Number Go Up

(Paperback)

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Description

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

Number Go Up is a dizzying safari of the surreal, hilarious, can't-make-it-up insanity of the crypto boom. Racing across the globe from the Bahamas to Italy to Cambodia, Zeke Faux takes readers behind the velvet rope and onto the mega yachts and multimillion-dollar tropical compounds of the billionaire crypto schemers, hustlers, and evangelists who may all be headed to prison-but are having a riotously good time turning the financial world upside down. * Joshua Green, #1 NYT bestselling author of The Devils Bargain *
Zeke Faux's Number Go Up does what should be impossible -- it combines meticulous reporting with irresistible story telling. The book reveals was arguably the most brazen financial con of the 21st century and does so without getting mired in abstraction or hype. It is the definitive book about crypto and the only one you'll want to read. * Max Chafkin, author of The Contrarian *

Author Bio

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News in New York. He's a winner of the Gerald Loeb award for explanatory business journalism and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel award, and a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Faux lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their three children.