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

by Zeke Faux

From the beginning, I thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined. Never before has so much wealth been generated with such flimsy schemes. But what shocked me was not the vapidity of the crypto bros. It was how their heedlessness had devastating consequences for people across the world.

A journalist composing a painstaking exposé of a crypto scam seemed like a restaurant critic writing a takedown of Taco Bell.

In an old document I discovered on Tether’s website, I found a list of the risks of buying the cryptocurrency. The company said it could go bankrupt, or the unspecified bank holding its money could, or a government could confiscate its assets. Last on the list: “We could abscond with the reserve funds.” I made a note of that one.

The Florida crime novelist Carl Hiaasen once wrote of his home state, “Every scheming shitwad in America turned up here sooner or later, such were the opportunities for predation.”