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

by Zeke Faux

Willett had essentially invented an easy way to create new cryptocurrencies and pioneered a new way to use them to raise millions of dollars. This was what later came to be known as an “initial coin offering,” and it would be the way the entire cryptocurrency industry funded itself. Willett’s plan was innovative. It was also illegal. What Willett did was a textbook example of what the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission calls an “unregistered securities offering,” meaning that Willett was selling an investment opportunity without any of the usual safeguards. Willett told me that the agency probably would have fined him hundreds of thousands of dollars if it had noticed what he was up to. But luckily, the regulators weren’t reading Bitcoin message boards. “They would have made a terrible example out of me if they’d known what was coming,” Willett said, laughing. “Never heard anything from them.”