Number Go Up Quotes

“It struck me that almost any of the companies I’d heard about would be good fodder for an investigative story. But the thought of methodically gathering facts to disprove their ridiculous promises was exhausting. 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.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“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.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“Like most cryptocurrencies, it had no “revenue” or “profits.” There was no reason why it should have any value.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“What I’d learned so far about Tether was inconclusive, but completely sketchy. 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.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“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.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“There were the venture capitalists, who’d gotten in early, watched the tokens they bought climb to ludicrous heights, and now believed they could predict the future. There were the founders of crypto start-ups, who’d raised so many millions of dollars that they seemed to believe their own far-fetched pitches about creating the future of finance. Then there were the programmers, who were so caught up with their clever ideas about new things to do inside the crypto world that they never paused to think about whether the technology did anything useful.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“Sanders said that it was easy to open exchange accounts using false identification.  He'd signed up for accounts of his own under the name "Taylor Swift".  As verification, he'd sent in a photo of himself in drag, wearing a blond wig, heavy blue eye shadow, and a glittering dress, which displayed his abundant chest hair.  He said crooks who prefer not to dress in drag can buy accounts registered by other people for as little as $20.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“One of them, ex-Wall Streeter Mike Novogratz, even tattooed his left shoulder with the word luna, next to a wolf howling at the moon.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“From the beginning, I thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“(Mine was 0xfDE68e4ABbE0A25a7a57626956E9A9B844CF4Cd3”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“Bees don’t waste their time explaining to flies that honey is better than shit.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“The idea of an instantaneous way of transferring money around the world was still appealing. But I’d tried out the fox-head icon, and the idea everyone would one day store their cash in some version of it was preposterous. Traveling around the world investigating crypto had given me a new appreciation for my Visa card. It worked instantly, with just a tap, charged no fees, and never asked me to memorize long strings of numbers, or to bury codes in my backyard. It even gave me airline miles. When my wife’s account was hacked and used to book an Airbnb, we were given a full refund with just a phone call.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“Each represented an ownership stake in the future of art, the thinking went, or a DeFi investment that would revolutionize the world of finance. People paid millions of perfectly good dollars to add lines to crypto spreadsheets, to record that they owned a stash of Dogecoins, or a rare Bored Ape. By manipulating sheets like these, Sam Bankman-Fried had made himself into one of the world's richest men.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“But in the parking lot, a sign on a little booth caught my eye. It advertised money-transfer services in Vietnamese and Chinese. On it, I spotted a White "T" encircled in green. Tether's logo. It didn't prove anything, but it seemed odd that the first time I'd seen the symbol outside of crypto conferences was at an alleged human-trafficking hub.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“Crypto bros routinely claimed that anonymous, untraceable payments on the blockchain would somehow help the world's poor. But it seemed like none of them had bothered to look into what their technology was actually being used for. Tricking Filipinos into going into debt for a pipe dream based on Smooth Love Potions was bad enough. But aiding and abetting enslavement?”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“it seemed that this scam slave complex would not be able to operate without crypto. And the benefits of crypto to the rest of the world seemed to be limited to enabling a zero-sum gambling mania.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“Crypto bros routinely claimed that anonymous, untraceable payments on the blockchain would somehow help the world’s poor.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“Among them were a Bored Ape with a vaguely racist “sushi chef headband,” and a pixelated image of a cartoon penis, called a CryptoDickButt, which, incredibly, was worth about $1,000 at the time. (Davies told me that one was sent to him unsolicited, apparently by some kind of crypto flasher.)”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“Devasini had shown his face: El Salvador. The country’s president, Nayib Bukele, had proudly announced his adoption of Bitcoin as a national currency at Bitcoin 2021,”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“One group of researchers would later estimate that 80 percent of ICOs were fraudulent.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

“The more I learned about Pierce, the more curious I was about him. He flew around the world promoting crypto in a Gulfstream jet that he had spray painted with Monopoly money and the Bitcoin and Ethereum logos. He had mounted a vanity presidential campaign in 2020 with the singer Akon as his chief strategist. He wore loud hats, vests, and bracelets, like Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean, and spoke in riddles like Johnny Depp in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. He had a tattoo of a scorpion on his right shoulder. He was, of course, a regular at Burning Man.”
― Zeke Faux, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall