frames here (though it was and is ridiculous even when explained correctly.) This is especially important because blockchain has many other applications, current and potential. Faux should not be slamming people for giving the public false info that hampers their ability to assess things and then give them false information that hampers their ability to assess things. The second issue is that Faux makes some really sad and ridiculous people look even stupider than they are for buying into this. Not the grifters at the head of this mess, but the people at the parties who scraped together 100k or whatever just to feel cool for 2 hours. They are sad, not funny.

Overall an informative and fun read. If you like Michael Lewis books you will like this. This is a 4+, but the fundamental misstep in explaining crypto won't let me give this a 5.… (mais)

I enjoyed it. It was a nice counterpoint to Michael Lewis' GOING INFINITE - some of the details are identical, right down to the chickpea korma SBF apparently liked for lunch. But SBF wasn't truly the focus. The focus was Tether. He kept waiting for Tether to self-destruct, and it never really did. Except, of course, that everything kinda did.

Epilogue: "The technology was as old as WhatsApp or Uber, which had long since wormed their way into our everyday lives so thoroughly their nanmes had become verbs. But no one had invented a mainstream use for cryptocurrency. So many smart people had spent so many thousands of hours working on crypto - and yet shockingly little use had come of it." Count me among them, I guess, for those dreamlike 10 months I spent at TechLab.… (mais)