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

Bloomberg journalist Faux debuts with a rollicking survey of the crypto world’s major players during the lead-up to the November 2022 collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange. A crypto skeptic, the author details his travels around the world to better understand what he suspected was “a giant Ponzi scheme,” visiting the superyacht of former Mighty Ducks child actor Brock Pierce, who founded the Tether cryptocurrency, the reserves of which, it was later discovered, were being illegally used as a “corporate slush fund” to prop up a crypto trading platform. In El Salvador, where bitcoin was made a national currency in 2021, Faux stopped by the tourist town nicknamed Bitcoin Beach but found its vendors largely hostile to the currency and wary of its volatility. Faux’s wry humor amuses (bitcoin mining is “like something out of the world’s most boring dystopian science-fiction movie,” he writes), and the potent dispatches from locales as disparate as ApeFest, an exclusive Manhattan festival for NFT owners, and Cambodia, where captives in a human trafficking ring were tortured and forced to lure get-rich-quick hopefuls into crypto scams, underscore the breadth of crypto’s reach. Snappy prose and solid reporting help this stand out among the recent spate of crypto exposés. (Sept.)