This is no great book unfortunately, but its subject matter itself is so fascinating that it is still a must read :: A book review is a curious artifact. By convention, it purports to stand in judgment of the work of an expert who has labored for months to create something of enduring value in the world. Few book reviewers, on the other hand, have ever done anything meaningful, and none has ever spent a book-equivalent effort on a book review. Still, hope springs eternal among would-be reviewers that they alone will write a review worth reading. And so I throw my hat into this accursed ring.

Number Go Up, by Bloomberg’s Zeke Faux, is the best book yet written about cryptocurrency. It is even better if you haven’t closely followed the rogues gallery committing a Shrekian onion of scams.

And yet I found it at times exasperating, perhaps because of the narcissism of small differences. I am also a long-time cryptocurrency skeptic, and perhaps if one squints a great deal a professional in financial writing, and it is not exactly the book I would have written. Of course, I did not spend two years of my life diligently talking to ne'er-do-wells and writing down what they said.

Most writing about cryptocurrency by professional journalists suffers from taking the representations of scam promoters at face value. This book does not have that problem: its tone is unbridled contempt for its subjects.

Some books might choose to unspool this point of view quietly over time, before gutting the subject with a single arc phrase and an implicitly raised eyebrow.

The byline for the Prologue announces that, as of February 17th, 2022, that “Total Value of All Cryptocurrencies: $2 Trillion (Yes, Trillion with a ‘T’)”

We, somewhat surprisingly, do not return to this device. It is drive-by contempt, thoroughly earned by the subjects but as yet unearned by the text.

Finance has a conceit that the numbers are important, indeed, that the world is ruled by important numbers. Financial journalism adopts that conceit when it is convenient, but (mostly accurately) assumes that the reader couldn’t read a balance sheet if their life depended on it. So in place of numbers, financial journalism is vibes, recounted conversations, and (at its best) snippets of documents contrasted with the conversations to cast doubt on the vibes. The numbers only matter insofar as you can vibe to them.

Which, to be fair, is a metacommentary on the crypto industry, which also pretends to be about crystallized math and its implications for humanity but cares about numbers to the precise extent that Number Go Up. Crypto and journalism love each other; where else in finance can one find such rich vibes (and such an engaged audience clicking merrily) unencumbered by the dreary necessity of ferreting numbers out of PDFs and doing fourth grade math on them.