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.

That’s it. That’s what Bitcoins are—numbers in a spreadsheet. There is nothing else. Without the spreadsheet, the Bitcoins don’t exist.

Mashinsky said banks like J.P. Morgan were dishonest when they claimed they could only afford to pay tiny interest rates to savers. “Somebody is lying,” Mashinsky said. “Either the bank is lying or Celsius is lying.” I was pretty sure I knew who was lying, and it wasn’t J.P. Morgan. I made a mental note to investigate Celsius when I got back to New York.

Even though I was the one asking questions about whether he was involved in what might be a giant Ponzi scheme, and, as far as I knew, Pierce knew nothing about my work, he started addressing me as if I were a washed-up journalist, and this Tether investigation was my final chance to save my career, or maybe my soul.

“The more confusion the better; People must not know what they do, which will make them the more eager to come into our measures.”

IT SEEMED UNLIKELY that someone who tried to rhyme “Razzlekhan’s the name” with “that hot grandma you really wanna bang” could in fact be a master thief. Then again, this was the crypto world, where a lack of experience or competence has never been a barrier to fame and fortune, and where large-scale hacks are a regular occurrence.

“I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person,” Levine said. “And that was so much more cynical than how I would’ve described farming. You’re just like, well, I’m in the Ponzi business and it’s pretty good.” Bankman-Fried said that was

A woman known online for selling jarred farts started selling NFTs of her flatulence instead. Her slogan was “Imagine the smell.”

I had trouble finding stores other than McDonald’s that accepted crypto. And buying a Big Mac with Bitcoin was not that exciting. It was slower than my credit card, charged me fees instead of earning me rewards points, and the burger still tasted rubbery.

“He’s the one that is writing bad things about us,” he told his wife, who was standing next to him. “Hello!” I said. She wouldn’t talk with me either.

“People make it seem like this big Wolf of Wall Street thing,” he said. “Bro, it was a bunch of nerds.”

The one coin I especially wouldn’t bet against is Bitcoin. It’s not that it’s useful—if anything, it’s more unwieldy than the others. But Bitcoin’s true believers are so convinced that it’s hard to imagine anything will change their minds. To them, whatever the question, the answer is “buy Bitcoin.” Everything they see is evidence Bitcoin will rise, like the members of a cult certain that the apocalypse—and their salvation—is just around the corner.

EVEN AT THE peak of the boom, many of the crypto boosters I interviewed would tell me that most coins were scams—just not theirs.