As someone in the tech industry who has managed to avoid Crypto entirely somehow, I was looking forward to this book to help me understand what it was I've been missing out on. I've loosely followed the drama (it's hard to avoid) and was generally familiar with how it all worked, but I just couldn't really wrap my head around why proving ownership of a jpeg or storing a reference to a digital currency in a decentralized system was really ground-breaking. This book both confirmed my biases, but also gave me insight into why people went so hard (and still are!) into crypto and the crazy effects it's had on so many people.
Number Go Up is a wild ride of highs and lows, which I expected, but also has some dark moments that I didn't expect. While we could all see the potential for criminal applications, I would never have considered the downstream impact of the anonymous, decentralized banking system.
Funny, interesting, informative, sobering -- this book was an enjoyable ride through the crypto rollercoaster, worth a read for anyone who even has a mild interest in this world and has been following along.
Saved annotations
"There's no monkey business." But then he described what sounded very much like monkey business.
One of his fingers was sheathed by metal, making it look like a dragon claw and him like a huge nerd.
It was as if the Wright Brothers sold air miles to finance inventing the airplane
But maybe you didn't even need to have fuck you money to say fuck you. You could just say fuck you if you felt like it was right.
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
IT SEEMED UNLIKELY that someone who tried to rhyme "Razzlekhan's the name" with "that hot grandma you really wanna bang" could be a master thief.
"I wasn't, like, leaving my house. I was scared. North Korea was going to come and put a gun to my head," he said. I laughed. "It's not funny," he said.
"It's a way to signal you are a Web3 native person. You are one of the cool kids," one ex-Goldman Sachs banker told a reporter, sounding very much like he wasn't.
but the crowd seemed to be trying to play it cool, or at least as cool as you can look while wearing clothes covered in cartoon apes.
One American Bitcoiner I met in San Salvador told me, semi-seriously, that he'd stimulated the economy by buying a refrigerator for the family of a stripper he was dating.
"You misplaced eight billion dollars?" I asked. "Mis-accounted,", Bankman-Fried said, sounding almost proud of his explanation.
"I was really lazy about this mental math," the former physics major said.