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

Zeke Faux — 2023

In 2021, cryptocurrency goes mainstream. Giant investment funds are buying it. Politicians endorse it. TV ads hail it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knows how it works - who cares when everyone is getting rich? But financial crime reporter Zeke Faux cares: even in fraud, there are standards. In the Bahamas, schlubby billionaire wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried tells him how he will use his fortune to save the world. In Cambodia, a spam text unearths a horrifying slavery ring fuelled by crypto. Faux buys a $20,000 cartoon of a mutant ape to gain access to a festival headlined by Snoop Dogg, and talks his way onto the yacht of a riddling crypto founder/former child actor (The Mighty Ducks, 1992) who was among the first to see the power of imaginary treasure. In search of an elusive cash reserve at the foundation of the whole system, the incredulous Faux finds himself crossing three continents, as well as the boundaries of law, taste and economic rationality. Shocking and uproarious, Number Go Up is the essential chronicle of a $3 trillion delusion, the greatest bubble in history.

Reviews

Haley Park@snek

Apr 21, 2024

I'm not going to lie," Sam Bankman-Fried told me.

This was a lie.

Funniest opening of any book I've ever read

Adam Goehrig-Bawany@adambawany

Jan 4, 2024

tldr idiots

Fred Rivett@fredrivett

Nov 20, 2023

Aptly named, as playfully written as insightful, the subtle digs had me chef kissing.

The story behind it all is scarcely believable and goes to show where unbridled human ambition can lead when returns that seem to good to be true are embraced by those with flexible grasps of truth and logic.

Whether those who were at the heart of it like SBF were intentionally neglectful or overly ambitious in their haphazard approach to digital rocket ship assembly is hard to say, but whatever the truth of their motivations the story of the mid air explosions are worth reading both as a cautionary tale and as a form of barely believable entertainment.

Sam Rijs@srijs

Oct 12, 2023

Highlights

Haley Park@snek

"Stablecoins are basically just a digital version of the U.S. dollar, right?" he said. "There's no monkey business."

But then he described what sounded very much like monkey business.

Haley Park@snek

Keiser called him a "giga-Chad", Chad being internet slang for an alpha male, and by the standards of the conference, in which reckless day-trading counted as manliness, he was.

A more accurate description would be that Saylor was the biggest loser in the room.

Fred Rivett@fredrivett

By 2023, the hot spots for crypto billionaires had shifted from the Bahamas and Miami Beach to the courthouses of Washington, D.C., and Manhattan.

Page 238

Fred Rivett@fredrivett

I tried to keep a straight face as I imagined him telling that to the congressmen and prosecutors investigating FTX. His supercilious attitude and slovenly appearance reminded me of the disagreeable know-it-all Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. His answer was so bad, it felt almost unfair to ask him tough questions.

Page 229

Fred Rivett@fredrivett

It was hard to believe that people had sent $55 billion in real U.S. dollars to a company that seemed to be practically quilted out of red flags.

Fred Rivett@fredrivett

From the beginning, I thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined.

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