Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

by Zeke Faux

As one person famously put it on Twitter, “Imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin.”

Mining became an environmental disaster. Miners scoured the globe for sources of cheap power. Pretty much everywhere they set up shop, locals objected. Residents of Niagara Falls, New York, complained that Bitcoin miners’ powerful cooling fans—necessary to keep the computers from overheating—were drowning out the sound of the area’s massive waterfalls. China—not exactly known for its environmentalism—banned mining due to its massive energy use. (Of course it was welcomed by Texas.)

Thiel had delivered a speech at the conference that day in which he called Warren Buffett a “sociopathic grandpa” for doubting Bitcoin. He did not tell the audience that the venture capital firm he co-founded, Founders Fund, had recently sold off the vast majority of its crypto holdings.

I couldn’t believe that every day, people sent millions of perfectly good U.S. dollars to the Inspector Gadget creator’s Bahamian bank in exchange for digital tokens conjured by the Mighty Ducks guy and run by executives who were targets of a U.S. criminal investigation.

“Bitcoin had turned out to be practically the opposite of untraceable: a kind of honeypot for crypto criminals that had, for years, dutifully and unerasably recorded evidence of their dirty deals.”

“These people are unbelievable the way they dress,” he said. “I’m here in a Brioni, these guys are in Lululemon pants. These guys are moving into the future. These are some of the worst-dressed people I ever met in my life.”

(I’d later learn Brady and Bündchen were paid about $60 million for their endorsements.)

It reminded me of a maxim called the “bullshit asymmetry principle,” coined by an Italian programmer. He was describing the challenge of debunking falsehoods in the internet age. “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it,” the programmer, Alberto Brandolini, wrote in 2013.

“I look at my life as pre-Beeple and post-Beeple,” said Noah Davis, the head of digital at Christie’s. “The same way the world thinks about before Jesus Christ and after.” The collage went for $69 million.

One American Bitcoiner I met in San Salvador told me, semi-seriously, that he’d stimulated the economy by buying a refrigerator for the family of a stripper he was dating.

“we are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro.”

(“So the ethics stuff, mostly a front?” the Vox reporter asked. “Yeah,” Bankman-Fried replied.)

So many smart people had spent so many thousands of hours working on crypto—and yet shockingly little of use had come of it. Bankman-Fried had discredited the only use anyone had come up with: semi-legal offshore gambling. If you couldn’t even trust the most reputable crypto casino—FTX—who would want to play?