Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

As it turned out, the people who set out to eliminate financial intermediaries simply created some new ones of their own, including, by early 2019, two hundred fifty-four crypto exchanges.

The whole thing was odd: these people joined together by their fear of trust erected a parallel financial system that required more trust from its users than did the traditional financial system.

In traditional finance, founded on principles of trust, no one really had to trust anyone. In crypto finance, founded on a principle of mistrust, people trusted total strangers with vast sums of money.