Library:Number Go Up
| Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall | |
|---|---|
| Author | Zeke Faux |
| First published | 2023 |
| ISBN | 978-0-593-44381-1 unverified |
| Role | Analysis |
| Domains | Business, Finance & Scams Technology & Media |
| Tactics | Fraud or Scam Propaganda Technique |
Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall is a 2023 book by Zeke Faux.
Summary
Zeke Faux, an investigative reporter for Bloomberg, set out in 2021 to understand the cryptocurrency boom, beginning with questions about Tether, the largest "stablecoin," a token meant to be worth one dollar and backed by reserves. His reporting took him from the Bahamas offices of FTX to the Philippines, El Salvador and the scam compounds of Southeast Asia. The book, published in 2023 after the collapse of FTX, is a skeptical and often darkly funny tour of an industry he concluded was riddled with hype and fraud.
Tether
Faux investigates whether Tether actually held the reserves it claimed. He describes the company's opaque operations and its executives' evasive answers. Tether had paid penalties to US regulators over misleading claims about its reserves, though it continued to operate and grow.
Sam Bankman-Fried
Faux spent time with Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, before its collapse, and describes the image he cultivated as a responsible, altruistic billionaire. When FTX failed in November 2022, it emerged that customer deposits had been diverted to his trading firm, Alameda Research. Bankman-Fried was later convicted of fraud.
Play-to-earn and pig butchering
Faux visits the Philippines to report on Axie Infinity, a "play-to-earn" game in which players earned tokens by breeding digital creatures, which briefly became a source of income for many people until the token's value collapsed. In the book's most disturbing section, he traces a "pig butchering" scam, in which fraudsters build online relationships with victims before persuading them to invest in fake crypto platforms, back to forced-labor compounds in Cambodia, where trafficked workers are made to run the scams.
Relevance to Bullshitopedia
Number Go Up shows how the language of technological revolution can be used to sell speculative assets, how stablecoins and exchanges can obscure where money actually is, and how crypto has enabled industrial-scale fraud. It applies old lessons about bubbles and confidence tricks to a new technology.
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