Book Review: “Number Go Up”

I recently finished reading the Kindle version of Number Go Up by Zeke Faux. This marks my 11th book review of cryptocurrency and blockchain-related books. See the full list here.

But… Number Go Up is marketed as a cryptocurrency book which is debatable. I would categorize it as True Crime with certain cryptocurrencies and centrally-issued pegged assets (like USDT) providing the enabling infrastructure.

It is a refreshingly witty book on a subject matter that is chronically filled with mindless conspiracy theories or Messianic price predictions.

Faux walked the tight rope, delivering a fairly nuanced and informative testament in an otherwise cacophonous market. Best of all it includes copious amounts of first-hand comments straight from the horses mouth of actual insiders, not wannabe social media influencers.

I read this back-to-back with Easy Money, by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, which was a dud in comparison. Easy Money was riddled with numerous mistakes that should have been caught when the manuscript was sent for independent fact-checking.

One quantitative example of how robust Number Go Up was, it contained 45 pages of references. In contrast, the shallow Easy Money contained a mere 8 pages of references.1 And while both books touch on some of the same topics (Tether, FTX, Celsius) and even interview some the same exact participants (SBF, Mashinsky, Pierce), Faux’s version of the events is not only richer in detail but often includes additional supporting characters… all without having to rely on an entourage.

Did I mention this was a witty book? In the margins I wrote: jhc, haha, lol, jesus, wow, burn and several variations therein about 25 times. It didn’t make the reader just laugh either. There were several times you could easily become angry, such as the face-to-face encounters that Faux had in Cambodia investigating romance-scam “pig butchering” compounds.

While the book occasionally discusses some technical concepts, it does not attempt to bog the reader down in a sundry of technical details. And when Faux did present something technical – like how a wallet works – he was in and out with the lesson in a few sentences.

If you could only read one book on the rise and fall of the most recent (virtual) coin bubble, be sure to check out Number Go Up.

With that said, despite the excellent prose and editing, I did find a few things to quibble about. But unlike the last two book reviews, there are no major show stoppers requiring a second edition to fix.

Prologue

Faux gets down to business, on p. 9 writing:

I’d like to tell you that I was the person who exposed it all, the heroic investigator who saw through one of history’s greatest frauds. But I got tricked like everyone else.

I’m not quite sure when I began following him on Twitter, but it has been at least a year. And not once during the collapse of the lending and exchange intermediaries last year did I see him do victory laps. Perhaps he did some quiet grave stomping late at night or on the weekend that I missed, but the tone of this book feels congruent with his online voice. And unlike the always-on coinerati (and anti-coiners who shadow them), the author upfront notes that he got tricked, we all did. 2

On p. 12 the author writes:

Thit is the story of the greatest financial mania the world has ever seen. It started as an investigation of a coin called Tether that served as a kind of bank for the industry.

As I pedantically questioned in other book reviews: by what measure was the 2020-2022 bubble the greatest financial mania the world has ever seen? Maybe it is, but in my adulthood the GFC seemed like at least a magnitude larger due to the existential issues of SIFIs and TBTF banks.

On p. 13 the author writes:

I pitched this book to my publisher in November 2021, near the mania’s peak, on the premise that crypto would soon collapse, and I’d chronicle the catastrophic fallout. Three months later, I was sitting with Bankman-Fried at his Bahamas office and looking at the computer screens behind his fuzzy head.

I think the author short changes himself a little here because chronologically he was already doing some sleuthing at the beginning of the year, attending Bitcoin Miami and other events.3 The timing is happenstance because not too far from his dayjob, according to Easy Money, both McKenzie and Silverman also met in a bar in New York to discuss pitching a book to a publisher at around the same time.

On p. 13 the author writes:

I told him my theory: that the coin called Tether, the supposedly safe crypto-bank that served as the backbone for a whole lot of other cryptocurrencies, could prove to be fraudulent, and how that could bring down the whole industry.

As mentioned above, I read this book immediately after completing Easy Money and in reading this particular sentence I had a small sense of déjà vu because that was their thesis too.4

Chapter 1: “I Am Freaking Nostradamus!”

On p. 15 he writes:

Don’t worry about how exactly a dog joke turns into a financial asset—even Dogecoin’s creator didn’t understand how it happened.

While Faux does provide a reference to an interview with Jackson Palmer, it bears mentioning to the readers that Dogecoin was co-created by two people, Palmer and Billy Markus.

On p. 16 he writes:

Jay wouldn’t admit he’d gotten lucky. He acted like his Dogecoin score proved his astute understanding of crowd psychology. Even after he moved on, I didn’t. I started seeing crypto bros everywhere. They were acting like the rising prices of the coins proved they were geniuses. And their numbers were growing.

This is an excellent observation. And when you attempt to engage some of them on social media more than a few will retort, HFSP!

On p. 17 he wrote:

Crypto didn’t hold the same appeal for me. I’d resisted the topic whenever it came up at work. It seemed so obvious. The coins were transparently useless, and people were buying them anyway. A journalist composing a painstaking exposé of a crypto scam seemed like a restaurant critic writing a takedown of Taco Bell.

This is one of the many witty comments, I’ll try not to post all of them because you should grab a copy of the book and find them yourself.5

On p. 18 he writes:

The answer was not much. But I did know they were called “stablecoins” because, unlike coins with prices intended to go up, they were supposed to have a fixed value of one dollar. That was because each coin was supposed to be backed by one U.S. dollar. The biggest stablecoin by far was called Tether.

This is a decent high level description of a centrally-issued pegged coin. In academic literature it is still probably more common to see “fixed” than “pegged” but either works.

With that said, I do think it is confusing – as a reader – to be introduced to Tether and not USDT. Later on it does get confusing, because the author uses Tether to describe both the issuer (Tether LTD) and the medium-of-exchange (USDT). I had a similar nitpick about the same type of usage in Easy Money, where the authors inexplicably do not fully define what a stablecoin is or mention how there is more than one (beyond Terra).

On p. 18 he writes:

I couldn’t tell which country’s authorities were overseeing Tether. On a podcast, a company representative said it was registered with the British Virgin Islands Financial Investigation Agency. But the agency’s director, Errol George, told me that it didn’t oversee Tether. “We don’t and never have,” he said.

One of the strengths of this book is that the author routinely gets a direct quote from people involved on the regulatory and law enforcement side of the table. Strangely we do not see anything like that in Easy Money.

On p. 19 he writes:

There were plenty of critics who speculated that Tether was not actually backed by anything at all.

Another refreshing sub-narrative in this book was the lack of a sub-narrative surrounding “critics” that occurred throughout Easy Money. That is to say, Faux does not attempt to put anyone on a pedestal, least of all, people marketing themselves as “critic” or “skeptic.”

On p. 20 he writes:

“In a panic, everything collapses and they look to the federal government to bail them out,” one attendee at Yellen’s meeting told me. “If the crypto market was isolated, maybe we could live with that. But hiccups in one market start to translate into other markets. These are the things we’re paid to worry about.”

The author referenced a series of important regulatory meetings that occurred in the summer of 2021 and actually got a direct quote from an attendee. Top notch stuff, no guessing games or reliance on clout chasers on Twitter.

Chapter 2: Number Go Up Technology

Great intro to the chapter on p. 22:

The Florida crime novelist Carl Hiaasen once wrote of his home state, “Every scheming shitwad in America turned up here sooner or later, such were the opportunities for predation.” In his books, the scheming shitwads are crooked cops, corrupt politicians, and the cocaine traffickers who financed much of Miami’s skyline. But plenty of people at Bitcoin 2021, the crypto conference I’d come to attend, met the description.

On p. 22 he writes:

I was deeply skeptical about cryptocurrency before I arrived, and what I had been learning about Tether wasn’t doing much to dispel those doubts.

Unlike the previous two book reviewed, the author does not make or spin this “skepticism” into some form of identity.

On p. 22 he writes:

My plan was to listen politely to a bunch of tech bros pitching their apps, and then to ask them what they knew about Tether.

And he did!

On p. 22 he writes:

The attendees wore T-shirts with crypto slogans, like Have fun staying poor or HODL, a meme about never selling crypto derived from a typo for the word “hold.”

He got it right! Unlike the previous two books reviewed, Faux discovered “HODL” was a typo from a drunkard.

On p. 24 he writes:

The mayor equated Bitcoin’s doubters with his city’s skeptics, who liked to needle him about climate change by pointing out that streets flooded even on sunny days. As it so happened, during the week of the conference, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had released a report calling for a massive, twenty-foot-high seawall across Biscayne Bay, blocking the ocean views of the city’s financial district. “You guys see any water here? I don’t know, I don’t see any water here,” Suarez joked to the crowd.

Can’t say I follow Suarez closely but does he typically use dark humor?

On p. 24 he writes:

Their bête noire was “fiat money.” That means money printed by central banks—in other words, pretty much all money in modern times.

I need to be pedantic (since that’s my calling card). In the U.S., the vast majority of “fiat money” is actually created by commercial banks not central banks.6

On p. 25 he writes:

A blockchain is a database. Think of a spreadsheet with two columns: In Column A there’s a list of people, and in Column B there’s a number representing how much money they have.

Hurray, a definition. Now I didn’t care much for the example the author used but unlike the previous book review, he gave it the good ol’ college try and it conveyed the necessary information to the reader.

On p. 25 he writes:

With the Bitcoin blockchain, the numbers in Column B represent Bitcoins.

Hurray, countable blockchains. Unlike several other books I have reviewed in the past (especially in the 2016-2017 era), Faux quickly explains to readers that there is more than one blockchain. Two sentences later he mentions the Dogecoin blockchain.

In other words, unlike Easy Money and Popping the Crypto Bubble, Faux does not conflate Bitcoin with every other blockchain.

On p. 26 he writes:

The technical innovation of blockchain is that it lets customers get together and maintain the list themselves, with no banker involved. If I want to transfer 1,000 Bitcoins from my account to someone else’s, there’s no handsy banker to call. So instead, my computer broadcasts the transaction to all the computers that run the Bitcoin network, sending all the other Bitcoin people a message that says, “Hey, I’m transferring 1,000 Bitcoins to another account.”

This is a decent example. But I think a more accurate verbiage would be “intermediary” instead of “bank” (because there are a variety of intermediaries in finance).7

On p. 27 he writes:

The solution that Bitcoin uses to prevent this “double-spending problem” is called “mining,” and it’s incredibly complicated and confusing. It also uses so much electricity that the White House has warned it might prevent the United States from slowing climate change. It’s like something out of the world’s most boring dystopian science-fiction movie.

This page is about as much as readers are provided into the topic of mining. That’s a little disappointing, since the market still lacks a long-form, non-hagiography on the topic. But that’s someone else’s calling for now and would not have really fit well into the flow of the book.8

On p. 28 he writes:

The difficulty of the game automatically increases when more miners enter it.

Technically the difficulty changes (increase or decrease) is based on hashrate, not on entry or exit of “miners.” That is to say, if readers were to download and use a Bitcoin mining client on their home computer, their mere entry would not immediately change the difficulty rating because the amount of hashrate a home CPU brings to bear is miniscule relative to the ASICs housed in warehouses by existing participants.

On p. 29 he writes:

Silk Road was Bitcoin’s first commercial application. Drug consumers didn’t set up their own mining rigs before going shopping on the dark web. They bought Bitcoins for cash on rudimentary exchanges. The demand started driving up the price.

To his credit, unlike Easy Money, Faux does not sensationalize and claim Silk Road was the “most successful onboarding app” for Bitcoin. Maybe it was, but Faux doesn’t get bogged down in histrionics.

On p. 30 he writes:

The system depends on economic incentives. The miners who confirm transactions have made such a large financial investment—in buying computers to compete in the guessing game—that it wouldn’t make economic sense to undermine Bitcoin by entering false transactions. But that also means it does make economic sense to run tons of computers to guess random numbers in hopes of winning the Bitcoin reward. As one person famously put it on Twitter, “Imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin.”

Solid quote. Nice reference to this funny tweet too:

Source: Twitter

On p. 30 he writes:

That is as bad for the environment as it sounds. Once Bitcoin’s price started rising, competition drove out the hobbyist miners. Within a few years, companies were selling specialized computers that were extra good at the guessing game. Miners started operating whole racks of them. Then warehouses full of racks.

This is a pretty concise way of describing the absurdity of the value leaking from the ecosystem, to the benefit of state-owned energy grids, A/C manufacturers, and semiconductor companies.9

On p. 31 he writes:

Other coins would adopt different authentication systems that used far less electricity, but Bitcoiners opposed any change to Nakamoto’s mining system. There was no way to reduce mining’s energy use.

This is a fantastic nuance that other authors, especially in both Easy Money and Popping the Crypto Bubble, fail to distinguish. The ossification and intransigence by the Taliban wing of Bitcoinland is real. For instance, the core developers (and foundations) behind both Zcash and Dogecoin have announced plans to migrate away from proof-of-work and adopt proof-of-stake.

While there have been (dubious?) efforts such as “Change the code” to kickstart something similar for Bitcoin, the bottom line is that it is the centralized exchanges that ultimately call the shots because they control the BTC ticker symbol. And during the blocksize “civil war,” several major ones said they would only recognize the chain that Bitcoin Core worked on. And that clique is anti-proof-of-stake. There will be a test after this book review, so take notes and pay attention!

On p. 31 he writes:

The fundamental absurdity of all this is that the numbers in the Bitcoin blockchain don’t represent dollars, or even have any inherent tie to the financial system at all. There’s no reason why a Bitcoin should be worth more than a Dogecoin or any other number in any other database. Why would someone burn massive amounts of coal just to get a higher number written in the blockchain for their account?

Preach it, brother! As Barney Gumble might say, just hook it to my veins.

Source: Twitter

On p. 31 he writes:

But, of course, just because the supply of something is limited doesn’t make it valuable—only 21 million VHS tapes of Pixar’s Toy Story were made at first, and you can get an original on eBay for three dollars.

Bingo! Without persistent and/or increased demand, a deterministic supply is mostly meaningless.10 Empirically we see that with hundreds (thousands?) of supply capped coins that fail to reach the proverbial NGU moon.

On p. 31 he writes:

For Bitcoin believers, the rising price became its own justification. On stage in Miami, many of the speakers resorted to a sort of illogical reasoning: The price of Bitcoin will go up because it has gone up. They wielded this circular argument to ward off doubt and call forth a future of infinite bounty. It became a mantra: Number go up.

To be fair, this mantra pre-dates the soothsayers at Bitcoin Miami by years. In fact, one could argue that the origins of Bitcoin maximalism – circa March 2014 – incorporated this fallacious circular view.

On p. 32 he writes:

“NUMBER GO UP,” declared Dan Held, an executive at a crypto exchange called Kraken, on stage at Bitcoin 2021. “Number go up technology is a very powerful piece of technology. It’s the price. As the price goes higher, more people become aware of it, and buy it in anticipation of the price continuing to climb.”

A sociologist or two could write a book on Held and his former colleague, Pierre Rochard, for the crazy things they have said to defend (and promote) Bitcoin maximalism.11

On p. 32 he writes:

Max Keiser, a Bitcoin podcaster, emerged first, in a white suit and purple sunglasses, to pounding EDM. “Yeah! Yeah!” he screamed, pumping his fists, as the dance music built to a drop. Elon Musk had recently said that Tesla would not accept Bitcoin due to its environmental impact, and Keiser was raging like the billionaire had run over his dog. “We’re not selling! We’re not selling! Fuck Elon! Fuck Elon!”

During my review of Chapter 6 of Easy Money, I linked to this exact string of expletives as something the authors missed by attending the 2022 edition of Bitcoin Miami and not the 2021 that Faux witnessed.

On p. 33 he writes:

A more accurate description would be that Saylor was the biggest loser in the room. He didn’t mention it during his talk, but his software company, MicroStrategy, had nearly gone bust during the dot-com bubble, back when the internet counted as a hot new technology. In 2000, just before it popped, he told The New Yorker: “I just hope I don’t get up one day and have to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘You had $15 billion and you blew it all. There’s the guy who flushed $15 billion down the toilet.’ ” Right afterward, he lost $13.5 billion.

Solid quote. Strangely, while Saylor does get another couple of paragraphs, Faux missed out on informing the readers that on August 31, 2022, the Attorney General for DC announced it was suing Saylor for evading more than $25 million in taxes. Surely readers would find that interesting?12

On p. 34 he writes:

Some people speculated that what Tether called “commercial paper” was really debt from exchanges like FTX. That would explain why no one on Wall Street had dealings with Tether. FTX could simply send Tether a note saying, “I promise I’ll pay you $1 billion,” and Tether could zap over 1 billion coins, and no one would be the wiser.

Of all the discussion surrounding Tether, the commercial paper (CP) angle was the one that felt like it lacked a sufficient bowtie for readers. Later he does mention how Tether announced it planned to move entirely away from CP and acquire Treasuries instead.

However I felt that – as mentioned in the reviews of both Easy Money and Popping the Crypto Bubble – it would be helpful to the audience to briefly explain the recent history of shadow payments and shadow banking in the U.S., starting with PayPal and Money Market Funds (MMFs) which trail blazed the path that Tether LTD and other centralized pegged coin issuers followed.13

Source: Twitter

On p. 35 he writes about SBF and Tether:

“We’ve wired them a lot of dollars,” he said. He also told me that he’d successfully cashed in Tethers, transferring the digital coins back to the company and receiving real U.S. dollars in exchange, though the process he described sounded a bit strange. “This is going through three different jurisdictions, through intermediary banks,” he said. “If you know the right banks to be at, you can avoid some of these intermediaries.”

The long and the short of redeeming these centrally issued pegged coins is you have to rely on legacy infrastructure (wiring). I have never attempted to redeem USDT or USDC, but a number of acquaintances have, and following the collapse of SEN and SigNet it involves ol’ fashioned wires.14

On p. 36 he writes about Mashinsky and Celsisus:

But then he described what sounded very much like monkey business. Tether, in addition to investing in Celsius, had lent more than $1 billion worth of its coins to the company, which Mashinsky used to invest in other things. Mashinsky claimed this was safe because for every $1.00 worth of Tethers he borrowed, he put up about $1.50 worth of Bitcoin as collateral. If Celsius went bust, Tether could seize the Bitcoins and sell them. He told me this was a service Tether offered to other companies too.

So I don’t want to be perceived as carrying water for Tether (or Celsius) – I stand by all my critical comments I have made of both of them in the past – but this type of arrangement is kind of what commercial banks do. And that’s probably the angle – shadow banking – I would have probed more.

On p. 37 he writes:

“Somebody is lying,” Mashinsky said. “Either the bank is lying or Celsius is lying.” I was pretty sure I knew who was lying, and it wasn’t J.P. Morgan. I made a mental note to investigate Celsius when I got back to New York.

Why not both?

As mentioned in my review of Easy Money, in 2015, J.P. Morgan paid a combined $307 million fine to settle cases with the SEC and CFTC, admitting wrongdoing in part because certain banking units failed to tell clients it favored in-house funds, clear conflicts of interest. In 2020, J.P. Morgan paid $920 million to settle DOJ, SEC and CFTC charges of illegal market manipulation or “spoofing” in the precious metals and Treasury markets.

If the author was looking for a large unblemished regulated financial institution, there probably is none. But to be fair, this was Mashinsky’s example the author was responding to.

On p. 37 he writes:

Mallers explained that he had gone to a beach town in El Salvador because a surfer from San Diego was teaching poor people there about Bitcoin, which was somehow going to help them stop being poor.

Ha, this is great. And sad too.

On p. 37 he writes:

Rather than telling his citizens first, he had chosen to reveal a major national policy to a bunch of Bitcoiners, in Miami, Florida, in English, a language most Salvadorans don’t speak.

Oof.

On p. 38 he writes:

I didn’t get it. There was a reason no one used Bitcoin to buy coffee—it was complicated, expensive, and slow to use. And what would happen if poor Salvadorans put their savings in crypto and then the price fell? But the audience was rapt. As I scanned the crowd, I saw that Mallers wasn’t the only one wiping away tears.

If there is a movie version of this book, need to have Steve Martin-like entertainer on stage ala Leap of Faith.

On p. 39 he writes:

Not everyone I spoke to in Miami was a Bitcoin cultist. The biggest users of Tether were professional traders at hedge funds and other large firms, and I interviewed several of them too. What they explained to me was that for all the talk of peer-to-peer currency, and the ingenuity of a way to transfer value without an intermediary, most people weren’t using cryptocurrencies to buy stuff. Instead, they were sending regular money to exchanges, where they could then bet on coin prices.

Compared to the two previous books, it is nice to see the author use a nuance around “Bitcoin cultist” — because not every coin or token encourages the sort of maximalism we see from Dan Held and Pierre Rochard. And empirically not every public chain project is attempting to reinvent “money.”

On p. 39 he writes:

Even so, many had their own conspiracy theories about Tether. It’s controlled by the Chinese mafia; the CIA uses it to move money; the government has allowed it to get huge so it can track the criminals who use it. It wasn’t that they trusted Tether, I realized. It was that they needed Tether to trade and they were making a lot of money doing it. There was no profit in being skeptical. “It could be way shakier, and I wouldn’t care,” said Dan Matuszewski, co-founder of CMS Holdings, a cryptocurrency investment firm.

I’m not endorsing CMS but I’ve found it weird to see certain Tether Truthers single out CMS as part of the inner ring of the Tether cabal.15 One of its most vocal members even accused Matuszewski of lying about redeeming USDT for real money, and then deleted the tweet. Maybe CMS (and Matuszewski) are indeed at the center of the Tether cabal, but the burden-of-proof is on the Truthers (the self-deputized prosecutors) to provide evidence.

Chapter 3: Doula for Creation

One of the most interesting things about this chapter is the author described, what I believe may have been the first bookform exploration into the history of Mastercoin.

I’ve read a number of interviews of Brock Pierce in the past. I even briefly met him in late 2014 at a house party in the Bay area. But this was the most colorful description of his social circle, drugs, dreams and all.

For instance, on p. 42 he writes:

I decided to mingle and ask the guests what they knew about our absent host. A beautiful woman told me she’d spent a week with Pierce in the Colombian jungle, where he’d bought land to protect it for Indigenous people. “It’s amazing what he does,” she said. Another man told me Pierce was building a spaceport on an old army base in Puerto Rico. An obnoxious guy who described himself as a “futurist” told me a story about a time in Ibiza when Pierce went three days without sleeping. “He’s surrounded by people who are benevolent dolphins and not sharks,” he said. He then asked me to smell a pastry for him before he ate it, telling me he was allergic to raspberries.

Ha! Everything in this paragraph is worth a couple chuckles because anecdotally it sounds true.

On p. 43 he writes:

At some point, a man at the other end of the table began bragging loudly about a cryptocurrency called “Let’s Go” or “Let’s Go Brandon,” a slogan that, through an almost inexplicable memeification process, had come to stand for “Fuck Joe Biden” among Trump supporters. The man, who I later figured out was a hedge fund manager named James Koutoulas, announced to the table that his plan for the coin was “dumb but it’s working.” A month earlier, a podcaster had presented Donald Trump himself with five hundred billion of the tokens, and just that afternoon, Donald Trump Jr. had made a cryptic post on Twitter seemingly referencing the meme coin. “Is that allowed?” someone asked. “They’re allowed to make money,” Koutoulas said. “Fuck the SEC.”

I had never heard of Koutoulas and I checked my email. A former colleague sent a spreadsheet in September 2018 with Typhon Capital Management listed as a “crypto fund;” that’s the fund Koutoulas founded.

On p. 43 he writes:

A doctor from Boise, Idaho, and a Bitcoiner were talking about the coronavirus vaccine and “medical freedom.” The Bitcoiner refused to tell me his name. “Real G’s move in silence,” he told me, with a high-pitched laugh.

Sounds par for the course. I’ve lost count how many supposed “cypherpunks” want to have it both ways: cash in off their notoriety and live it up large all while being “anonymous.” Jameson Lopp immediately comes to mind: telling The New York Times how he made himself “vanish” and simultaneously getting CryptoDeleted, deleted.16

On p. 44 he writes:

None of the guests seemed to know one another. A crypto venture capital fund manager—wearing a mock souvenir T-shirt from convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island—joked about a scam that another yacht guest was running. A crypto public relations man offered what he called “Colombian marching powder” to a young woman.

So much oof in those three sentences.

On p. 46 he writes:

I realized I had walked in on a presentation for a timeshare that I would pay money not to join. It was also not the best setting for a long conversation. My tour guide soon sent me back downstairs. When Pierce and I did catch up, by phone, he told me he’d dreamed up the idea for a stablecoin back in 2013. He said he knew from the start it would change the course of history. “I’m not an amateur entrepreneur throwing darts in the dark,” he told me. “I’m a doula for creation. I only take on missions impossible.”

Someone should call the police, the author was subjugated to some cruel and unusual punishment.

On p. 49 he writes:

By 2013, Pierce was running one of the first Bitcoin venture capital funds. There still wasn’t much you could do with Bitcoins, and crypto remained largely the domain of geeks and hobbyists. But around that time, a man going by “dacoinminster” had posted a proposal on the popular message board Bitcointalk that would lead to the creation of Tether and make the entire $3 trillion cryptocurrency bubble possible. He called his idea “MasterCoin.”

I think one detail that could have been worth adding was that this fund was originally called Crypto Currency Partners and during the “bear market” of 2015 rebranded to Blockchain Capital. The fund typically wrote small checks (around $25,000 per deal) and had spurned at least one VC rule at that time: do not invest in startups that competed with one another (e.g., if you invest in one exchange in a specific jurisdiction, then do not invest in another exchange that served the same jurisdiction).

On p. 50 he writes:

Willett imagined that once he created the MasterCoin system, other people would come up with all sorts of ways to use it: coins that tracked property titles, shares of stock, financial derivatives, and even real money. None of the ideas were completely original—he told me he’d read many discussions of them on message boards—but he was the first to put them into practice.

Could be worth mentioning that there were several (three?) colored coin projects that existed around the same time, attempting to track similar off-chain wares.

On p. 50 he writes:

“If you think Bitcoin has a reputation problem for money laundering now, just wait until you can store ‘USDCoins’ in the block chain!” Willett wrote in 2012. “I think criminals (like the rest of us) will prefer to deal with stable currencies rather than unstable ones.”

Pretty prophetic. Although, unclear from his original post if Willett was thinking of any distinction between central bank-issued digital currency versus privately issued pegged coins (which is what we have ended up with so far).

On p. 51 he writes:

Willett’s plan was innovative. It was also illegal. What Willett did was a textbook example of what the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission calls an “unregistered securities offering,” meaning that Willett was selling an investment opportunity without any of the usual safeguards. Willett told me that the agency probably would have fined him hundreds of thousands of dollars if it had noticed what he was up to. But luckily, the regulators weren’t reading Bitcoin message boards. “They would have made a terrible example out of me if they’d known what was coming,” Willett said, laughing. “Never heard anything from them.”

So both Willet and the author could be correct. But I think referencing or quoting a U.S.-licensed attorney would have made this a stronger paragraph.

On p. 51 he writes:

Phil Potter, an executive at an offshore Bitcoin exchange, Bitfinex, was developing a similar idea. They teamed up and adopted Potter’s name for it: Tether. (Potter told me he was actually the one to first approach Sellars with the idea. “I’m sure Brock will tell you he came down from Mount Sinai with it all written on stone tablets,” he said.)

This is one of those quotes I spit-the-coffee-out, so to speak. You see, in Easy Money, the authors never got a direct quote from anyone at Tether, Bitfinex, or the regulators who oversee them. It was a disappointment. In contrast, readers of Number Go Up get a chance to hear from all of the above.

On p. 52 he wirtes:

Tethers. Then Tethers could be transferred anonymously, like any other cryptocurrency.

Pedantically, it isn’t truly anonymous: it is pseudonymously.

On p. 52 he write:

The problem was that Tether, like other cryptocurrencies, broke just about every rule in banking. Banks keep track of everyone who has an account and where they send their money, allowing law enforcement agencies to track transactions by criminals. Tether would check the identity of people who bought coins directly from the company, but once the currency was out in the world, it could be transferred anonymously, just by sending a code. A drug lord could hold millions of Tethers in a digital wallet and send it to a terrorist without anyone knowing.

I partially agree with this but believe a clarification should be added: in the U.S. That is to say, not every country has the exact equivalent of the “Bank Secrecy Act” which is what the author is referring to here.17

Source: Twitter

Three years later I would probably amend my own tweet to state on-chain activity can be surveilled by anyone running a node (tracing can be done at any time). But that surveillance sharing from CEXs depends on jurisdiction.

On p. 52 he writes:

“The U.S. will come after Tether in due time,” Budovsky wrote me in an email from a Florida prison. “Almost feel sorry for them.”

This was another spit-the-coffee-out moments. Unlike the authors of Popping the Crypto Bubble and Easy Money, Faux reached out to the creator of Liberty Reserve for a quote. And got a relevant one. Solid reporting.18

On p. 54 he writes:

When I spoke with Pierce on the phone, I asked him the central question: Was Tether actually backed up by real money? He assured me it was. He said Tether was preserving the dollar’s status as a global reserve currency. “If it were not for Tether, America would likely fall,” he said. “Tether in many ways is the hope of America.” But as he droned on, I realized Pierce had little information to offer about the location of Tether’s funds. My mind started to wander.

To me, this was the correct way to frame the conversation for the reader: Pierce is not an insider, so he probably does not have up-to-date inside info. I pointed this out in the review of Easy Money, where McKenzie and Silverman felt compelled to include Pierce’s information-free banter.

On p. 55 he writes:

But Pierce wasn’t going to help me find salvation. He told me that he’d actually given up on Tether in 2015, about a year after he started it. The currency had gotten almost no users, and it seemed likely it would be frowned upon by authorities. An SEC lawsuit, or a trip to prison, would prevent him from reaching his own destiny. “My view was if I made money from this thing it would prevent me from doing the work that I have to do for this nation,” Pierce said.

Unclear if Pierce truly believes the tales he spins.

On p. 55 he writes:

But if the exchange used Tethers instead of dollars, it wouldn’t need them. Potter pitched this idea to his boss at the exchange: Giancarlo Devasini, the Italian former plastic surgeon. He went for it. Devasini and his partners already owned 40 percent of Tether, and they bought the rest from Pierce’s crew for a few hundred thousand dollars. Pierce told me he handed over his shares for free.

This passage is another example for why I think Faux probably should have used Tether LTD to describe the issuer and USDT to describe tethers. A casual reader might assume that Devasini owns 40% of the USDT supply.

On p. 55 he writes:

After interviewing most of the people involved with Tether’s creation, I realized that they didn’t have the answers I was looking for. All of them said something similar: They definitely deserved credit for coming up with one of the most successful companies in the history of cryptocurrency, but they bore no responsibility for whatever the company was doing now.

Ha!

Chapter 4: The Plastic Surgeon

This is one of the shortest chapters, but involves some interesting color on Giancarlo Devasini that has not appeared in print before.

For instance, on p. 59 he writes:

This didn’t exactly match what I’d read on Bitfinex’s website. There, it said that Devasini’s group of companies brought in more than 100 million euros a year in revenue, and that he sold them shortly before the 2008 financial crisis. But Italian corporate records showed that the companies had revenue of just 12 million euros in 2007. Some of them even filed for bankruptcy. And none of the former employees I spoke to remembered Devasini selling them.

An example of “exit inflation”?

On p. 59 he writes:

What they did tell me was that in 2008, Devasini’s production facility was destroyed in a fire. Fuxa said it was caused by diesel generators that Devasini had set up because the local utility hadn’t provided enough power. “He basically built a power plant in the back and it went up in smoke,” Fuxa told me. But a newly unprofitable factory burning down in a mysterious fire struck me as a potential red flag, waving in the distance.

Oof.

On p. 60 he writes:

Tether called the lawsuit “meritless” and said it went nowhere.

Perhaps it is stonewalling, but a canned response is arguably better than simply not even reaching out to Tether LTD, which is apparently what a lot of the people who market themselves as “Tether Critics” have done. Solely engaging on Twitter has its limitations.

On p. 63 he worte:

Devasini was fascinated with finance. In a December 2011 post titled “The Shell Game,” he explained how Italian banks could avail themselves of billions of dollars of low-interest-rate funding. They could use it to gamble on anything, or to buy higher-yielding government bonds to make risk-free profits.

December 2011 was the middle of the European debt crisis (Italy was one of the i’s in PIIGS). Spoiler alert: since then, a number of Italian banks have struggled in what is labeled “the doom loop,” which includes the oldest Italian bank, Montei dei Paschi (which was bailed out). Would the banking sector be different if they had followed Devasini’s suggestion? Not sure, but is it a straight line between this “shell game” post and the setup of Tether LTD threeish years later?

Chapter 5: Hilariously Rich

On p. 66 he wrote:

He’d been left with a stockpile of 20 million unsold CDs and DVDs from his defunct manufacturing business. Now he decided to sell them for Bitcoin. He posted an ad on the Bitcointalk forum offering them for 0.01 Bitcoin each—about ten cents at the time. Marco Fuxa, his former business partner, told me that Devasini sold them all. If that’s true, and he kept the Bitcoins, their value would have later soared to more than $3 billion. “That’s how he got his money,” Fuxa said.

Big if true.

On p. 66 he wrote:

The first big exchange, Mt. Gox, repurposed a website created as a place to trade virtual Magic: The Gathering cards. (“Mt. Gox” stands for Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange.) Unsurprisingly, a former trading card website proved to be a bad custodian for billions of dollars.

It is interesting to see what different authors decide to include and omit to provide readers a backdrop to the industry they are covering. The collapse of Mt. Gox in 2014 unilaterally led to a 2+ year bear market and is frequently highlighted in mainstream press including this book. Yet neither Easy Money nor Popping the Crypto Bubble mentioned it even though it might have helped their arguments.19

On p. 67 he wrote about the aftermath of the 2016 Bitfinex hack (the 2nd one):

Trading increased so much that within eight months the exchange had earned enough to pay back its customers, either in cash or in Bitfinex stock. With this gambit, Bitfinex earned customers’ loyalty. And judging from what he’d do in the next few years, Devasini had learned a lesson: He could get away with bending the rules.

Even though I am not a trader, this always rubbed me the wrong way. If a regulated financial intermediary (like a custody bank) had done something similar in 2016, it is hard to see how the scrip would have been permitted to be issued. But we’ve seen some pretty strange things in traditional finance too ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

On p. 68 he writes about ICOs:

The hype was so powerful, it seemed like anyone could post a white paper explaining their plans for a new coin and raise millions. Brock Pierce, the Tether co-founder, promoted a coin called EOS, which was pitched as “the first blockchain operating system designed to support commercial decentralized applications.” It raised $4 billion. Yes, really. “I don’t care about money,” Pierce said in an interview around that time. “If I need money, I just make a token.”

Perhaps stranger is that Block.one (the entity that conducted the ICO) settled with the SEC in 2019 for $24 million with no disgorgement. Does this mean that EOS is in the clear now (in the U.S.)?

On p. 68 he writes:

These ICO-funded start-ups promised that blockchain would revolutionize commerce by enabling provenance to be tracked and verified. Even big companies like IBM and Microsoft started saying that they would put practically everything on the blockchain: diamonds, heads of lettuce, shipping containers, personal identification, and even all the real estate in the world. It seemed like blockchain-powered ICOs were the practical use that crypto had been waiting for. But there was one problem. None of this stuff ever advanced beyond the testing phases, if anyone bothered to even do that. Most ICOs were scams. And they weren’t actually an innovative form of fraud. ICOs made it easier to run a scam that’s about as old as the stock market. It’s called a “pump-and-dump” scheme.

I think this needs a paragraph break after the first sentence. Because while accurate, some readers may think that companies like IBM or Microsoft were directly involved in ICOs at that time (they were not).20

On p. 69 he writes:

With help from Mayweather, Centra raised about $25 million. But like most of the companies that raised money with ICOs, it was a total scam. It never issued its crypto debit card, or anything else at all. Even the CEO listed on its website didn’t exist—his picture was a stock photo. It would later be revealed that its founders, including a pot-smoking, opioid-addled twenty-six-year-old who ran a Miami exotic car rental business, had paid Mayweather $100,000 for his endorsement.

In contrast to Easy Money, where one of the authors talks about smoking pot and eating edibles a few times, this is the only place that marijuana is mentioned.21 Is that a good or bad thing? As Buddy Holly might say, Faux’s writing is square.

On p. 72 he writes:

By early 2017, Bitfinex was keeping its money in several banks in Taiwan. But the way the international financial system works, running an exchange required the cooperation of other banks too. Bitfinex’s Taiwanese bankers relied on other banks—known as correspondents—who acted as middlemen to pass money from Taiwan to customers in other countries.

One of my former colleagues at R3 previously worked at a large bank in Taiwan. When this publicized debanking occurred he mentioned in speaking with his former colleagues, senior managers who finally learned what was happening viewed it as scandalous because Bitfinex was flagrantly bypassing risk controls by opening up new accounts under different names.22

On p. 73 he writes:

But somewhere in the United States, an I.T. worker in his early thirties spotted the filing for the abortive lawsuit after it hit the court docket. He couldn’t believe what he was reading. Tether was supposed to be backed by real U.S. dollars in a bank. But in the lawsuit, the company itself admitted it had no access to the banking system. What was especially odd was that even after filing the case, Tether kept issuing coins. It created 200 million new ones that summer. But was anyone even sending in the corresponding $200 million, if the company didn’t have a functional bank account? The man signed up for Twitter, Medium, and other social media platforms under the pseudonym “Bitfinex’ed.” And what he started posting would create big problems for Devasini. Tether had spawned a powerful troll.

I believe one of the first times I interacted with Bitfinex’ed (prior to him losing a bet and blocking me), was when he proof read my post discussing the court case above: How newer regtech could be used to help audit cryptocurrency organizations.23

In retrospect, maybe I should have trademarked one of the subtitles: “Tether is not so tethered.”

Chapter 6: Cat and Mouse Tricks

On p. 74 he writes:

Four years later, when I started looking into Tether on my Businessweek assignment, Bitfinex’ed was still posting multiple times a day. His writing was conspiratorial, but it had struck a chord. Everyone in crypto would bring his posts up in conversation with me. Tether defenders tended to blame him for any negative news about the company. I’d seen things he wrote echoed in lawsuits and in mainstream reports. He seemed to know so much about Tether that I wondered if he worked for the company, or if he was a disgruntled government investigator. I arranged a meeting with him, on the condition I wouldn’t reveal his identity.

As mentioned in the Easy Money review, the first search result for googling “Bitfinexed identity” is to a five year old article that links to a Steemit article. Bitfinex’eds name is Spencer Macdonald.24 Back when I wrote long newsletters Bitfinex’ed was on my private mailing list and sent me the link to a Steemit article of a guy who “doxxed” him because Macdonald had re-used the same catchphrases “Boom. Done.” under an alias Voogru on reddit.25

On p. 75 he writes:

He told me that he didn’t want to reveal his real identity because he’d gotten death threats from Tether defenders. As he worked himself up, the pitch of his voice rose higher.

That sucks, I have also received a slew of threats (and petty grievances) in the past too. The people who send those threats should receive some kind of consequence. Putting that aside, why does he still use this alias at this point since it has been googlable for years?

On p. 75 he writes:

By then, Andrew had lost me. I had been hoping to get new leads at this meeting, not an analogy drawn from a cartoon about anthropomorphic ducks. Andrew told me his mission to expose Bitfinex wasn’t personal. It seemed like it was. He said he imagined Kevin Smith—who played a slovenly hacker named Warlock who works out of his mother’s basement in a Die Hard sequel—portraying him in a movie. “I think it’s more humiliating for Bitfinex that way,” he said.

I agree with Faux, it seems a bit personal too. And I don’t think there is any shame in admitting that: several Bitfinex/Tether LTD staff (executives?) wronged you in the past — plus repeatedly lied in public — and you want to get even. But Macdonald – like the rest of the Tether Truther gang – likely has no inside information, he says as much to Faux. So how does Macdonald plan to humiliate them? In Easy Money, James Block dropped the alias (DirtyBubbleMedia) and still uses chain analytics to trace linkages, why not follow his lead?

On p. 77 he writes:

When I asked for his sources or evidence, Andrew didn’t have anything new to provide. That was where I was supposed to come in.

This is a big oof. In Easy Money the authors put Macdonald/Bitfinex’ed on a pedestal, but never present a smoking gun. Perhaps there is one, but that rabbit hole took up valuable page space that Faux instead uses to interview a prosecutor from the NY AG office.

Speaking of speculation, Matt Levine recently hypothesized that Tether could be a lucrative business for one of the following reasons:

Source: Twitter

Number 2 is a possibility that Faux also independently surmises in the book, yet the authors of Easy Money do not, possibly because their sources (Bitfinex’ed/Macdonald) dismiss it a priori.26

On p. 77 he writes:

Betts explained that Noble wasn’t exactly a bank—it was an “international finance entity,” organized under looser Puerto Rican laws. His plan was to open accounts for all the major cryptocurrency hedge funds and companies. That way, they could easily transfer money between themselves without ever sending it out of Noble.

The Drake meme seems pretty fitting for this passage:

On p. 78 he writes:

The dispute got so heated that Devasini wanted to pull the company’s cash from Noble. Devasini’s deputy, Phil Potter, wanted to keep their money in the “international finance entity,” so Devasini and his other partners bought him out for $300 million. Potter took the payment in U.S. dollars, not Tethers.

That is a pretty big chunk of change. From its neighboring paragraphs, it appears this buyout took place in 2018. How did the partners who bought him out fund that buyout during this time period?

Chapter 7: “A Thin Crust of Ice”

This was a great chapter if for no other reason than we get to read in booklength (for the first time?), from a NY AG prosecutor involved in the Tether case. After reading this book, I think going forward reporters should ask Tether Truthers if they have ever reached out and/or spoken to any of the prosecutors. That seems like the bare minimum low-effort task to complete, otherwise it is just LARPing as a social media maven.

On p. 80 he writes about John Castiglione and Brian Whitehurst who were assigned to investigate the cryptocurrency market for the NY AG.

On p. 81 he writes about subpoenas:

The crypto industry responded with outrage. Four exchanges didn’t respond at all. Some of the others said they had no responsibility to police suspicious activity. Castiglione and Whitehurst decided to focus on Bitfinex, the crypto exchange owned by the same group that owned Tether. It had the most red flags. The company said it didn’t do business in New York, but one of its top executives—the chief strategy officer, Phil Potter—lived there. Castiglione sent a subpoena to some New York trading firms, and they informed him that they did use Bitfinex.

One of the exchanges that said they would not respond was Kraken whose representatives, at the time, said they did not do business in New York. Yet curiously, a year later, their head of trading – who was based in New York – sued them for stiffed compensation.

On p. 82 he writes:

This was, amazingly, even sketchier than it sounds. Crypto Capital advertised on its website that it enabled users to “deposit and withdraw fiat funds instantly to any crypto exchange around the world.” But it didn’t have any special technology. Instead, it was essentially a money-laundering service. Crypto Capital would simply open bank accounts using made-up company names. They’d tell banks they’d use the accounts for normal things, like real-estate investing. Then they’d let companies like Bitfinex use them for customer transfers. (Bitfinex would later claim that it believed Crypto Capital’s assurances that everything was on the up-and-up.)

Amazing, plus a funny parenthetical.

On p. 83 he writes:

Castiglione and his colleagues asked for proof that all Tethers were paid for with actual dollars by real customers. The defense lawyers acted affronted. But after some back-and-forth, one of the defense lawyers acknowledged that there had been what he called a “development.” They didn’t exactly come clean. Bitfinex had placed more than $850 million with a payment processor—Crypto Capital—and it appeared to be “impaired,” he said. Bitfinex had filled the hole by borrowing from Tether’s reserves. “I’m sorry, can you say that again?” Castiglione asked. Castiglione couldn’t believe it. Impaired seemed to be a euphemism for “gone,” and gone meant the exchange was insolvent and on the brink of collapse. On Wall Street, a trading venue in this situation would have to tell the world and shut down. It seemed like Bitfinex didn’t even plan on informing its customers. Castiglione asked the defense lawyers to leave so he and his colleagues could confer in private.

Future writers and reporters: if your book on Tether doesn’t have something as juicy as this statement above, do more digging because this is the bar to surpass.

On p. 85 he writes:

At first, Bitfinex’s lawyers said the deal to lend themselves Tether’s money was only pending. But after weeks of exchanging letters, they informed Castiglione that it had been completed, though they assured him it was a fair transaction negotiated without conflict of interest. They sent over papers documenting a $900 million line of credit from Tether to Bitfinex. Signing on behalf of Tether was Giancarlo Devasini. And on behalf of Bitfinex: Giancarlo Devasini.

They got the last laugh though, right? In the process of writing this, Tether LTD announced its latest attestations: about 85% of their reserves were now supposedly held in cash and cash-like equivalents (Treasuries). If they are able to pocket the 5%+ yield on Treasuries that is at least a couple billion in annual profit.27

On p. 86 he writes:

The settlement with New York required Tether to publish quarterly reports detailing its holdings, and to send even more detailed information to the attorney general. Castiglione hoped they would inspire someone to look more closely. But no regulators asked to see them.

This is interesting. Why have no other regulators reached out to see the documents? Did other regulators and law enforcement receive similar documents from subpoenas and thought the NYAG had outdated material?

Chapter 8: The Name’s Chalopin. Jean Chalopin.

On p. 91 he writes:

Tether’s lawyer, Stuart Hoegner, had a little bit more to say to me. In a video chat, he called Tether’s critics “jihadists” set on the company’s destruction and said their market-manipulation claims didn’t make sense. And, in an email, he said my reporting was “nothing more than a compilation of innuendo and misinformation shared by disgruntled individuals with no involvement with or direct knowledge of the business’s operations.”

It is not clear when Hoegner had the change of heart, or maybe it is just in external communications? You can always fire your client to save your book credibility.28

On p. 93 he writes:

That October, Businessweek published my account of what I found, with the headline “The $69 Billion Crypto Mystery.” (By then, Tether had issued 69 billion coins.)

Portions of the ~5,000 page article was reused throughout the book. Perhaps because the photo is black & white Jean Chalopin kind of looks like Chuck Norris.

On p. 93 he writes:

People read into the story whatever they wanted to believe. To crypto fans, it showed that Tether did in fact have at least some money, which was a positive. To those who were skeptical, the information about Chinese commercial paper was damning. I wasn’t sure what to make of the financial records myself. I tried digging into the details of their holdings. Many of the loans appeared to be legitimate loans to real companies. Others I couldn’t verify at all. But that was unsurprising given the low quality of data on Chinese corporate loans. Rather than a smoking gun, the records felt like another inconclusive clue.

He hasn’t received a smoking gun so far. Other authors on the beat take note, it’s okay to say you don’t have conclusive evidence one way or the other.

On p. 94 he writes:

“I’m betting a shit-ton of money on them being a crook,” Fraser Perring, co-founder of Viceroy Research, told me. “Worst case is, I can’t lose hardly anything. I’m already rich, but I’m going to be fucking rich when Tether collapses.”

In Easy Money, the authors obliquely refer to a hedge fund (when interviewing James Block). I hypothesized it could have been Hindenburg Research or Citron (the former is mentioned later in this book). How many hedge have active trading positions on Tether solvency (one way or the other?)

On p. 95 he writes:

More recently, in March 2023, California’s Silicon Valley Bank collapsed after worry about its investment portfolio, amplified by a prominent podcaster, caused its customers, mostly start-up executives, to freak out.

Faux references a Financial Times article highlighting Jason Calcanis, who is a co-host of the All-In Podcast. Calcanis’ hysteria has led to a number of memes (and at least one bankrupt bank):

Source: Twitter

On p. 96 he writes:

But none of the analysts seemed much better informed than “Andrew,” the conspiracy theorist I’d met who posted as “Bitfinex’ed.”

Oof. Watch your notifications: FactFreeh, WillyBot, and other anonymous accounts will troll you if you point that out on the bird app.

On p. 97 he discusses the $1 million bounty from Hindenburg Research:

In November, we met in front of a hot dog cart by an entrance to Central Park. Anderson showed up wearing a hoodie. As we strolled down a path past children playing baseball, tourists taking photos, and a steel-drum band, he talked about what he could do with detailed documents on Tether’s holdings. Anderson said the bounty announcement hadn’t produced any great tips so far. I told him I might be able to help. Without revealing any details, I described the documents that I’d received.

I feel a little vindicated because in the past I have asked Tether Truthers, such as Jorge Stolfi, if they were so certain that Tether was acting in a fraudulent manner, why not collect the $1 million bounty. I have no affinity for Tether LTD (or Hindenburg) but I suspect it is because Stofli, and others, do not have actual evidence. Perhaps Tether LTD is still operating in a fraudulent manner, but using innuendo or hearsay is not a valid argument.

On p. 98 he writes:

“This book is going to be called Jay Is Wrong and Zeke Is Right: The Cryptocurrency Story,” I said. “As a writer, you don’t want to be compromising in any way, you know? You don’t want to have ulterior motives.”

This is basically the opposite approach to Ben McKenzie, who in Easy Money writes about his $250,000 bet shorting the coin market… but doesn’t publicly disclose the bet until after the book is published. Conflict of interest?

Chapter 9: Crypto Pirates

This was a really solid chapter on SBF and FTX. In fact, I only had one quibble with it.

On p. 117 he writes:

Owning an exchange (FTX) and a firm that trades on it (Alameda) was an obvious conflict of interest. On Wall Street it wouldn’t have been allowed, due to the risk that the trading firm would be given preferential treatment or access to confidential information.

While I agree with the author, that this should not be allowed, it technically is not true in the U.S.

As mentioned in the review of Easy Money, an uneasy arrangement has been allowed at various eras in traditional markets: Glass-Steagall separated commercial banking from investment banking and was enacted in 1933. Fast forward sixty six years later, in 1999, most of it was repealed. Some economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman opined that this set the stage for the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Even after the financial crisis and a myriad of debates, Glass-Steagall was still not restored. Even today, too big to fail banks still have these conflicts of interest.

So yes, some U.S. stock exchanges may not have that specific conflict of interest, but a number of other intermediaries do.

Chapter 10: Imagine a Robin Hood Thing

On p. 120 he writes:

There was one other thing that was incongruous with Bankman-Fried’s public image: the itty-bitty matter of U.S. law. If Bankman-Fried had stayed in Berkeley, many of the bets FTX offered would’ve been not quite legal. Or entirely, deeply illegal. Nearly all the coins it listed would have been deemed unregistered securities offerings, like MasterCoin. The exchange itself didn’t comply with SEC trading rules either.

That could be true, but it probably would have been a stronger statement if the author had quoted or cited a U.S.-trained securities lawyer on that matter.

On p. 122 he writes:

“You’ve built up a good reputation,” I said, needling him a bit. “You could probably run some crypto scam and make a few billion dollars right now. By your logic, wouldn’t that make sense?” “Charities don’t want that money,” he said. “Reputation is so important for everything you do. And as soon as you start to think about the second-order effects, it starts to look worse and worse.”

It has been interesting to read this book and write the review during the SBF criminal trial. The book itself was introduced as evidence when SBF took the stand. While the passage above didn’t make it into testimony, in retrospect it was a pretty big self-own.

On p. 126 he writes:

In fact, by then, Tether had grown to 79 billion coins. And it was becoming clear that Bankman-Fried was a big enough user of Tether that he wasn’t likely to tell me if something worse was going on. The short sellers and conspiracy theorists kept promising to reveal some big secret, but it hadn’t happened.

I have my own theory as to why some of the conspiracy theorists went off the deep end, turning their notoriety into a cottage industry for continual media engagement. But putting that cynical view to the side, reporters should ask these folks to provide the receipts. And move on to other sources if they do not.

On p. 127 he writes:

The funds were not in the possession of shadowy North Koreans or some other group of cyberterrorists. The stolen billions were traced to a couple in their early thirties who lived in downtown Manhattan, not far from my place in Brooklyn. Their names were Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan. Judging from social media, the two didn’t exactly appear to be criminal geniuses.

I recall the first time I saw those names in the press and I asked a couple (trader) acquaintances in NY if they had ever heard of them. No one had. The next chapter illustrates why this book is a solid entry into the True Crime genre.

Chapter 11: “Let’s Get Weird”

On p. 135 he writes:

In 2021, a total of $3.2 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen from exchanges and decentralized finance (or DeFi) apps, in which crypto traders make deals directly with one another. That’s a hundred times more than the total stolen in all bank robberies in an average year in the United States.

Bank robbers need to step up their game, those are rookie numbers.

On p. 135 he writes:

Back in 2015, Bitfinex had set up a new security system after it lost about $400,000 of cryptocurrencies in a hack. Other exchanges generally mixed users’ coins together and stored the private keys on computers that weren’t connected to the internet, a practice known as “cold storage.” Bitfinex’s new system kept each user’s balance in a separate address on the blockchain, allowing customers to see for themselves where their money was. It used software from the crypto-security company BitGo.

Some background: the day Bitfinex was hacked (a 2nd time), some anti-government commentators, such as Andreas Antonopoulos falsely claimed that it was the fault of the CFTC. Recall that a few months prior, the CFTC fined Bitfinex for violating the CEA.

Source: Twitter

There is only so much time of in the day to fact-check, so hats off to Faux for not stumbling down the well-worn “its the governments fault” excuse. Maybe it is sometimes, but not that day.

On p. 135 he writes:

Michael Shaulov, a former coder for the Israeli Intelligence Corps and co-founder of the crypto-security firm Fireblocks, told me hacks like these generally don’t require a high level of technical expertise. Often, he said, the hardest part is crafting an email that tricks an insider into opening a malicious attachment. “The social-engineering vector is key,” he said.

Over the years I’ve had a chance to speak with people involved at a couple of the companies mentioned in this chapter. And while I have heard a single person singled out, it was a little disappointing that the criminal case against Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan didn’t say who or what was compromised.29

On p. 138 he writes:

They returned after a few weeks and then a third time a few weeks after that. “You sure you’re in the right building?” the doorman asked. (At the time, police were investigating the death of a prostitute in the tower across the street—surveillance video had shown men rolling a 55-gallon drum that concealed her dead body out of the building.) The agents assured him they were.

Faux’s never ending attention to detail strikes again.

On p. 142 he writes:

The arrest was national news. It was the largest seizure of stolen funds ever. “Today, the Department of Justice has dealt a major blow to cybercriminals looking to exploit cryptocurrency,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said at a press conference. The TikTok commentariat tore through Morgan’s music videos, and within hours Razzlekhan was already a social media legend, having air-humped her fanny pack into the ranks of famous grifters. “The Bitcoin crimes are nothing compared to calling this shit rap,” Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show.

The amount of podcasts, videos, and obscure magazines and newspapers that Faux must have digested is impressive. Pretty solid zingers elsewhere too.

On p. 143 he writes:

Years after the Bitfinex heist, a fifth of the missing Bitcoins were still unaccounted for. Roughly $70 million worth had been sent to Hydra Market, a Russian dark-web site. No one knew where the money went from there, but on Hydra, vendors called “treasure men” were known to exchange crypto for shrink-wrapped packets of rubles that they buried in secret locations. It was possible there were underground bundles somewhere in Russia, waiting for Morgan and Lichtenstein to dig them up.

Is it just a matter of time before people randomly start digging for bundles of burried rubles? Shouldn’t there be a prediction market for this type of degen activity?

On p. 144 he writes:

The Bitcoins had been worth about $70 million when they were stolen. Devasini and his crew stood to recoup billions of dollars. It gave me little confidence in their abilities to safeguard money that their Bitcoins ended up in the hands of a pair of idiots, but having the coins sitting locked up in the couple’s wallets was probably a lucky break.

Based on the numbers mentioned in this book, there is a possibility that those high up Tether LTD are quite well off at this stage. Although clearly not at the same strata as Colin Platt.

On p. 144 he writes:

I quickly found that Mashinsky had an interesting history. I’d found a 1999 article in a defunct tech publication in which he listed a few very different businesses that he’d tried out after moving to the United States: “importing urea from Russia, selling Indonesian gold to Switzerland, and brokering poisonous sodium cyanide excavated in China for use by gold miners in the U.S.” He also said in the article that he wanted to get into the business of whole-body transplants. “Give an old person a new body—keep the head, keep the spine, and re-create the rest,” he said.

In another universe Mashinsky has taken Brains-in-a-vat mainstream. There you get a free whole-body transplant on the condition that an hour a day you solve captchas. Years later he is sued and charged with digital tomfoolery, for stealthily making it 20 hours a day; he accidentally created the plot of The Cookie Monster.

Chapter 12: “Click, Click, Click, Make Money, Make Money”

On p. 149 he writes:

Stone took his money out of stocks and went all-in on Ethereum, eventually starting Battlestar, which was supposed to help investors earn a return on their crypto holdings through what it called “institutional grade Staking-as-a-Service.” (Don’t ask.)

While I like some technical nitty gritty, rather than bore readers (or botch it like other authors have), Faux punts on describing what “institutional grade Staking-as-a-service” is. And that’s okay. With that said, he does mention “yield farming” a couple of sentences later but doesn’t really define it in the book.30

On p. 150 he writes:

By then, the ICO boom was over. It was no longer plausible for someone to announce they were going to create Dentacoin, a cryptocurrency for dentists, and raise millions of dollars —a real thing that happened in 2017. DeFi was different. It was based on “smart contracts.” These are, basically, simple programs that run on the blockchain. Remember that the Bitcoin blockchain is a two-column spreadsheet, and MasterCoin, Ethereum, and the like allowed for adding new columns that represented new coins. Now imagine if the spreadsheet added functions. Instead of just allowing users to add Bitcoins to one person’s row and subtract them from someone else’s, these smart contracts enabled them to swap one kind of coin for another, or make a loan to another user.

I think this could be a little unclear for readers and a paragraph break should be made with “DeFi was different.” Also, while users can create and deploy new assets via Mastercoin (renamed Omni), it doesn’t have a virtual machine like other “modern” chains do so its functionality is very limited compared with Ethereum.31

On p. 151 he writes:

DeFi used these smart contracts to create decentralized, anonymous versions of exchanges like Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX.

Probably more accurate to say pseudonymous.

On p. 151 he writes:

“DeFi may not exist in January,” Mashinsky wrote. “What we want is for every DeFi player to have a Celsius account, so when the Ponzi runs exhaust themselves they will all park their coins with Celsius.”

Wow, just wow.

On p. 154 he writes:

His description of life in Puerto Rico sounded like a montage from a crypto version of The Wolf of Wall Street: “dancing, partying, drugs, beach.” Stone set up two big screens at the dining room table. He rarely looked up from them, even when his host threw weekly parties. As people danced around the room, he’d stare at the screens and snort lines of ketamine. Other crypto traders would bring their laptops too. Some preferred Adderall or cocaine. Stone liked to say he was one of the largest players in DeFi, a friend who hung out with him then told me, often yelling about hacks or how much money he was making. “He’d type loud, like he wanted people to know,” the friend said.

On p. 155 he writes:

Because it was crypto, all that money was stored on Stone’s laptop. It was as if Stone kept a billion dollars in bundles of hundreds, just sitting on his friend’s dining room table. The account was protected by a password, but Stone grew paranoid. He couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time. He’d stay up until three in the morning trading, then start again at six or seven.

I’m not a master of memes but pretty certain an appropriate one for the passage above is: are ya winning, son?

On p. 155 he writes:

Mashinsky was claiming Celsius was safer than banks, but the company didn’t even have a system for tracking what Stone and its other traders were doing with the money. As one Celsius executive wrote in an internal email in December 2020: “As things stand currently, Celsius does not have a clear, real-time, and actionable view of our assets and liabilities.”

SMH.

On p. 157 he writes:

Mashinsky argued that crypto was better than dollars, because inflation would inevitably erode the value of all government-issued currency. I told Mashinsky I didn’t have any savings in cash, so it wasn’t like I was sitting on a pile of money that was getting less valuable. And I wasn’t worried about the safety of my bank account.

That old chestnut. J.P. Koning wrote a pretty good debunking of a similar narrative.

Chapter 13: Play to Earn

On p. 162 he writes:

Lapina started using his earnings to buy more teams of blobs, and he hired other people in town to play with them on their own phones. He let them keep 60 percent of whatever they won in the game. Before long, Lapina had more than a hundred people battling for him, including teachers, his grandmother, and even a police officer, who Lapina had to talk out of quitting the force.

Wow, had no idea how “viral” Axie was at that time.

On p. 162 he writes:

“It’s actually the beginning of the metaverse, in our opinion, just hiding in a very cute little game,” Aleksander Larsen, the Norwegian co-founder of Sky Mavis, said on a podcast. “I actually believe that Axie has the potential to impact the globe very heavily with letting people interact with the global economy, actually exiting their prisons, where they are born.”

Filtering through podcasts for this gem. Sounds like something VCs Congratulating Themselves would find.

On p. 163 he writes:

The returns didn’t strike the Filipinos I talked to as unreasonable. But a more sophisticated investor would have realized the daily rate of return was 8 percent—way, way too good to be true. At that rate, with earnings continually reinvested for ten months, Lapina and everyone else who bought a single set of Axies would be trillionaires.

Finally, a scheme on par with PTK.

On p. 163 he writes:

The only thing that kept the Axie economy afloat was new players buying in.

Because I’m overly pedantic I would probably have written, “the only thing that kept the Axie economy afloat at this price level” because technically Axie (the game) is still alive today.

On p. 166 he writes:

Quigan told me she and her husband were considering going abroad to Dubai to seek better-paying jobs. But she still checks the price of potions daily. “I don’t get angry,” she said. “I’m still optimistic that sometime, somehow, it will still go up.”

Probably could print that quote on a shirt and sell it a coin conference.

On p. 166 he writes:

QUIGAN MIGHT NOT have been angry, but I was. Crypto bros and Silicon Valley venture capitalists gave Filipinos false hope by promoting an unsustainable bubble based on a Pokémon knockoff as the future of work. And making matters worse, in March 2022, North Korean hackers broke into a sort-of crypto exchange affiliated with the game and made off with $600 million worth of stablecoins and Ether. The heist helped Kim Jong Un pay for test launches of ballistic missiles, according to U.S. officials. Instead of providing a new way for poor people to earn cash, Axie Infinity funneled their savings to a dictator’s weapons program.

Not a good look Bob.

Chapter 14: Ponzinomics

On p. 170 he quotes Anthony Scaramucci:

“These people are unbelievable the way they dress,” he said. “I’m here in a Brioni, these guys are in Lululemon pants. These guys are moving into the future. These are some of the worst-dressed people I ever met in my life.”

Yea, it’s not the fly-by-night scams to be concerned about, it is the clothing choices.

On p. 171 he writes:

As Lewis went on, Bankman-Fried tapped the toes of his silver New Balance sneakers, sometimes pressing his legs with his elbows as if to hold them still. It seemed like Lewis saw him as another one of the truth-telling, system-disrupting outsiders he liked to write about. But the author’s questions were so fawning, they seemed inappropriate for a journalist. Listening from the packed auditorium, I started to question whether Lewis was really writing a book, or if FTX had paid him to appear. (Lewis later told me that he had in fact come to report for his book and that he was not compensated.)

Was Lewis provided flights on the FTX jet? Either way, Michael Lewis was unhappy with Faux’s reporting on this topic, telling The New York Times in its review of Going Infinite:

I’ve never met Faux but I do not think he is on trial for defrauding customers for ~$8 billion in losses. Who knows, maybe Faux has been moonlighting as a North Korean hacker. How else could he track down VIPs at art shows?

On p. 172 he writes:

At a party for a project called Degenerate Trash Pandas, I asked one coder if crypto would ever be helpful for regular people. “Why is it that you think that is important?” he said to me, in a tone of total sincerity. “I really would like to know.”

Socially useful dapps? Get out of here.

On p. 173 he write:

Another crypto executive showed me a digital image of a sneaker that he bought for eight dollars, which he said had grown to be worth more than $1 million. He told me that recently, all owners of these imaginary sneakers had been issued an image of a box, which was itself worth $30,000. When he opened the box, he found another picture of sneakers and another box, each of them valuable in their own right. “It’s this never-ending Ponzi scheme,” he said, happily. “That’s what I call Ponzinomics.”

Reminds me of that SNL sketch with Tim Meadows and Will Ferrell with a Bible and a bar of gold:

On p. 175 he writes:

It struck me that almost any of the companies I’d heard about would be good fodder for an investigative story. But the thought of methodically gathering facts to disprove their ridiculous promises was exhausting. It reminded me of a maxim called the “bullshit asymmetry principle,” coined by an Italian programmer. He was describing the challenge of debunking falsehoods in the internet age. “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it,” the programmer, Alberto Brandolini, wrote in 2013.

Source: Twitter

Another solid Tweet reference. Unfortunately Community Notes was not around in 2014-2016 which I think could have headed off some of the nonsense narratives.32

On p. 180 he writes:

Van der Velde seemed annoyed. He hinted that there was something in Tether’s past that he couldn’t reveal. “It’s very easy to invite a journalist into your office when you don’t have any battle damage,” he said. “Tether saved the whole industry. We had to carry those heavy loads. Sam had the luxury of making a nice clean start. Sam never had to deal with that.”

I think this is partly why Tether LTD has been given a free pass by much of the industry: it has provided the necessary lubricant to cross the chasm. It is systemically important for the coin world.

On p. 182 he writes:

He refused and accused me of being insufficiently committed to my project. “How do you expect to write a book about crypto if you have only dedicated $600 to crypto?” Loney said. I told him it was pretty common for writers to write about, say, presidential politics without serving as president, or baseball without being able to hit a fastball. But he wasn’t convinced.

That reminds me of this interaction from a few years ago:

Source: Twitter

Six years later there is still a problem with conflating holding a de minimis amount of coins in order to test out say, how limit orders work on UniSwap V3 versus making it the bulk of your portfolio. You do not need to own an airplane to be a pilot or stewardess or flight instructor. It’s possible to be a blockchain researcher without having to own massive quantities of the coin you are studying.

Chapter 15: All My Apes Gone

On p. 186 he writes:

A common misconception about NFTs is that the buyer owns a unique, verifiable digital image. That’s not the case. There’s nothing stopping anyone from simply right-clicking Justin Bieber’s ape and downloading the image file to their computer. The replica is indistinguishable from the $1.3 million original, and perfectly usable for a profile picture. What a Bored Ape buyer pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for is not a digital ape cartoon—it’s the ability to prove they are the one who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a digital ape cartoon.

So I partially agree with the premise here: the way many art-related NFTs were marketed the past few years was if there was a unique digital image. In most cases however – such as with BAYC – the owners had to refer to URL pointers. But not every art-related NFT project followed that path; there is a small category called “generative art” that as the name suggests, is generated and/or store fully on-chain. See Slide 9 for some examples of projects whose assets reside fully on-chain.

On p. 193 he writes:

The process of buying the ape didn’t make me feel any better. It could only be purchased on an NFT marketplace using the cryptocurrency Ether. (That’s what the Ethereum blockchain’s coins are called.)

A pedantic rewording of the parenthetical: the word native should probably be inserted between blockchain and a singular coin.

On p. 193 he writes:

Once my money was on Coinbase, I had to trade it for Ether, which was easy enough. Coinbase works just like E-Trade, except that instead of Apple stock, you’re buying and selling cryptocurrencies. It’s not exactly what Satoshi Nakamoto had in mind when he invented the first peer-to-peer electronic cash system—Coinbase is simply taking the place of your online trading site.

The irony of many intermediaries involved in that trade lifecycle.

On p. 195 he writes:

Each offer charged me a “gas fee” of about three dollars, an annoying sum for a technology advertised as an improvement on credit cards. These are paid to the operators of the Ethereum network—similar to the rewards paid to Bitcoin miners—and vary with demand, sometimes spiking past a hundred dollars per transaction.

It would have been a massive distraction, but I think readers would have liked to know why there was a spike. Not that there needs to be a future edition, but a hypothetical footnote could discuss maximal extractable value (MEV), which is sometimes the cause for these spikes.33

Source: Flashbots

Chapter 16: It’s the Community, Bro

On p. 199 he writes:

The Mutant Cartel was his effort to build a community around the Mutant Apes, which he felt had been a bit overlooked by their creators. “It’s all the good stuff about being in a cult without any of the negative,” Messika said. “It’s genuinely beautiful to see this deep camaraderie.” I wasn’t sure about what he was saying, but I have to admit it felt cool to be part of his crew.

This is the closest Faux describes becoming part of a crew. This stands in contrast to Easy Money where the authors arguably lost objectivity by becoming too close to their sources.

On p. 200 he writes:

Comedian Amy Schumer’s set early in the evening was not a hit. She seemed embarrassed to be there and called the attendees nerds. “I don’t know what NFT stands for,” she said. “I’m assuming it’s, looking out, not fucking tonight, is that correct? Do I have that right?”

Nerds just gonna stand there and take that? Didn’t make an NFT of that NFT joke?

On p. 202 he writes:

Even assuming one was made, the licensing fees would likely be barely enough to cover the cost of one Bored Ape. To make everyone’s investments pay off, 10,000 movie studios would have to make 10,000 deals to make 10,000 cartoons about 10,000 similar-looking animals.

On p. 204 he writes:

The bestselling writer Neil Strauss wrote an impenetrable ape-themed book that was itself released as a limited-edition NFT. At least 2,000 copies sold for about $250 each. “Captain Trippy lay in his hammock at the back of a room, holding a Shaving Ape cigarette loosely in his right foot,” he wrote. “Some say it’s the reason for his brightly colored psychedelic skin and captain’s hat, so that he can be seen through the smoke.” I’m not sure if anyone has actually read the whole thing, but I made a $300 profit when I sold my copy.

Someone call the purity police: the author is flipping NFTs for big bucks!

On p. 205 he writes:

A month before ApeFest, Ripps had started to sell his own NFTs. He called them RR/BAYC. They were exact replicas of Bored Apes—in fact, since NFTs don’t actually contain images, just links to them, Ripps’s NFTs contained links to the exact same images. He offered his for way cheaper, about $200 each. Ripps told me he hadn’t ripped off Bored Apes—he’d created a new artwork by placing them in a new context. “The NFT isn’t the image,” Ripps said. “The NFT is a cell in the spreadsheet that’s in the blockchain that links to an image. No one is mistaking their apes for my apes.”

Well when you say it out loud that way, it does sound a little ridiculous. But… the pedant in me must protest: not all art NFTs require an external link (but most of them do).34

On p. 207 he writes:

I later learned from a legal document that Snoop allegedly owned a stake in Yuga Labs. I was almost relieved to find out he may have been shilling his own investment.

I lied, here’s another zinger.

On p. 207 he writes:

But I felt angry on their behalf. I wondered if Fallon felt any responsibility for promoting Bored Apes in his segment with Paris Hilton.

I empathize with the authors anger. I’ve attempted to confront people I felt were responsible for actively misrepresenting some scheme. But, and I say this as someone who has never owned a ritzy Ape or Mutant: those are Veblen goods. The only way to buy them was to fork over $20,000 for the cheapest. Unsophisticated retail (who apparently got raked on Axie) couldn’t meet that threshold. That’s not an excuse for Fallon but it’s in a different league.

Chapter 17: Blorps and Fleezels

On p. 212 he writes:

Kwon’s main coin was called TerraUSD. It was a stablecoin like Tether, intended to always trade for one dollar. But Kwon didn’t promise to back his coins with dollars in a bank account. Instead, TerraUSD was backed with a second coin that Kwon made up, called Luna. Since Kwon controlled the supply of Luna, he could simply create as many as needed out of thin air.

This is mostly true, except the part where Kwon controlled the supply of Luna. He may have engineered its parameters at genesis, but post-launch he did not appear to unilaterally control Luna’s supply any more than Satoshi unilaterally controlled the Bitcoin supply.35

On p. 212 he writes:

If you’re having trouble following this, that’s actually a good sign about your investing instincts. Comedian John Oliver later summarized Do Kwon’s nonsensical business plan: “One blorp is always worth one dollar. And the reason I can guarantee that is I’ll sell as many fleezels as it takes to make that happen. Also, I make the fleezels.”

Part II is great episode. Coincidentally I referred to Part I in the review of Easy Money.

On p. 212 he writes:

The reason people bought into Kwon’s Terra-Luna plan is that TerraUSD coins could be deposited in a special crypto bank called Anchor, also controlled by Kwon, which paid a 20 percent annual interest rate. This raised obvious questions, such as “Where does the money to pay those interest rates come from?” and “This is a Ponzi scheme, right?”

I probably would describe Anchor as a lending protocol, so maybe a shadow bank? My autopsy of that collapse: Not all algorithmic stabilization mechanisms are the same.

On p. 213 he writes:

The Tether critics were getting excited. Bitfinex’ed, the anonymous critic who asked me to call him Andrew when we met at the bayside pool, tweeted more than sixty times that day.

I think after 50 tweets in a day the state of Florida requires social media users to go outside and touch grass.

On p. 216 he writes:

Kyle Davies, Zhu’s high school friend and co-founder, later said the lenders were so desperate to make loans that they asked for almost no proof that Three Arrows would be able to pay. “One of the last calls we did someone lent me almost a billion, off a phone call,” he said. “That was uncollateralized. That’s where the system was. People needed to get dollars out the door.”

In my review of Easy Money, I pointed out that the authors criticism of lending was shallow because it didn’t discuss how the centralized lenders were rehypothecating funds and/or providing uncollateralized loans. Faux found a podcast with one of the borrowers saying as much. This filtering of information from disparate media is part of the reason why Number Go Up is a superior book.

On p. 217 he writes:

Even companies that hadn’t lent to Three Arrows themselves took a hit. Gemini, a well-regarded exchange, turned out to have lent users’ money to a company called Genesis Global, which lent it to Three Arrows.

Source: Twitter

As mentioned in the Easy Money review, the tweet above (Barry Silbert is the founder of DCG) did not age well. During the process of writing this review, the NYAG sued Genesis, DCG, and Gemini for allegedly defrauding investors.

On p. 217 he writes:

As crypto skeptics David Gerard and Amy Castor wrote, the industry was like an inverted pyramid whose tip rested on a box of hot air—Kwon’s Ponzi scheme. When the box crumpled, the pyramid came falling down.

What are crypto skeptics? This is the first and only time the author uses that phrase. There a number of other people who have provided critical views without marketing themselves as “crypto skeptics.”

On p. 216 he writes:

The losses hit everyone in crypto. Michael Saylor, the laser-eyed crypto prophet who was the star of the Bitcoin conference in Miami, stepped down as CEO of his company, MicroStrategy, after it lost almost $1 billion on its Bitcoin bet.

And was charged with tax evasion by the DC AG four weeks later.

On p. 221 he writes:

Like Chappy, many of the investors I talked to said they were still committed to crypto. It seemed to me like they just didn’t want to admit they’d been wrong. “To me it’s not about the money at all, it’s about the future,” an emergency room doctor in Lafayette, Louisiana, told me after he lost $800,000.

I’ve already used the Michael Scott cringe meme, it would be pretty apt here.

On p. 223 he writes:

I wondered why more people hadn’t cashed in their Tethers. There was clearly at least a small chance Tether might fail. Even someone who mostly trusted the company, despite all the reasons not to, would have reason to cash theirs in. Investors wouldn’t even have to leave the crypto world. Tether could be easily swapped for a competing stablecoin, called USDC, which was based in the United States and didn’t have the same checkered past.

This is the only time in the book where the author mentions another centralized pegged coin (which is one more than either of the previous two books did). I don’t think it is as cut and dry as Faux makes it out to be, for reasons discussed by J.P. Koning.3637 It would be a distraction for the reader, but if we were really to drill into this issue, could be worth looking which centralized stablecoin-issuers executives lobbied against the STABLE Act proposal. And who needed a bailout after SVB, Silvergate, and Signature banks collapsed.

Chapter 18: Pig Butchering

This is another must-read chapter in a must-read book. For instance, I learned that some of the scammers who randomly send beautiful pictures via the phone, are effectively slaves held in compounds in towns scattered around Cambodia. Yea, that stranger guy (or gal) that you have been sending messages to, might just be buttering you up for a coin-related scam.

On p. 231 he writes:

After being allowed to place a few winning bets or trades, the victim, feeling emboldened and thus vulnerable, would be convinced to make a really big gamble. That one they’d lose. Once the mark was gone, the store would be packed up. If the police came, they’d only find an empty room. It was, as the linguist David Maurer wrote in his 1940 classic The Big Con, “a carefully set up and skillfully managed theater where the victim acts out an unwitting role in the most exciting of all underworld dramas.”

TIL. Has Faux been holding that info nugget in his back pocket to be used in the right book?

On p. 232 he writes:

Icetoad and other volunteers from the Global Anti-Scam group told me that Tether refused to help them by freezing accounts or seizing stolen money, even when presented with evidence that an account held the proceeds of fraud. Tether clearly had the capability to help. In some cases, like hacks, Tether had frozen accounts and seized money. But when contacted about pig butchering, Tether would fall back on the excuse that it didn’t control the blockchain. Another Global Anti-Scam volunteer provided copies of several victims’ email exchanges with Tether.

This particular passage, while well-written, just seems a little difficult to follow because Tether probably should be written Tether LTD. Or maybe it is just me.

On p. 233 he writes:

To me, that sounded like a cop-out. When I sent my eighty-one Tethers to Vicky Ho’s platform, there was an entry in Tether’s database representing how much money I had, and another one representing how much Vicky Ho had. Another way of looking at it would be that Vicky Ho had an anonymous, numbered account at the Bank of Tether.

This is not quite true. Unless Vicky (or ZBXS, the platform she used) directly minted or redeemed USDT, then it is unlikely that particular unit ($81) ended up in a database managed by Tether. According to the book, ZBXS seems to be a fly-by-night exchange, and might not do any surveillance sharing. Also, as mentioned earlier, pseudonymous is probably more accurate than anonymous.

Source: The Block

But I do think Faux raises a good point. Tether LTD does actively blacklist addresses (see chart above).

What is the rhyme or reason for why some activity is permitted and others are not?

Source: Twitter

On p. 233 he writes:

I couldn’t believe that Tether was getting away with making its own rules for when it would cooperate with police. Imagine if the cops told a bank that it was holding stolen money and the bank said it wouldn’t return it because the thief didn’t shoot anyone. And, from what Icetoad and other members of his group were telling me, the criminal syndicates who ran pig-butchering scams were actually extremely violent. They told me that many of the people sending spam texts to potential victims like me were themselves victims of human trafficking.

I’m going to say something a little unpopular: I agree with what the author has written but I am not sure his analogy with banks refusing to cooperate with the police is correct.

In speaking with lawyers about this topic, one of the relevant concepts in property law is “nemo dat.” Physical cash is exempt from nemo dat because if every transaction required the cash holder to trace the provenance or lineage of the physical cash, then commerce would grind to a halt. Are centrally-issued pegged coins given the same exemption? I do not know. Perhaps someone could argue that because the coins utilize a public chain, we can (more) easily see the provenance to determine if they are a bona fide purchaser.

Again, I agree with the thrust of Faux’s argument and incidentally it is one of the reasons I surmised that centrally-issued pegged coins would become white-list only. But so far that prediction has been barely partially correct.

On p. 234 he writes:

I’d provided Vicky Ho’s address to Sanders before the meeting. Sanders pulled up a flowchart he’d made tracking transfers to and from the numbered account.

Source: CipherBlade

Above is a short flowchart included in the book. Strangely, neither Easy Money nor Popping the Crypto Bubble included any type of chart. I think readers will find this type of chart helpful, especially since many blockchains can provide those types of linkages by default.

Speaking of which:

Source: Blockseer

Above is a chart illustrating coin movements from Bitfinex to miners in August 2016.38 There is no need for a second edition of the book, but if there was for some reason, then this could fit into chapter 11.

Chapter 19: “We Have Freedom”

It’s a tight race with several other chapters, but this was perhaps the best chapter in the book, in part because it elicits a range of emotions for readers. Including anger and despair. Faux got on an airplane to investigate the leads he had identified. If there is one chapter that will make readers want to go full-on Rambo mode in the hills and valleys of Cambodia, it’s probably this one.

On p. 245 he writes:

Videos like these captured millions of views in Vietnam and turned Phong Bui into a local star. They had gruesome pictures of victims’ injuries and lurid titles like “The Story of Thuy Escaping from Hell on Earth and the Midnight Screams.” I’d paid to have them transcribed and translated. It seemed distasteful to turn human suffering into YouTube content. But they were one of the best sources of information on crypto-fueled human trafficking that I’d found. That’s how I located several of the victims I’d been interviewing.

I have heard content moderation at video sharing sites can really do a number on you. If I had to filter out this type of (flagged) material not sure how long I’d last on the job.

On p. 251 he writes:

“When they want to send to overseas, it’s convenient to send USDT,” he said. “It’s anonymous and it’s quite safe.”

Who am I to argue with a clerk at a money-exchange shop? A pedantic person, that’s who. It’s pseudonymous. If it were truly anonymous then ransomware operators and exchange hackers would demand it instead of Monero.

On p. 251 he writes:

This guy doesn’t care if Tether is backed by Chinese commercial paper, or anything at all, I thought. He just wants to trade crypto for bricks of cash, and not tell anyone about it.

Oof.

On p. 251 he writes:

Then, without asking for identification or even a name, he handed me a crisp $100 bill. I’d turned my crypto into cash, with no paper trail.

Faux point reminds me of something similar from J.P. Koning:

Source: Twitter

On p. 252 he writes:

Before we left, I spoke with Richard Jan, a veteran Taiwanese police officer who worked on the Big Fatty case. He said the Taiwanese government had rescued more than four hundred victims of human trafficking in Cambodia in 2022.

Jesus H. Christ. How many remaining victims were there?

On p. 254 he writes:

I wanted to do something, but Danielle and Dara had told me it was useless to report forced labor to the authorities. Local potentates were generally getting paid off by the traffickers. Rather than aid escapees, Cambodian officials would detain them for immigration violations.

Chapter 20: No Acceptamos Bitcoin

On p. 263 he writes:

I wanted to see the effects of Bitcoin in El Salvador myself. Before going, I met with Jack Mallers, the boyish crypto executive who’d introduced Bukele’s Bitcoin plan for El Salvador on stage at Bitcoin 2021 in Miami. Only ten months had passed since he burst into tears and told the crowd: “I’ll be there. We die on this hill. I will fucking die on this fucking hill!” But when I asked him how the experiment was working out, he said he couldn’t remember the last time he visited. He didn’t seem to be too torn up about it. “It’s very important to know that it’s not my project, you know,” he said.

Do we still use the term “poser” to describe these people?

Speaking of posers, a few weeks ago Faux did a reddit AMA. This response is germane:

Source: reddit

On p. 264 he writes:

Bukele was more committed to the bit. The forty-one-year-old president had become a crypto influencer, with four million followers on Twitter, where he dubbed himself “The Coolest Dictator.” He used government funds to buy $100 million worth of the cryptocurrency, and promptly lost half of it when the price of Bitcoin fell.

Not so fun fact: when Bukele was the toast of the Bitcoin world, Nic Carter uncritically hosted him in a Twitter Spaces, along with Alex Gladstein and Balaji Srinivasan.39 To my knowledge, the only high profile ‘coinfluencer’ to publicly condemn Bukele – and his association with cryptocurrencies – was Vitalik Buterin.

On p. 266 he writes:

When I mentioned Bitcoin at the first store I entered, the clerk snatched the bottle of water I was trying to pay for out of my hands. “Trash,” he said. “I will never use it.”

On p. 266 he writes:

García didn’t have much to say about Bitcoin. It was a way of drawing in tourists, he said. He converted their payments to dollars as quickly as possible. But he did have a story to tell about a different Bukele initiative: the gang roundup. It turned out being an unofficial Bitcoin mascot was not enough to protect him.

There is a similar (sad) story in Easy Money. What do Bitcoin promoters who point to El Salvador as a “success” have to say when these stories are highlighted?

On p. 267 he writes:

Bukele refused to speak with me. I texted with the legislator who’d posted the photo with Devasini, but he refused to talk about Tether, sticking to praising the president for his successful Bitcoin project, all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. “Our president is a brave visionary,” wrote the legislator, William Soriano. “El Salvador now leads the monetary revolution that will transform the world as we know it. Not just economically, but culturally as well.”

My Spanish is rusty but I believe Soriano is a sicofante?

On p. 269 he writes:

Bukele’s most prominent, if unofficial, Bitcoin advisers appeared to be Max Keiser, the podcaster who’d screamed “Fuck Elon!” on stage in Miami in 2021, and his wife and co-host Stacy Herbert. A few years earlier they were producing a conspiracy-theory-heavy news show on Russia’s state-owned RT network. Now, judging from social media, they were living large as champions of the state, eating at El Salvador’s best restaurants and flying in military helicopters to tour government crypto projects. Before my trip, I’d watched a segment on YouTube where they celebrated El Salvador’s Bitcoin law.

Oh it’s worse than that.

Source: Twitter

Shortly after his manuscript was sent for publication, an official “Bitcoin Office” Twitter account for El Salvador was established.

The greatest minds of their generation sitting in the official Bitcoin office of El Salvador. No problem is too small for these former Russia Today hosts.

On p. 269 he writes:

Herbert was cheerful and slightly less unhinged in person. She called Bitcoin “perfect money,” Bukele a “super-genius-like mathematician,” and said that Bitcoin City was part of how he would transform El Salvador into the next Singapore. But she wouldn’t share much about Tether and Devasini. She did mention there was one tangible sign of Tether’s presence in El Salvador: a mural that featured a Bitcoin volcano eruption and a tree with leaves shaped like Bitfinex’s logo. It was designed by Devasini’s much younger partner, an artist named Valentina Picozzi, and it was painted on a large wall near the entrance to a gang-controlled neighborhood. She said this was a sign of the commitment by Devasini and Tether’s other executives to helping the Salvadoran people.

Take that salty naysaysers and non-believers! “Perfect money” is going to rock your world.

Chapter 21: Honey is Better

On p. 272 he writes:

As I waited, the Italian critics and I respectfully contemplated Picozzi’s work: a blister pack of large orange pills with the Bitcoin logo on them—Bitcoiners like to say they’ve “taken the orange pill”—and a piece of white paper embossed with the phrase “Son of a bit.”

This is an example for why I contend – despite having been labeled a “critic” or “skeptic” for years – do not think it makes sense to market oneself as a “crypto critic.”

An “art critic” does not deny the existence of many different art forms, or materials used to create cart. In contrast, I have linked to threads above by folks like Jorge Stofli who contend that smart contracts mechanically do not work. The authors of the previous two books each market themselves as a “crypto skeptic” or “crypto critic” but painfully show in long form that they do not understand the subject matter they are writing on.

On p. 276 he writes:

Nearby, I spotted Tether’s chief technology officer, Paolo Ardoino, who was explaining his diet to another attendee. He looked fit, in a tight T-shirt tucked into slim gray dress pants. “I eat once a day. Only red meat,” he said. But he wasn’t willing to speak with me, even about the wonders of beef. “He’s the one that is writing bad things about us,” he told his wife, who was standing next to him. “Hello!” I said. She wouldn’t talk with me either.

A quick quasi related anecdote: when I confronted Chris DeRose for the first time at an American Banker event in 2015, I told him his (brighton36) harassment techniques on reddit were loathsome:

Source: reddit

Now obviously I’m aware that Faux is nothing like the misogynistic DeRose, certainly not a harasser. But I do know what it is like to be in social situations with people you disdain. My wife probably would’ve said the same thing to DeRose after she told off Marc Hochstein. 40

Chapter 22: Assets Are Not Fine

On p. 281 he writes:

FTX had seemed to me like a crypto casino, which lured investors to gamble on made-up coins and scams. But I hadn’t suspected that the casino’s counting room was short on cash.

To be fair, aren’t most cryptocurrencies made up, not just the ones at FTX? Arguably the only “non-made-up” coins are those that claim to link to real-world off-chain assets?

On p. 283 he writes:

The company, valued at $32 billion earlier in the year, was finished. Anyone who had left money on the exchange was completely wiped out.

Ackchyually, while Faux was correct when he submitted the manuscript, due to ongoing developments in bankruptcy FTX customers might now get 50 cents on the dollar.

Chapter 23: Inside the Orchid

On p. 290 he writes:

Talking in detail to journalists about what was certain to be the subject of extensive litigation seemed like an unusual strategy, but it made sense: The press helped him create his only-honest-man-in-crypto image, so why not use them to talk his way out of trouble?

During his house arrest this past year, SBF spoke with a variety of reporters and leaked Caroline Ellison’s journal to a pair of NYT reporters in order to discredit here and build up public sympathy.

Source: Twitter

We never find out which reporter it was (it was only two). The duo also wrote a couple of softball pieces on SBF earlier in the spring and summer. SBF did try to talk his way out of trouble, but ended up getting convicted on all 7 counts anyways.

On p. 292 he writes:

“As an individual, to make a bet where it’s like, ‘I’m going to gamble my $10 billion and either get $20 billion or $0, with equal probability,’ would be madness,” Rob Wiblin, host of an effective-altruism podcast, said to Bankman-Fried in April. “But from an altruistic point of view, it’s not so crazy.”

Another podcast to filter through. Imagine all the tweets the author could have written instead of listening to podcasts!

A year ago, just days before SBF is arrested, Faux interviewed some of the hangers-on left in the Bahamas. Here is one exchange on p. 301:

I threw out an easy question. “Why are you still here?” I asked. He started off by saying he wanted to help FTX’s customers. Then, unprompted, he told me that he thought there wasn’t much risk Bankman-Fried would ever get in trouble. “I firmly believe once somebody becomes a certain level of rich, they’re never poor again,” he said. “They don’t go to jail. Nothing bad happens to them.” 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. I gave him a second chance to say something nice about Bankman-Fried. “Are there specific things that make you think Sam is honest?” I asked. “Oh, I didn’t say he was honest,” the man said.

Unfortunately we do seem to have a two-tier justice system in the U.S., especially when it comes to prosecuting white-collar crime. However in this instance, SBF was arrested, extradited, and found guilty by a jury within a period of 12 months.

Epilogue

On p. 311 he writes:

Traveling around the world investigating crypto had given me a new appreciation for my Visa card. It worked instantly, with just a tap, charged no fees, and never asked me to memorize long strings of numbers, or to bury codes in my backyard.

No one has to like cryptocurrencies but this seems like sample size bias. I purposefully attempt to get credit cards that waive international transaction fees, some people may not qualify for those so they do get charged fees.

I mentioned this in the previous two book reviews: Visa and Mastercard are centralized entities operating centralized infrastructure. In the U.S., Visa and Mastercard operate a duopoly that is good only for their shareholders. For instance, following news that the Federal Reserve has proposed lowering the interchange (swipe) fee, the CEO of Mastercard slammed it.41

Not that there needs to be another edition, but a future footnote could include a conversation about the friction-filled payment infrastructure that allows private companies to extract rents on retail users in the U.S.

For instance, five months ago a bi-partisan bill was introduced in both the House and Senate: “the Credit Card Competition Act, which would require large banks and other credit card issuers with over $100 billion in assets to offer at least two network choices to process and facilitate transactions, at least one of which must not be owned by Visa or Mastercard.”

On p. 313 he writes:

Were we really throwing the full weight and resources of the U.S. government to prosecute some kid for manipulating the price of a coin named after a fruit? The situation seemed especially ridiculous given that I didn’t see any cases relating to money laundering for Chinese gangsters or facilitating human trafficking in Cambodia.

This is a good point. For instance, “Bob” is a dual citizen who used to be an executive at a large Bitcoin exchange based in China (not Binance) who knowingly allowed users from sanctioned countries (specifically North Korea) to trade on the platform in order to boost trading volume. He is still very active in this space as an executive for a mining company and regularly posts on social media. Yet Virgil Griffith went to prison.

On p. 313 he writes:

For most banks, this also meant that they had to start paying higher interest rates to their depositors. But Tether doesn’t pay interest to the people who own its coins. Whatever the company earns on its reserves is pretty much pure profit.

This is a good point. I mentioned this in a footnote for Chapter 8 but it is worth surfacing here: Circle shares revenue with partners (large holders), does Tether LTD do the same with large holders of USDT such as centralized exchanges?

The affable J.P. Koning recently pondered something similar:

Source: Twitter

It bears mentioning that in the “permissioned” blockchain world, the concept of passing interest onto holders becomes messy because depending on the jurisdiction paying cash holders (or CBDC holders) would result in the asset possibly being deemed a security which could create onerous reporting and taxing requirements.42

On p. 315 he writes:

Most of the short sellers betting against Tether gave up. Nate Anderson of Hindenburg Research, who had once tantalized me in Central Park by dangling his $1 million prize for information on Tether, failed to turn up the bombshell he was looking for.

Oof. Maybe there is a bombshell, but the problem with Easy Money in particular is that there is so much innuendo around Tether you could slice it with a toy butter knife.

NGU Notes

On p. 350 he writes:

Tether was presented with a 187-point fact-checking memo prior to publication and declined to respond to any specific questions about its history, its reserves, or its use by scammers and human traffickers. “The huge volume of corrections required would be tantamount to our rewriting Mr. Faux’s book for him, which is not our job,” a spokesperson for the company wrote. “Our attention is better focused on our customers and the success of the Bitcoin community.”

Wow, a 187 point memo. Did the authors of the two previous books provide Tether LTD with a similar memo?

Conclusion

This book was nearly flawless, and unlike the previous two books reviewed there are no fatal errors and certainly nothing that would be need to “rewriting” this book.

Unlike Easy Money, which seemed to have a substantive error every three pages, Number Go Up was a breeze to read. It was funny, it was witty, and most importantly it informative!43 In one book the author – who was relatively new to this space – scooped mainstream press as well as the conspiracy circles of Tether Truthers.44

I rarely recommend books, but in this case, have no qualms in doing so.

Endnotes

  1. I also recently reviewed Popping the Crypto Bubble by Diehl et al, which was the worst book on the topic, just filled with evidence-free polemics. It did include 41 pages of references but since the book relied entirely on second-hand information, its references should have been significantly longer. []
  2. Unless your name ends in Ellison or Singh or Wang, best to sit this one out. []
  3. In fact, his BusinessWeek article on Tether was published the month before so I probably would have changed the wording to un-short-change oneself. []
  4. One wonders if November 2018 was too early to seek a book deal to expand on: Systemically important cryptocurrency networks []
  5. One reviewer of this review said: “There are better examples of Taco Bell. For the analogy of useless overhyped food, he could have used protein shakes.” []
  6. Economists use aggregates such as M0, M1, and M2 to measure the expansion and contraction of the money supply. []
  7. Also, not a big deal, but by convention uppercase B is used to describe the network and lowercase b is used to describe the medium-of-exchange/unit-of-account. []
  8. Although, Tether LTD is actively investing in Bitcoin mining operations, including in Uruguay and Oklahoma. Perhaps the topic for a new chapter in the paperback version? []
  9. That’s all McKenzie and Silverman had to do: explain the history concisely. They scarcely even mention what was in the Riot mining facility, let alone how much resources it consumed. []
  10. Analysts and commentators have been discussing this with some Bitcoiners for years. []
  11. One day when I have some extra time, perhaps I will post the older newsletters that had some golden tweets of theirs. []
  12. The case has not gone to trial yet, but Saylor did lose a bid to quickly quash the suit. []
  13. For more on this topic, readers are encouraged to peruse the academic writings of Morgan Ricks and Rohan Grey. []
  14. Recall that Silvergate and Signature Bank both operated infrastructure – SEN and SigNet – that enabled participants to immediately transfer funds 24/7/365. When the parent banks collapsed, this infrastructure was turned off. []
  15. As mentioned in Easy Money, I am not sure who coined the term “Tether Truther” but I have used it in the past to describe people who still claim – post-CFTC settlement – that Tether LTD is still acting in a fraudulent manner. The “Truther” modifier is similar to the scheming intrigue of other “Truther” movements. USDTQ is a riff on the conspiratorial TSLAQ. []
  16. When I worked in Shanghai I met a guy who introduced himself as “John Teddy” who relied on using other people’s bank accounts because he didn’t want to go through he KYC process himself. In the summer of 2011 he did offer to sell me a few thousand bitcoins for a few thousand dollars; whoops on that missed opportunity, right? []
  17. Specifically Faux is probably referring to the “Travel” rule. See also: Gemini UK to Block Bitcoin Transfers To and From Non-Approved Exchanges []
  18. This quote actually first appeared in Faux’s BusinessWeek piece on Tether. []
  19. One reviewer of this review thought this could be because the authors of Easy Money arrived late to the scene and seem to have also relied on sources who were unfamiliar with certain large scams, hacks, and fraudulent schemes. []
  20. Both IBM and Microsoft have been actively involved in blockchain-related projects for years, but to my knowledge, nothing directly intersecting with an ICO. []
  21. Easy Money does not mention Centra at all, even though it could have helped strengthen the authors arguments. Coincidentally, Nathaniel Popper was the first mainstream reporter who wrote an exposé on how influencers such as Floyd Mayweather were being paid to endorse coins (without disclosing they were being paid). For instance, five months after his article appeared, the two founders of Centra were arrested. []
  22. I.e., someone inside was helping them navigate the controls and approval process. []
  23. It is worth pointing out that prior to its publication, I changed the title to the post due to possible reprisals from a now former colleague at R3 who wanted to control all external communications. []
  24. I previously mentioned his real name back in February 2022 in section 5. []
  25. He sometimes calls himself Andrew. Are there more aliases? []
  26. For what it is worth, I too have proposed scenario 2 in the past, and made a bet with Bitfinex’ed that it was a possibility. []
  27. It is unclear what revenue sharing agreements are in place. Recall Circle shares revenue with partners (large holders), does Tether LTD do the same with large holders of USDT such as centralized exchanges? Obviously this assumes that Tether LTD are telling the truth and/or not exaggerating. Perhaps they are fibbing. They claim to be publishing real-time reserve data next year. []
  28. I’m kind of joking, his book was decent for its time. And outside counsel can drop a client, but I believe he was inside counsel (GC even). A reporter should ask him what changed after his Bitcoin book was published. []
  29. Earlier this year, Wired published an interesting article on this topic, but the individual named by others does not appear in it. Maybe I was provided incorrect information? []
  30. Probably not a big deal considering some readers might have tried opening new checking accounts to take advantage of teaser rates, or attempted credit card churning. []
  31. Years ago I wrote a paper critiquing the notion that metacoins, specifically those that used Bitcoin, were fit for purpose for securing off-chain assets. []
  32. Although the fact that Jack Dorsey became a Bitcoin promoter kinda sorta feeds my tin foil hat theory for why “crypto” related activity was not heavily moderated. []
  33. Based on the authors description of how he acquired the art NFT, it is not apparent where additional MEV would have been extracted; he didn’t use a fungible token swap which is typically what gets reordered. []
  34. Ordinals, a Bitcoin-based tokenization protocol, received a lot of attention at the beginning of the year from the art NFT world due to the ability for users to “inscribe” data on-chain. []
  35. At least, that’s not an allegation made by law enforcement at this time. In a court filing, Jump Trading is stated as buying large quantities of UST to prop up its value during an earlier de-peg; still not the same thing as controlling the supply of Luna. []
  36. In the process of writing this, the FCA, the top financial regulator in the U.K., outlined proposed stablecoin rules that would effectively make issuers into narrow banks. []
  37. See also: Will the real stablecoin please stand up? by Anneke Kosse, Marc Glowka, Ilaria Mattei and Tara Rice []
  38. As mentioned in a footnote in Easy Money, I was a formal advisor to Blockseer which was acquired by DMG Blockchain. One of the prominent “crypto critics” amplified false information about myself last year including that I was not an advisor. A quick googling could prove that, why don’t they do it? []
  39. Probably not a huge surprise since both Carter and Srinivasan have publicly stated they are betting against the U.S. []
  40. For some reason Hochstein – who was editor at American Banker at the time – invited DeRose to provide A/V help at the event. Later Hochstein, among other things, unfortunately helped mainstream the nocoiner pejorative. []
  41. The Fed proposed cutting the current cap from 21 cents per transaction to 14.4 cents per transaction. []
  42. In 2017-2019, Project Jasper, World Wire, and the USC consortium, all had to tackle these thorny issues. []
  43. A reviewer of this review has a strong opinion on selective enforcement: “Overall, the book should have explored a central question: why the U.S. government with its correct and massive focus on money laundering, human trafficking, and terrorism financing is not proactively shutting down new crypto whenever it appears they way it would do if it was a physical dollar printing press. Why Tether, Ripple, Stellar and numerous other coins are allowed to propagate with no public disclosure of how they make money. Or why the PayPal stablecoin was allowed but Facebook’s Libra wasn’t. Other governments obviously don’t have the same moral imperatives to stop those types of activities, but why is the U.S. continually being reactive. I.e., the book doesn’t answer the question of how this was allowed to happen and how it will prevent it from happening again.” []
  44. It’s not a coincidence that a reporter relatively new to the space was able to accurately describe some of the tech: Fais Khan provided feedback and he is the author of another great book, The Billionaire’s Folly. []

Book Review: “Easy Money”

I recently finished reading the Kindle version of Easy Money by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman. Simultaneously, I also read Number Go Up from Zeke Faux, another blockchain-focused book that came out about two months after the publication of Easy Money. These would make the 10th and 11th blockchain-specific books I have reviewed. See the full list here.

Easy Money was not the worst blockchain-related book I have read, that award would go to Popping the Crypto Bubble. Easy Money had a lot of potential, in fact, several chapters had some pretty good prose and first-hand reporting.

But for some inexplicable reason – unlike most of the other blockchain books I have reviewed – the authors insert Ben McKenzie into the story for no apparent reason.

Previous books written by reporters might explain in first person how difficult it was to use a wallet or how difficult it was to explain mining to someone – but McKenzie finds a way to insert himself into every chapter even if he is irrelevant.1 And that takes a lot away from what could have been a powerful book.

For instance, Chapter 7 was probably the best written and interesting chapter of the book. The two authors flew down to El Salvador to investigate what kind of traction Bitcoin-based payments was having in the small Central American country. And as the authors describe the plight of one of the residents who is unlucky to live on land that was to be turned into an airport, they write:

Here was a famous Hollywood actor who wanted to film and interview him, to tell his story, yet no one in his own country could tell him when he would be kicked off his land or where he might go.

The reader is constantly reminded of how McKenzie was in several popular TV shows. In all but one other blockchain book I have reviewed few authors attempt to regularly remind people of who they are. The main exception is Fais Khan who wrote The Billionaire’s Folly, which was an insiders account of working at ConsenSys.

McKensie was not an insider. In his own words, he was stoned and out of work in late 2020, and came to the conclusion that he should pivot careers and write a book about crypto. Yet because he did not get really started until late 2021 – near the height of the recent bubble – it all comes across as Johnny-come-lately ambulance chasing self-serving plot filler to boost his PR so he can appear in the Netflix adaptation.2 It is both poor form and cringey.

Furthermore, the dual authors make a number of elementary mistakes. For instance on p. 36 they write: “In 2016, Tether was hacked. More than 100,000 Bitcoin (worth $71 million at the time) was stolen, and the company was in desperate straits.”

What they meant to write was that Bitfinex, the centralized exchange, was hacked. It was actually hacked twice in 2016, the second time 119,756 bitcoins were stolen.

Later, on p. 264 they write: “The other major player left standing was Tether. The stablecoin company, valued at $71 billion as of March 1, 2023, had miraculously survived while the industry around it bit the dust.”

This is not an accurate way of describing the company. The valuation of a bank – or in this case, a shadow bank – is usually determined by its book value of equity (BVE), not by how large its deposit base is. If we took its self-disclosed quarterly reports at face value, Tether LTD itself is worth several billion dollars. In contrast, the aggregate value of USDT spread across all chains, as of this writing, is around $86 billion. Academics such as Stephen Kelly, have publicly analyzed these claims, a future edition should include such remediations.

It is also worth pointing out that the book quickly glosses over any deep or detailed technical discussion and that is likely to help the reader move through the pages. Yet there is no glossary for further explanations and the Appendix consists of a single page copied from the SEC website regarding Ponzi schemes.

This is kind of strange considering even Diehl’s book at least paid some lip service towards the technical bits. To be fair though, unlike Diehl’s book, McKenzie and Silverman do not repeat the same refrain over and over again. But that should not be the bar. With the resources of a real publisher (Abrams), this should have been a top shelf book. But instead it is 1-star quality book and a hard pass.

As usual, all transcription errors are my own.

Chapter 1: Money and Lying

On page 1 the authors write:

These get-rich-quick speculative schemes were merely the latest iteration of casino capitalism. Political economist Susan Strange populated the term in the 1980s, but its roots stretch at least as far back as the 1930s.

This may seem pedantic but I am pretty certain the authors meant to write “popularized” and not “populated.”

On page 1 the authors write:

You may have noticed something about cryptocurrencies: They don’t do anything. Sure, you can trade them, betting that one will rise or fall, but they aren’t used for anything productive. Cryptos aren’t tied to anything of real value, unlike shares in a company or a commodities future. They’re computer code uncorrelated with any actual asset.

This requires nuance, something the book does not really have.

For instance, not every cryptocurrency is the same. Some, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), attempt to represent off-chain assets. A myriad of financial institutions and other large enterprises have attempted to tokenize a plethora of atoms, often in toy experiments that do not last a year or so. However there is an entire category of “real world assets” (RWA) that do in fact represent “real value.”3 We can argue about the particulars – should Paxos USD or PYUSD be allowed to exist? – but the authors cannot ignore the existence of tokenized assets identified by Centrifuge.

A better, a stronger argument they could have used involves “self-referential assets” — which many major cryptocurrencies are considered.

On page 1 they write:

In crypto, this comes from the fees charged by the exchanges, as well as the costs associated with validating the transactions. In Las Vegas, it’s called the rake, the amount the house takes from every pot. This means that, given enough time, the average gambler will lose. It’s how casinos keep the lights on.

I actually agree with one of their points here (regarding opportunity costs) but without evidence it is just another random opinion. A future edition could also cite the musings of Jack Bogle, the founder of Vanguard and creator of the index fund. He often characterized the excessive speculation that benefited financial intermediaries as the “croupier’s take.”

On page 2 they write:

When I first started paying attention to financial markets in the fall of 2020, I came to a similar conclusion, a troubling sense that graft and deceit had penetrated all aspects of the economy, operating with political and legal impunity. It made me want to scream in anger—and to make a wager of my own.

McKenzie is a couple of years older than me and it is hard to imagine how he thinks this helps his credibility.

How can you go your adult life – as someone with an economics degree – without paying attention to financial markets until three years ago? What were you doing in 2008 during the financial crisis? How did you miss the craziness of the ICO boom in 2017-2018 that John Oliver ridiculed?45

On p. 3 they write “crypto-currency” with a dash and then inexplicably use “cryptocurrency” without a dash later. And back and forth. The same happened with the word “block-chain.” Where was the proof reading?

On p. 3 they write:

A few thousand cryptos in 2020 grew to 20,000 two years later, and their purported value swelled in tandem, from some $300 billion in the summer of 2020 to $3 trillion by November 2021.

The authors use this 20,000 figure throughout the book. It comes from reference #4 for Chapter 1 which refers to CoinMarketCap (CMC) but in going to the website, there are currently 9,213 cryptocurrencies.6 For comparison, CoinGecko currently catalogues 10,812 coins. There probably have been significantly more than 10,000 coins or tokens created – many of which have died – but the author’s figure seems like an outlier.7

On p. 4 they write:

Narrative Economics was published in 2019, prior to both the current viral spread of cryptocurrency and the COVID-19 pandemic.

That seems like a weird tie-in especially since there was a mountain of PR for cryptocurrency projects during 2017-2018 in the U.S. For instance, between December 2017 to January 2018, you could turn on CNBC to hear some guest promoting a random coin they liked.8 More than likely, Narrative Economics was published before the viral spread of cryptocurrencies that the authors paid attention to.9

On p. 5 they write:

Two of its biggest drivers were financial deregulation and low interest rates—a decades-long, mostly bipartisan political effort to grow the financial sector combined with a policy intended to stimulate the economy in the wake of the first dot-com bubble.

This is partially true. A future edition should include a conversation around just how leveraged banks were, both foreign and domestic. This would have also been a good spot for the authors to discuss systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) such as ‘too big to fail banks’ (TBTF) which even Diehl’s book paid lip service to once.

Why are SIFIs and TBTF banks worth discussing? Putting aside the ever present rent-seeking and moral hazard issues, the infrastructure that these organizations rely on often is highly centralized and dependent on a specific vendor thereby creating single points of trust and single points of failure. The book largely ignores legacy infrastructure operated by incumbents.

For example, a future edition could highlight one area the U.S. financial system (specific banks) could be improved: make banks public utilities.

On p. 7 they write:

Coordinating with other countries’ central banks, the US government offered $700 billion in bank bailouts and trillions in loan guarantees, managing to stem the worst of the contagion.

Probably worth telling the readers that this controversial bailout package, frequently referred to as TARP, failed to pass the initial House vote.

On p. 8 they write:

Public key encryption plays a vital role in modern life. For example, all https:// websites (nearly all the ones the average person uses) employ public key encryption. It does things like protect users’ credit card information from being stolen when making online purchases. Public key encryption has two useful properties: Anyone can verify the legitimacy of a transaction using publicly available information (the public key), but the people/parties conducting those transactions are able to keep their identities hidden (the private key).

While this is not a bad explanation, the authors should have used “public key cryptography” because that is usually how it is referred to. In fact, Bitcoin – like most cryptocurrencies – does not use any form of encryption.

On p. 9 they write:

This time-stamped, append-only ledger is the blockchain. In 1991, computer scientists Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta, building off the work of cryptographer David Chaum, figured out a way to timestamp documents so they couldn’t be altered. Each “block” contains the cryptographic hash (a short, computable summary of all the data in it) of the prior block, linking the two and creating an irreversible record, a ledger composed of blocks of data that can be added to a chain (blockchain), but never subtracted from.

This is good. In fact, one of the problems with Diehl et al.’s book is that the trio completely whiffed on the Haber & Stornetta references in the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Worth pointing out that pages later, McKenzie and Silverman reuse this archaic blockchain as a strawman, hold your breath!

On p. 9 they write:

So far so good, but one issue remained: what’s known as the double spend problem. If you remove a centralized authority from the equation, how do you make sure people aren’t gaming the system by spending money that’s already been sent somewhere else? How do you secure the network against manipulation? “Satoshi” relied on what’s called a consensus algorithm.

Pedantically Bitcoin – and its progeny – use what is called Nakamoto consensus. For comparison, Diehl et al.‘s book briefly mentioned it in passing. A future version should incorporate that.

On p. 9 they write:

The network targets a new block every ten minutes or so, by dynamically adjusting the degree of difficulty required in the winning block; the more participants, the harder the process gets, and the more energy is required to guess the next block correctly. This is the proof of work behind Bitcoin: lots and lots of computers (“miners”) performing relatively simple mathematical calculations over and over again endlessly.

This is not really accurate:

(1) There are many proof-of-work based coins. Bitcoin (and some of its clones) have a readjustment period of 2,016 blocks, roughly two weeks. Adjustment does not take place every block as the authors write above.

(2) The resources consumed in a proof-of-work network like Bitcoin rises and falls directly proportional to the coin price. If number go up, then so too does the difficulty level and vice versa. They cite him later in Chapter 5 but it would be helpful to include analysis from Alex de Vries here as well.

What this means is that more energy is not necessarily required to guess the next block correctly. In fact, in its early years, Bitcoin could be solo mined on a normal laptop. Proof-of-work coins that never see much price appreciation can be solo mined by simple computers too.

There is another issue with their statement above: it does not explain the nuance, the difference between a Bitcoin mining pool (which is the block maker) and Bitcoin hashing farms (which generate the proofs-of-work). But more on that later.

On p. 9 they write:

After about an hour, participants in the network are convinced about history six blocks deep; they know that it is extremely unlikely anyone will rewrite that history.

This is not accurate. By social convention – not code – intermediaries such as coin exchanges will allow users to trade their newly deposited bitcoins between 3-6 block confirmations. Centralized exchanges like Coinbase, may require some coins such as Ethereum Classic to have hours of blocks built in order to protect against reorgs. But in both cases, this is social convention, not code.

On p. 9 they write:

As you may be able to tell, Satoshi’s vision is both immensely clever but also cumbersome, practically speaking. As more competitors enter, the hash rate increases and more energy is expended to agree upon a block of data that remains roughly the same size. This is what’s called a Red Queen’s race, a reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

There are a couple of problems with this:

(1) During each transition from CPUs -> GPUs -> FPGAs -> ASICs, whoever was able to access to the newest generation of equipment first has had a material advantage from an energy usage perspective.10 For instance, four pages later the authors mention what Laszlo Hanyecz did – but fail to mention who he is and how he got his bitcoins. Note: Hanyecz was one of the first (if not the first) person to scale bitcoin mining with GPUs. His hashes per watt were likely lower than anyone else up until that point in 2010.

(2) I looked in the refences but do not see the authors point to any article that mention the Red Queens’ race. I myself referred to the Red Queen’s race multiple times in papers and articles between 2014-the present day.11 Would be interesting to see who it originated from (I believe I first saw it on a /r/bitcoin post in 2013); echoes of John Gilmore?

On p. 10 they write:

Ethereum also led to the introduction of NFTs, which are basically links to receipts for JPEGs stored on blockchains (shh, don’t tell that to anyone who owns one).

This is false. Both tokenization and non-fungible token projects existed several years before Ethereum turned on. For example:

Source: ChainLeftist

It bears mentioning that even before Spells of Genesis was released on Counterparty (in 2015) several different colored coin projects attempted to tokenize off-chain assets. See my short presentation on this topic from last year.

In fact, if we are going to be really pedantic, perhaps the original idea behind “crypto art” (and NFTs) was inspired by Hal Finney in 1993?

Source: CryptoSlate

On p. 10 they write:

The number of cryptos exploded around this time, rising tenfold in five years, from less than one hundred in 2013 to more than a thousand by 2017. There are now an estimated 20,000 cryptos, most of them small and insignificant, their ownership concentrated in the hands of a few “whales,” much like penny stocks.

There could be 20,000 coins and tokens, but as mentioned earlier, it is unclear where they arrived at that specific estimate since both CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko currently show around 10,000 each.

On p. 11 they write:

Remember, blockchain is at least thirty years old and barely used by businesses outside of the crypto industry. Since at least 2016, hundreds of enterprises have tried to incorporate it into their business models, only to later scrap it because it didn’t work any better than what they were already using. Ask yourself a simple question: If blockchain is so revolutionary, after thirty years, why is its primary use case gambling? Ironically enough, the more important technology is the one that predates it: public key encryption.

Nearly every sentences in this paragraph has an inaccuracy.

(1) Yes, the “blockchain is at least thirty years old” is really how McKenzie and Silverman are going to spin things. Even if we take their claim at face value the other problem is that not every blockchain is the same.

The Haber & Stornetta “chain” is limited in functionality. What is its throughput? How decentralized is it? Were the authors aware that this archaic chain places attestations once a week in The New York Times? That’s arguably not the best security property.

Source: Twitter

(2) Since there were hundreds of enterprises that have tried to incorporate a blockchain into their business, could the authors provide one example next time?

We are beginning to see a troubling pattern from the authors, lots of strawmen and few specifics.

They could be right, in fact, I even agree with part of their statement. But as Hitchens’s razor states: that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

What kind of evidence could they have provided?

Source: Twitter

Above is a line chart illustrating Stack Overflow posts per quarter for three different ecosystems: Ethereum, Corda, and Hyperledger (Fabric). The latter two were primarily targeted at enterprises. R3, the major sponsor for Corda, recently announced layoffs impacting more than 20% of the company headcount. Does the decrease in Stack Overflow activity translate to less commercial activity? Maybe.

Since we are already doing their homework for them, here’s another example they could use in a future edition: in the process of writing this review Citi announced that it is offering a pilot service that turns customer deposits into digital tokens, for use use trade finance and cash management. Is this the type of blockchain project the authors think will ultimately be scrapped? Maybe it will, but next edition the authors could give specific examples.

(3) I actually kind of agree with their comment about how popular gambling-type of activities are within the various major chains.12 But strangely, the authors do not beef up their argument by providing any stats or charts.13 Stranger: while there are a handful of graphics in the book, there are zero blockchain-related charts, some of which could have helped strengthen their arguments. A quick googling found a bunch of crypto casino stats. Are the veracity of the numbers reliable? Sounds like something the authors could include next time.

On p. 11 they write:

The original story—that Bitcoin represents a response to the devastating failures of the traditional financial system—holds significant power because we all agree on its premise: Our current financial system sucks. But is the story of Bitcoin actually true? Does it do what it purports to do, create a peer-to-peer currency free of intermediaries? Was a trustless currency relying only on computer code even possible?

I have no affinity for Bitcoin but this is a strawman argument because it uses a retconned narrative from a number of Bitcoin maximalists. Satoshi herself explained that she started coding Bitcoin 18 months prior to the release of the whitepaper, which chronologically places its origin before the financial crisis of 2008-2009. I think the initial motivation was more aligned with securing (and funding) an online poker community, which the authors discuss later in the book.

On p. 11 they write:

Bitcoin may be the most popular digital currency, but it was not the first. In a 1982 paper, cryptographer David Chaum theorized the intellectual scaffolding of blockchain, upon which cryptocurrency would emerge some quarter of a century later.

They do not talk much about “blockchains” later in the book but it is worthy pointing out that in 2023 we typically use an article such as “a” or “the” in front the word blockchain. There was a period of time (mostly around 2016-2017) where consultant-types tried to push an articleless blockchain, but the grammar pendulum has shifted once more.

On p. 11 they write:

DigiCash was a legitimate project, without the conflicts of interest and other red flags surrounding many current crypto ventures. Unfortunately, it failed to take off and in the late 1990s the company declared bankruptcy before being sold.

Who died and made these authors king? By what standard was DigiCash “legitimate” or “illegitimate”? Maybe it was both or neither? But they provide no rubric, just dictum. According to legend, at one point Microsoft considered paying $75-$100 million to acquire DigiCash and integrate into Windows but Chaum wanted $2 per license sold. Also, in 2018 Chaum announced a new blockchain platform, Elixxir. Is this legitimate? It’s a public blockchain so obviously not?

On p. 11 they write about eGold:

It lasted until the mid-2000s before being shut down by the feds for violating money transmitter laws.

Throughout the book the authors describe activities from the FBI but this is the only time they lowercase feds.

On p. 13 they write:

PayPal and other payment services existed, but they were beholden to annoying gate-keepers like the law, national borders, banks, and terms of service agreements.

PayPal provided the MSB-centric model that a couple centralized pegged coin issuers have emulated.

While they make a lot of bluster over Tether LTD, this is the type of statement that impeaches the authors credibility: because neither seems to understand how certain fintechs have skirted U.S.-specific laws they cite in the book. This is nearly identical to Diehl et al. who approvingly namechecks PayPal a couple of times too, all while trying to dunk on “stablecoin” issuers. That is not consistent.

Source: Twitter

On p. 13 they write:

Bitcoin seemed like a solution, but at first no one outside the small Bit-coin network ascribed any worth to its tokens. In a story that has become memorialized in Bitcoin lore

Why is there a hyphen/dash in the 2nd Bitcoin but no hyphen/dash in the other two?

On p. 13 they write:

on March 22, 2010, 10,000 Bitcoins were used to pay for two pizzas, worth forty dollars

Without mentioning his name, or more importantly how he got 10,000 bitcoins, the authors are describing Laszlo Hanyecz. They do cite a relevant Forbes article but I think the readers would enjoy learning how disappointed Satoshi was when she first heard about GPU mining on the Bitcoin Talk forum.

On p. 13 they write:

Sure, the stuff was nearly worthless, but it was open to all, as early adopters could mine Bitcoin with their home computers without racking up enormous hardware and electricity costs.

This is accurate. But it conflicts with a number of their comments on page 9. A future edition should reconcile these conflicting statements.

On p. 13 they write:

Until it was shut down by US law enforcement in October 2013, the Silk Road was the most successful onboarding mechanism in Bitcoin’s history.

This might be true, but how did the authors determine or quantify “the most successful on boarding mechanism”? In looking at the citations and references, there are none. Maybe they are correct but a future edition probably should include a highly cited relevant paper: A Fistful of Bitcoins: Characterizing Payments Among Men with No Names by Meiklejohn et al.

On p. 13 they write:

If it didn’t work as a currency, perhaps a new story could be told. In the coming years, coiners started talking about Bitcoin as a potential store of value (despite its wild volatility) or as the basis of a new, parallel financial system, free of state control.

There are a couple of issues with this:

(1) They include the word “coiners” without providing any definition.14 “Coiners” appears nine times altogether in this book, yet not once do the authors explain what might mean. It is only by looking at the surrounding context that we can guess they have conjured up a word to describe “the outgroup.”

And here is where the story becomes even stranger. McKenize and Silverman arrived relatively late to the coin thunderdome. For some reason, they quickly fashioned themselves as “nocoiners” a term that readers of this blog understand was intended to be a slur. Yet these two market themselves with it as a badge of honor to The New York Times. Bananas.

Recall that the etymology of “nocoiner” arose in late 2017, coined by a trio of Bitcoin maximalists who used it as a slur. I was on the receiving end of coinbros lobbing the unaffectionate smear for years.15 The fact that McKenzie, Silverman and other prominent “anti-coiners” use it as a way to identify themselves – and their “in-group” – is baffling because it is the language of an intended oppressor. Do not take my word for it, read and listen to the presentations from those who concocted it.

If there is one take away from this book: do not willingly use the term “nocoiner” to describe yourself or use the term “coiner” to describe others. It is identity politics.

(2) The authors are somewhat correct: certain Bitcoin promoters, specifically a group that often refers to themselves as “Bitcoin maximalists” did in fact shift the narrative from disintermediated payments to a store-of-value.

Samuel Patterson went through everything Satoshi ever wrote. Unsurprisingly Satoshi discussed payments significantly more than a “store of value.”

Source: Twitter

I do not have a horse in this race, especially since I have no particular affinity for Bitcoin. But I do think the authors should have been more nuanced and specific about who was pushing specific narratives. 16

On p. 14 they write:

This was the beginning of DeFi (decentralized finance), in which tokens would be routed through complex, mostly automated protocols that added leverage and risk to the system—and a chance at huge rewards.

This is the introduction chapter but readers expecting more in-depth nuance will be disappointed because this is pretty much how they describe “DeFi.” It is not really accurate but let us wait a few more chapters to discuss why.

On p. 15 they write:

In late 2020, I came down with a serious case of FOMO. The entertainment business was on ice thanks to the pandemic, and I was bored and depressed. I saw a bunch of average Joes making money in the stock markets, so I dusted off my long-neglected degree in economics and started paying attention to them for the first time in my life.

Look, 2020 sucked for a lot of people. 17 But the statement above does not really help your credibility. Wouldn’t… you want to portray yourself as an expert?

On p. 19 they write:

Cryptocurrencies didn’t do any of these things well. You couldn’t buy stuff with them—the guys at my deli would look at me like I was nuts if I tried to pay for my bagel and coffee in Bitcoin. Advocates say this is a temporary problem; if more people would just buy Bitcoin, eventually it will become a currency you can actually use.

There are at least two issues with this:

(1) Readers have probably noticed the pattern wherein the authors conflate “cryptocurrencies” (broadly) with Bitcoin (specific). This is a strawman. Also, on social media the people who frequently push this particular narrative they are criticizing are often Lightning Network aficionados. Those are a subset of the Bitcoin-specific world.

(2) A lot of cryptocurrency / cryptoasset-related projects are not attempting to tackle payments or reinvent money. According to the book, the authors sample size for “industry events” I believe was just two? SXSW and Bitcoin Miami. That’s not exactly a robust sampling. Sure, you can conduct market research remotely but their unnuanced language has room for improvement.

On p. 19 they write:

The technology behind Bitcoin sucks. It doesn’t scale. Satoshi’s solution to the double spend problem was innovative, but also clunky. The more miners who entered the competition the more energy was used, but the blocks were the same. Bitcoin is able to handle only five to seven transactions a second; it can never go above that.

There are some good criticisms of Bitcoin out there but this rant is just bad, it sounds identical to Diehl et al.

(1) Bitcoin is just one implementation of a blockchain. The authors claimed earlier in this chapter that the “original” blockchain arose thirty years ago. But they never provide any metrics on how fast that one is/was. What is the throughput of the Haber & Stornetta “chain” versus Bitcoin 0.1 in 2009?

(2) The authors conflate the limitations of Bitcoin with every blockchain, and that is intellectually dishonest. There are several different Layer 1 (L1) chains – such as Avalanche – that clearly show the world is not limited to the throughput of Bitcoin. If anything, the omission of other chains shows a lack of market research and due diligence by the authors. Yea, sifting through claims is tiresome work, that’s my day job and often isn’t fun.

(3) Nakamoto consensus (proof-of-work) is not the only game in town when it comes to solving the “double-spend problem.” For just under a decade, different teams of researchers have successfully engineered and productionized proof-of-stake-based chains which overcome some of the limitations that proof-of-work-based chains had. The authors mention “proof of stake” a couple of times later on in passing but do a disservice to readers by effectively ignoring it.

(4) As mentioned a couple of times before: just because someone attempts to mine on a proof-of-work chain does not automatically mean extra resources are immediately required to mine additional blocks. For instance, if I started a new proof-of-work chain tomorrow, a fork of Bitcoin, then a variety of older USB-mining devices could easily generate hashes while consuming relatively little amounts of electricity. Energy (or resources in general) are typically only expended if the coin value goes up. Crab price action is often not attractive miners, especially those who own warehouse facilities filled with hashing equipment.

(5) In the references they cite one paper, On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains, which was presented in February 2016. A lot has happened in the past 7+ years. In fact, the paper primarily focuses on Bitcoin which again, is no the only blockchain in the world. Surely there are more relevant technical papers exploring the challenges and limitations of other chains?

On p. 19 they write:

Visa can process 24,000. To operate, Bitcoin uses an enormous amount of energy, the equivalent in 2021 of Argentina—the entire country. Visa and Mastercard use comparatively miniscule amounts of electricity to serve a customer base orders of magnitude greater. Bitcoin’s energy consumption is enormously wasteful, and poses a massive environmental problem for the supposedly cutting-edge technology (and really, for all of us).

This type of rant is similar to the kind you would find in Diehl et al. book, where there is a kernel of truth surrounded by apples-to-oranges comparisons.

I actually agree with their criticisms of (proof-of-work) energy consumption, and have written about it many times. But their other arguments above are incorrect in at least two ways:

(1) Visa and Mastercard are centralized entities operating centralized infrastructure. In the passage above, the authors endorse and defend rent-seeking incumbents. In the U.S., Visa and Mastercard operate a duopoly that is good only for their shareholders. For instance, following news that the Federal Reserve has proposed lowering the interchange (swipe) fee, the CEO of Mastercard slammed it.18li

The next edition of this book could include a conversation about the friction-filled payment infrastructure that allows private companies to extract rents on retail users in the U.S. For instance, five months ago a bi-partisan bill was introduced in both the House and Senate: “the Credit Card Competition Act, which would require large banks and other credit card issuers with over $100 billion in assets to offer at least two network choices to process and facilitate transactions, at least one of which must not be owned by Visa or Mastercard.”

(2) A better comparison would be between proof-of-work networks (like Bitcoin) and proof-of-stake networks such as Avalanche or Cosmos. The latter two do not require enormous amounts of energy to operate. By continually conflating Bitcoin with all blockchains as a whole, weakens their credibility.

On p. 19 they write:

So if cryptocurrencies weren’t currencies, then what were they? How do they actually work in the real world? Well, you put real money into them and hope to make real money off of them through no work of your own. Under American law, that’s an investment contract. More precisely, it’s a security.

The authors – neither of whom are lawyers – throw this hand grenade towards the end of Chapter 1 and do not even provide a citation in the reference section.19 Maybe they are right, but that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Also, anyone can create a (ERC-20) token and pair it with another token on a decentralized exchange, such as an automated market maker (AMM) like Uniswap.20 You can do it without raising external capital from anyone too. That’s precisely what Colin Platt did a few years ago.

On p. 20 they write:

There were now potentially 20,000 unregistered, unlicensed securities—more than all the publicly listed securities in the major US stock markets—for sale to the general public.

You would think they would provide specific examples of coins or tokens, and the facts-and-circumstances as to how they are unregistered and/or unlicensed securities. But they do not. Maybe they are right, but that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

On p. 20 they write:

Worse, these unregistered, unlicensed securities were primarily traded on crypto exchanges, which often served multiple market functions and, therefore, had massive conflicts of interest.

The first part of the sentence can be correct, but they again do not provide any citation. I whole-heartily agree with the 2nd half of the sentence. I even gave a speech a few years ago, discussing these types of conflicts of interest.

On p. 20 they write:

And perhaps most disturbing, most of the volume in crypto ran through overseas exchanges. Rather than being registered in the United States, they were often run through shell corporations in the Caribbean, apparently to avoid falling under any particular regulatory jurisdiction.

This is a partially valid argument. Although they do not provide specific examples here, anecdotally it is likely that some centralized exchanges attempt to use regulatory arbitrage to avoid specific jurisdictions. But the next edition should provide a couple here (they do a little later).

One other quibble with this passage is that traditional financial institutions do precisely the same thing. They pioneered the playbook of lobbing for regulatory changes and structures in specific jurisdictions. For instance, the entire reinsurance industry is headquartered out of Bermuda.

On p. 21 they write:

When you buy a share of Apple, you are effectively a portion of the revenue stream, as well as the brand equity, market share, intellectual property—all of that. But cryptos don’t make stuff or do stuff. There are no goods or services produced. It’s air, pure securitized air.

This could have been a stronger argument if the authors used nuance. As mentioned earlier, there are “real world assets” (RWA) which tokenize off-chain wares. Instead of making a blanket statement, they should have honed in on the self-referential nature for most other cryptocurrencies. Also, the burden-of-proof is on them when they claim each and every cryptocurrency is a security.

On p. 21 they write about “Dave”:

We came up with a side bet of our own: I bet him dinner at the restaurant of his choosing that Bitcoin would be worth $10,000 a coin or less by the end of 2021. To my mind, it was easy money.

We never find out if Dave is a real person or not but that is unimportant. What is important is that prior to the publication of this book, McKenzie had an undisclosed financial interest: a large bet.21

As another book reviewer pointed out:

In a recent Guardian profile, the actor disclosed he lost as much as $250,000 trying to short the market. Allegedly he got the timing wrong. The article doesn’t share many details, so we can only speculate but this wager could undercut much of what McKenzie has been saying over the years. In other words, the self-declared paid liar is also a hypocrite.

Is McKenzie a liar? He definitely cherry picks but I’m not sure I would use liar to describe him yet. He is definitely inconsistent for not disclosing on social media that he was actively shorting cryptocurrencies.22 Later in the book he kind of defends this behavior by saying he does not invest in public companies so perhaps he justifies it all by claiming the coin projects are private? Again, we do not know exactly what the short(s) were so it is kind of just guesswork.

On p. 23 they write:

I decided to do something. I decided to get stoned.

When I was reading the book, I did an audible chuckle. It may be authentic, but why do the authors think this adds credibility to the story? Why should we take him seriously at this point? This is not the last time we hear about his marijuana usage.

On p. 24 they write:

I needed to do something other than drink to help me cope. Pot did the trick. While high, I stumbled upon an ingenious notion: I would write a book! It would be a book about crypto, fraud, gambling, and storytelling, as told by a storyteller who was himself gambling on the outcome. To my THC-inspired brain, it all made perfect sense. I had stumbled on something profoundly original! The next day, I woke up a bit groggy and realized the obvious: I don’t know how to write a book.

This is not even the silliest thing in the book. By now readers expecting a deep-dive into the nitty gritty should temper their hopes. Easy Money is basically a self-promotion book that takes a serious set of topics and superficially touches on each while giving the authors an excuse to play blockchain tourist. It is a disappointment to those of us who actually filled out whistleblower forms and sat down with prosecutors.

Chapter 2: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

While every book has an origin story, for some reason the authors felt the backstory for this book was compelling enough to include in the actual book. While there are some amusing parts, most of it should have been left on the cutting board. It all comes across like Entourage wannabes. A good journalist needs a team but that team – and the journalist – do not have to become part of the story. Here they force themselves onto the reader and it is pages that could have otherwise been used to describe more of what happened in El Salvador. For instance, Zeke Faux – and other journalists – show you do not have to continuously insert yourself into the story line just because you have a hot take.

On p. 27 they write:

It was August 13, 2021, and I was perspiring more than I would have liked outside my local bar. It wasn’t the sweltering heat of that summer night making me nervous; it was the stupidity of what I was doing. You know how it goes, what had seemed sensible to propose via Twitter DM after some edibles seemed somewhat less so now. I had invited a journalist I’d never met to pitch him on writing a book I didn’t know how to write about events that hadn’t happened yet. What could possibly go wrong?

If you’re keeping score at home, this is the third time in as many pages that the author mentions he is consuming some form of marijuana. Sure it is just edibles, no big deal right? It is neither classy nor does it add credibility. If anything it reinforces stereotypes of the entertainment industry.

On p. 27 they write about McKenzie’s first interactions with Silverman:

I told him about my econ degree and my interest in fraud. I talked about my friend Dave, and about our little bet that a crypto crash was imminent, and that I felt I had a duty to warn others before it was too late. And then I told him I wanted to write a book about it all.

I genuinely appreciate his sincerity on wanting to warn others but the timing – and self-serving motivations – are ridiculous. Coin prices peak about two months after this meeting. The time to warn, and act, was arguably a couple years before hand. What were you doing in 2018-2019?23

On p. 26 they write:

I could summon my own superpowers as an econ dork and mid-level celebrity and spread the gospel of “crypto is bullshit.” I could call out the liars and thieves, write it all down, and put it out there for the people to see.

This is incredulous.

Pages ago the authors explained how McKenzie had ignored finance until the fall of 2020 and needed to dust off his economics degree. Was the Netflix version of this book going to show a montage of McKenzie pouring over the works of John Nash or Keynes’ General Theory and writing equations on a chalkboard that quickly turn him into an “econ dork?”

To his credit, McKenzie does look a bit like Russell Crowe, so that scene is a possibility.

More seriously: the fact that the authors literally state spread the gospel of “crypto is bullshit” undermines their credibility. How can you be objective while oozing so much self-righteousness? If you are going to self-deputize, shouldn’t you at least go through the motions of ascertaining the facts-and-circumstances like an actual prosecutor must?

On p. 28 they write:

I tried my best to be civil but firm toward my fellow celebrities, some of whom had made a lot more money and had much bigger bills than I did. I get it: Life’s a hustle. But let’s not be gross about it, or lack any discernment or critical thinking. There’s a bridge too far and crypto is past that.

We have no idea how much money the authors made from the book advance but we already saw McKenzie mention he had FOMO and was looking for work. The solution was that he hustled “crypto is bullshit” to anyone including reporters.

For example, last year in that same interview where he wore the “no-coiner” identity as a badge of honor he says:

Trolls still tell me to “have fun staying poor” and I have yet to react by saying “look at my bank account.” That is juvenile.24 And this is not the only time the authors humblebrag.

Chapter 3: Money Printer Go Brrr

This is could have been an interesting chapter, if the authors had spent time explaining to readers how the market structure of the coin world worked. For instance, they could have explained what pegged stablecoins were.25 Who were the major issuers. What market makers were. How centralized cryptocurrency exchanges typically fold together custody, trade execution, and clearing all in one. Instead, we are introduced to a cast of characters that do not seem fully integral to the story (e.g., they are not insiders).

On p. 31 they write:

For skeptics like Jacob and me, there was one corporation that reigned supreme when it came to our suspicions about the cryptocurrency industry: the “stablecoin” company Tether and its assorted entities such as the exchange Bitfinex.

Before diving into this, one thing that was a slight (grammatical) distraction was “Jacob and me” which is used 3 times altogether in the book, versus “Jacob and I” which is used 24 times. Again, not a big deal, just a little copyediting nitpick.

Anyways, much like “coiners,” the authors never define what “skeptics” are. Are they the same as “critics” – another vacuous word they frequently use? Strangely still, they commandeer a word that has been used to describe an assortment of people the past few years.

For instance, I have also been labeled a “realist,” “critic,” “skeptic,” “nocoiner” — oh and a “gadfly.” Terms I have rejected and the authors should have rejected too. For example, on June 30, 2015, CoinTelegraph described me as:

Source: CoinTelegraph

Several years later The Financial Times labeled me as “realist”:

Zeke Faux did not attempt to co-opt a term, his loss, right?

Sure we have “food critics” and “movie critics” but neither of these practitioners deny the existence – or potential utility – of the thing they are critiquing. Over the past 24 months the terms “critics” and “skeptics” seem to be used as a way to market newsletters, podcasts, and books. For instance, David Gerard and Molly White – people the authors namecheck in the Acknowledgements – have built careers out of the “nocoiner” identity – they are fully invested in it. And it shapes their coverage on this topic.

At a minimum can we all agree that fervently marketing oneself something contrarian sometimes devolves into tribalism?

On p. 31 they write:

Founded in 2014, Tether claims to be the first stablecoin ever created. (A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged to an actual currency such as the US dollar.)

Three issues with this:

(1) The authors really should have used “USDT” to describe the token itself and Tether LTD to refer to the company that issues tether tokens. It gets confusing later on.

(2) In a future edition the authors should add a nuance around what a pegged and non-pegged stabilized coin are. For instance, while centrally issued stablecoins like USDT attempt to maintain a pegged value, others such as Rai drift a bit but are relatively stable (due to a controller system and CDPs). There is a small but growing category of assets that are stabilized relative to some external value, by definition they are not pegged-coins.

(3) Back in 2012-2014 during the heyday of “colored coin” projects, there were some toy experiments that attempted to tokenize (link) USD to a discrete amount of satoshi.26 On Counterparty, there was an actual product – Digital Tangible Gold – that tokenized gold held in custody by Morgan Stanley. For history buffs, Pierre Rochard, one of the maximalists who coined the term “nocoiner,” contacted Morgan Stanley directly who then closed the custody account.

On p. 31 they write:

And if you were making huge gains or moving money between jurisdictions, Tether helped avoid the imposition of regulated banks with their pesky reporting requirements.

As previously mentioned it is unclear if the authors are referring to tether (USDT) or Tether (the company). If it is the latter, according to the company they have implemented some KYC / AML requirements. It would be interesting to know how rigorous those were. Also a future edition could explain the difference between banked and bankless exchanges and how USDT acts as a type of shadow bank for latter as well.

On p. 31 they write:

On October 19, 2021, we published “Untethered” in Slate.

At this point I had already interacted with Silverman via Twitter, sending him mining-related links. They reached out to conduct an interview for the article above, here’s what they penned:

Source: Slate

Those were indeed my words, but it does feel a bit like cherry picking for sensationalism. I pointed this out on Twitter too. I also provided a lot of other color that they did not use. Obviously it is their column but I don’t think it was a fair representation of the totality of my conversation.

On p. 31 they write:

We hadn’t cracked the company’s mysteries, but the piece, which built on past investigations by Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and writers like Cas Piancey, Bennett Tomlin, and Patrick McKenzie, was consistent with our proselytizing mission. We were here to ring alarm bells and make sure the lay public could hear them.

This is a little revisionist history and misses some important people such as J.P. Koning. Since the authors have done such a good job at self-promotion, let me give it a shot.

Back in 2017 I introduced “Bob” to reporters including Bloomberg and later the NYT. Bob later went on to speak with the CFTC (this is not to take credit for what became the CFTC lawsuit).27 The most popular post I wrote that year was Eight Things Cryptocurrency Enthusiasts Probably Won’t Tell You which identifies Bitfinex and Tether as the number one glossed over aspect of the ecosystem.

In December 2017, I was quoted in Bloomberg:

“Is there anything backing this?” said Tim Swanson, who does risk analysis for blockchain and cryptocurrency startups. Swanson, also director of research at Post Oaks Labs, said he fears problems with tether could hobble exchanges that trade it. “If these aren’t backed 1-to-1, then what is the contagion risk if one of these exchanges goes down?”

And I was far from the only person curious about Tether in 2017.

While a future edition does not need to cite me, they should at least expand the list of people who openly discussed the role Tether (USDT) played in the coin world beyond the three they mention above, starting with Koning. For bonafides, the oft-cited Money Flower Diagram from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) specifically mentions Koning’s Fedcoin idea.

On p. 32 they write:

The second red flag for Tether was its size relative to its workforce. Twelve employees (maybe even fewer) are running a business that deals in tens of billions of dollars? Forget the absurdity and ask yourself why. If you were running a legitimate, huge business dealing in big-dollar transactions, wouldn’t you want, and need, more than a dozen people helping you run it?

This would not be a top three red flag for me. The authors are saying: managing that size of money should involve more than a dozen. But does it necessarily? What is the average size of a money manager or hedge fund? According to IBISWorld the average U.S. hedge fund has 10.7 employees.

Ah but Tether LTD is not a hedge fund, or at least should not be, right?

And this is how we arrive at what the top red flag should be and one that Rohan Grey forcefully argues thusly: a case against centrally issued pegged-USD issuers – such as Tether – should be rooted in first principles. Tether LTD intentionally operate as shadow banks and/or a shadow payment provider. Everything else – while perhaps important – is a knock-on of that.

This is why we should put aside conspiracy theories – if Tether LTD owns Evergrande commercial paper – because a first principles analysis would conclude that U.S. regulators should use the tools available to them to bring Tether LTD into compliance irrespective of what Tether LTD has as reserves. If that means Tether LTD is required to form a state or national bank, then that is one (unlikely) outcome.28

However a persistent problem in this book is that the authors spend more time discussing possible hypotheticals rather than what we can easily confirm. The CFTC and NYAG have already provided evidence that backs up the concerns academics such as Rohan Grey previously articulated. Strangely, while the authors namecheck Grey in the Acknowledgements, they do not cite any of his work. A future edition should also include a discussion on shadow banks that explores any similarities between PayPal and Tether LTD.

On p. 34 they write:

They hid that fact from the general public, only to have it revealed with the release of the Paradise Papers, a trove of confidential financial documents that were leaked to journalists in 2017.

It was Nathaniel Popper, then a reporter at The New York Times, who first connected overlapping ownership between Bitfinex and Tether LTD via the Paradise Papers. The reason I highlight this is because Jacob Silverman dunked on Popper on Twitter during the writing of the book. Then later deleted the tweets.29 Despite his stellar reporting on the topic, Popper is notably absent in the book including the reference section.

On p. 36 they write:

To pick one more bizarre factoid from an extensive list, their primary bank mentioned above, Deltec, was headquartered in the Bahamas and run by Jean Chalopin, the guy who co-created the Inspector Gadget cartoon series. If it wasn’t a giant scam, it was at least marvelously entertaining.

In November 2018, I got heckled on stage by a Tether promoter, Josh Olszewicz. Here is part of what he yelled at me from the audience:

Source: Twitter

It wasn’t even the first time I was harassed at a fintech event (John Carvalho stalked me at Consensus 2017).

Putting aside the colorful personalities this space attracts, I still do not understand the Inspector Gadget fascination. 30

On p. 36 they write:

In 2016, Tether was hacked. More than 100,000 Bitcoin (worth $71 million at the time) was stolen, and the company was in desperate straits.

As mentioned at the beginning of this review, this is incorrect. In August 2016, Bitfinex – the cryptocurrency exchange – was hacked and 119,756 bitcoins were stolen.

On p. 36 they cite a paper: Is Bitcoin Really Un-Tethered? by John Griffin and Amin Shams.

But then they wrote something kind of strange in parenthesis:

(Griffin’s blockchain forensics firm has also had contracts with a number of government agencies, indicating that he is advising on crypto investigations.)

Why speculate on what Griffin’s analytics firm may or may not be working on? Surely you could just contact them and ask? It is called Integra FEC.

On p. 36 they write:

Wash trading is the practice of buying and selling an asset back and forth among accounts you control in order to give the appearance of demand for that asset. Crypto is perfectly suited for this sort of manipulation.

To strengthen their argument they could have cited the CFTC settlement with Coinbase before its direct listing two years ago. Its senior engineer, Charlie Lee (who was the creator of Litecoin), was accused of wash trading on the GDAX platform.

On p. 38 they write:

While Tether might have been a last resort for people in need, it carried with it massive costs. Trading in crypto often means incurring heavy fees, and it’s difficult to cash out into real dollars via legal means, pushing people into relationships with unsavory characters who are, at a minimum, not motivated by charity.

How much are those heavy fees?

On p. 38 they write:

In addition, the use of Tether can be seen to further undermine already weak currencies, contributing further to their downfall.

I should be in their small-tent camp, right?

For instance, on November 2, 2018 in an op-ed for FinTech Policy, I labeled Tether (USDT) a systemically important utility for the crypotcurrency world. On March 3, 2021 I gave a presentation to the Fed’s DLT monthly meeting and ended by saying they should look into pegged-coin issuers like Tether LTD.

The authors could improve their arguments by providing specific details because they miss the entire discussion from first principles: centralized pegged-coin issuers acting as shadow banks.

For instance, in their one sentence claim above, how does using Tether (USDT) undermine weak currencies? Which currencies? Is there a nation-state that has adopted USDT? Who knows, the authors do not provide those details.

On p. 38 they write:

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. On the other end of the line was a male voice I only knew as belonging to a pseudonymous Twitter handle calling himself Bitfinex’ed. He had been on the Tether case for years. Bitfinex’ed had long suspected the company was a fraud, and had paid the price for his obsession with harassment, ridicule, and, he claimed, an attempt to buy him off. On crypto Twitter, some hailed him as a conspiratorial crank while many others, including people in the industry and in mainstream media, had learned to trust his tips.

There are a couple of issues with this:

(1) Bitfinex’ed real name has been in the public for a few years, all you have to do is a bit of googling. It is Spencer Macdonald. How did I find this out?31 Back when I wrote long newsletters he was on my private mailing list and sent me the link to a Steemit article of a guy who “doxxed” him because Macdonald had re-used the same catchphrases “Boom. Done.” under an alias Voogru on reddit.

While the Steemit article mentions his name it is not fully accurate either. At the time, some of Tether LTD’s supporters were pretty bananas online (just look at how one heckled me IRL). For instance, Stephen Palley helped provide legal assistance when there were issues with Macdonald’s Twitter account being locked. CoinDesk ran an article about it.

The other area where that Steemit article is incorrect relates to Jeff Bandman and the CFTC. The entire bottom quarter of that post is a guilt-by-association. Maybe Bandman is bff’s with both Palley and Macdonald, maybe they play golf and tennis together each weekend. There was no evidence presented that they are all in cahoots. Either way, ~2.5 years later we learned the results from the CFTCs subpoenas: that at certain periods of time Tether LTD did not have reserves they claimed backing the USDT (among other things) and some of the executives lied both publicly and privately about that.

(2) What tips did the authors assess were right and wrong?

For instance, Macdonald and I made a bet almost two years ago. And I won. But he blocked me months ago and never sent me the scotch. Sad days.

Source: Twitter

Maybe Macdonald and the group of “Tether Truthers” (USDTQ) are correct, maybe Tether LTD still operates as a fraud today.32 If readers are expecting some kind of “smoking gun” from reading this book, they will be disappointed. Bitfinexed – and some others in his circle – act as if they have some kind of secret knowledge.

When you ask them to simply reveal it, they post to more twitter threads.33 When you ask them to file whistleblower forms, they do not.

For comparison, Zeke Faux met with Bitfinex’ed in-person and wrote the following on p. 77:

When I asked for his sources or evidence, Andrew didn’t have anything new to provide. That was where I was supposed to come in.

[Andrew is one of the nom de plume of MacDonald/Bitfinex’ed]

Nothing secret was revealed in this book which is a disappointment. For instance, Bitfinex is an investor in Blockstream and USDT was directly issued onto Liquid (a quasi permissioned chain operated by Blockstream).34 At least two of the executives, Adam Back and Samson Mow, regularly promote and defend both Tether and the current president of El Salvador. Did they really own a Gulfstream IV?35 Nary a mention of Blockstream in the book.

In my view there are two distinct phases of Tether-related criticism with the divergence before and after the settlements with the CFTC and NYAG:

Phase 1 – concluded in early 2021 where the CFTC and NYAG both proved that Tether LTD did not operate in full reserve and some of the executives lied
Phase 2 – 2021 to the present day, post-settlement Tether Truthers claim that Tether LTD still does not operate and back USDT in full (reserve).

I stand by my previous criticism of Tether LTD and Bitfinex from phase 1.

But the onus is on the Tether Truthers to provide evidence that Tether LTD is still operating as a fraud and/or scam. Maybe it is, but what we typically see on Twitter is innuendo. Are both the CFTC and NYAG missing something? I posted this question on Twitter the other day and was called low IQ. Great feedback, I’ve been called much worse!36

On p. 38 the authors write:

Bitfinex’ed, whose real identity remained a mystery to us

The first search result for googling “Bitfinexed identity” is to a five year old article that links to the Steemit article.

On p. 38 they write:

Despite attempts to dox him—and a temporary Twitter suspension—Bitfinex’ed managed to maintain his anonymity, while developing a growing audience online. His fixation on Tether has bordered on obsession.

Again, the first search result for googling “Bitfinexed identity” is to a five year old article that links to the Steemit article.

On p. 38 they write:

Crypto partisans dismissed him as being salty because he hadn’t gotten in early enough on Bitcoin. But more sober observers pointed out the fact that Bitfinex’ed had been right about many of his claims. Some just took longer to prove.

That could be true, but which specific claims was he right about? Off the top of my head, based on direct communications with him I believe he had two correct predictions:

(1) That USDT was at times not fully backed

(2) That Tether LTD and Bitfinex shared common ownership

And while not a prediction per se, at the time he also transcribed ad hoc interviews that executives, such as Phil Potter, publicly gave on issues surrounding banking access. Speaking of which, did the authors try to reach out to Potter? Because Faux gets a direct quote from Potter regarding the origins of Tether.37

On p. 38 they write:

And few people had done more to educate journalists, critics, and the larger public about the perfidy lurking underneath crypto’s wildly anarchic market activity.

How do McKenzie and Silverman know this? They did not start covering this space until just under two years ago. Did they sit down and tabulate who educated who?

On p. 38 they write:

Bitfinex’ed was the angry, roiling conscience of crypto Twitter, always ready to swoop into a conversation and expose the dark underbelly of the latest industry spin. To some that made him a threat.

Macdonald did not and does not have a monopoly on “exposing the dark underbelly.” For example, did the authors contact ZachXBT?


On p. 42 they write:

SPACs, or Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, were often nothing more than blank checks issued to aggressively self-promoting “investment gurus” who would pocket a huge fee in exchange for gambling with their investors’ money.

This is a good point.38

On p. 43 they write:

My portfolio of short bets was, to put it generously, in shambles. I started with $250,000 that summer, by November it was down to $38,931. While I had bet on other frauds, the main culprit was simple: I had wagered too much on crypto’s collapse too soon, and blinded by my certainty, I nearly lost it all. By the time I got out of my initial crypto positions, they were almost worthless. What had been a lot of money was now very little. To be blunt, it was an unmitigated disaster—the kind of thing that provokes an uncomfortable conversation with your spouse.

We learn a few more details scattered around the book. As mentioned earlier, he began this bet with a friend “Dave” but we are never told its composition. Did McKenzie attempt to short some futures contracts on CME? Also, at least he is honest about his “blinded by my certainty” — something that other book authors on this topic failed to reflect on (such as Michael Casey’s dubiously title: “The Age of Cryptocurrency” reviewed 7 years ago).

On p. 43 they write:

The financial press was practically in lockstep about the inevitable crypto-fied future of money. Politicians, their pockets brimming with donations from industry moguls like Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX, were preaching the Bitcoin gospel. They were also openly contemplating passing industry-written legislation to further legalize these rigged casinos.

This is another decent point. But later in the book, we are only provided a cursory set of examples which we will discuss later. Also, the main quibble readers should have with the 2nd sentence is that the authors conflate “Bitcoin” with “crypto” as a whole. SBF may have been many things, but he did not frequently give off maximalist vibes.

On p. 44 they write:

Since in my analysis crypto was only speculation, it would fall like a rock once the Fed raised rates. Unfortunately for me, I had been just a bit early in making that call.

As my friend Colin Platt – the richest person in the world – is wont to point out: being early is effectively the same thing as being wrong. He says this from experience (with DPactum)!

On p. 45 they write:

In the interests of objectivity—and not wishing to be a participant in the kind of market manipulation I’ve denounced—I’ve never written about the companies I’ve shorted. You don’t have to trust me on this; you can look at my work. I’ve never written about publicly traded companies, only privately held ones. I’ve never traded or owned any cryptocurrency. My bet on crypto was simpler, and bigger than any one company: I thought the whole thing—all $3 trillion of it—was a speculative bubble. That part was obvious to me. The thing I couldn’t prove yet was that it was a bubble predicated on fraud. Hence, my journey with Jacob.

As mentioned above on p. 21, another book reviewer labeled McKenzie a liar and a hypocrite for failing to disclose this bet. The disclaimer above doesn’t really absolve the lack of disclosure: he has a vested interest in seeing the coin world go kaput.

I empathize with McKenzie.

For example, during the rapid rise in coin prices in December 2017, I was quoted as a “skeptic” in The Wall Street Journal:

That was published just days before the Bitcoin price peaked. Yet as certain as I was, I still did not short the market primarily because of counterparty risk and timing. Do I get book deal with Abrams now?

One last comparison, in Number Go Up, Zeke Faux describes a multi-million dollar offer he received to provide some purported Tether-related documents to a short seller. He turned it down, reasoning:

“This book is going to be called Jay Is Wrong and Zeke Is Right: The Cryptocurrency Story,” I said. “As a writer, you don’t want to be compromising in any way, you know? You don’t want to have ulterior motives.”

Unlike Faux it’s pretty clear from the book – and tweets – that at least one author has an ulterior motive: McKenzie discusses his short selling bet a number of times.

Overall this chapter made several interesting observations (such as the abuse around SPACs) but it seems like portions of the chapter could have been removed (e.g., most of the commentary around Bitfinex’ed) and instead re-used to discuss more of the celebrities like Matt Damon who acted as a public spokesperson for crypto-related companies.

Chapter 4: Community

A portion of this chapter hones in on McKenzie’s desire to have an entourage, a crew. It comes across as sappy and cringey and not something a made-it actor or journalist would strive for.39 As mentioned at the top, in no other book on this topic (that I have reviewed) have the writers explicitly stated as much because it should not be necessary.

In fact, because of the never ending drama-per-second the coin world generates, copy-paste Twitter accounts like Web3isGoingGreat, are able to rely on continuous streams of mainstream reportage on this topic to copy-paste from. McKenzie and Silverman did not need a crew of podcasters, and the next edition of the book probably should reclaim these pages to discuss what is going on in say, El Salvador, which was interesting and novel.

On p. 49 they write:

Bitcoin maximalists proudly boast that “Bitcoin has no marketing department,” which is technically true, but in practice dead wrong. Multibillion-dollar corporations—at least on paper—spent real dough to convince people to buy crypto. Sometimes the appeals were explicitly about Bitcoin, leveraging the brand awareness of the best-known cryptocurrency.

While we are never provided a full definition of what “Bitcoin maximalism” or who specifically makes that claim, I have heard this claim before from Andreas Antonopolous during his halcyon days. And while the authors do list off a series of A-list celebrities and entertainers who shilled something coin-related, it would be great to see specific tweets of endorsements in a second edition.

On p. 50 they write:

It also felt appropriate that I found myself on the opposite side of the proverbial line of scrimmage from the Hollywood consensus, but seemingly without a squad of my own. To counter the feelings of isolation and depression in my quest for truth in crypto, I needed to finally meet some fellow skeptics in the flesh. I needed a team of my own. Crypto-skeptic nerds assemble!

You do not need a squad to be a (investigative) reporter in this space.

Sure, building up a reliable rolodex of contacts is part-and-parcel to what reporters covering a beat will accrue over time, but journalists are encouraged not to get too close to sources otherwise you compromise your objectivity.

For instance:

Source: Twitter

I have not had a chance to read Michael Lewis’s new book, but according to his 60 Minutes interview, Lewis still has some affinity for SBF.

Source: Twitter

On p. 51 they write:

HODL is hold on for dear life, meaning that you should cling to your crypto no matter the price.

I have pointed this out in several other book reviews but the etymology, the genesis of “hodl” did not originate as an acronym or portmanteau. It came from a drunk poster on the BitcoinTalk forum, there are many articles discussing this. However, what the authors describe “hodl” to mean is correct.

On p. 53 they write:

Surveying the landscape in 2022, it was hard not to notice the myriad similarities between crypto and pyramid schemes. Both depended on recruiting new believers rather than buying anything with an actual use case.

This is an adequate comparison (for many cryptocurrencies).

I currently think a decent description of Bitcoin itself is how J.P. Koning categorizes it as a game akin to a decentralized chain letter:

Source: J.P. Koning

On p. 54 they write:

Bitcoin ownership is highly concentrated in an extremely small number of whales who wield enormous power in the highly illiquid market. According to an October 2021 study conducted by finance professors Antoinette Schoar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Igor Makarov at the London School of Economics, .01 percent of Bitcoin holders control 27 percent of all the coins in circulation. Some community.

Anecdotally this is probably true, for Bitcoin at least. Is it the case that every cryptocurrency / asset is the same way?

On p. 54 they write:

The eccentric community of crypto skeptics also fits in that category, and I was proud to call myself a member.

We are over 50 pages into the book and the authors still have not provided a succinct definition of what a “Coiner” or Skeptic” or “Maximalist” or “Critic” are. What are these tribes? What are their etymology?

On p. 56 they write:

many coiners really do feel that they are part of a like-minded community

What are coiners?

On p. 56 they write:

Practically everyone I spoke to at crypto conferences and other public events both admitted to being scammed and accepted it as if it was almost obligatory, a character-building exercise and bonding agent. Few spoke about stopping scammers in general.

This is a really good point, and I completely agree with the authors.

McKenzie’s experience reminded me of the meme from The Ballad of Buster Scruggs:

It is still unclear why this rugging behavior is perceived as a rite of passage and normalized.

On p. 57 they write:

In the case of the 20,000 cryptos other than Bitcoin, it should be simple to categorize them under the law. Most were securities made by real companies with real employees.

Maybe that is true, did the authors cite a securities lawyer? Did they quote a U.S. judge?

This is the same problem that occurred in Diehl et al., book: lots of opinions but few references. I am a certain there are U.S.-trained lawyers who share the same views as the authors, why not quote them here? For instance, later in the book they chat with John Reed Stark; this would have been a good spot to introduce him.

On p. 57 they write in parenthesis:

Ethereum also used proof of work to mine its cryptocurrency, until turning to proof of stake in September 2022. In proof of stake, owners of the crypto validate the blocks, making the system far less energy intensive, but incentivizing even more centralized ownership.

Two issues with this:

(1) As mentioned earlier, while there is some discussion of proof-of-work-based mining (the authors visit a hashing farm in Texas), the conversation or discussion around alternatives — such as proof-of-stake — are few and far between.

(2) Did the authors provide evidence that proof-of-stake systems are even more centralized? Maybe they are, but no references were provided. What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.

This also reminds me of Matthew Green’s evergreen tweet:

Source: Twitter

On p. 57 they write:

What started as simple speculation and peer-to-peer exchange became a web of derivatives markets, DeFi protocols (a set of rules governing a particular asset, often using so-called smart contracts, run on blockchains), lending pools, and other newfangled features of digital finance.

What are derivatives markets? What are DeFi protocols? What are lending pools?

On p. 58 they write:

Under this arrangement, buying Dogecoin on a crypto exchange like Binance was indeed an act of trustlessness, but only in the sense that it was hard to trust any offshore crypto entity.

This is a strawman. Why? Because Binance is a centralized exchange, it is a trusted-third party. No one is arguing that Binance or other centralized exchanges are… decentralized.

On p. 58 they write:

“Not your keys, not your coins,” was the mantra thrown around by die-hard crypto fanatics, meaning you should keep your crypto in a “cold wallet” that didn’t touch an exchange—or even the internet. But that kind of advice did not reflect the reality of the markets. It defeated the primary purpose of money, which is to make buying and selling stuff convenient and fluid.

I mostly agree with their observation and have written about all of the “friction” that coin-related intermediaries often add. But there does need to be a nuance with private keys because various controllers in traditional finance also have key (recovery) management involving hardware wallets, cold wallets, an so forth. Traditional finance has incorporated the modern iteration; see Thales on slide 9.

On p. 58 they write:

Unfortunately, creating money that’s trustless is impossible in practice, for it goes against the very nature of money itself. Adopting it as a mission can only lead to disappointment.

There are a couple issues with this:

(1) This seems to be an a priori argument. By definition, a priori arguments are the opposite of empirical arguments. So no matter what evidence someone could provide, it seems like the authors have made up their mind.

(2) Not every cryptocurrency or cryptoasset project is attempting to reinvent money.

On p. 59 they write:

In the United States, the nation with the largest economy in the world—as well as the issuer of the world’s reserve currency since 1944, the US dollar—we often take this consensus for granted. Everyone wants dollars, especially in times of crisis.

What is a reserve currency?

There are several reasons why the U.S. is the issuer of the world’s reserve currency. While the authors do mention a couple of authors, experts such as professor Michael Pettis and Brad Setser, attribute the U.S. dollars current reserve status due largely to the (im)balance of trade. The U.S. runs large trade deficits. And mercantilist economies such as China are either unwilling or unable to shift to running large trade deficits. Until something dramatically changes, the U.S. dollar will continue to remain the key reserve currency.

On p. 59 they write:

In that sense, the stated goal of cryptocurrency—to create a trustless form of money—is literal nonsense. You cannot create a trustless form of money because money is trust, forged through social consensus. As Jacob Goldstein writes in Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing, “The thing that makes money money is trust.” Saying you want to create trustless money is like saying you want to create a governmentless government or a religionless religion. I think the words you are searching for are anarchy and cult. The bartender should cut you off and make sure you get a ride home.

This is a strawman. Not every cryptocurrency or cryptoasset project is attempting to become “money.”

There are a number of coin promoters who regularly echo comments similar to Zero Hedge, that the U.S. dollar is doomed. Maybe it is, and maybe that is who the authors are thinking about, but we are not provided specific names of people who make the argument that a specific cryptocurrency is going to become a “reserve currency” let alone “money.”

On p. 60 they write:

The failures of our current system to do so have no doubt lent the story of cryptocurrency much of its power. A severe, and very understandable, lack of trust in the financial system reflects a wider loss of faith in democratic governance. Wealth inequality is at near record highs and many working people feel that the economy is rigged against them. But that doesn’t mean the story of cryptocurrency is true, or offers a better alternative to the present situation. You cannot replace people and flawed institutions with magical bits of computer code.

There are a couple of issues with this:

(1) What are some of the failures of the current system? Are the authors referring to too big to fail banks? Systemically important financial institutions?
(2) What is the story of cryptocurrency? Which one? This is a problem with generalizing without looking at the facts-and-circumstances of each.

On p. 60 they write:

That code was written by human beings who themselves are far from perfect.

This seems like an inconsistent argument. Is the claim that “smart contracts” and/or “blockchain” projects are inherently prone to error because humans wrote the code? If so, shouldn’t we be equally concerned about all digital, automated financial infrastructure created by humans? Why single out cryptocurrency?

On p. 61 they write:

A decentralized financial system seemed less like an inherently noble pursuit than an alternative structure that, just like TradFi, further enriched those at the top.

What is TradFi? They tell us later but should have mentioned it here.

On p. 61 they write:

I will inevitably be attacked by crypto promoters as advocating for nation-state supremacy or excusing the myriad failings of this or that government, but that is missing the point entirely.

In the past I have jokingly referred to myself as a statist shill. Looks like we all could have been fellow travelers at some point!

On p. 61 they write:

Consider a familiar example: our banking system. Why do you trust that the money you put in a licensed US bank is going to be there when you want to use it? Because the federal government guarantees it in the form of the FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation).

While true this seems a bit of cherry-picking because we also have too big to fail banks that are regularly penalized for screwing their customers. I think there are better arguments to describe the utility of trust that has been created by public institutions like the U.S. Mint or the Federal Reserve without having to describe prudential regulators such as the FDIC.

For instance, earlier this year Bank of America agreed to pay $250 million in fines and compensation to cover “junk fees” it had levied on customers. Last December, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) fined WellsFargo $3.7 billion for rampant mismanagement and abuse of customer accounts.

On p. 61 they write:

Is our financial system perfect? Of course not! In fact, it is deeply, deeply flawed. It cries out for more reform and democratic accountability. But it at least includes guardrails that protect consumers and a legal framework that acknowledges the role of trust in binding people together, whether in social life or commerce.

There has got to be a better way of defending “trust” and “consumer protections” than defending private incumbents.

That passage also sounds strikingly similar to what Diehl et al., wrote in their own book:

While our existing financial system is undeniably profoundly flawed, not optimally inclusive, and sometimes highly rigged in favor of the already wealthy; crypto offers no solution to its problems other than to create an even worse system subject to unquantifiable software risk, profound conflicts of interest, and an incentives structure that would exasperate wealthy inequality to levels not seen since the Dark Ages. Put simply, Wall Street is bad, but crypto is far worse.

When I tried to explain to friends that this book unnecessarily carries water for incumbents, this is the reoccurring meme that came to mind.

There is no reason the authors have to defend incumbents or the a cartel that regularly is fined for the very activities that the authors abhor. Guess who invented all of these criminogenic concepts in the first place?

Rather, it is possible to critique both the coin world and the traditional financial world. You do not have to join one camp or the other.

On p. 62 they write:

But nonetheless, the private banking era was not a success, and eventually central banks were created to better manage the franchisee banks and ensure the safety of customer deposits.

Agreed, and there is a long line of commentators, researchers, and academics who favor policies allowing retail to directly gain access to central bank money (bypassing commercial banks). 40 There is no technical reason, in 2023, for retail to be intermediated from central bank money. If this comes in the form of a central bank digital account and/or digital currency is a separate discussion and one worth having.41

On p. 62 they write:

Among the many butcherings of language in cryptocurrency, historians may find this the cruelest cut of all. The purported “future of money” is in fact the past of money, a failed experiment and one we revisit at our collective peril.

At least two problems with this:

(1) It generalizes all cryptocurrencies as attempting to build a “future of money” when this is not the case.
(2) It is an a priori based argument so by definition it is not evidence-based.

On p. 62 they write:

I have to address one last false story that Bitcoin maxis—the people with the laser eyes who aren’t Tom Brady—have been spreading.

That is a shallow explanation of a Bitcoin maximalist. While some prominent maximalists may have added laser eyes to their profile pictures, that’s more of a degen meme than anything else. Many of the original Bitcoin maximalists – the guys and gals who coined the term – hate me and made it abundantly clear on Twitter each quarter from mid-2014 until the present day. They did not have laser eyes until the past couple of years.

On p. 63 they write:

In economics, supply does not determine scarcity. Supply is simply the amount of something available to be bought or sold. Scarcity occurs only when the demand for that thing exceeds the supply at the price of zero.

I whole heartily agree! This is a good point.

On p. 63 they write:

Imagine I own the rights to all the dogshit in Brooklyn. I have approached each and every dog owner in the fair borough, and they have agreed to sell me their dog’s poop. I do not own the dogs, mind you, merely the rights to their fecal matter. Now, there are only so many dogs in Brooklyn, and there is only so much they can defecate. The supply fluctuates by the number of dogs—despite how it may appear, there is an upper limit here on the number of dogs, certainly lower than twenty-one million—and the amount of times they poo. But is dogshit scarce? Are people clamoring for it because it is prized and useful? Will my cornering the market make me a rich man? Unfortunately for my empire of shit, the answer to all those questions is no.

Much like smoking pot and consuming edibles earlier in the book, is it really classy to use this specific example? Surely there are less crude ways of explaining supply and demand?

On p. 64 they write:

By now, more than 90 percent of the Bitcoins that can ever exist have already been mined. That makes Bitcoin’s supply almost perfectly inelastic, a fancy word meaning it can’t grow or shrink in response to changes in price.

The fact that over 90% of bitcoins total supply has been mined is not why bitcoin is perfectly inelastic. What makes it perfectly inelastic – a topic I have written on a few times before – is that fact that irrespective of the labor force applied, no extra units of bitcoins can be extracted. With proof-of-work networks like Bitcoin, the marginal productivity of labor is zero. It does not matter how many more units of labor are added to the income generation (mining) process as the network will always produce the same amount of economic output. In contrast with traditional commodity extraction, deploying more equipment or a larger labor force, could result in large production of say, a precious metal.

There is one caveat: Bitcoin mining may be considered perfectly inelastic due to the code that prevents extra units from being extracted, but the way block propagation works in practice, block makers (mining pools) have accelerated halvenings.42 That is to say, when Bitcoin was first released, the halvenings were expected to coincide roughly every four years. However because of how mining works in practice, the next halvening is expected April 2024, about 8 months ahead of schedule.

On p. 64 they write:

It’s basically fixed. This makes the price of Bitcoin even more susceptible to changes in demand.

Agreed! I – and several others – have written about this before.

On p. 65 they write:

The problem with the Bitcoin-as-digital-gold argument runs even deeper when we examine economic history. Bitcoin maxis are often “gold bugs,” meaning they want us to return to the gold standard, when you could exchange paper money for a certain amount of gold.

Anecdotally this seems to be true, many maximalists I have met and/or interacted with often are some form of goldbug.

On p. 65 they write:

But elasticity is crucially important in times of crisis.

Agreed!

On p. 66 they write:

But that does not mean returning to the gold standard would be any better.

Agreed!

On p. 66 they write:

The day after the Super Bowl, I finally met in the flesh my first fellow crypto skeptic not named Jacob Silverman. Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin host a podcast called Crypto Critics’ Corner that proved a lifeline when I first stumbled into the seemingly lonely world of crypto skepticism in the spring of 2021. Sensing something was off about the industry but hoping to educate myself, I searched for decent podcasts on the subject.

(1) I am not going to say do not listen to their podcast, but McKenzie is correct: it was (is!) hard to find a good podcast that isn’t 100% shilling the listener something. Can recommend Epicenter which regularly hosts technical-focused guests. And despite my disagreements with her in the past, I think Laura Shin’s Unchained is often quite good too. For instance, here is her recent interview with Zeke Faux.

(2) How did McKenzie conduct a “literature review” or due diligence during 2021? Although tough to navigate, there were plenty of active “skeptics” or “critics” that the authors never even mention, such as Mark Williams, Yakov Kofner, Angela Walch, and J.P. Koning.43 We will discuss this again later.

On p. 68 they write:

Appearing on Crypto Critics’ Corner alongside Jacob, who joined remotely from Brooklyn, would mark my first long-form interview in my bizarre career pivot. Cas, a sideways-baseball-cap-wearing SoCal native, welcomed me generously, showing me around the studio owned by an artist friend whose elaborate wood carvings decorated the walls.

It is unclear why the authors are using this nom de plume when Cas Piancey revealed his identity last year. His real name is Orson Krupnick Newstat.44

On p. 69 they write:

Leaving Cas’s studio, I realized I had found my community. It had nothing to do with a coin we were pumping, a company we believed in, or some utopian technological vision that, in practice, came with a heavy side of dystopia. We wanted to understand this crazy new financial system, especially its dark side. And it helped that we liked each other.

This book seems like it is veering into auto-biography territory, was that the intent?45

On p. 69 they write:

The crypto skeptic community that Bitfinex’ed, Cas, Bennett, Jacob, and others brought me into became my team, friends, and trusted colleagues. A few of them I regarded as heroes—or at least the closest thing to it in an industry in which it seemed most people would sell a Ponzi scheme to their mother if it would help pump their bags. Bitfinex’ed—whoever he was!—was our initial ambassador to this new community, but he was soon joined by other pseudonymous online sleuths, as well as economists, computer scientists, indie journalists, cynical former bankers, straight-laced former regulators, stoner podcasters, Scandinavian businessmen, and a few untrustworthy cranks.

Maybe this is one “crypto skeptic community” but certainly not the only one. Also, for years I have been referred to as a “crypto skeptic” — a title I thought was shallow and one I never adopted. Does this make me a crypto skeptic, skeptic? Crypto skeptic skeptics, assemble!

On pgs. 69-70 they write:

To say I learned a lot from them would be a vast understatement, and it quickly became apparent to me why a community like this was valuable. The world didn’t need just one crypto critic, it needed a thousand of them, of diverse backgrounds, interests, and motivations, spelunking through the industry’s darker corners and sharing what they found. When everyone was selling something, we needed a few people to say, “I’m not buying, but I’m curious how you do it.”

Apart from the fact that the authors still do not define what a “critic” is or is not, I agree with nearly everything in this statement. With one major caveat: let’s try to forego purity tests, especially if you just became interested in this space. See for instance, this clique of “no-coiners” acting as if there wasn’t a wider universe of coin “skepticism” or “criticism.” Let’s be Big Tent and include actual technical experts, not just people we may agree with.

On p. 70 they write:

At least now, with Cas, Bennett, and a delightful crew of eccentrics behind me, I had a corner of my own to retreat to in between rounds. Admittedly, it was a David and Goliath battle—a random group of skeptics up against a multi-trillion-dollar industry. But I came back from Los Angeles with more pep in my step. Maybe it was just the gambler in me, but I liked my chances.

Repeating it over and over does not make it sound more objective. Readers might ask: are you moonlighting as a reporter or as a social club manager? Can’t be both. Plus, there are a number of investigative reporters operating at this point, did you reach out to any of them for potential collaboration?

Chapter 5: SXSW, the CIA, and the $1.5 trillion that wasn’t there

This chapter should have been split into two, with the visit to the Bitcoin mining facility pulled out. Also, because of the uneven tone of the book up until this point, it wasn’t clear who the authors felt would narrate this in the movie adaptation. You might think think this is facetious but the entire conversation with the alleged CIA agents does not give a reader any sense of conclusion, there is no bowtie on it. What purpose do the agents fill besides page filler?

But let’s start with one of the two events they attended.

On p. 71 they write:

In early 2022, South by Southwest (SXSW), a big tech and music conference in my hometown of Austin, Texas, invited me to organize a panel of crypto skeptics. I was pretty fired up. SXSW would mark our first venture into the real world; everything Jacob and I had done thus far was online or remote. We recruited Edward Ongweso Jr., a razor-sharp journalist for Motherboard, Vice’s technology site, to join us on stage. I decided to record the whole thing, hiring a local director of photography, Ryan Youngblood, to film whatever hijinks might transpire.

What are crypto skeptics? Are they the same thing as critics or realists? Why did they choose Ongweso?

On p. 72 they write:

“Well, there’s another DAO that helps with that,” he said. His dream was to move to Portugal, a burgeoning crypto tax haven.

That was probably true while the book was being written, however in October 2022, the Portuguese government said it will start taxing short term gains on digital assets. It is unclear if this has reduced the desirability or appeal for crypto-related projects from domiciling.

On p. 73 they write:

Bad actors are everywhere—certainly in so-called TradFi, or traditional finance—so why should crypto be different?

Ah, gotta love the “so-called” modifier. While the authors do interview a number of coin promoters and coin “skeptics” they don’t make much room for anyone who works in traditional finance. Strange because there are credible people within the world of “tradfi” that probably agree with their views. A second edition should interview experts at the DTCC (the largest CSD in the world) or say, Tony McLaughlin from Citi, he’s no coin shill.4647

On p. 75 they write:

The guy who had approached us, whom I will call Charles, led us over to a group of six people with SXSW name tags that read USG in the spot reserved for their employer. Most of them were unassuming: close-cropped hair, dress shirts, fleece vests—the typical uniform of law enforcement people playing at casual dress.

For approximately four pages the authors describe a strange interaction they have with a couple of alleged spooks.

For example they write on p. 76:

Charles was a couple years from early retirement. “I can’t wait to smoke weed!” he said. “It’s great,” we assured him.

Yet more weed smoking by the authors. Why is this in the book?

On p. 78 they write:

“You need to be a borderline sociopath to do this work,” Charles said. “Ryan is probably too normal,” he added, referring to our local cameraman, who said he had been rejected years earlier from the CIA. Ryan smiled uncomfortably.

It was never fully clear why the authors hired a cameraman for many of their interviews. Are they planning on releasing a video as well? For instance, last year Alex Gladstein asked the authors to release the video interview of SBF, which they declined.48

On p. 78 they write:

It went like this all night, Jacob and I exchanging occasional looks that indicated our mutual disbelief. At one point, Jacob gawked as Charles explained that the NSA had found “a small bug” in Signal—the encrypted messaging app used by journalists, activists, and millions of other people, including the spies at our dinner table—but if you restart your phone once a week or so, it wasn’t a problem. It was hardly a sophisticated technical explanation, and maybe it was all bullshit braggadocio, but a Signal exploit would be incredibly valuable—easily seven figures on the open market—and a closely held secret by any intelligence agency.

In my typed notes on Kindle I wrote “Isn’t this burying the lede?” Surely a big story here is that a U.S. intelligence agency used an exploit in Signal?

The only reason I can think of not to include this earlier is because we never learn if these two people – Charles and Paul – actually were spooks. I’ve met people at conferences who claimed to work for a branch of the government and I would google them afterwards and often it was true. What did the authors find out about these two?

On p. 82 they write:

There are more than 20,000 cryptocurrencies out there, sophisticated exchanges, decentralized finance protocols that allow billions of dollars of crypto to change hands without human intermediaries, and financial products that resemble less regulated, riskier versions of their Wall Street equivalents.

What are sophisticated exchanges? What type of decentralized finance protocols? What are human intermediaries? Which financial products resemble less regulated, riskier version of their Wall Street equivalents? It is unclear.

On p. 82 they write:

At least in the gambling-like realm of financial speculation, there’s a lot you can do with crypto. With few guardrails in place, it’s easy to borrow money and add leverage in order to increase one’s odds of winning big or losing everything. Many of these financial products and transactions are extremely complicated, and difficult for the average investor to navigate. Nearly all of them are extraordinarily risky.

I agree with the majority of these comments apart from the leverage element. At the time it was written leverage in the coin world was primarily procured by going through a centralized intermediary like an exchange (Binance) or lender (Celsius).49

On p. 82 they write:

By some measures, Celsius was a successful going concern, but with investment backing from Tether (they loaned Celsius over $1 billion), strange lending activities, sky-high interest rates on offer, and some murky movement of its tokens, it was an object of extreme speculation and rumor within the crypto-skeptic world.

If there is a second edition the authors must cite Maya Zehavi for being the first “Celsius skeptic.” Among other firsts, she was the first person to publicly put a magnifying glass on Hogeg before and after he was removed as CFO. Is she a “skeptic”? She was often labeled as one before the term was co-opted.

On p. 83 they wrote:

I took a breath, told myself that I wasn’t hungover from a night of drinking with CIA operatives, and, trailed by my cameraman, did my most confident walk over to Mashinsky and his confederates.

But were they actual spooks? Is the reason Charles and Paul were in this book just so the authors could say they drank with some alleged spooks?50

On p. 84 they wrote:

We got it on camera. There were moments that astonished me. Talking about scams, he took the usual tack and said people needed to educate themselves.

So are you going to release the video too? Seems spicy no?

On p. 84 they wrote:

Toward the end of our conversation, when the video was off but with audio still rolling, Mashinsky told me something that made my blood run cold. I asked him how much “real money” he thought was in the crypto system. I didn’t think he would actually answer the question, but he did.

Is that common? To turn off the video but keep the audio rolling? I have no affinity for Mashinsky but was that an accident?

On p. 84 they wrote:

“Ten to fifteen percent,” Mashinsky said. That’s real money—genuine government-backed currency—that’s entered the system. “Everything else is just bubble.” The number seemed straightforward and eminently believable. But it was still shocking to hear it from a high-level crypto executive, who seemed totally unconcerned about it all. Mashinsky acknowledged that a huge speculative bubble had formed. If the overall crypto market cap was about $1.8 trillion at the time we spoke, that meant that one and a half trillion or more of that supposed value didn’t exist.

Everyone new to this space is entitled to be shocked, that the “market cap” is probably not an actual “market cap.”

For instance, five years ago, I cited an estimate from Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou at JP Morgan entitled “Flows & Liquidity: The emergence of cryptocurrencies.”  According to his analysis:

The net flow into cryptocurrencies is very much a function of coin creation which is controlled by computer algorithms and in the case of bitcoin is diminishing over time. Figure 6 shows the net amount of money invested every year since 2009. The cumulative amount has totaled around $6bn since 2009, well below the current market cap of $300bn.

Panigirtzoglou illustrates this over time with the bar chart below:

Around the same time Citi published a note with similar estimates:

In 2017, cryptocurrencies grew from a market cap of less than $20bn to around $500bn. We estimate this surge was driven by net inflows of less than $10bn.

What was the estimate five years later?

That’s a good question and something the authors do not readily provide an answer for apart from citing Mashinsky and later SBF. Maybe the two operators are/were correct but definitely a missed opportunity and one that should be included in another edition.

Graph 1 (above) comes from Project Atlas, a new initiative coordinated by the BIS in partnership with several other central banks. Figure C is likely something the authors would find of interest.

On p. 84 they write:

And given the general lack of liquidity in crypto markets—that a billion dollars’ worth of Ethereum isn’t redeemable for a billion dollars of cash without tanking the market—that meant that the crypto economy was dancing on a knife’s edge. One bad move by a major player might tip the industry into freefall. An illiquid market based on irrational speculation, it was all essentially vapor.

Well that could be true, what references did they cite? Nothing in the works cited at the end. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

On p. 85 they write:

Crypto critics call it “hopium,” and it’s a powerful drug.

What is a crypto critic? Who was the first crypto critic to call it hopium? It might actually be difficult to identify because there is a French automobile brand called “Hopium” founded in 2019. I believe the first time I heard the term “hopium” as it related to coins – was after the 2017 bubble imploded. People were making memes of “copium” and “hopium” but perhaps I am misremembering and it was more recent.

On p. 85 they write:

As OG crypto critic David Gerard would say, “You lost your money when you bought the tokens.”

Gerard may have said that and he might be right but let’s not hand over trophies to people who market themselves as “crypto critics” or call someone an “OG” when they are not.51

Whose shoulders did Gerard and others stand on? In addition to J.P. Koning and Angela Walch (mentioned before) there was Ray Dillinger. If we were to make a chronological argument, then a “godfather” of ‘crypto critics’ (in the English-speaking world) is professor Mark Williams. Who is Williams?

Williams’ op-ed appeared about 6 days after the price of bitcoin peaked. Despite arcuately describing its volatility, some Bitcoin promoters labeled him “Professor Bitcorn.” Why wasn’t he mentioned in this book?

In April 2014 Williams even provided public testimony at a U.S. House committee. Definitely worth referencing in the next edition.

And since we are being very specific, if the authors really wanted to label something “OG” then we might want to hand a trophy over to the annual Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference whose attendees include a crossover from the cryptocurrency and blockchain world (remember, “crypto” used to mean “cryptography.”) What kind of crossover? Just look at the 2023 program.

Inexplicably the authors continue this chapter and include an unrelated topic: a visit to a Bitcoin mining facility.

You know what is a tad weird? The authors are about to visit the largest U.S. based Bitcoin mining facility – operated by Riot Blockchain – and they miss the opportunity to speak with Pierre Rochard. Yes, that Rochard – the co-creator (popularizer?) of the “no-coiner” pejorative works for Riot. In fact, Rochard hasn’t missed a beat, pushing out nonsense that is indistinguishable from satire (he’s the one walking in a field with a hard hat).

On p. 85 they write:

If you drive for about an hour northeast from Austin, past the scrub brush and the quota-driven traffic cops, you reach a former Alcoa aluminum smelting plant on the outskirts of the tiny town of Rockdale (pop 5,323). It was the kind of old-school corporate holding that’s so big they built a lake to service it (Alcoa Lake). The facility, sold in 2021 for $240 million to an obscure real estate firm, had mostly gone fallow. But its mere existence—the mothballed warehouses, silent smokestacks, miles of fencing, the power substation on site—was a reminder of a not-so-bygone era when large industries operated in the United States and factories, perhaps even staffed by decently compensated union workers, actually made stuff.

This is good prose, this part of the chapter is pretty good. Readers deserve an entire chapter – heck, a whole book – discussing the zaniness of the mining world. For instance, Riot earned $31 million in energy credits from ERCOT (the energy regulator in Texas) in the month of August. That is right, a Bitcoin mining company got paid not to mine. This isn’t a brand new subsidy either and it deserves (ridicule!) mention in the next edition.52

Continuing on p. 86 they write:

Money was coming in, ambitious building projects were planned, people were getting steady construction work—all the supposed hallmarks of basic economic progress. But to what end and at what cost? I had come to Whinstone to find out, accompanied by Jacob and David Yaffe-Bellany, a reporter from the New York Times who wanted to write a piece on me.

We never did find out to “what end” or “what cost” — we are left wondering. We have seen a widely circulated video inside one of the Riot’s facilities so that gives us some idea of how large, but the authors should have provided an answer to these. Also, was that a humblebrag?

On p. 87 they wrote:

We wanted to hear their pitch: how Bitcoin mining brought jobs, stimulated development, and would be an asset for the whole community. To hear that pitch, they asked us to sign what amounted to nondisclosure agreements. David, the Times reporter, assured us that he couldn’t, his job wouldn’t allow it. None of us felt comfortable. What was the point of signing something that might limit our ability to write and report on what we might see? It made no sense to do so when we were going in with cameras—if they were going to let us in with cameras.

Oddly enough, we as readers, never did get to hear that pitch described in words even after the authors did not sign the NDAs. What are the jobs numbers?

On p. 87 they wrote:

Eventually we confronted a more urgent reality: Jacob really had to pee. Standing practically cross-legged outside the car, his face radiated the barely withheld anxiety that comes after a long car ride after a morning guzzling coffee. I was a bit out of sorts, too. We were supposed to be featured in the New York Times as intrepid crypto critics, and here we were unable to get into our featured location while self-urination seemed to be a non-zero possibility.

Look I was born and raised in Texas, spent about 25 years there. And I fail to see how this passage is interesting. It’s like the marijuana consumption, probably should cut it out.

On p. 87 they wrote in parenthesis:

We’d met a lot of strident Bitcoin critics but not anyone interested in attacking a Bitcoin mine.

Well at least this time the authors provided a little nuance “Bitcoin critics” and not just “critics.” And if we were to guess why the site has the security measures described it is likely because Riot doesn’t want someone to come in and steal the mining (hashing) gear. Those are effectively money printers. The golden goose as it were.

On p. 88 they wrote:

We chopped it up for a few more minutes, and then, after the typical alchemy of bureaucratic authority parceling out permissions, we were told that we could go in the gates and drive to the main office. “I left my NDA in the bathroom,” said David as soon as we piled into the car. Jacob announced his paper was under his foot. Others had disposed of theirs quietly in their pockets. Either some Whinstone official had forgotten about the agreement during our time in the office or perhaps had been overruled. It didn’t matter. We weren’t signing anything. They waved us through the gate and we drove in.

I am not a huge fan of NDAs but I have signed my share of them, and/or my bosses have which made me bound by them (at time of employment). Readers have no idea what was in this specific NDA either. Maybe it was all just theater?

Either way how does it help the authors credibility to show that they will wiggle around to avoid signing an NDA? Just tell them you won’t sign an NDA and see what happens.

Pages earlier you mentioned turning off the video but keeping the audio on in the Mashinsky interview. Are you guys trying to do “gotcha” interviews in an industry filled with people (criminals) making cringy music videos?53

On p. 89 they write:

While I agreed that, everything else being equal, employment was a good thing, I couldn’t help but notice the flimsy underpinnings of this otherwise sturdy mining operation. This company was using enormous amounts of electricity to mine speculative digital assets to keep a zero-sum game of chance going. Texas’ notoriously over-worked electric grid, also known as ERCOT, had gone down after a winter storm in February 2021, contributing to the deaths of 246 people. Mining Bitcoin hardly seemed worth the potential harm to the population.

While I agree with much of this statement, I don’t think it is completely fair to connect Bitcoin mining with mismanagement by ERCOT in February 2021. Maybe that argument is stronger in November 2023 but 30 months ago this large facility was not fully operational.

Also, the authors should be clearer: Riot currently only contributes proof-of-work hashing for one specific chain, Bitcoin. Digital assets should probably be singular, not plural, in the next edition.

On p. 90 they write:

What benefit did any of this produce for the rest of us? Was it worth the cost? In 2021, the greenhouse gasses released to produce the energy consumed by Bitcoin and fellow networks more than offset the amount saved by electric vehicles globally.

This is a good point muddied by “fellow networks.” What are the fellow networks? For example, in my February 2021 paper I provided estimates not just for Bitcoin but also for Ethereum (pre-Merge), Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, BSV, ZEC, and Dogecoin. Are these what the authors had in mind when they mentioned “fellow networks”?

On p. 90 they write:

It was all ridiculous, but I kept coming back to the same thing. Economically, the parabolic rise and fall of bubbles was well established. But what would crypto’s downfall do to this community?

This is a great question that is never answered. How many jobs does Riot contribute to Rockdale? How many jobs do Bitcoin mining (hashing) operations contribute to across the U.S.? It’s probably negligible but the authors raised these questions and never answered them.

Despite the issues with the nuances of mining, I still think this particular section could be the foundation for a good future chapter focused on proof-of-work mining in the U.S. To date no one outside the coin industry has written a long-form non-hagiographic explanation of how large hashing operators hone in on specific regions due to subsidies and/or acquisition of say, a retired coal power plant that becomes unretired. For instance, how Stronghold Digital Mining bought two languishing coal-fueled generating facilities in Pennsylvania and ramped up their production.

We have seen organized greenwashing from coin lobbyists such as Coin Center but only piecemeal pushback from investigative journalists. For instance, here’s one of the all-time greatest (leaked) RFPs:

Source: Twitter

The second edition has a lot of potential when they dig into what the lobbyists have tried to whitewash and greenwash. Environmentalist Ketan Joshi has documented some of these attempts.

Chapter 6: The Business of Show

This chapter had some interesting potential, to discuss the ‘Brock Chain’ (Brock Pierce)! The authors visited Bitcoin Miami, albeit the 2022 edition and not the arguably more-coke-filled 2021 edition. Alas, while they do discuss El Salvador at the end there is no mention of former Russia Today host, Max Keiser and his wife (Stacy Herbert), who are official advisors to Bukele… and was a bit bananas at Bitcoin Miami 2021.

Anyways, let’s start off with a humblebrag on p. 91:

On April 1, 2022, our months-long investigation into the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance, was published in the Washington Post.

Their Washington Post article was good albeit a little short, clocking in at around 2800 words. And most of that Washington Post story is reused – word for word – in the first part of chapter 6 (specifically the bits about Francis Kim and Fawaz Ahmed). That’s perfectly fine and common by the way (I myself reused portions of articles and papers in one book). Readers looking for some more depth might be interested in reporting by Tom Wilson from Reuters who was actively investigating the same topics at the same time.

On p. 92 they write:

The second, and perhaps more important, reason crypto took off in China was to avoid capital controls. The official limit of $50,000 in overseas foreign exchange per year is an attempt by the state to restrict wealthy Chinese from moving their money out of the country. If you are a Chinese billionaire, there are numerous ways to get around this, but one of the less expensive ones is crypto. Either buy crypto with yuan and cash out into dollars or other currencies overseas, or perhaps better yet, invest in Bitcoin mines (often using electricity stolen from the grid) and then move the mined Bitcoin via crypto trading elsewhere.

They reference a 2020 article from South China Morning Post, but I think it is a bit of a stretch to make a couple of the specific inferences that McKenzie and Silverman do. For instance, the article does not mention billionaires at all or that Bitcoin mines “often use electricity stolen from the grid.” Maybe both of those are true, but neither are mentioned in the article. Scrolling through my archives, I quickly found one example in Hunan province.

In fact, the article specifically mentions how USDT became popular in China:

Ironically, Beijing’s ban actually fuelled the adoption of Tether in China. Chinese users started replacing the yuan with Tether as the de facto currency in cryptocurrency trades, purchasing it under the table from unregulated “over-the-counter” brokers.

I have no affinity for Tether LTD but that detail wasn’t mentioned in the chapter. Wonder why?

On p. 93 they write:

Binance allows its customers to employ enormous leverage—at one point up to 125-to-1 (now down to 20-to-1 for most customers, comparable to other exchanges). That means retail traders can gamble with far more chips than they actually bought. The upside is large, but so is the downside: At 125-to-1, for every 1 percent move, your one-hundred-dollar bet could net you a fortune, or wipe you out instantaneously. Kim was trading with 30-to-1 leverage. In mainstream financial markets, offering extreme amounts of leverage to retail traders—not accredited investors who must prove they have the funds to withstand a margin call—is not allowed

That is mostly accurate and fair but with one nuance: foreign exchange (FX) trading platforms do offer – and advertise – high leverage, even beyond 125x. For instance, according to Benzinga, at least three FX platforms allow higher than 125x leverage.  Whether cryptocurrencies / assets like bitcoin are the same as FX is a different matter, but Diehl et al., made the same error.

As of this writing, the global FX market is the largest most liquid market in aggregate (and filled with oodles of retail punters).54 This is not a defense of Binance rather it is to highlight how wording and nuance are important. High leverage is allowed in certain “mainstream financial markets.”

On p. 94 they write:

If that weren’t enough, Binance itself trades on its own exchange. In traditional markets, this kind of arrangement would never be allowed, as the conflicts of interest—and potential for market manipulation—are glaring.

This is a good point, and I agree with it. However contrary to the authors conviction, this kind of arrangement has been allowed at various eras in traditional markets: Glass-Steagall (which the authors briefly mention later) separated commercial banking from investment banking in 1933. Fast forward sixty six years later, in 1999, most of it was repealed. Some economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman opined that this set the stage for the 2007-2008 financial crisis. And guess what, even after the financial crisis and a myriad of debates, Glass-Steagall was still not restored. Yes, even today, too big to fail banks still have these “glaring” conflicts of interest.

On p. 94 they write:

Imagine the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq taking positions on different sides of trades it facilitates. No financial regulator would allow it, for obvious reasons.

I agree with the thrust of their argument, even though it is not really accurate.55

What is incorrect? While the NYSE and Nasdaq do not custody user funds and in theory – only provide order matching – the parent companies of both are equity holders of a handful of clearinghouses in the U.S. 56

What would have been helpful in this book (and others post-FTX collapse) would be to describe the similarities and differences in clearing and settlement (C&S).57 These socially useful activities (C&S) are operated by systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs), which in the U.S. are overseen by the Fed Board of Governors. And at an international level, the Financial Stability Board (FSB). Post GFC, post-Dodd Frank we actually have a more concentrated set of SIFIs with conflicts of interest throughout the entire trade life cycle because of how interconnected ownership has become.58 One of the best articles that concisely describes this convoluted relationship is How a Lone Norwegian Trader Shook the World’s Financial System.

Again, I agree with the point the authors are trying to make, but they could have used a better example.

On p. 96 they write:

At one point, according to a screenshot of a chat with a Binance customer service representative that Kim shared, he was offered a voucher for $60,000 in Tether and another $60,000 in trading credits as an inducement to keep him on the very platform that he felt had robbed him.

Perhaps it is just me, but I do think the authors to describe “Tether” as both the unit-of-account and the issuer is confusing. USDT would have sufficed.

On p. 97 they write:

Liti staked $5 million to support the suit, which was being led by international law firm White & Case. Binance’s user agreement requires litigious customers to submit to arbitration at the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre. With a minimum cost of $50,000 for the services of the court and a qualified arbiter, this clause in the agreement creates a prohibitive barrier for traders who lost a few hundred or thousand dollars seeking restitution. By pooling millionaire day traders with mom-and-pop claimants, and using the backing of Liti Capital, White & Case got around that hurdle.

What is the status update for this? The official website of the Steering Committee for the Binance Claim does not seem to have been updated for a couple of years. The last tweet from the account was September 18, 2021.

On p. 98 they write:

According to their analysis, Binance has become the perfect playground for professional trading firms to clean up against unsophisticated retail traders. Using state-of-the-art algorithmic trading programs and access to the latest market-moving information, these firms are both faster and more powerful than the regular Joes they compete against.

This is probably true, professional high frequent trading (HFT) operations have an edge versus retail in traditional finance so maybe the same odds (or worse?) in the coin world?

On p. 98 they write:

Ranger compared what was happening on crypto exchanges to the online poker craze of the mid-2000s. Back then, you had a sense of the stakes and could see who was beating you at the virtual table. “At least poker’s kind of honest,” said Ranger. “You’re losing to this guy named, like, Penis420, and he bluffed you out of your cash, and you’re here.” But for average crypto investors/gamblers trading on Binance, there was no such clarity. Across the table could sit an advanced computer trading program. Regular traders don’t stand a chance; when the professional firms easily outmaneuver them, they can get wiped out in seconds.

This passage is a little confusing. The poker analogy makes sense in poker but what persona are the authors describing in the last sentence? Day traders? Leveraged traders? How to “regular traders” who buy and hold and do not have leverage get wiped out in seconds? Maybe they gobbled up some junk coins?

On p. 99 they write in parenthesis:

Zhao himself said that Binance may eventually lose out to more nimble and harder-to-regulate DeFi, or decentralized finance, exchanges.

We are nearly a hundred pages in and still no cohesive explanation of what “DeFi” is or what examples of a decentralized exchange is.

On p. 99 they write:

It was hard to see how this “democratization of finance” was going to lead to a fairer economy rather than a more chaotic one, with a vast gulf between winners and losers. The liberatory rhetoric and experimental economics of crypto could be alluring, but they amplified many of the worst qualities of our existing capitalist system while privileging a minority group of early adopters and well-connected insiders.

This is a really good point, I agree with it. The one caveat I would make is that not every intermediary operator claims to be trying to “democratize finance” so a future edition should provide a specific name.

On p. 100 they write:

Surprisingly, the press passes actually came through. We received an official invitation to make a pilgrimage with the true believers.

Why was that a surprise? How many events / venues / interviews rejected press pass requests while writing this book?

On p. 100 they write:

Peter Thiel, the arch-capitalist fifty-four-year-old cofounder of PayPal, was throwing one-hundred-dollar bills from the main stage, trying to signify their unimportance. When members of the crowd rushed to grab them, Thiel appeared shocked. “I thought you guys were supposed to be Bitcoin maximalists!”

Welp, I chuckled at something Thiel said, time to call it a day.

On p. 101 they write:

But first, I wanted some merch. Across the sprawling Miami Beach Convention Center, the product and sales pitches ranged from free NFTs to getting in on the ground floor of the next ICO that seemed a lot like the last ICOs. A DAO promised an investment scheme to “democratize yachting.” Crypto mining machines sold for thousands of dollars each.

This chapter would have been solid if it simply described the crazy claims made by the kiosk participants. One nitpick though: which crypto mining machines sold for thousands of dollars each? Because Bitmain has sold hashing equipment for years that cost roughly that. Is that a lot or a little money?

On p. 101 they write:

If you ignored the formal hysterics and instead talked to regular folks milling about the conference, Bitcoin Miami sometimes felt like just another trade show. Big and energetic, full of boozy salesmen talking about how Bitcoin had changed their lives, with sponsorships adorning every surface, it was a Potemkin village of American consumerism and gambling addiction masquerading, in typically humble crypto fashion, as the future of the entire financial system.

Excellent prose!

On p. 102 they write:

“In Miami we have big balls,” said Francis Suarez, Miami’s Bitcoin bro mayor, who has toyed with the idea of abolishing taxes and funding the city through a nearly worthless token known as MiamiCoin.

The authors missed a golden opportunity to dunk on MiamiCoin, which lost more than 95% of its value in the span of 9 months and Suarez himself lost $2,500 on it.  

On p. 102 they write:

The local faithful, while zealous, were peaceful. No one yelled at me at the Bitcoin Conference or denounced me as a nonbeliever. Some people overflowed with solicitous generosity—there was at least one strip club invitation that I believe wasn’t a covert marketing stunt. The lack of open conflict was almost a letdown—and an indicator of my own latent narcissism, perhaps. Everyone was just excited to talk to some guy from TV that had cameras following him around.

You all should come with me sometime because I’ve had plenty of threats made against myself both online and offline! Someone even called my wife a chink. Classy! Also, why was McKenzie expecting open conflict?

On p. 103 they write:

There are many different ways one could define the crypto community, but the cynic in me would say there were none, not really. The majority of the people in Miami seemed only loosely tied to one another through commerce. They had few other bonds to speak of besides a utopian vision of financial freedom. To me, they were a projection of the timeless American fantasy: getting rich for free as quickly as possible. They flew to Miami to perform the rituals of multi-level marketing-style salesmanship and gladhanding. Also, there were parties.

Excellent writing.

On p. 103 they write:

From his home base in tax-friendly Puerto Rico, Brock maintained numerous crypto business interests and had become one of the industry’s most colorful spokespeople. I hadn’t expected to stumble upon him like that, but Brock—an insider with a sketchy past—was an ideal interview subject.

On the topic of crypto colonialism and Brock Pierce, readers might also be interested in an article five years ago: Making a Crypto Utopia in Puerto Rico. A new paper from Olivier Jutel, “Blockchain financialization, neo-colonialism, and Binance” is also a must-read.

On p. 104 they write:

The goal of interviewing Brock was to talk about Tether, the company he cofounded in 2014. While Brock had no current involvement with the company, we had heard from a source that he had at one point tried to buy back into Tether’s ownership group for the laughably low amount of $50,000. A source had also told us Brock dangled his political connections to the Trump White House in the hopes of getting back into the good graces of Tether executives like CFO Giancarlo Devasini.

Strangely, at least in the subsequent dialogue provided in the book: neither of those rumors were confirmed or denied. Did the authors ask him about buying back into Tether LTD in the video?

On p. 105 they write:

“I talk to more world leaders, probably, than our secretary of state,” he said. “I’m talking to forty-plus governments.” These statements seemed absurd, the kinds of exaggerations told by a particularly imaginative friend in grade school, but I smiled and nodded. It would take a little forbearance to eventually steer the conversation toward Tether.

Isn’t another logical follow-up: what are you talking to these world leaders about? Are these dialogues with other governments set up by Pierce’s team or solicited by the governments themselves?

On p. 105 they write:

“Why hasn’t Tether been audited?” I asked. His response was telling: He simultaneously claimed that they “probably” were working with a major accounting firm while bemoaning that they had tried and failed “hundreds” of times to get an audit. His reasoning was that no firm would touch them because of the lack of “regulatory clarity” around crypto, invoking a common industry complaint. For us crypto skeptics, this didn’t even rise to the level of cliché. There was plenty of clarity. It was just that companies like Tether tended to operate offshore and outside the ambit of American law. Tether’s executives, who never stepped foot in the United States, were reportedly being investigated by the Department of Justice for bank fraud.

I think it is a fair question that should be asked.59 But what did the authors expect Pierce to respond with? He’s no longer an insider, right? And while I mostly agree with the authors commentary, none of us are lawyers so maybe next edition a reference or quote from a lawyer would be better? Oddly, there is nothing in the reference section even though there are probably are a number of U.S. trained lawyers who would say something similar on the record.

Lastly, during his interview with Laura Shin, Zeke Faux provides an answer on the auditing question too, one that McKenzie or Silverman would probably disagree with. Can investigative reporters agree to disagree?

On p. 105 they write:

Given their role as essentially crypto’s unacknowledged central bank, with a few multimillion-dollar settlements already behind them, the company’s behavior potentially violated all manner of security, banking, and financial laws and regulations. Some even argued that by minting a dollar-denominated digital token, Tether was engaged in counterfeiting. As Jacob liked to joke, one sign that Tether was a fraud was that the company had never sued anyone for calling it a fraud. (As Tether’s leadership surely knows, the discovery process goes both ways.)

Maybe all of this is true, and maybe they are finally hammered by a series of law enforcement actions, but the question I ask Tether Truthers (USDTQ) is: why doesn’t the NY AG re-sue Tether LTD/Bitfinex?

Recall that there was a two year monitoring period after the settlement; the authors are alleging that Tether LTD continues to operate in a fraudulent manner during this time. Maybe that company is indeed up to no good. But the onus is on the authors to provide evidence in this book, and they don’t.

Matt Levine sorta does. If anyone claims to have direct evidence, shouldn’t the logical question be: have you submitted it to law enforcement and/or informed the CFTC and NY AG of possible violation of settlement terms? What about the fact that there is no major price discrepancy between CEXs that do not allow pegged coin trading versus those that do?

Also, why would Tether LTD sue Spencer Macdonald (Bitfinexed) or myself, for having publicly asked what the reserves were prior the settlement agreements with both the CFTC and NYAG? What would they get from either of us? BitPay never sued me after a couple of analytics-based posts. I don’t think a lack of lawsuits is necessarily a strong argument. 60

On p. 107 they write:

“Of innovation in general. I can’t really share the conversations I’ve had . . . National Security Council and things . . .” I may have involuntarily laughed at that point. Obviously Brock Pierce would not have attended an NSC meeting!

Great line, why would Pierce brag about something that didn’t happen? Bananas.

On p. 107 they write:

Risk-tolerant crypto traders and exchanges owners were stacking leverage on leverage (or fake dollars on top of fake dollars) to extract returns—in real dollars—on their investments.

The bigger story probably was undisclosed / unknown rehypothecation occurring at centralized lenders. But they only touched on Celsius so far. Also, what is a fake dollar? If the authors mean that collateral backing loans wasn’t there then that’s probably true, if so, would that be undisclosed rehypothecation?

Source: Twitter

The tweet above (Barry Silbert is the founder of DCG) did not age well. During the process of writing this review, the NYAG sued Genesis, DCG, and Gemini for allegedly defrauding investors.61

On p. 107 they write:

Tethers were being printed by the billions and issued to a very small group of important players like crypto mogul Justin Sun, who issued a token called TRON, along with sophisticated trading firms like Cumberland and Alameda Research, the Bahamas-based outfit owned by Sam Bankman-Fried, known in the crypto world (and now beyond) as SBF.

Would be helpful to have a diagram explaining the USDT minting / redemption process and who allegedly participates.

For example:

Source: OfNumbers

Above is a rough stab at a flow of funds of user behavior in April 2015. What do those flows look like in 2023?

On p. 107 they write:

Those players then gambled with the Tethers. The supposedly democratizing, decentralizing currency of the future had come full circle: a way to enrich the few at the expense of the many, in opaque games of chance the public couldn’t hope to understand.

This is a strawman. You don’t have to like cryptocurrencies or blockchains but portraying USDT – which is centrally issued – and Tether LTD as “democratizing and decentralized” is disingenuous.

The final few pages of this chapter are great, the authors interviewed two exiled Salvadorans in Miami: Mario Gomez and Carmen Valeria Escobar. Rather than quoting portions here, I do recommend grabbing a copy of the book for those final interactions plus the next chapter.

Overall this chapter had some good gems, such as the interview with Brock Pierce and the Salvadorians. But the authors also made some unforced errors that were a real distraction, such as not knowing that there are existing conflicts of interest within U.S. banks that regulators continue to allow (post Glass-Steagall).

Chapter 7: The World’s Coolest Dictator

This was the best chapter in the book and unfortunately it was also one of its shortest, clocking in at just 12 pages. While it weaves some good prose in with first-hand reporting, the authors still use terms like “coiners” without providing a definition.

Let’s start off with the obligatory reminder that one of the authors was/is a TV star. On p. 113 they write:

He was easy to spot. He held a placard with the alias I use when traveling, Don Drysdale, and wore a Batman T-shirt. Napoleon turned out to be a fan of Gotham, the Batman prequel TV show I starred in that centered on a young police lieutenant (and future commissioner) named Jim Gordon.

Most of the remaining part of the chapter is significantly less cringy and the description of Bukele and how he rose to power is pretty solid.

For instance, on p. 119 they write:

Unfortunately for his people, the young leader refused to accept defeat, instead doubling down on his Bitcoin wager. Bukele changed his Twitter handle to “world’s coolest dictator,” and his profile picture sported laser eyes favored by Bitcoin maximalists, or maxis, who believed that Bitcoin was the one true cryptocurrency and the rest imposters, mere shitcoins. Bukele bragged that he bought Bitcoin, using the state treasury, on his phone while sitting on the toilet.

This is the closest we get to a working definition of a “Bitcoin maximalist,” it is not horrible but does not really encompass the nuances that one the first maximalist extolled.62

Pages 120-122 have some solid interviews with Salvadorians who ended up on the wrong side of Bukele, including a family who lived in a house that unfortunately would be demolished to make way for the new airport for Bitcoin City. What is Bitcoin City and why does it need an airport? Read the book.

One nitpick (timing wise) has to do with one of their comments on the bottom of p. 122:

By the time we visited in May 2022, the issuance of the bond had been delayed, seemingly indefinitely. Despite the ill-conceived scheme, there were still consequences for the local population.

To be fair, if I were in their shoes, I probably would have written the same thing. However following the book’s publication there was a 180% rally in El Salvadorian government bonds. The following month, in August, Bloomberg ran a headline Bitcoin-Touting Bukele’s Bond Rally Draws JPMorgan, Eaton Vance. And as of this writing, the rally has not cooled off.

On p. 123 they write:

Despite the tense environment, Wilfredo welcomed us to his home with open arms. I immediately noticed what I would come to understand as his signature expression: a broad, easy smile revealing several gold-capped upper teeth. As we fumbled to communicate, first through my poor Spanish and then by way of Nelson translating, he was patient and wry with his replies. Here was a famous Hollywood actor who wanted to film and interview him, to tell his story, yet no one in his own country could tell him when he would be kicked off his land or where he might go.

As mentioned in the beginning of this review, McKenzie’s remark comes across as a little tone deaf. Why not use your notoriety to stop Wilfredo’s home from being demolished? The purpose of the book – according to the Author’s Note – is to condemn those who committed fraud. And what about helping the victims too?

Overall a decent chapter and one that could be expanded in a future edition or even used as a standalone spinoff.

Chapter 8: Rats in a Sack

This is one of the weaker chapters because it relies almost entirely on repeating news from other sources. And unlike the previous chapter, nothing really knew is revealed that we couldn’t learn from other books or mainstream news sources.

There is also an introduction to some important concepts that once again, are not explained.

For instance on p. 128 they write:

The two were bound together via an arbitrage system designed to keep Terra, a so-called algorithmic stablecoin, at one dollar.

What is an algorithmic stablecoin? Are all algorithmic stablecoins the same are are there differences?

On p. 128 they write:

Or so went the plan. There was also a “staking pool” called Anchor, which was also created by Do Kwon and his company, Terraform Labs.

What is a staking pool? Is that the same thing as a validating pool used by some proof-of-stake networks? Or are there differences, like a whitelist maintained by a 3rd party?

On p. 128 they write:

Sure, there was the occasional bit of criticism. The economics of Terra, Luna, and Anchor were clearly Ponzi-like, involving the circular flow of money common to such schemes. Where was the 20 percent return on Anchor coming from?

Strangely, with so much written on Anchor from other sources, they never answer their own question. The short answer is the 19.5% – 20% yield marketed for Anchor was an unsustainable subsidy based on a combination of ANC (the governance token for Anchor) and bLUNA staking yield. Here’s my long form explanation of what happened to Terra last year: Not all algorithmic stabilization mechanisms are the same.

On p. 129 they write:

That the whole thing smelled like a Ponzi was no secret, but rather a fact discussed by some big industry names on Twitter, podcasts, and in other media.

Probably the most prominent Terra critic during that time was a trader, Kevin Zhou, who publicly described the fundamental issues of UST (and ANC) with just about anyone willing to listen. A second edition should include him or at least refer to his interviews.

On p. 129 they write:

But on Mirror, people weren’t trading real stocks in a regulated market. They were trading synthetic copies of real stocks on a market overseen by, well, Do Kwon.

Even the SEC lawsuit does not use this as an argument, because it is not true. Mirror was many things but it was not “overseen by Do Kwon.”

On p. 129 they write:

Can you imagine the gall it takes to set up a fake copy of the New York Stock Exchange, one that, given its shaky underpinnings and nonexistent oversight, might attract who knows what kind of shady players? And then to refuse to even account for it?

Again, this is not the argument the SEC made when it (1) subpoenaed Terraform Labs and Do Kwon and (2) sued them.

This is important because it hurts the credibility of the authors: right now there are more than a dozen stock exchanges operating in the U.S. These stock exchanges are not all the same, some offer traders different functions and different products. Some purposefully attempt to mitigate the advantages of HFTs. Some process significantly more volume than others.

But a key similarity is that say for equities, a share of Apple stock, none of these exchanges has a monopoly as the trading venue for that stock.

In contrast, some exchanges, like the commodities-focused ones, have a monopoly on specific futures contracts: you can only trade it on one exchange. For example, the WTI Crude futures contract that is frequently quoted in financial press is only tradable at the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX).

The SEC sued Terraform Labs for selling unregistered securities. Not for making a new trading venue.

And in June 2022, a U.S. court rejected Do Kwon’s appeal:

The court stated that business arrangements with U.S. companies to trade assets from the Mirror Protocol justified the SEC’s investigation, where “a $200,000 deal with one U.S.-based trading platform” was made. Furthermore, the Terraform Labs “indicated that 15% of users of its Mirror Protocol are within the U.S.” during negotiations.

It’s unclear why the authors thought the appropriate analogy was a “fake copy of the New York Stock Exchange” when that type of example does not appear in the complaint. 63

On p. 130 they write:

Almost a year later, one LUNC was worth about one thousandth of a cent, but the token’s overall market cap was still in the top fifty of all crypto tokens. That signaled two things: Crypto was dominated by what were essentially penny stocks, and even in a disaster like TerraLuna, a lot of people hadn’t given up hope. They were holding on.

To be fair to the coin world: penny stocks originated the pejorative, penny stocks. Maybe the next edition can use “Lunatics” as a coin-specific pejorative?

On p. 132 they write:

In the midst of all this, Terraform Labs’ entire legal team quit at once.

The authors missed the opportunity to find specific tweets to dunk on, such as one lawyer who mentioned how they lost everything including their significant-other… just weeks after bragging about how wealthy they now were.

On p. 132 they write about the cascading collapse of centralized lenders in the wake of Three Arrows Capital (3AC) insolvency:

Blockchain.com, a crypto exchange, was due $270 million. The contagion had spread.

The authors were pretty miserly when it came to graphics and images, one they should include in the next edition is this whammy:

Source: Twitter

It is a self-attestation from Kylie Davies, co-founder of 3AC to Blockchain.com. This was basically all the due diligence the lender did. Check out my March presentation for more doozies.

On p. 134 they write:

After devouring tech talent the previous year, big exchanges like Crypto.com (usurpers of the naming rights to Staples Center) and the Winklevoss twins’ Gemini conducted multiple rounds of layoffs, sometimes without any public announcement, in just a few months.

Usurpers? They are naming rights not a birth right and Staples had a 20 year deal beginning in 1999. What should the stadium be called?

On p. 134 they write:

One of them was BlockFi, another crypto lender that offered huge, and unsustainable, interest rates on customer deposits.

Pretty easy to say after the collapse of the bubble. For what it is worth, I publicly questioned BlockFi’s yield in 2019 and got lampooned by Andrew Kang, Nic Carter and Rob Paone.

Source: Twitter

Deep analysis!

Spongebobbed!

What were the books authors doing in March 2019?

It is all too easy to come after the bubble and publish a mostly second hand account about “huge and unsustainable interest rates” after the lender filed for bankruptcy, the harder part was publicly discussing where the yield comes from prior to the bubble.

Source: Bloomberg

On p. 134 they write:

The curtain was being slowly peeled back through a steady diet of leaks, bankruptcy filings, and the first wave of lawsuits. Important revelations were emerging, some of which confirmed earlier criticisms from skeptics.

What specific criticism? Which “skeptics”? Please provide the receipts.

On p. 135 they write:

The entire crypto economy depended on Tether’s stablecoin—it was by far the most traded token each day. But its murky operations, uncertain financial backing, and bloviating executives—to say nothing of those executives, like CEO Jean-Louis van der Velde, who were almost never heard from—didn’t seem like the makings of an organization that could weather a major industry downturn. At some point, I believed, the bill would come due for Tether, and it would be one it couldn’t afford to pay.

The first sentence is probably true for some (most?) spot exchanges, but not necessarily for on-chain trading.

For instance:

Source: The Block

The color-coded bar chart (above) visualizes the different on-chain volumes of USD-denominated pegged coins. While USDT-based volume is large, USDC is often much larger. Strangely the book doesn’t discuss other centrally issued pegged coins at all.

On p. 137 they write:

And all the while, scams, rug-pulls, hacks, and Potemkin crypto projects proliferated, adding billions more to the toll that comes with being part of the web3 community.

Since “web3” is never formally defined in the book, this dunk doesn’t really bite. Are readers supposed to assume anything blockchain-related suffered from billion dollar scams and hacks during this time frame? Or did the damage primarily impact intermediaries? Where’s the shade for Certik?

On p. 137 they write:

Perhaps the most disturbing part of the crypto crash of the spring of 2022, which wiped out more than $2 trillion in notional value and wrecked the nest eggs of everyday traders all over the world, was the utter lack of humility shown by the industry’s leading figures. Materially, most of them were fine: Their predictions might have been ludicrous, and perhaps they lost oodles of money—but it was usually someone else’s money, and they had made enough insider profits along the way to simply hop over to the next project, should the current one fail. Many had also bought in early to Bitcoin, which still held some value, even if it was 60 percent or more below its peak.

There is a lot to unpack here. I agree with the authors, that a lot of the shills and prominent promoters lacked humility. Coinesia writ large.

But the authors are playing fast and lose with the word “most.” How many were fine? How many bought bitcoin early? How many had made “enough insider profits”? I’m sure some coinfluencers check all of those boxes, but readers are never given even a ballpark estimate.

On p. 138 they write:

As trillions of dollars of wealth evaporated

If we take “market cap” at face value, the aggregate coin market cap peaked just north of $3 trillion in November 2021 and dropped to around $1 trillion where it currently gyrates. Saying “trillions” seems like an embellishment.

On p. 139 they write:

The truth is that most of the scammers and con men were tolerated—or even encouraged—by the wider crypto industry because there was no economic incentive to do otherwise.

This is a fair point. Though not everyone encouraged or tolerated these bad actors. Some even publicly called them out.

On p. 139 they write:

While I had been shouting to the Twitter rafters trying to warn people of the impending financial disaster I sensed looming, seasoned academics were articulating a more nuanced version of the same.

Buddy, you didn’t start tweeting about any of this until after the bubble peaked in 2021. The time to warn people was in 2018-2019.

On p. 139 they write:

Hilary Allen, professor of law at American University, wrote a paper in February 2022, just three months before the crash, referring to cryptocurrency and its assorted DeFi products as effectively a new form of shadow banking.

Allen’s paper, while sincere in its concerns, made several major errors.64 A number of people, including myself, attempted to explain some nuances that she missed. For instance, she claimed that lending protocols effectively provide unlimited leverage. However, in practice not only do all of the major lending protocols implement a form of whitelisted assets but each of those assets has a loan-to-value cap.

For instance, p. 938 of her paper is factually incorrect in a couple of areas, she did not incorporate the suggestions from experts. That part of the paper should not have passed peer review. Empirically, while many centralized lenders collapsed in 2022, none of her predictions she made came to pass specifically regarding DeFi lending protocols. 65

On p. 139 they write:

Broadly speaking, shadow banking refers to a company offering banking services while avoiding banking regulations.

The authors are finally discussing what a shadow bank is. If you recall, in the first chapter they mention PayPal but fail to mention it was one of the first prominent fintech “shadowbanks.” A number of centrally-issued pegged coins issuers (like Tether LTD) have modeled their operations after the path pioneered by PayPal, as a shadow payment and shadow bank provider. None of that is mentioned by the authors (or Allen).

On p. 140 they write:

We know this happened during subprime, but as Professor Allen points out, the leverage in crypto, especially DeFi, is far higher. “The amount of leverage in the system can also be increased by simply multiplying the number of assets available to borrow against,” she writes. “That is a significant concern with DeFi, where financial assets in the form of tokens can be created out of thin air by anyone with computer programming knowledge, then used as collateral for loans that can then be used to acquire yet more assets.”

Allen and the authors are not only incorrect but they do not even provide a number, what is the leverage? That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Specifically the part where Allen is wrong is claiming that any amount of tokens can be created out of thin air and used as collateral for loans.66 In practice, only about thirty different coins and tokens have been whitelisted on DeFi lending protocols such as Aave or Compound.

Fun fact: the authors never mention specific lending protocols in the entire book.

On p. 140 they write:

The people behind crypto coins can create endless amounts of fake money. Crucially, the exchanges themselves can also do so, in the case of coins like FTT (FTX) and BNB (Binance). If folks can use that fake money to borrow real money, that’s a problem, as the leverage is potentially unlimited.

This is absurd.

If the authors were right, then none of the centralized lenders would have gone bankrupt last year because they would have just created endless amounts of fake money and continue to lever up and up. They could not because there is no such thing as unlimited leverage in either DeFi or centralized lending.

Why make this up? There was real provable criminal activity taking place, why resort to exaggerating like this?

This again reminds me of another evergreen tweet from Matthew Green:

Source: Tweet

On p. 142 they write:

Crashes happen in regulated markets, but at least there is some flexibility built into the system—whether it be negotiations between the parties, court cases, or even government bailout—that can mitigate the damage. At the end of the day, licensed banks in the United States are backstopped by a trusted third party, the US government. Cryptos are famously trustless, so no such third party exists. Not only that, but rigidity lies at the very foundation of crypto itself in the form of so-called smart contracts.

This is a pretty shallow explanation of how the U.S. financial industry is overseen and regulated by different state and federal regulatory bodies. Sure due to time and space constraints the authors need to be brief, but there is no delineation between state-chartered and nationally chartered banks. Or the role that the FDIC or OCC play. Or how in times of crisis the Federal Reserve acts as the lender-of-last resort. Or what role international bodies, such as the Financial Stability Board, play “at the end of the day.”

Also cryptos, which by now is the catch-all term the authors use to capture all cryptocurrencies / cryptoassets, are only “trustless” in the on-chain realm (assuming the chain is actually decentralized). Most of the criticism in this book, so far, seems to be around activities of off-chain intermediaries such as centralized lenders.

On p. 142 they write:

Smart contracts are basically small computer programs designed to execute their functions immediately, without the interference of a financial intermediary, a regulator, a court, or the parties themselves. The irreversibility of the blockchain—it’s an immutable ledger that can only be added to, never subtracted from—and the smart contracts built around it means DeFi is far more rigid than TradFi. Most actions, once performed, cannot be undone. When an interconnected system falls apart, this is not a good thing.

I wrote an entire (outdated!) book in March 2014 on this topic and the definition above is superficial at best. For instance, smart contracts do not have to execute all of their functions immediately. On permissioned chains – or even permissionless chains – intermediaries can even play a role. In fact, that’s precisely what real world asset (RWA) issuers due via black listing and white listing of addresses such as Aave Arc.

When the authors say “DeFi is far more rigid than TradFi” that could be true but they do not follow-up with any evidence. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

For instance, you would think an easy slam dunk example they could provide is the fallout from The DAO hack in 2016, such as a hard fork. But that famous hack is not mentioned anywhere in the book. Are the authors aware of what happened? If so, surely that would be a good way to steelman their view in the next edition.

On p. 142 they write:

Complexity leads to fragility. The more complicated the financial mousetrap you build, the more likely it is to fail.

What evidence or source do they cite to back up these claims? Nothing. They are just opinions. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

On p. 142 they write:

Blockchain, consensus algorithms, smart contracts, and cryptographic signatures are all real human creations whose value we can debate. As individual components, they may all have positive attributes, but combining them together in a more or less unregulated marketplace has become self-evidently problematic. Unless, of course, you were just trying to use that complexity as a smokescreen to commit fraud.

If a large commercial bank, such as J.P. Morgan were to start using smart contracts for a blockchain-based project, does that a priori mean that JPM is “using that complexity as a smokescreen to commit fraud”? That is how weak the authors arguments have become in this book.

Onyx may fail, but it serves as a counterfactual to the a priori arguments used by the authors. Launched in 2020, this blockchain-based project from J.P. Morgan exists. Is the bank using it to commit fraud? Who knows, maybe the authors could weigh in.

On p. 143 they write:

Remember my initial thesis: When a bubble pops, the most speculative things fall fastest. Since crypto was entirely speculative, the investment equivalent of gambling, it was bound to go poof when the Fed started raising interest rates.

Perhaps he tweeted it but it is unclear when McKenzie publicly stated this thesis. I actually partially agree with it. But without receipts, he can’t really do a victory lap.

On p. 143 they write:

On March 17, 2022, seeking to counteract inflation, the Fed raised interest rates by a quarter point (or 25 basis points if you want to sound fancy). On May 5, they raised half a point and the carnage began. On May 8, crypto had a nominal market cap of $1.8 trillion. By June 18, it was $800 billion. A trillion dollars evaporated in less than six weeks. The joke was the lie that it had ever been there in the first place.

The whiplash is strong here. Just 13 pages earlier the authors chronicled the collapse of Terra which led to a cascading collapse of centralized trading entities (like 3AC) and lenders (such as Celsius). No one, including the authors, have connected the collapse of Terra with the rise in interest rates. This is a spurious correlation.

Now I would agree with part of the authors arguments that in November 2023, with rates at 5.25%, it is likely that “risk free” investments (such as U.S. Treasuries) are attracting some speculative funds that would otherwise go into riskier assets like cryptocurrencies. But the implosion of Terra – and the subsequent unwind and cascading domino effect onto centralized lenders was mostly self-imposed due to poor risk management (e.g., rampant rehypothecation). In other words: Jay Powell and the Board didn’t pop the bubble, the Board just has stymied that spate of exuberance for now.

On p. 144 they write:

Democratic politicians were taking huge donations from the crypto industry—most notably, from Sam Bankman-Fried—and spending far too much time with industry lobbyists. (We saw the photos on Twitter before you deleted them, guys.)

This is one of just a small handful of times the authors mention coin lobbyists which is a little strange considering how much air cover the coin lobbying industry provides.

Not only did the authors not name names, they did not even reference the Tweet or the date, here it is:

Source: Twitter

Mark Wetjen never registered as a lobbyist for FTX which he is required by law to do (see the Lobbying Disclosure Act). This is considered a big no-no. Wetjen was also on the advisory board of Coin Center as of ~3 years ago (unclear when the lobbying org changed it). Following the collapse of FTX, Pham deleted the picture and Wetjen deleted his Twitter account.

On p. 144 they write:

But crypto, in practice, was nearly always the opposite of what it claimed to be, so of course it ended up becoming a tool for political influence. And because crypto was foremost a way to get rich, crypto investors celebrated the billionaires, like SBF, who were showering politicians with donations in order to legitimize crypto and shape its regulatory future.

This is a great point.

On p. 144 they write:

The previous fall, Bitfinex’ed told us the crypto industry was vanishingly small, controlled by only a handful of players. At the time it seemed far-fetched, but the more bankruptcy filings forced the opaque sector into the light, the more he was proven right.

Unless Macdonald named names, this is just a he-said-she-said. For instance, on October 16, 2021 Macdonald DM’ed me that “Even disclosure of reserves can be catastrophic” and nine days later that “Get ready to buy me that scotch don’t worry I’ll share.”

I have no affinity for Tether LTD or Bitfinex but Macdonald’s predictions above were wrong. And he didn’t even buy me the scotch he wagered.

A couple of times he was, that’s why I stayed in touch with him. But he ended up blocking me for holding him to the same standard we all hold promoters: verify don’t trust. Maybe Tether LTD’s attestations are bogus, maybe they operate in the same fraudulent manner as they did in 2016-2018, but the onus is on Macdonald and others to provide that evidence. And right now, none of the “disclosure of reserves” has been catastrophic.

On p. 145 they write:

Crypto critics and good governance advocates worried about Bankman-Fried’s growing political influence.

Specific examples before 2022? Such as?

On p. 146 they write:

“Help you avoid things that won’t age as well.” It wasn’t the first time a powerful person had tried to shape our reporting, but few were higher on the food chain than SBF. As in all relationships like this, the important thing was to not succumb to that influence, however it might be exerted. As a newly minted journalist, I had begun to realize that competing agendas were all around me, that sometimes we had to mingle with some unsavory people in order to find the truth while still keeping our ethics intact.

This is hard to buy because one of the things readers (at least U.S.-based readers) are aware of is Hollywood entertainers are represented by an agent(s) and have connections with PR firms whose goal is to help promote the entertainer in a flattering light in order to land the next big gig. Competing opinions and agendas are all around Tinseltown, they make movies about it.

On p. 146 they write:

At the same time, I realized something: If these crypto bros were really as cocky as they appeared to be, maybe stirring some shit up on Crypto Twitter would yield results. To use a poker analogy, why not splash the pot a bit, piss some people off? On May 14, I fired off a tweet egging them on: “Anyone in the crypto industry wants to come at me, feel free. Fwiw, I have spent 20 years in showbiz, I can take a punch. Just a couple words of advice: don’t miss.”

It’s nearly impossible to McKenzie seriously since he openly admits to shitposting on social media to trawl for engagement. That is what Instagram influencers do for more attention, not a serious investigative reporter. Zeke Faux didn’t, that’s your peer.

All in all this was one of the worst chapters in the book primarily because it relies on and amplifies Hilary Allen’s false predictions. And also because the authors continue to make a priori arguments instead of evidence-based ones.

Chapter 9: The Emperor is Butt-ass Naked

Despite the adolescent chapter title, the chapter is one of the better ones. Unlike most chapters, this one involved some first-hand reporting on FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. For readers unfamiliar with SBF, the chapter does a decent job of painting the scene. But for those already steeped in the lore surrounding SBF, nothing new is really revealed.

But there were still a number of unforced errors made by the authors who used unnuanced language.

For instance, on p. 151 they write:

Hong Kong benefited from being close to mainland China, where cryptocurrency had exploded in popularity, due in no small part to the desire of wealthy Chinese to avoid state capital controls.

This may be true, but what is the reference or citation for this? Nothing in the back of the book. If the authors are relying on the South China Morning Post article from earlier, recall it did not specifically mention wealthy people (millionaires or billionaires). Again, anecdotally I think it could be true, but the burden of proof rests with the authors.

On p. 152 they write:

The first was potential conflicts of interest. Sam owned an exchange and a trading firm that operated on that exchange. Imagine if J.P. Morgan owned an unregulated version of the Nasdaq. What was stopping him from manipulating the value of assets on his exchange via Alameda and pocketing the proceeds?

I agree with the thrust of what the authors are saying, but it is not a particularly good example. Recall earlier the discussion around revoking Glass-Steagall. Today J.P. Morgan operates the largest commercial bank in the U.S. which is fused with an investment bank.67

In 2015, J.P. Morgan paid a combined $307 million fine to settle cases with the SEC and CFTC, admitting wrongdoing in part because certain banking units failed to tell clients it favored in-house funds, clear conflicts of interest. In 2020, J.P. Morgan paid $920 million to settle DOJ, SEC and CFTC charges of illegal market manipulation or “spoofing” in the precious metals and Treasury markets.

If the authors were looking for a large unblemished regulated financial institution, there probably is none. So the next edition could just describe why these “conflicts of interest” are abused by CEX operators.

On p. 152 they write:

The second was his company’s deep ties to Tether. In November 2021, Protos, a crypto media company renowned for its skepticism, revealed that Alameda Research was one of the largest (perhaps even the largest) customers of Tether.

Strangely there is no link or reference to the Protos article. Also Protos is sometimes hit-and-miss. While I have found myself nodding in agreement with a couple of their op-eds, they also have a notable few duds.

(1) This past summer they published a byline-free xenophobic article: Uncovering Ethereum’s close ties to Chinese money.68 One of the shadowy reasons is because Vitalik Buterin’s interest in speaking Chinese! Since I worked in China for five years and my wife is Chinese just waiting for a xenophobic hitpiece to drop.

(2) A year ago, Protos published the “Tether Papers” which they billed as being as important – and revealing – as the Paradise Papers. Upon closer inspection it was a dud because the authors – some of the same people that McKenzie and Silverman put on a pedestal in this book – did not reveal anything about market makers you couldn’t already get from a subscription of The Block Pro or Messari or The Tie Terminal. In other words, the investigation was standard market research wrapped in a cloak-and-dagger marketing foil.

On p. 152 they write:

The notoriously shady stablecoin company had printed $36.7 billion for Alameda. We’re supposed to believe Alameda gave over $36 billion to buy thirty-six billion Tether? Where would Alameda have gotten $36 billion from? According to public reporting, they had raised a few billion from VC firms and others, but nothing like what Protos found. If Alameda didn’t give Tether the full amount up front, how did the arrangement work?

These are good questions, none of which are answered anywhere.69 The next edition should explore how this arrangement worked.

The line chart (above) visualizes Alameda’s balance on FTX for the duration of 2022.70 It is negative for all but one day. A second edition should include these types of charts to help readers understand the magnitude of loses.

On p. 152 they write:

The ties between Tether and FTX/Alameda went even deeper. Daniel Friedberg was the former general counsel of FTX, and now its chief regulatory officer. He once worked alongside Stuart Hoegner, the general counsel of Tether, at Excapsa. Recall that Excapsa was the holding company of Ultimate Bet, the online poker site that had a secret “god mode” where insiders could see other players’ cards. So FTX/Alameda’s top lawyer worked with Tether’s top lawyer at the parent company of the card cheating website. Huh.

This is guilt by association and is lazy. I have no affinity for Stuart Hoegner, have even publicly stated so. I’m not going to carry water for Friedberg, but it is disingenuous to slam him without at least referencing his side of the drama.

On p. 152 they write:

Sam posed for a picture with CFTC Commissioner Caroline Pham and was a regular at CFTC offices.

What is the context for that photo? The authors do not provide a reference or link. Scroll up to page 144.

On p. 153 they write:

But banks in the Caribbean were often more willing to engage. And whether coincidentally or not, Tether’s bank happened to be nearby. Deltec Bank, the one run by the cocreator of the Inspector Gadget cartoon series Jean Chalopin, was based in Nassau. Chalopin boasted of assisting the Bahamian government in drafting the DARE Act.

This is an interesting point. I had not heard the part about Chalopin boasting before. Is there a reference or a citation I can learn more about this? Not in the back section unfortunately.

Also, when the authors say “banks in the Caribbean were often more willing to engage” how much easier is it to open an account in an Caribbean bank? Are there some stats to quanitfy this engagement level?

On p. 154 they write:

Still, I was glad he was there, as we quickly realized the room I had rented was too small to fit much more than the five of us in addition to the two cameras. But that also gave me an idea.

It’s never really addressed in the book but: why did the authors need to video tape every interview? There is no separate web page for Easy Money where readers are directed to for additional content, like video interviews. In fact, to the chagrin of SEO, there are at least two films with the same name (released in 1983 and 2010). Did the authors think it adds more weight or seriousness to the F2F interview? Also, as mentioned earlier, last year Alex Gladstein asked the authors to release the video interview of SBF, which they declined.

On p. 156 they write:

I pointed out that Sam himself had publicly stated that most cryptos were in fact securities. He tried to duck it, saying he hadn’t done a “thorough review of tokens 10,000 to 20,000.” This was a common talking point from crypto evangelists; they all knew (or should have known) the bottom 10,000 coins were the functional equivalent of penny stocks, with ownership of the coins heavily concentrated in the hands of a few whales who could manipulate the market for them. Nonetheless, Sam conceded that “the majority are maybe securities by count.”

Pigs flew past my window: I actually agree with SBF on his point. In the U.S., prosecutors conduct an investigation based on the facts-and-circumstances of a coin or token. At a minimum the authors should include a citation or quote from a U.S.-trained securities attorney, which SBF is not. It is unclear why the authors do not cite any attorney in this chapter when there are more than a handful of U.S. trained and practicing attorneys who likely agree with the authors position on the matter.

On p. 157 they write:

Sam pointed out that Bitcoin can only process 5–7 transactions per second. By his own admission, Bitcoin was “four orders of magnitude” away from accomplishing this. It was never going to happen. Finally we agreed on something! But then Sam pivoted. He argued that other blockchains were faster.

Why set up a strawman for the readers? This is not a secret. Historically it was Mike Hearn, the Bitcoin Core developer, who initially came up with that calculation. Subsequently, Hearn wanted to conduct a hard fork to increase the Bitcoin block size so that there could be more transaction throughput. Disagreement with other developers led to the famous blocksize “civil war” in 2015-2017.

And twice in two pages: SBF is right, there are other blockchains on this planet, some that are significantly faster than Bitcoin.

On p. 159 they write:

The Solana blockchain suffered numerous outages since its launch in 2020, with fourteen in 2022 alone. It also had an unfortunate tendency to be hacked, including a hack that would occur just weeks after our interview that cost users at least $5 million.

This is untrue. While there have been outages, as of this writing, the Solana blockchain itself has never been hacked. Since they did not provide a citation, a quick googling found that several thousand wallets were indeed compromised. But conflating wallets with the blockchain hurts their credibility.

On p. 159 they write:

I asked Sam what percentage of crypto was being used for payments. He agreed the “majority of people today are not using it as a payment method” but instead as a “financial asset.” He guessed “$4 billion” of crypto was being used as payments. Crypto’s market cap was roughly $1 trillion on July 20, 2022. Four billion would represent 0.4 percent of that number. Seemed pretty insignificant to me, but then again, could you even trust that Sam’s number—or the market cap number—was real? That gave me an idea.

That estimate could be correct. But of all the things to drill into with the SBF, why burn any oil on this? Central banks and universities researchers regularly publish surveys on the motivations of coin ownership.

For instance, in the process of writing this review:

Source: Twitter

But Tim, this survey was published after the book was done. Yes, but there are similar surveys published each year by different central banks, this wasn’t the first.71

Or more to the point, if the authors wanted to improve their argument, at a minimum they should have sliced some data: asked some analytics providers for flows into payment providers.

For example, in January 2015 I published a paper that included this line chart (below):

Source: Slicing Data

The dataset above came from the WalletExplorer dataset. Because BitPay reuses addresses, it is a visual of what BitPay has received over a two year time frame (2013-2015). It clearly shows that at the time, retail activity was not seeing huge growth that certain promoters claimed.

On p. 160 they write:

Sam expressed cautious optimism that eventually customers in Celsius and Voyager would get some of their money back. I was skeptical but I wasn’t there to argue bankruptcy law.

Fair point, but why argue about securities laws when he isn’t a lawyer either?

On p. 160 they write:

Eventually, Sam got back to the original question. He estimated that there were $100 billion of stablecoins left and that they were “roughly backed” 1:1. (No, I don’t know what “roughly backed” means either.)

Since he is actively responding to your DMs, why didn’t you ask him a follow-up question later?

On p. 161 they write:

“You could say the same of stocks,” Sam said. I pointed out I can go in and out of stocks in seconds via an app on my phone.

This is not particularly good argument because it implies to readers that McKenzie is talking about market orders, which over the past decade are not necessarily good for retail on any type of trading platform. This connects with payment-for-order-flow (PFOF), a controversial business practice implemented by Robinhood (and other fintechs) with its high-frequency trading partners such as Citadel. Robinhood earns the majority of its revenue from PFOF which isn’t necessarily good for the users. Is this the app that McKenzie is referring to?

On p. 161 they write:

We moved on to stablecoins. SEC Chair Gary Gensler called stablecoins the “poker chips at the casino,” I said. Tether was the biggest stablecoin in terms of trading volume by a country mile. “Your company Alameda is one of Tether’s biggest clients.” “Alameda does create and redeem Tether. We’re one of the larger ones doing so.”“Okay, so there was an article from Protos, the crypto publication, from last year that said that Alameda and Cumberland, another trading firm, received $60 billion of USDT (Tether) over the time period they analyzed, which is equal to 55 percent of all outbound volume ever.” “Yep.” “Does that sound right to you?” “Sounds ballpark correct.”

The insinuations and innuendo are getting a bit long in the tooth at this point. The authors should either introduce the “smoking gun” or try a different angle. Because even in the current SBF court case (jury just convicted as of this writing), Tether LTD does not seem to play a major role in the collapse of FTX.

Maybe Tether (USDT) is a key enabler and systemically important infrastructure, I would agree with that. I think there is sufficient on-chain data to show it is a key lubricant to trading in several ecosystems (via Mastercoin, ERC-20, and TRC-20). But readers are not even presented charts or stats that illustrate these points.

On p. 167 they write:

Most people who had ever purchased crypto entered the market in 2020 and 2021, and most of those people had lost money. Sam argued that the people who invested before then had made money, which didn’t refute my point.

This could be true but the authors do not provide any reference or citation. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

On p. 168 they write:

Sure, a minority of people who got in early did well. He tried to pivot away from a discussion of price and toward an “ultimate use case.” I was fine with that. One of my biggest problems with crypto was that it didn’t actually do anything anything productive. To that end, I repeated my ask from earlier: Give me one use case for crypto.

Anyone asked this question by the authors should be aware the authors are a priori anti-blockchain. Throughout this book they repeatedly use the same evidence-free approach that Diehl et al., used. McKenzie literally states his view in the paragraph.

So it is hard to have a good faith discussion when they do not seem to recognize the existence of RWAs.72 Also, SBF should have had a better answer considering all of the pitches he had heard.

On p. 169 they write:

In a roundabout way, Sam had gotten to the heart of the matter. While getting a wire transfer can be a major pain in the ass, and I agreed we could improve our payments system and our broader financial system, one of the reasons a wire transfer is cumbersome is that it runs through our banking system, which has safeguards in place: anti–money laundering laws, know-your-customer laws, the ability to protect against fraud. These regulations exist for a reason. We can and should argue over how to improve our system and amend those regulations when necessary, but claiming crypto was better simply because it was “cleaner” and moved faster was either disingenuous or deeply ignorant. Sure, it moved fast, but at enormous cost. Crypto opened the door to facilitating all sorts of criminal activity, and “trusting the code” often meant having to live with hacks, scams, and fraud as a cost of doing business. Plus, the irreversibility of the blockchain meant you couldn’t correct an honest mistake. You lose money? DYOR, man.

This strawman is similar to the type found in Diehl et. al., book. Not every cryptocurrency or blockchain project is attempting to create a bank, or a payment system, or “money.” The next edition needs to be more specific about which projects the authors are referring to here. Or what existing infrastructure they are comparing the strawman with.

For instance, how does McKenzie propose “we could improve our payments system”? Does a wire transfer take three days to move because of KYC and AML processes? FedNow flipped on a couple of months ago, it introduced another real-time payments (RTP) system in the U.S.

Does FedNow cut through the 3-day wire by removing or ignoring regulations? No. The poorly named “The Clearing House”, which operates the other RTP, must be super fast because it bypasses these KYC and AML processes, right?73 No.

The authors inexplicably defend the status quo – including slow incumbent intermediaries – without explaining why it takes a specific unit of time for funds to transfer. Saying that “crypto moved fast but opened the door to all sorts of criminal activity” is sensationalistic writing and not serious investigative reporting.

On p. 170 they write:

I was searching for some semblance of heartfelt contrition on his part, some gesture of sympathy toward the naive crypto-buying masses, but mostly I came up empty. Sam reiterated a generic need for federal oversight. I expressed a hope that, at a minimum, we skeptics could find common ground with industry players like him and work toward eliminating the myriad scams and pervasive fraud in crypto. Sam nodded, his head hanging low.

What are skeptics? Does McKenzie speak on their behalf? Is there a card membership form?

On p. 171 they write:

We said our perfunctory thank-yous. But Sam kept talking. “And always if you guys have any thoughts or questions about the ecosystem. Feel free. And Tether, there’s a lot more I could say off-the-record.” (Off-the-record is by mutual agreement; we never agreed to it.) “Frankly, they’re emotional guys. And I don’t want to piss them off. Weird fucking dudes. Like really fucking weird. They’re honestly not scammers, but they are difficult people. And I think the FT article on Giancarlo is an amazing article . . .”

This is the third time the authors have shown a lack of compunction towards off-the-record conversations. It all sounds like “gotcha” journalism, not investigative journalism. The ends do not justify the means. Worse for the authors, the hot mic does not reveal anything new.

It also reminds me of that same tweet from Matthew Green:

Source: Tweet

On p. 172 they write:

Jacob asked if USDD, a new stablecoin, could be an eventual replacement for Tether. Recently Alameda had announced a financial partnership with Justin Sun, the entrepreneur behind USDD. Sam responded as if he had never heard of USDD. “USD what?” “USDD.” “Which is DD?” “The new Justin Sun algorithmic stablecoin.” “No, no. I don’t know where on the scale from DAI (another algorithmic stablecoin) to LUNA it is, but I think it might be on the bad end of that spectrum.”

What is an algorithmic stablecoin? Still no definition or description or categories. Also, like most of Justin Sun’s projects, USDD did not take off. For example, a year ago its “marketcap” was about 10% higher than it is today.74 Speaking of which, the paragraphs on Sun were pretty solid, a second edition could mention the SEC lawsuit announced in March 2023.

On p. 176 they write:

But if there was one thing that everyone could agree on, it was that Sam Bankman-Fried had it all figured out. Even among the most die-hard crypto skeptics, it was broadly assumed that Sam was making money hand over fist, and whatever shenanigans he might be up to, he would most likely get away with it.

That’s why the victory laps – by anyone – after the demise of FTX, make no sense. As Faux and these authors pointed out, no one knew besides 4-5 people.75

On p. 177 they write:

For example, “every year there was a 25 percent chance that [Terra] was going to crash to less than 50 percent.” Where did that number come from? Interviewing Sam was like punching against air. If this was the king of crypto, was it a kingdom made of sand?

That’s a good question. The next edition should try to track down the answer.

All-in-all this chapter does not provide any crazy revelations. Based on the questions in the SBF interview, the authors revealed they too had no idea what was happening between Alameda and FTX. For instance, if the authors knew what the inner circle knew, then one of the questions that would have been asked is: is Alameda exempt from liquidations on FTX? Instead it was a lot of innuendo around Tether LTD which as of this writing, does not appear to been a major culprit in the downfall of FTX.

Lastly, based on theirs actions, it appears the authors are willing to not only use the content of a hot mic, but also publish content that the interviewer said was off-the-record. The ends justify the means? In this case, the hot mic didn’t reveal anything interesting, so why include it?

Chapter 10: Who’s In Charge Here?

A future version of this chapter has the potential to be very interesting at it could discuss how the coin lobbying world works. Instead, the current chapter is pretty shallow. While one piece of specific legislation is mentioned, readers are not informed of who’s-who in the coin lobbying world, or what spin doctoring they have achieved.

On p. 179 they write:

But to skeptics, and to people unlucky enough to have invested more than they could afford to, the implosion represented something more severe. Crypto was on life support. A market worth $3 trillion in November of 2021 had been reduced to less than $1 trillion—and even that number seemed aspirational at best. As some bankrupt crypto companies stopped allowing customer withdrawals, it was hard to know how much real money was left to back the fake stuff. When I spoke to him in March, Alex Mashinsky of Celsius had estimated that number at less than 15 percent—and that guy was allegedly running a Ponzi scheme that soon went bankrupt. He might have been exaggerating; it was probably even less.

What is a skeptic? The authors still have not provided a concrete definition. Also, the authors state “it was probably even less.” How much less? They never provide a ball park estimate of what they think the “real money” inside the coin world is.

On p. 179 they write:

Michael Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, and the guy who encouraged people to mortgage their houses to buy Bitcoin, resigned his position in August.

Inexplicably the authors missed a key event. Michael Saylor resigned on August 2, 2022. On August 31, the Attorney General for DC announced it was suing Saylor for evading more than $25 million in taxes. Surely readers would find that interesting?76

On p. 180 they write:

What was clear was just how widely the crypto virus had infected the general public. Most Americans who bought into crypto did so in 2020 and 2021, when the market was at its peak, having been lured by promises of mind-boggling profits in the crooked casinos. That same majority, on average, lost money as the price of virtually all of these cryptocurrencies had crashed, most by 70 percent or more from their all-time highs.

They could be right but there are no references or citations in the back. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

On p. 181 they write:

How in the world was this massive speculative bubble in an industry rife with fraud—and built upon an incredibly shaky economic foundation—allowed to metastasize to such a degree?

Because in part, actual whistleblowers were ignored? And the prosecutors left the government and joined the counsel for the defense? There is a world worth looking into circa 2017-2019 that the authors missed.

On p. 181 they wrote:

In the midst of all this, crypto lobbying expenditures were at an all-time high, and politicians from both parties were touting pro-industry legislation.

What is an estimate for how much these expenditures were in the U.S.? How much was spent lobbying in other developed countries?

One notable example that comes to mind was an intense effort to lobby specific senators, such as Kyrsten Sinema, during the debate around the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021:

Source: Twitter

A future edition should include specific examples.

On p. 182 they write:

The stateless, peer-to-peer currency that would avoid all intermediaries and democratize and decentralize the future of money now needed to kiss Washington’s ass in the present and throw some of the real stuff around. It was either that, or watch their industry go bye-bye.

This is a strawman, not every public blockchain project is attempting to build “the future of money.” But with the second sentence, I fully agree.

Here are a couple times I lampooned the phenomenon specifically with Bitcoin:

Source: Twitter
Source: Twitter

On p. 182 they write:

Ironically, even Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and The Big Short, was in thrall with the boy wonder, according to reporter Zeke Faux of Bloomberg.

Oh a trifecta of streams almost crossed! Three books published within four months of one another on the same topic.

On p. 184 they write:

Toomey spun his ownership of Bitcoin and the potential conflict of interest as a source of important “expertise” when deciding on regulatory policy. He argued that Washington needed to offer “respect for consumers” to make their own investment choices, despite the fact that the very lack of disclosures inherent in cryptos not being classified as securities kept investors in the dark as to how they might be getting swindled.

I partly agree with the authors view point here. But – and to be clear I am not a lawyer – I do not think the “lack of disclosures inherent in cryptos” is why some might not be classified as securities. The entire facts-and-circumstances exercise that a U.S. prosecutor conducts involves several prongs that the authors mention a couple of times. Disclosures – or lackthereof – is tangential.

On p. 184 they write:

A representative example was Brian Brooks, who was chief legal officer of exchange Coinbase before he became Acting Comptroller of the Currency, only to leave that governmental position to become the head of Binance’s US division. He lasted all of three months at that job, before resigning due to “differences over strategic direction.”

It is worse than that. Brooks was never confirmed by the Senate, he served as an Acting Comptroller and days before leaving he unilaterally published guidance – which he did not request public comments on – that has since been partially rescinded. His next gig was as the CEO of Bitfury, a notorious mining company whose machines at one point consumed 10% of the electricity in the Republic of Georgia.

On p. 186 they write:

Unfortunately, like the majority of crypto investors, most people of color entered the market near its peak in the bull run of 2020/2021 and were now among the ones left holding the bag.

This could be true but what is their source? There is no reference in the back either. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

On p. 186 they write:

Many of these issues were known to them, in some form, even if they hadn’t been publicly acknowledged, much less acted upon.

It could be worth the authors time for them to investigate which non-lobbyists spoke to policy makers and regulators in the 2017-2019 time frame. I know I was not the only one.

On p. 187 they write:

The United States of America is unique in the way it separates its regulation of securities from its regulation of commodities. It’s basically a historical fluke.

Actually if the authors had looked into it, they would have discovered it is nearly all political. There have been multiple attempts to merge the SEC and CFTC, including shortly after the 2008 Financial Crisis. The most recent attempts always hit the same road blocks: powerful lobbying forces from the banking industry and their interlocutors: the members of the House and Senate Banking Committees and the House Agriculture Committee. For instance, in 2012 a bill was introduced in the House to merge the two and in 2017 the Treasury department – then led by Mnuchin – weighed in on a proposed merger.

On p. 190 they write:

For many coiners, it was taken as good news, a way of legitimizing the first cryptocurrency by enshrining it under the existing regulatory regime.

What is a coiner?

On p. 190 they write:

There was no fine or criminal prosecution. CFTC Commissioner Wetjen, in the grand revolving door tradition, later entered the crypto industry. In 2021, FTX US hired Wetjen to be its head of policy and regulatory strategy—the mirror to his former governmental position. To recap, the first derivatives exchange in crypto to be classified as such under American law was later found to have engaged in illegal activity, got off the hook, and then later another exchange hired the regulator who oversaw that decision to help guide their maneuverings on Capitol Hill. You can’t make this stuff up.

In the next edition the authors should include the part mentioned above on page 144 that Wetjen did not register as a lobbyist (like he was supposed to) and was also an advisor to Coin Center, another coin lobbying organization. To be fair, the revolving door crosses both ways: probably worth mentioning that after leaving the CFTC, Wetjen joined the DTCC as head of public policy and later the Miami International Holdings which is a holding company that owns several exchanges.

On p. 190 they write:

But the reality is that Bitcoin’s ownership is actually extraordinarily centralized, concentrated in a tiny group of whales and mining pools. In fact, just two mining pools account for 51 percent of its global hash rate, meaning just two large groups control the majority of new Bitcoin created.

This is not a good argument, as it lacks two things: (1) references and (2) nuance. Without references it can be dismissed out of hand as just another opinion; there are some ways to verify the claims but why should I keep doing their homework for them?

In terms of nuance: while mining pools have become important for proof-of-work chains, it takes two to tango. I agree with the thrust of the point, I have made it myself about GHash voluntarily “self-limiting” in 2014. But unlike GHash (which provided a hosted mining service too), the largest pools do not usually run the hashing equipment, those are typically operated by 3rd parties (such as Riot who the authors visited). Thus, it is not technically sound to say that two mining pools control the majority of the new Bitcoin created, because they need the hashing equipment (that generates the proofs-of-work) in order to build a correct block.

On p. 190 they write:

Whoever Satoshi Nakamoto is, it’s a real person or real people. Once again, code does not fall from the sky. One day we may well find out who started this whole nonsense. If so, break out the popcorn, law nerds.

It’s not clear from the rest of the chapter what the authors are implying. Do they mean Nakamoto would be liable for something and therefore sued or charged by a government? If so, why not just say that?

In fact, while I doubt she agrees with the authors modus operandi, Angela Walch authored a paper that they might want to cite in the next edition: In Code(rs) We Trust: Software Developers as Fiduciaries in Public Blockchains. 77

On p. 190 they write:

One meeting included one of Pham’s former colleagues who had gone over to the crypto industry and now was publicly lobbying her.

Who? Name names next time.

On p. 191 they write:

That’s not to overlook the efforts of SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce, whose enthusiasm for the industry is legendary.

The authors missed the opportunity to use the “subprime mom” and “subprime dad” analogy from Lee Reiners:

Source: Twitter

Curiously, while the authors namecheck Lee Reiners in the Acknowledgments, they misspell his name and worse, they don’t actually cite any of his work. Notably, Reiners was the first person to write a long form discussion on the revolving door as it relates to the coin world. In fact, five years ago he wrote a widely circulated article entitled: The Revolving Door Comes to Cryptocurrency. It is a strange omission, credit where credit is due.

On p. 194 they write:

“There really is no legitimate side to crypto,” said Stark. To him, crypto had simply repackaged the traditional get-rich-quick scheme in a shiny, fraudulent wrapper.

While Stark might be correct, what evidence did he provide? If it is asserted without evidence it can be dismissed without evidence.

On p. 195 they write:

“For me it’s all so obvious,” said Stark. “When you ask anybody, ‘Give me one legitimate use for crypto. Give me one thing you can use crypto for?’ I just don’t see it, and nobody can ever tell me anything.”

Why is Stark the final arbiter for what is and is not a legitimate use for crypto? Who died and made him king? If you have already predetermined there are no legitimate use cases, what can someone tell you?

For instance, in the process of writing this review J.P. Morgan announced its Tokenized Collateral Network. They weren’t the first organization to deploy a new chain with “enterprise” customers.

In any case, the authors need to be more consistent in the next edition: are they a priori handwaving all blockchain-related projects out of hand? Or are they going to conduct market research and lots of interviews to drill into say, 100 dapps (categories) from DeFi Llama? Cannot simultaneously be evidence-based and use an a priori cudgel.

On p. 195 they write:

What I found most refreshing about Stark was his concern for people who got caught up in crypto. “You can blame the victim if you want. But the reality is, it’s really not the victim’s fault. They’re being taken in by really sophisticated hustlers.”

What victims has Stark helped? Which hustlers did he bring to justice?

On p. 195 they write:

It was up to critics like Stark—who had no skin in the game, who didn’t make money off of his crypto criticism—to put forward that argument.

What are critics? Are they the same as skeptics?

How do the authors know Stark hasn’t made any money off of his notoriety? Is that really the litmus test? Are the only people worth talking to those who write long LinkedIn posts? If the authors are willing to entertain the idea that “critics” and “skeptics” come in all shapes and sizes, they’d find that there are a ton of industry folks who are quite openly critical and probably even agree with some of the authors views. There is no reason to be insular or have some kind of purity test on these topics.7879

On p. 197 they write:

In combating a false economic narrative, it is crucial to put forth an alternate true one, to reveal the hucksters and con men for who they really are. But Kardashian and her fellow celebs were, at least for the most part, not those fraudsters. They were just a tool, a megaphone used to spread the lies of crypto more effectively.

I agree with this view, whole heartily. But in the next edition could the authors use more precise language? For instance, Kim Kardashian was sued by the SEC and fined $1.26 million in penalties for failing to disclose she had been paid to advertise EthereumMax (EMAX). It was unlawfully touting, not fraud that she was charged with. This is sloppy polemics just like the Diehl et al., book.

Overall this chapter was a wasted opportunity: the authors could have dug into specific coin lobbying organizations, an idea I encouraged them to do. Instead readers are not informed of who’s-who in the coin lobbying world and are twice referred to a Tweet that is never provided (which Pham deleted but others saved). While we are given an overview of specific piece of legislation, the DCCPA, we aren’t informed that an industry insider – Gabriel Shapiro, a lawyer – leaked a draft that put SBF on damage containment mode and contributed to ending its legislative hopes.

As a consequence, readers are not informed of who’s actually in charge here.

Chapter 11: Unbankrupt Yourself

This is one of the better chapters, largely because it involves a bit of first-hand reporting. We learn about Dr. James Block (aka DirtyBubbleMedia) who used Etherscan to identify suspicious transactions. Yet one oversight was not including Maya Zehavi anywhere in the discussion of Celsius. She is an Israeli-based blockchain-focused entrepreneur who was the first person to publicly sound the alarm on Celsius and Hogeg in particular. She should be interviewed in the next edition.

There is not much to nitpick in this chapter. For instance on p. 206 they write:

At the time, before many industry players turned on one another, there was a collective omertà against bad-mouthing competitors.

Omertà is a great word and I want to agree with the authors here. But tribalism is still quite common irrespective of market conditions, especially the uno coin maximalism variety. Heck, I got yelled at last year for talking about the etymology of “nocoiner” tribalism. Talk about social media wasting your time!

On p. 207 they write:

Soon, James discovered that Chain.com, a murky startup with a lot of crypto but seemingly only one employee, may have been behind it. James and Jacob had been looking into Chain, and James wrote a piece about the CEO’s extravagant purchases of multimillion-dollar NFTs. It turned out that after James published his Dirty Bubble Media article about Chain, someone had created similar, competing articles that, while containing much of the same content, painted Chain in a more positive light.

I previously mentioned this to Jacob Silverman: Chain.com today is not the same entity (or people) that ran Chain.com ten years ago. For the bulk of the 2010s, Chain.com attempted to play its hand in the “enterprise” blockchain world and eventually was acquired by Stellar. Someone else bought the domain name a couple years ago. But that’s not clear from the the language in the passage above. For example, is Adam Ludwin still involved? Seems unlikely.

On p. 209 they write:

Jacob confronted Chain’s CEO via Telegram. He denied ever having heard of Mevrex or hiring them. Eventually, after a fair amount of badgering and pleading with communications people at the respective companies, James’s Twitter and Substack accounts were restored.

What did Jacob say? What did James say?

On p. 210 they write:

They also treated their critics—some of them simply well-meaning customers who wanted to know how their assets were being handled—with utter derision.

This is a good point. One notable example was Mashinsky responding to Mike Dudas.

Source: Twitter

On p. 210 they write:

Every time Mashinsky accused his evil critics of spreading FUD, I assumed that DBM was probably on the right track. The proof was often in the block-chain data, waiting to be interpreted.

Why is there a hyphen in blockchain?

The discussion on KeyFi’s revelations on p. 211 was good, seems like everyone was happy when NGU but when it doesn’t, they spill the beans on social media.

On p. 214 they write:

As for James Block, who eventually revealed his name after journalists began peppering him with requests for tips and commentary, he was offered a job by a hedge fund shorting crypto. He decided to stick to medicine.

Out of curiosity was the hedge fund Hindenburg Research? The same ones who announced a $1 million bounty on Tether that as of this writing no one has claimed? Or was it Citron Research, the fund that announced it was shorting Ethereum and then days later deleted their thread?

I’ve often wanted to short a variety of coins and tokens but the counterparty risk was one of the main reasons I haven’t.80 Perhaps this is part of the reason why Perpetuals are popular?81

On p. 216 they write:

James sounded the alarm on Celsius, but few wanted to listen.

I think James Block did a great job highlighting numerous red flag as Celsius. And there were others, including Maya Zehavi, who publicly questioned Celsius’s model. Nearly two years ago Protos even highlighted one of Zehavi’s tweets.

And one on Hogeg that could be in the book:

Source: Twitter

Zehavi has at least a dozen Hogeg-related tweets pre-2020. A second edition should give her a well deserved podium.

What would have made this chapter in particular stand out is if it included some diagrams showing the flow of funds that James Block and others identified. The prose was decent too. Definitely seems like the chapter with the fewest errors or mistakes.

Chapter 12: Chapter 11

Source: Kindle

There was a minor technical glitch in the Kindle version, it is missing the subtitle.

Overall this chapter is a bit dry in large part because it relies almost entirely on second-hand reporting. They do have a few new original quotes from SBF but none of those seemed particularly incriminating.

The authors also missed a couple of comparisons when it comes to evaluating intermediaries.

For instance, on p. 217 they write:

Accounts on FTX US were of course not FDIC-insured, as FTX US is not a licensed US bank but rather a money services business, which doesn’t offer customers the same protections.

This is a good point. A similar (misleading) claim was made by Robinhood five years ago. In December 2018 the CEO publicly claimed that user deposits in new checking accounts were insured by the SIPC only to have to walk back the claims after the head of the SIPC (and others) pointing out that this was not technically true.

On p. 217 they write:

Like so many interactions in crypto, it was a messy and unsatisfying affair. However, it did reinforce one thing: Sam was desperate to stage-manage his public image. The dark arts of PR were part of any actor’s Hollywood education, and Sam clearly needed more lessons.

What are the dark arts of PR? Is McKenzie saying he too was involved in the “dark arts of PR”?

On p. 219 they write:

Over Twitter DM, Sam spoke darkly to me of a coming conflict dividing the industry. Binance was pushing its customers to convert their stablecoins into BUSD, Binance’s own dollar-pegged token. “It’s the beginnings of the second great stablecoin war,” he messaged me on September 5. “All the stables are gearing up for it. Taking this as a declaration of war.”

This is interesting. For illustrative purposes a timeline could be helpful to readers to understand when the first, second, third, etc. “stablecoin wars” supposedly took place. Also, when SBF said “all the stables are gearing up for it” did he provide any evidence for this? For instance, was TUSD or Dai backers involved?

On p. 220 they write:

That financial perpetual motion machine looked a lot like the Celsius “flywheel” concept that James had previously investigated, and that Professor Hilary Allen had warned about in February of that year.

It bears repeating: Celsius was a centralized lender. Connecting that with what Allen wrote about (“DeFi”) last year is disingenuous.

In contrast, here’s what I had to say in June 2022:

There’s not need to cite me, but if you are going to critique the coin world, at least try to accurately describe what is and is not centralized.

On p. 220 they write:

According to bankruptcy filings, FTX/Alameda lost $3.7 billion before 2022. Quite impressive to lose that much in a bull market!

This is a good point.

On p. 227 they write:

As last month’s scammers came in from the cold to yuk it up on social media, the post-SBF positioning became frantic—who was to blame, who supported him, who failed to warn the public. Even us crypto skeptics got our turn in the dock—apparently our frequently repeated claims that the entire industry was built on bad economics, bad incentives, and outright fraud wasn’t enough.

What is a “crypto skeptic”? Do the authors speak on all of their behalf?

On p. 228 they write:

Some claimed to have held back for fear of angering a powerful industry player. Bitcoin maximalists blamed Sam for all their problems, rightfully pointing out SBF’s cozy relationship with mainstream media publications, regulators, and lawmakers (some of which he gave large sums of money). But then, as maxis are wont to do, they wandered off into wackadoodle land, painting conspiracy theories that Sam was working with Biden to send money to Ukraine via crypto.

What are Bitcoin maximalists? What are maxis? I have seen it but in the next edition can the authors provide a reference for the conspiracy theory?

On p. 229 they write:

Rep. Emmer was hopeful that further discussions might let them proceed with legislation that would allow for a “light touch” when it came to crypto regulation. The Blockchain Eight encapsulated so much of what was wrong when it came to Washington’s cozy ties to the industry. Evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, five of the eight members received campaign donations from FTX employees.

I mostly agree with this. But I think there is arguably an even more damning example: a couple of the “Blockchain Eight” attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. To use blockchain parlance, those would be Byzantine actors.

On p. 230 they write:

Legitimate technology companies like Microsoft belatedly summoned the bravery to admit that actually, when you really think about it, blockchain sorta sucked. It had no substantive use case. All the money spent to explore how maybe crypto might actually do something in the future had been wasted. Numerous other blockchain “pilot projects” quietly folded, including one by the Australian Securities Exchange.

There is a kernel of truth in this paragraph. For instance, in May, ASX said it would not use a blockchain for its CHESS-replacement endeavor (which was spearhead by Digital Asset). And there have been quite a few pilots and experiments that tried and failed to gain product-market fit or infrastructure-market fit. I’ve written about several of these cases (including the Chain.com of the 2010s).

But the rest of it is just polemical in the same vein as Diehl et. al. When did Microsoft belatedly say “blockchain sorta sucked”? As of this writing, their Azure department has an entire Web3 team still actively involved in the blockchain world.

But let’s take the authors unreferenced claim at face value, that there is no substantiative use case discovered by Microsoft or other “legitimate technology companies.” So is that the end of the blockchain story?

Putting aside for the moment that the authors have shown an affinity for incumbents, why should readers be led to believe those are the only participants allowed to have opinions on the matter? One of the key weaknesses of this chapter, and book, in general is that the authors attempt to have it both ways: they sometimes attempt to use evidence when it helps their argument but then resort to an a priori cudgel in other instances. The next edition needs to have consistency (e.g., remove the a priori arguments).

A better argument would have been to reach out to the “head of blockchain” at Microsoft (currently Yorke Rhodes) and do some first hand reporting about what that organization has done and why they apparently think “blockchain sorta sucks.” Maybe it does! But let’s at least be methodical about dressing it down.

On p. 233 they write:

The chairman of FBH was none other than Jean Chalopin, the chairman of Deltec Bank, whose most infamous client was Tether. As the New York Times noted, “Farmington’s deposits had been steady at about $10 million for a decade. But in the third quarter this year [2022], the bank’s deposits jumped nearly 600 percent to $84 million.” The bank was renamed Moonstone. Its digital director was Janvier Chalopin, son of Jean.

So what exactly is the crime? That there is nepotism at a bank called FBH (Moonstone)? Should sons or daughters be able to run banks their parents previously ran? If not, should the Rockefeller and Morgan families be looking over their shoulders? Insinuation and innuendo is all the authors have here?

On p. 235 they write:

On December 16, just over one week after releasing its report on Binance’s holdings, Mazars announced—via Binance—that it was exiting the business of auditing crypto companies “due to concerns regarding the way these reports are understood by the public.” The company deleted its website with its reports on Binance and other crypto firms.

Oof, that’s a good point. I think one of my favorite audit-related stories was shortly after Bitfinex was hacked (the 2nd time) Michael Perklin was brought in to conduct an audit. But then he quietly left and joined Shapeshift. No audit was made available to the public.82

On p. 237 they write:

The Trump NFT collection—45,000 silly cartoonish portraits of the former prez looking cool and badass—sold out in a day at ninety-nine dollars apiece, likely netting him millions.

“Likely”? Perhaps Donald Trump lied in his filings, but according to a CoinDesk story in April 2023, he earned between $500,001-$1 million on NFT sales. Is that a lot or a little?

On p. 237 they write:

That system eventually became an engine of economic inequality and political alienation. Crypto was right about that. But their solution—to create a private, trustless financial system based on code, unstable digital assets, and a new class of intermediaries—fell apart under its own contradictions, including rampant opportunities for fraud. Crypto had indeed produced something no one could trust, and Sam Bankman-Fried, their knockoff J. P. Morgan, would be remembered as one of its architects.

This is not a strong argument. For example, what happens if incumbents end up using blockchains in the future? Are intermediaries okay so as long as they are incumbents?

It’s also unclear why the authors keep using a false dichotomy. Investigative journalists don’t have to carry water for anyone. And in this instance, it is perfectly fine to critique both the cryptocurrency world and traditional finance.83

This could have been a good chapter. For example, they did do a decent job concisely chronicling some of the drama (and beef) between Binance and FTX. But the tone of it all feels like self-promotional “told ya so” which is strange because neither author was actively investigating this space until late 2021, after the alleged crimes began at the various centralized intermediaries. A future edition could fold this together with the outcome of the current SBF criminal case.

Chapter 13: Preacher’s Father

This chapter probably should have come much earlier because it told a really interesting, sad story that the authors did some first-hand reporting on. The problem is that its somber tone is polar opposite of the stoner tone of the first few chapters. While the authors were quite glib about discussing McKenzie’s pot smoking/edible habit, at the end of the book the readers get some whiplash with McKenzie sitting in church listening to a sermon from a son of a fraud victim. Although to be fair, I’m not religious so maybe I’m being overly sensitive relative to other readers.

A future edition could probably keep the entire chapter intact, as it was well-written and involved a relatively unknown (alleged) fraudulent operator: Stallion Wings.

With that said, there are a few nit picks.

On p. 246 they write:

They come in wanting to limit their downside, but end up doing the exact opposite—they chase their losses until the money is gone. The vast majority end up losing money because the forex market, just like a casino, has a negative expected value.”

This could be true – and anecdotally I think they could be right – but the authors do not provide any references (in fact, there are only 2 references for the whole chapter). That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Also, as mentioned earlier, some trading platforms in the forex (FX) market also allow high leverage to retail (beyond 125x).

On p. 247 they write:

The volatility of crypto and the high leverage offered to retail customers add to its addictiveness. With wild swings in price, a well-placed crypto bet can be intoxicating, euphoric. Add to that leverage—essentially the ability to borrow large sums to bet with—and the highs get even higher. Recall that Binance offered regular customers 125-to-1 leverage, a ratio unheard of in regulated markets.

A future edition should include the meme of Mark Karpelès, former ex-CEO of Mt. Gox:

Again, there are regulated markets (FX) that allow for that type of ratio, just google: Forex leverage. MultiBank Group immediately pops out, are they legit? Should FX markets be more tightly regulated?

On p. 252 they write:

The original computer code that would become Bitcoin included a poker lobby, a framework from which a virtual poker game could be built. Whoever Satoshi Nakamoto was, in early 2007 they were clearly interested in methods of creating non-confiscatable digital money and how they might be used in online poker.

I agree with this point. And over the years, there are at least five cryptocurrency developers who have publicly said something similar, albeit for different reasons: Matt Corallo, Greg Maxwell, Jeff Garzik, Alex Waters, and Jackson Palmer. There are a number of threads on reddit and Bitcoin Talk that also discuss this scenario.

Their concluding paragraph of the chapter, on p. 255 reads:

Each generation of tech and financial “innovators” promise their own form of utopia, and crypto advocates have had their turn to demonstrate theirs, with all of its attendant failings. Like so many of its Silicon Valley venture capitalist forebears, the crypto industry’s vision is fundamentally a selfish one, divorced from any real sense of how the world works and what is required to bring us together rather than pull us further apart. We cannot eradicate the need for trust, and it is not just wrongheaded, but fundamentally nihilistic to aspire to do so. In the end, we have only ourselves and each other on whom we can rely.

I agree with the first sentence and have written about “Innovation Theater” before. But it is a strawman and inaccurate to portray “the crypto industry vision” as a unified something. Sure there are a variety of camps that sometimes lobby together, but they can’t claim to speak “on behalf of crypto” anymore than the authors can claim to “speak on behalf of critics.” It’s disingenuous and happens throughout the book.

Ironically while the authors attempt to hammer home the importance of “trust,” throughout the book they do not cite sources for a number of their claims. Verify, not trust.

Overall it was an okay chapter, albeit a bit preachy which is sort of fine considering it partially takes place in a church. Perhaps the biggest drawback from this chapter and the book altogether at this point is that the authors do not provide any solutions to prevent fraud or restore those who have been defrauded. That is a missed opportunity.

Epilogue

This epilogue is pretty self-serving, it is basically describes McKenzie as some kind of maverick who tells truth to power. It’s cliché and does not really cover new ground. It makes sense to have an epilogue for this type of book but its tone seems out of touch with the victims described in the previous chapters.

On p. 257 they write:

It was December 14, 2022. I was testifying before the Senate Banking Committee on the collapse of FTX/Alameda and what it meant for crypto, and for the millions of investors who had lost money in the process. On the other end of the panel was Professor Hilary Allen, whose February paper had anticipated crypto’s collapse.

How many millions of investors lost money from the collapse of FTX and Alameda? Did they mean to write customers?

Also, Allen’s paper did not anticipate “crypto’s collapse.” She incorrectly predicted DeFi lending protocols would collapse, and they did not whereas centralized lenders did. Maybe Aave and Compound will eventually face some kind of existential cataclysm, but as of this writing they have not.

On p. 257 they write:

Professor Allen and I had been invited to describe the myriad ways in which crypto’s epic collapse was entirely predictable and why the time for such shenanigans is long past.

I think the readers would be interested to know who invited McKenzie and Allen, just like we would like to know who invited Schulp and O’Leary. There are an endless amount of folks who probably want to testify to a Congressional committee. There are also a number of experts worth adding to the dais that have unimpeachable on this topic, including J. P. Koning and David Andolfatto.

On p. 258 they write:

“Mr. Wang created this back door by inserting a single number into millions of lines of code for the exchange, creating a line of credit from FTX to Alameda, to which customers did not consent,” claimed FTX lawyer Andrew Dietderich. The innovative wonders of “trustlessness” and “decentralization” were on full display.

This is a strawman. FTX and Alameda were centralized intermediaries, by definition neither were decentralized.

On p. 258 they write:

Add a single number to millions of lines of code, and voilà, one can siphon billions in “loans” from accounts held by regular folks oblivious to the swindle. Trust the code, indeed. Dietderich continued: “And we know the size of that line of credit. It was $65 billion.” Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi was $64.8 billion.

Another strawman. The code that ran this part of FTX was written for the intermediary, not a blockchain, and it was managed on github. And again, both Alameda and FTX are centralized intermediaries. Neither was a blockchain nor a smart contract. The authors are insinuating that the code that runs DeFi protocols, such as Aave, have some kind of giant exploitable whole on par with Madoff’s Ponzi or FTX. Maybe they do, but the authors need to be specific next edition. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

On p. 259 they write:

I’d gotten into several public Twitter spats with journalists at The Block who questioned my understanding of the industry they supposedly covered honestly. They were less voluble now.

Is it possible that both are true? That certain coin reporters are shills and that the authors do not have a good understanding of the subject matter?84 For instance, in all but one chapter the authors conflate Bitcoin with “crypto” (broadly) and do not provide definitions or examples of “DeFi.”

On p. 263 they write:

While the speed of the failures was alarming, I couldn’t help but notice that two of the three collapsed banks had significant exposure to the volatile world of cryptocurrency, and the third (SVB) counted as clients the crypto companies Ripple, BlockFi, Circle, Avalanche, and Yuga Labs, among others.

Steven Kelly and Todd Phillips are academics that should be included in a future edition as they discussed these bank failures in real-time.85

Readers may be interested in the Appendix of my March 2023 presentation on the topic as well.

On p. 264 they write:

The other major player left standing was Tether. The stablecoin company, valued at $71 billion as of March 1, 2023, had miraculously survived while the industry around it bit the dust.

As mentioned at the beginning of this review, this is not the correct valuation of the company. The authors mistakenly conflate the aggregate amount of USDT issued with the book value of equity of the issuing company (Tether LTD). Tether LTD is worth a fraction, in the low billions

On p. 264 they write:

Per Bloomberg, “Bitfinex Chief Technology Officer Paolo Ardoino said in an interview he sees enough demand for El Salvador to issue the full $1 billion it is seeking.” Where this demand would come from was anyone’s guess.

I am skeptical of that claim too but the authors are reporters: they are supposed to find out where that demand is. For example, in Chapter 7 I noted that following the book’s publication there was a 180% rally in El Salvadorian government bonds. The following month, in August, Bloomberg ran a headline Bitcoin-Touting Bukele’s Bond Rally Draws JPMorgan, Eaton Vance.

On p. 265 they write:

The issuance of the Bitcoin Bond was itself fraught with consequences for the local population. Wilfredo Claros, the fisherman I visited the previous spring who lived in the hills above La Unión, would soon be forced to abandon his home and his land so the airport servicing Bitcoin City could be built. According to Wilfredo, the government offered him one-tenth the amount he had requested in exchange for his property.

This is probably what the epilogue should have centered around: the victims. The people who got screwed by the SBF and Mashinsky.

A future edition of the Epilogue could focus more on “where are they now” — the stories of the El Salvadorians are interesting!

Acknowledgements

Even at the end, we still do not have a precise definition of a “critic” or “skeptic.”

On p. 269 they write:

To the members of the crypto skeptic community, I want to thank you for your friendship, tutelage, and guidance along the way. Unfortunately, it would be impossible to list all the skeptics who have helped me over the past two years, but I do want to thank a few of them specifically.

Is there a formal organization for supposed “crypto skeptics”? Or the “cryptos skeptic skeptics”?

The authors then list off eight names, none of whom are blockchain technical experts (although one worked for a smart contract-related company, which he removed from his LinkedIn). Did the authors reach out to any of hundreds of engineers that eagerly respond to social media questions on this topic? If not, why eschew actual experts?

Why interview actual experts when you can chat with social media influencers!

On p. 269 they write:

Thank you to Hilary Allen, Lee Reneirs, Rohan Grey, Eswar Prasad, and John Reed Stark for helping me understand American law as it relates to cryptocurrency, as well as the history of financial regulations in the US.

As mentioned in Chapter 10, they misspelled Reiners last name and didn’t cite any of his work. Strangely, even though they name check Rohan Grey, they don’t cite any of his work either, despite having co-authored the STABLE Act and opined on centrally-issued pegged coins on numerous occasions.

Appendix

This is a copy/paste from the SEC website.

Conclusion

In retrospect, seeing as how much it has been used as a marketing term, perhaps I should have trademarked both “crypto critic” and “crypto skeptic” back when I was first called them.

This was not a good book. It should have been, as it had a good publisher and the market clearly needs a book exploring what went wrong during the bubble years. But the authors made a lot of unforced errors, including getting too close to their sources, that could have been fixed through independent fact-checking.

What’s one example?

Let’s start with the Author’s Note at the very beginning:

What follows is my opinion of the events as I perceived them over the nearly two years I spent down the crypto rabbit hole. Throughout the book I use terms like “fraudsters,” “conmen,” “swindlers,” and “scammers” in reference to various actors in the crypto industry. These descriptors are nothing more than shorthand for my opinion. I don’t mean to imply that any particular person, in fact, broke a law or violated a regulation. In a similar vein, not everyone who works in cryptocurrency has poor intentions. While we may disagree wildly as to crypto’s usefulness, they have not committed fraud. It is my hope they will join me in condemning those who have.

Despite this disclaimer, the authors regularly claim – without facts – that such and such is a security or some entity broke a law. Sure everyone is entitled to an opinion, but using nuance-free language, and strident certainties is at odds with this Author’s Note.

There was no substantive technical criticism.86

For example, the authors missed the opportunity to discuss the critical role Lido currently plays in the Ethereum universe. What role is that? That’s what the authors should have figured out.

Or how centralized and dependent L2s currently are on sequencers. What’s a sequencer?

Or how MEV has evolved overtime. What is MEV? How do frequent batch auctions (such as those used in CoW Swap) reduce the impact of MEV?

Source: Threads

I mostly agree with Benedict Evans observation above. It seems clear from this book that the authors misunderstand the subject matter, otherwise they wouldn’t have made as many mistakes. This includes conflating all “crypto” with Bitcoin or failing to provide a single example of a DeFi dapp or not explaining what staking is or what a block maker is or not knowing that PayPal operates as a shadow bank (now with two types of “dollars”).8788

Furthermore, by endorsing Hilary Allen’s thesis, this also dings their credibility. Recall Allen predicted that DeFi lending protocols would collapse during a crisis. Aave and Compound did not collapse like she predicted. In fact, it was the centralized lenders that blew up last year. Perhaps these DeFi lending protocols will face a day of reckoning, but they do not suffer from the rehypothecation problem in part because all of the collateral is locked on-chain.

The authors routinely impeach their credibility by purposefully crumbling up NDAs and intentionally keeping the audio recording after an interview is done. This smells more like gotcha journalism which is lazy especially since nothing new was revealed in the process.

As a consequence, the book should probably be renamed: Blockchain Tourists. Is that unfair?

The jaunt down to Rockdale Texas seems to have resulted in little more than a photo-op for the authors. Did they help close down Riot’s Bitcoin mining facility?  Have they subsequently attended any of the local hearings or spoken with anyone during the “week of action” like Peter Howson did?89 Note: Howson is the author of the newly released: Let Them Eat Crypto

And while you can’t always time the publish date of the book, Easy Money had the misfortune of being released just before Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up, which was superior in all dimensions. 90 If you have to choose between the two, I can definitely recommend Faux’s version of events. See my review of that book here.

Endnotes

  1. In Number Go Up, Zeke Faux also writes his book in first-person, but doesn’t make the story about him. []
  2. For example, were the authors aware that one of the events McKenzie attended was a front for BSV? []
  3. By the end of Q3 2023, tokenized U.S. Treasuries hovered around $665 million. []
  4. In contrast, Zeke Faux noted this episode on p. 212:

    If you’re having trouble following this, that’s actually a good sign about your investing instincts. Comedian John Oliver later summarized Do Kwon’s nonsensical business plan: “One blorp is always worth one dollar. And the reason I can guarantee that is I’ll sell as many fleezels as it takes to make that happen. Also, I make the fleezels.”

    Strangely the authors did not include any history – abridged or otherwise – on the zany world of ICOs. This is puzzling because the infrastructure enabling Tether (USDT) was Mastercoin, one of the first projects to use the ICO model to kickstart itself. In contrast, Zeke Faux discusses it at length on page 49. []

  5. Fun fact: in January 2018 I spoke with one of the producers of that John Oliver episode and provided some fact-checking and clarification. []
  6. CMC also has a little 2m+ figure in the top left, that clearly is larger than the figure the authors use. []
  7. Hayden Adams, co-creator of Uniswap, has previously mentioned that on an average day 5-10 new coin pairs are added to Uniswap by random developers. []
  8. For instance, Meltem Demiror’s appeared on CNBC in a now deleted segment mentioning XRP. All of that was memoryholed, promoters ended up with coinesia. []
  9. Speaking of which, does everyone remember when Anthony Pompliano stopped using “The Virus is Spreading” as his catch phrase circa March 2020? []
  10. Jeff Garzik got on an airplane in order to receive one of the first Avalon ASIC miners. []
  11. For instance, Chapter 4 of my 2014 book literally is titled: The Red Queen of Mining. In Chapter 6 of “The Age of Cryptocurrency,” Michael Casey made a similar mistake. []
  12. In 2014, during a now deleted podcast episode (#116), I had a chance to debate co-hosts Stephanie Murphy and Adam B. Levine regarding on-chain activity, including gambling from Satoshi Dice. See: A Marginal Economy versus a Growth Economy []
  13. The authors could have easily dunked on garbage metrics such as cumulative addresses or wallets, two figures that only goes up no matter what. For instance, over eight years ago I published: A brief history of Bitcoin “wallet” growth. A few days later, an employee at BitGo contacted me for help to identify which wallets were “real” versus one-time burners. That was a job for an analytics company. []
  14. For comparison in Number Go Up, Zeke Faux uses the term “crypto bro” (15 times) which is a term I and other writers have used to describe specific coin promoters. []
  15. Marc Hochstein unfortunately normalized its mainstream usage. []
  16. For instance, during the block size civil war in 2015-2017, a number of the the Bitcoin Cash/XT developers wanted to significantly increase the block size in order to pursue a payments-focused roadmap. Who was right or wrong? Well empirically we have seen Bitcoin Cash successfully upgrade to 32 MB blocks, but these are mostly empty blocks because in practice, most BCH holders seem to want to hoard their coins instead of use them for payments. []
  17. We moved three times in the span of ten months, all with a one-year old in tow. []
  18. The Fed proposed cutting the current cap from 21 cents per transaction to 14.4 cents per transaction. []
  19. Readers may enjoy: Everything Everywhere Is Securities Fraud by Matt Levine. []
  20. In theory, AMMs could be used in traditional finance too. See: Automated Market-Making for Fiat Currencies by Alex Lipton and Artur Sepp. []
  21. It is likely that the authors of several other books I reviewed also had some undisclosed investments. One that comes to mind was Chris Burniske in Cryptoassets. []
  22. For what it is worth, there have been dozens of times where I wanted to short a specific coin or token, but it was hard to trust the counterparty (the CEX), so I never did. I empathize with his motivation, but he should have disclosed the bet(s). []
  23. I wrote long newsletters outlining the antics and shadiness of parts of the coin industry. []
  24. This past summer, McKenzie trolled the birdapp by saying “have fun staying poor” as well. []
  25. See also: Will the real stablecoin please stand up? by Anneke Kosse, Marc Glowka, Ilaria Mattei and Tara Rice []
  26. Tokenization attempts have expanded beyond precious gems and metals. In 2021, Poolin, at the time one of the largest multi-cryptocurrency mining pools, released a “hashrate token” which as the name suggests, attempts to tokenize a discrete amount of hashrate generated by mining hardware. At the beginning of the year, Navier, a Bitcoin hosted mining services company, announced a similar effort for “qualified investors.” []
  27. On p. 96 the authors mention White & Case. Coincidentally, this was the law firm Bob – a U.S. trained lawyer – worked at prior to joining the coin world. []
  28. The STABLE Act, co-authored by Rohan Grey, provides legislative latitude for the erection of a narrow bank-like structure that currently does not exist but likely best fits the needs of an entity like a pegged-coin issuer. []
  29. For some reason Silverman has deleted every tweet he ever engaged with me on as well. Unclear when this occurred; is this common for reporters at The New Republic to do? []
  30. For instance, two months ago, the U.S. Secret Service seized around $58 million belonging to Deltec from MUFJ. Why does it matter if the creator of Inspector Gadget founded Deltec? Is there only a specific category of people who are allowed to create banks? It is a distraction for readers who should have been informed more pertinent details like what Forbes reported in January. Perhaps this is a little unfair, as the authors had to ship a book and missed some news (they were still updating this book in January and the Epilogue appears to be written in March). Either way, the book was light on details for Deltec which does seem like an interesting bank to look into and Zeke Faux did so in Number Go Up. []
  31. I previously mentioned his real name back in February 2022 in section 5. []
  32. I am not sure who first coined the term “Tether Truther” but I have used it in the past to describe people who still claim – post-CFTC settlement – that Tether LTD is still acting in a fraudulent manner. The “Truther” modifier is similar to the scheming intrigue of other “Truther” movements. USDTQ is a riff on the conspiratorial TSLAQ. []
  33. “Cut to the chase” is an apt expression here. In contrast to Faux’s book (which does discuss Tether at length), McKenzie and Silverman linger and beat around the bush. Part of the issue likely stems from the fact that they have cultivated sources, such as Bitfinex’ed, who have no insider information. []
  34. It seems USDT-related development is about the only thing active on Liquid at the moment. []
  35. See 40 cointroversies to look into over the summer []
  36. Gee, I wonder what cowardly “Boston Celtics” fan who loves to setup alt accounts saying the same thing “This You?” to the same exact people, could be. []
  37. On p. 50 Faux writes: Phil Potter, an executive at an offshore Bitcoin exchange, Bitfinex, was developing a similar idea. They teamed up and adopted Potter’s name for it: Tether. (Potter told me he was actually the one to first approach Sellars with the idea. “I’m sure Brock will tell you he came down from Mount Sinai with it all written on stone tablets,” he said.) []
  38. Many SPACs deserve scorn because in part, some screwed over retail and it was odd that Diehl et al. treatment on this topic did not mention SPACs at all. []
  39. One response could be that Zeke Faux, on p. 199 of Number Go Up, mentioned being part of the “crew” for The Mutant Cartel, but it was clear to readers that the mutant ape he purchased was to be temporarily used as a guest admission ticket, not some permanent band-of-brotherhood. []
  40. For instance, I have publicly stated many times that I am in favor for allowing anyone that wants to opt-in to have an account with the central bank. See section 2 in Was 2021 the year the coin world went from edgy to banal? []
  41. It is worth looking at the E-Cash Act too. []
  42. According to Bowden et al., actual block propagation (arrivals) do not follow the (theoretical) homogenous Poisson process that was expected upon its release in 2009. []
  43. Kofner is the author of the widely cited comparison between transferring funds with Bitcoin versus several “traditional” wiring services. It debuted in 2014 and is still updated on a regular basis. []
  44. Newstat tweeted out his identity and then did a “reveal” podcast with Tomlinson wherein he made a number of false statements about myself. Unfortunately neither McKenzie nor Silverman reached out to verify if any of the claims that Newstat had made were valid (or not). And subsequently McKenzie falsely accused me of harassment. Then he blocked me. It would be a massive distraction to this book review if we were to litigate all the finer points of this drama. In reading this book it is clear that they were all pals, so closing ranks makes sense, but that is not what a reporter is supposed to do. Verify, not trust. []
  45. I recall a DC-based reporter recently tweeting that if a reporter feels the need to befriend their sources, they should probably just get a pet instead. []
  46. An interesting post-trade infrastructure story – about the DTCC and Cede and Co. – was written more than six years ago: Dole Food Had Too Many Shares by Matt Levine. []
  47. Coincidentally, in the process of writing this review the DTCC acquired Securency, to help with their tokenization efforts. []
  48. Note: I strongly disagree with Gladstein on many things but do find it strange that the SBF segment wasn’t released, surely it would be good promo material? []
  49. While it is possible to lever up with white-listed collateral on DeFi lending protocols such as Aave and Compound, the amount thus far is magnitudes less in part because of capped LTV ratios. []
  50. Between 2014-2019 I met a whole sundry of people claiming to work for some kind of agency including the FBI and InQTel. Didn’t drink with them though. []
  51. Seems like this purity contest over who is the most OG “critic” is stolen valor. And the supposed award nominations? Jumping the shark. []
  52. Dozens of U.S.-based Bitcoin mining companies recently visited Washington D.C. to lobby and spin the narratives away from P-o-W being an environmental blight. A second edition could look at these types of efforts. []
  53. The authors could have highlighted that some bad actors never leave the coin world. For instance, Michael Patryn – co-founder of defunct exchange Quadriga – was revealed to be Sifu. Patryn/Sifu were in the news last year for forking Aave. []
  54. Coincidentally, in the process of writing this review, FX retail trading in Japan – which accounts for the largest market share globally – hit a record high. []
  55. Not an endorsement but there are attempts to build self-custodial exchanges in the DeFi world, such as C3. []
  56. Look no further than the Board of Directors at registered clearing agents to illustrate possible synergies and conflicts. []
  57. Derivative liquidations in traditional finance is now less brazen in how it screws end users. For instance, in the UK, retail traders of spread-betting and CFD products often lose all capital in 3-6 months. As a consequence the FCA has honed in on changes to advertising CFDs the past four years which includes restricting the sale and how they are marketed. []
  58. Coincidentally, I co-authored a peer-reviewed paper that intersects with this topic: Decentralized Financial Market Infrastructures: Evolution from Intermediated Structures to Decentralized Structures for Financial Agreements []
  59. I have publicly asked it as well, for instance, on November 30, 2017. []
  60. Also, doesn’t the former Chief Strategy Officer – Phil Potter – live in New York City? []
  61. Laura Shin recently interviewed two creditors of Genesis who deposited more money following assurances from Genesis. []
  62. See Tribes of maximalism []
  63. To hammer this point home, nearly two years ago, BSTX, a joint venture between tZero and Boston Options Exchange (BOX) Digital Markets, received approval from the SEC to operate a blockchain-based securities exchange. Maybe BSTX fails to gain traction, maybe the market doesn’t care about blockchain-related exchanges. But the issue at the heart of Mirror wasn’t “the exchange” existed; the problem was the fraud, not the existence of a new trading venue. []
  64. Allen also made a number of incorrect claims regarding Ethereum’s “Merge” last year. []
  65. Allen was wrong in part because according to her acknowledgements she seems to rely on Stephen Diehl for technical assistance. Here is a my book review on Diehl’s book, the most inaccurate blockchain book I have ever read. []
  66. I sent an email to Hilary Allen on February 20, 2022 that included a number of comments in her draft, it does not appear that she incorporated any of the suggestions including the correction to the false claims about new tokens being used as collateral for loans. []
  67. Over the past 15 years it acquired Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, and WePay. The former two during the duress of the financial crisis. J.P. Morgan is also a partial owner in Maxex, a mortgage clearinghouse; payments consortium “The Clearing House”; Cboe Clear (in Europe); and other infrastructure that might meet the criteria of “conflicts of interest” albeit at arms length. []
  68. Lack of by-lines: one of the reoccurring themes within the Protos world is to dunk on anonymous Tether promoters and shell companies, yet the publication allows anonymous contributions. This is a double-standard, having your cake and eating it too. []
  69. According to its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing last year, Alameda had outstanding liabilities of $5.1 billion. But putting aside those loses, I could conjure several explanations. []
  70. One interesting nugget the public learned during the SBF criminal trial is that Caroline Ellison testified that she produced multiple different balance sheets, all of which were false. The one that was leaked to CoinDesk in 2022 was one of the rosier balance sheets, yet was itself fudged too. []
  71. See also Crypto adoption in America by J.P. Koning []
  72. This is not an endorsement of RWAs. At least one lawyer has argued: that the point of blockchain is to reduce trust assumptions/requirements and in almost all current cases, “tokenizing RWA” increases trust assumptions far above those even required for normal off-chain ownership. As a researcher this is why I have found it strange that some DeFi dapps parasitically rely on off-chain collateral (centrally issued pegged coins). Readers may be interested in this relevant thread from Andrea Tosato. []
  73. Zelle is operated by Early Warning who partnered with The Clearing House a couple of years ago. []
  74. On October 10, 2022 the USDD “marketcap” was about $795 million, a year later it was roughly $728 million. In contrast, according to ChainArgos, “Overall USD stablecoin market cap on ethereum down roughly $4 billion on ethereum and up more than $5 billion on Tron over the last 90 days.” []
  75. Some of the people the authors cited in this book did some grave stomping when FTX collapsed. But as we have seen in the criminal court case of SBF, apart from a handful of insiders no one actually knew what was going on. []
  76. The case has not gone to trial yet, but Saylor did lose a bid to quickly quash the suit. []
  77. Having spoken to Walch about the current batch of “skeptics” and “critics” – which she has been labeled in the past – it is pretty clear why neither of us amplify people who market themselves as such on social media. []
  78. Following the Hamas terrorist attacks, Stark dinged his credibility in a pair of sensationalistic tweets. He states that “crypto is not traceable” yet relies on ChainArgos which uses analytics to link addresses. Contra Stark, in this case, something is indeed traceable. Two chain analytics companies wrote rebuttals to this specific sensationalism: Chainalysis and Elliptic. Also, the authors of The Wall Street Journal article Stark cites mistakenly counted an entire exchanges’ trading volume (~$82 million) for a terrorist group’s address. Even the U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo weighed in on the topic. []
  79. One example of the “Horseshoe theory” in practice — the observation that some Bitcoin maximalists and anti-coiners both use an anti-empirical, a priori cudgel — is to look at say, Stephan Livera’s list of guests. At one point the running joke was that his dozen repeat guests each had podcasts whereby the only invited one another, because that was the size of their maximalist clique. In some ways we see that form of insular “in-group” dynamic in this book wherein the majority of “critics” or “skeptics” are the ones who pass one another’s purity tests. []
  80. In Number Go Up, Zeke Faux spoke with several hedge funds that wanted to short USDT. On p. 92 he writes: “I’m betting a shit-ton of money on them being a crook,” Fraser Perring, co-founder of Viceroy Research, told me. “Worst case is, I can’t lose hardly anything. I’m already rich, but I’m going to be fucking rich when Tether collapses.” []
  81. Perpetuals has become a catch-all term for a category of futures. These products often have higher daily trading volume that spot trading on centralized exchanges. Cam Harvey put together a quick primer on the topic. The original idea dates back three decades, from a paper by Robert Shiller. []
  82. As I mentioned at the time: For instance, on August 17, 2016, Bitfinex announced that they had hired Ledger Labs who, “is undertaking an analysis of our systems to determine exactly how the security breach occurred and to make our system’s design better going forward.” According to one post, Michael Perklin was the Head of Security and Investigative Services at Ledger Labs and part of the team leading this investigation. However in January 2017 a press release announced that Perklin was joining ShapeShift as the Chief Information Security Officer; his profile no longer exists at Ledger Labs. 18 Thus the question, what happened to the promise of a public audit? []
  83. The authors point out that during highly volatile periods, some CEXs suffer delays and/or shutdown entirely. They highlight a couple of possible reasons, including exchange operators being up to no good, which historically is a real possibility. To be even handed, even mature exchanges in traditional finance have (partial) shutdowns. For instance, in the process of writing this review the London Stock Exchange had a major technical incident which impacted (trading delays) small cap stocks for around 80 minutes. []
  84. Will certain crypto reporters from The Financial Times be held to the same standard they often criticize coin reporters of not reaching? []
  85. Coincidentally, during the process of writing this review, Phillips published a new paper directly related to the “securities” issue the authors referred to: Crypto Skeptics’ Supreme Risk. []
  86. Another missed opportunity was a discussion around privacy and confidentiality. For instance, the Zcash Foundation had its implementation of a threshold signature system reviewed by security professionals. Throwing the baby with the bath water, as this books authors frequently do, seems short-sighted. And this germane topic is not just relevant in the blockchain world either. For instance, Plaid normalized man-in-the-middle attacks. Will Akoyab continue this MITM normalization process? []
  87. A low-hanging point they could have made with proof-of-work mining: the block rewards are often value leaking from the ecosystem, to the benefit of state-owned energy grids and semiconductor companies. []
  88. Speaking of PayPal: is PYUSD just a marketing stunt? Which of the two different PayPal dollars is safer than the other? Will the frequency of the audit of the assets backing their other PayPal dollar be increased? []
  89. See also: Texans versus bitcoin: Jackie Sawicky and the Texas Coalition Against Cryptomining []
  90. For instance, while both books discuss Tether at length, Faux reached out to and received direct quotes from: Phil Potter (former CSO of Bitfinex) and from J.R. Willet (who created Mastercoin which is the infrastructure the USDT used on Bitcoin). Faux even corresponded with Arthur Budovsky, the creator of e-gold, who wrote back from prison. Did McKenzie and Silverman attempt to speak with these sources? []

Presentation: 8 areas for PMF and IMF with blockchains*

This past week I gave a new presentation at the 2nd annual Soranomics event (last year I presented on a related topic: pegged coins aka “stablecoins”). It includes a number of illustrations to discuss product market fit and infrastructure market fit.

Below is a copy of the deck as well as the A/V. Note: there are citations and references in the speaker notes. Note: I am to publish a long-form version based on this content.

Mini book review: “The Billionaire’s Folly”

I’ve previously reviewed at least seven blockchain-specific books in the past number of years. No one has paid me to review them, although I have received a couple copies for free. Unfortunately more than half of the books have been pretty bad… both technically wrong and often very polemical.

Fortunately, a page turner appeared in my inbox about a month ago: “The Billionaire’s Folly” by Faisal Khan. I’ve already posted a couple of short comments on the bird app and an usual for me – do not have a lot more to add. Mostly because it lacked many errors. Sure, it had a couple of typos here and there and a couple of debatable points but overall it was well-written and informative.

It also didn’t try to stray far away from what it aimed to do: discuss Khan’s perspective working at ConsenSys, an Ethereum-focused company, during what turned out to be the heady days of the ICO era. So in some ways, it is closer to Nathaniel Popper’s Digital Gold (which was equally well-written) than most of the other b-word books.

I didn’t mention this in the thread above but a number of anecdotes that Khan shares in the book were either relayed to myself (often through co-workers) or by actually witnessing it first hand. So it is interesting to see some of them independently confirmed.

One that did not (because Khan had yet to join the company) but definitely could have fit right in, involved an event held in the spring of 2016 near Seattle. About 60ish employees of this Fortune 100 tech company hosted a day-long powwow about “blockchains” and only three external companies were allowed to send representatives:

  • A well-known, large consulting company
  • ConsenSys, who sent several executives
  • R3 (my then-employer) sent myself

After presentations were given, the floor was opened for questions and a senior architect in the back questioned the urgency and immediacy that one of the promoters had claimed. And during the ensuing war-of-words, a partner at the consulting firm literally stood on the table at this closed-room event, crooning to everyone that “blockchain was the biggest thing in his career and that it would dramatically impact this tech company.” One of Khan’s future colleagues from the table over made eye contact with me and we just shook our heads. Although in retrospect, he was probably shaking his head for very different reasons than I was. I’m ngmi, right?

Either way, Khan has oodles of stories packed into a book that isn’t polemical. Check it out.

Web3 needs critics and criticism

[Note: The views expressed below are solely my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer or any organization I advise.]

"I made it up "Source?" Doctor Manhattan Jaw Neck Sleeve Gesture Human anatomy Art Waist Chest Trunk Thigh Nerve Knee Electric blue Symmetry Painting
[A public position lacking specific citations]

As we have discussed before, “Web3” is a nebulous term that has been used to market a slew of products and services, often via “chainwashing.”

What is “Web3?”

This past week 25 guys and one gal signed and published a 741-word letter to senior U.S. legislators calling for “Support of Responsible Fintech Policy.” And while many “Web3” promoters do deserve a good chastising, this letter has many technical shortcomings and is a disappointment to those who have been in the trenches for years… before being a “critic” was considered en vogue. Worst, it doesn’t define what “Web3” or even a “blockchain” is or is not.

But let’s start with a comment that I thought was pretty good, the intro:

“Today, we write to you urging you to take a critical, skeptical approach toward industry claims that crypto-assets (sometimes called cryptocurrencies, crypto tokens, or web3) are an innovative technology that is unreservedly good. We urge you to resist pressure from digital asset industry financiers, lobbyists, and boosters to create a regulatory safe haven for these risky, flawed, and unproven digital financial instruments and to instead take an approach that protects the public interest and ensures technology is deployed in genuine service to the needs of ordinary citizens.”

I – along with a number of other independent researchers such as Angela Walch (who they referenced) – have publicly made similar requests in the past. For instance, the original conclusion in my 2018 WSJ op-ed expanded upon the lack of transparency and surveillance sharing for why the SEC has not approved a bitcoin-denominated ETF by stating, “…the retail public wants seductive narratives and fantastical returns. The supply of fraud will therefore grow to meet that demand.”

To reuse a cliché analogy, throughout most of 2021 you could probably throw a baseball at a collection of dapps and hit one that at the very least, played fast and loose with marketing high APR yields.

This was followed with a quizzical take:

“Not all innovation is unqualifiedly good; not everything that we can build should be built. The history of technology is full of dead ends, false starts, and wrong turns. Append-only digital ledgers are not a new innovation. They have been known and used since 1980 for rather limited functions.”

The first sentence probably has a lot of supporters, including myself, as it relates to non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The somber and horrific legacies of the atomic and hydrogen bombs are certainly an example of something that should not have been built.

But the shade thrown at “append-only digital ledgers” is pretty farcical. Why do these authors get to determine what is or is not useful in the spring of 2022?

For instance, if we look at the core moving pieces of the Bitcoin blockchain, all of the main elements (“prerequisites“) had been around for years. And it was by assembling them together that we have arguably the first blockchain.1 The authors are taking a page from the lazy Maximalist playbook, one that does not withstand empirical scrutiny.

In looking at the “tech stack” of Big Tech, Google maintains a project called “Certificate Transparency” (implemented as “Trillian“).2 Certificate Transparency is not a blockchain, but it is a Merkle tree of things which are interconnected and signed and in production today.

From the Trillian team:

The ideas underpinning Certificate Transparency, Revocation Transparency and related efforts are not specific to certificates, but can in fact be used to make almost anything transparent. These technologies are strongly related to the much-hyped blockchain. The reality, of course, is that there isn’t a “the” blockchain, and that decentralisation is not always the answer. We are not making “the” blockchain, and we do not claim to support decentralisation.

As mentioned in a previous post, the problem with the a priori position that anti-coiners (and many maximalists) have is that over time they continually get backed up into a corner. Why? Because over the past decade we continue to see – empirically – how blockchains and blockchain-like elements are incorporated by a spectrum of organizations from Big Tech and Big Finance all the way down to small startups.

As Matthew Green (a cryptographer) explains in a thread on this topic, the granular fine points around “blockchain technology” is mostly bad:

Unfortunately the authors – while seemingly well intentioned – do not clearly state what parts of a blockchain they dislike, what parts of “distributed ledger technology” that they explicitly think is bad.

Furthermore, the idea of a neutrally owned, shared ledger is not a new concept. Several initiatives in the financial industry — such as a Joint Back Office (JBO) — pre-date the euphoria around blockchains but languished in concept mode.3 What is the lure for maintaining a shared ledger between (competing) organizations? Resiliency and reduction of reconciliation often come up as two of the main reasons but the list is long and deserves its own post. Suffice to say, claiming that “append-only digital ledgers” are a plaything of the ’80s is not even wrong.

Another broad sweeping set of statements that lack precision:

As software engineers and technologists with deep expertise in our fields, we dispute the claims made in recent years about the novelty and potential of blockchain technology. Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design.

As Green and Byrne (among other responders) have pointed out, there is a missing nuance by the authors in that there are different types of blockchains. For instance, depending on the implementation some permissioned blockchains allow – in theory – certain participants to freeze transactions.4

Likewise on public chains, administrators of USDC, USDT, and other collateral-backed pegged coins, regularly blacklist and freeze transactions. In fact, any chain with smart contract functionality can provide some form of reversibility (or at the very least, freezing of state). We also see this empirically during and after exploits, with developer teams freezing tokens.

This is a strange miss because one of the signatories is Stephen Diehl, who as far back as July 2017 (when I spoke to him in an official meeting) was/is the CTO and director at Adjoint, which is a British private blockchain firm that has previously announced payment-related partnerships.

This statement starts out good:

Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.

Green (and suzuha) points out that the authors are trying to have their cake and eat it too:

Source: Twitter

For example, as far back as 2015, banks involved in R3 presented use-cases that required – by law – protection of PII. At the time, any company or organization wanting to engage with regulated financial institutions quickly learned how PII was an unmovable touchstone (see this related presentation). And so from those functional requirements arose different solutions ranging from hardware-based solutions (like SGX) to software-based solutions (like ZK-Snarks). The public chain world was often where these ideas either first originated or at the very least, first tested.5

Over the years I have regularly pointed out how privacy and confidentiality-features could be used for a sundry of illicit activities. But just because it could be used by those types of actors, does not mean it regularly is.

On that point, in 2016 I helped edit a paper on this very topic. It was co-authored by Danny Yang (founder of Blockseer), Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, and Jack Gavigan. Wilcox-O’Hearn and Gavigan are executives at the Electric Coin Company, a for-profit company leading the development of Zcash. Worth pointing out that one of the signatories on the letter above amplified false information about myself two months ago, claiming I was not an advisor at Blockseer. Not only is this false, but I still own the equity in DMG Blockchain (which acquired Blockseer four years ago). This calls into question the credibility of the individuals amplifying information they did not fact check. What other false information are they claiming about blockchains?

Scare quotes is not the only thing that harms this section:

By its very design, blockchain technology, specifically so-called “public blockchains”, are poorly suited for just about every purpose currently touted as a present or potential source of public benefit. From its inception, this technology has been a solution in search of a problem and has now latched onto concepts such as financial inclusion and data transparency to justify its existence, despite far better solutions already in use.

The paragraph preceding this one also mentions “public blockchains” but doesn’t use quotes around it. And neither defines or provides nuance to explain the differences between “permissioned” (or private) blockchains compared with “public” (or anarchic) blockchains.

Either way, the authors make a good argument about how pulling on the heart strings of financial inclusion is mostly bupkis and I agree, and others have pointed that this rings hollow too.6 To strengthen this, the authors should have provided a citation or at least an example of “far better solutions already in use.” For example, Raúl Carrillo (who is not one of the listed authors) has pointed to Postal Banking as a possible avenue for (re)banking not just marginalized persons. Blockchains aren’t need for that or arguably for other retail activity.7

The next part of the paragraph is painfully arbitrary:

After more than thirteen years of development, it has severe limitations and design flaws that preclude almost all applications that deal with public customer data and regulated financial transactions and are not an improvement on existing non-blockchain solutions.

First of all, the first web browser (appropriately called the “WorldWideWeb“) was launched in 1990. It wasn’t until 2004 that Google revealed Ajax-based Gmail followed by Google Maps. If the authors are trying to make the claim that anything (everything?) useful should have been invented in 13 years then they should hold other tech initiatives to the same standard.

The lack of nuance in this letter is striking because not every blockchain is based on the purposefully limited architecture of Bitcoin. Between 2009-2015, a typical on-chain user could only access Bitcoin or a Bitcoin-based fork or clone (like Litecoin). Ethereum and other chains with a virtual machine, did not launch until the summer of 2015.8 That is part of the reason why regulated financial institutions (Big Banks) and large technology companies (Big Tech) began deploying resources in this sector in 2015: first with consortia and later setting up their own internal teams of subject matter experts. What a user could do with a blockchain changed over time thus a priori declaring “almost all applications” dead is incredulous.

And again, the authors provide no examples of what “existing non-blockchain solutions” they are referring to. For example, every single major vendor that provides core banking software for banks — such as FIS, Fiserve, and Jack Henry — have integrated tools that enable the software to interact with or hook into a blockchain. Every major Big Cloud vendor provides both tools for blockchain node operators as well as dedicated “Web3” development teams to compete with Alchemy and Infura. Several CSDs and CCPs have invested in a blockchain-focused company (like Digital Asset or Axoni) and have announced blockchain-based pilots. Pretending that this digitization and tokenization trend is not occurring beyond niche NFT art collections is intellectually dishonest.

I agree with most of this statement but it needs nuance:

Finally, blockchain technologies facilitate few, if any, real-economy uses. On the other hand, the underlying crypto-assets have been the vehicle for unsound and highly volatile speculative investment schemes that are being actively promoted to retail investors who may be unable to understand their nature and risk. Other significant externalities include threats to national security through money laundering and ransomware attacks, financial stability risks from high price volatility, speculation and susceptibility to run risk, massive climate emissions from the proof-of-work technology utilized by some of the most widely traded crypto-assets, and investor risk from large scale scams and other criminal financial activity.

The nuance these authors need to include is defining what “blockchain technology” is and is not. Trillian is not a blockchain but shares several common elements. Thus throwing the baby with the bath water flies in the face of the empirical reality.9 As far as criticisms around the negative externalities created by proof-of-work-based blockchains: I 100% agree. I have written on this topic roughly every 18 months. What would strengthen their statement is to provide actual statistics and data regarding each of their points (the data exists from companies like Chainalysis or previously, Blockseer).

Their polemical statement meanders on a bit more but this statement is worth assessing:

The catastrophes and externalities related to blockchain technologies and crypto-asset investments are neither isolated nor are they growing pains of a nascent technology. They are the inevitable outcomes of a technology that is not built for purpose and will remain forever unsuitable as a foundation for large-scale economic activity.

The second sentence falls under Hitchens razor: that which is presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. In fact, we do know why Bitcoin was built, Satoshi explained it at length on mailing lists and in the white paper. And Bitcoin was just the first “blockchain,” other chains have arisen later that fulfill other requirements. Onyx from JP Morgan is now being used for trading intraday repos. Maybe Onyx is just a flash in the pan, but it serves as a narrative violation — and there are more than a dozen other examples that the authors are likely unaware of, just read Ledger Insights each week.10

Lastly, in the Financial Times, one of the authors was quoted saying:

“The computational power is equivalent to what you could do in a centralised way with a $100 computer,” said de Icaza. “We’re essentially wasting millions of dollars’ worth of equipment because we’ve decided that we don’t trust the banking system.”

This is true with respect to proof-of-work-based blockchains but not at all relevant to alternate Sybil resistant models like proof-of-stake (P-o-S). Conflating the two is not accurate. Also, de Icaza and others needlessly defend the status quo, both with comments like this as well as the letter itself. Fortunately for retail, “the banking system” is not completely static and changes over time (it is also not a single monolithic entity). Also, not a single author listed works for a financial institution yet opines on it; there are plenty of blockchain “skeptics” within the financial industry why not find one?

Which brings us to the next section.

(Un)intentionally defending the status quo

The only reason to publicly identify themselves is to give weight or credibility to the matters discussed in the letter. Even though this letter was directed at U.S. congressmen and women, more than half of the signees are neither US residents or citizens. Even though more than a handful work at public tech companies or large organizations that rely on donations, let us give them the benefit of the doubt that they were not explicitly defending the status quo.

Yet without offering specifics beyond vague “non-blockchain solutions,” the authors are implicitly defending both systemically important financial institutions (SIFIs) and systemically important cloud providers. Both are bad for society and we should not defend their existence.

It is worth pointing out apart from two or three, most of these authors were not actively critical during the very public 2017-2018 ICO boom.11 What has motivated them to self-deputize and attempt to police what can and cannot be done with a blockchain in 2022 and ignore those who have been pathfinders in prior years? Perhaps there is a good reason, busy solving other worldly problems. I am certainly a fan of more introspection by disinterested parties!

I have written about it before but if the aim is to (1) influence policy makers and work with (2) regulators, there are at least two ways to achieve their goals:

  1. Set up a not-for-profit lobbying organization modeled after Coin Center… the Anti-Coin Center. Hire former regulators and policy makers and re-use the lobbyist blueprint to engage with decision makers. A couple of years ago I wrote out a general overview to a couple L1 creators, it’s not complicated. You don’t even need a blockchain. But it does require some capital to hire for various roles, so it is not completely lean (e.g., would probably need to hire an actual blockchain engineer instead of relying on IT administrators). Oh and someone who posts frivolous memes all day is a must.
  2. About four months ago, I asked one of the authors to submit their concerns directly with various agencies, such as the SEC and CFTC. This can be done formally through a whistle blower process (I’ve done it!). An ad hoc Hail Mary… is to informally do so through letter writing campaigns coordinated on social media. And as they haven’t stated otherwise, instead of submitting paperwork, some of these authors spend all day engagement farming on social media. If the outcome is “to get regulators to do something” this seems suboptimal because U.S. regulators typically need a paper trail to get the bureaucracy moving.

The blockchain world needs critics and criticism but it also needs criticism that is technically valid. And this letter is not only imprecise but sounds like something incumbent technology firms would write to defend their turf (which probably isn’t how it originated).

Bonafides

Over the past 18 months, the most recent coin bull market brought in a slew of new commentators a few of whom have attempted to co-opt the term “critic.” Clearly no one owns this term, there is no monopoly on it. Heck, I’ve even been labeled a “crypto” or “bitcoin” critic on more than one occasion. Yet we are seeing a cottage industry of professional “skeptics” who have a priori made up their mind irrespective of the evidence presented.

In addition to writing the most widely cited paper on “permissioned” blockchains, I wrote the first long form discussion on potential systemic important cryptocurrency networks in 2018 and think it is a bit absurd that some anti-coin commentary claims that cyber coins currently threaten the entire financial system. Feel free to disagree, but the onus is on the party making the positive claim. The counterfactual occurred the past five months: more than half of the aggregate coin marketcap evaporated. As collateral-backed pegged coins unwound, they did not lead to massive treasury liquidations crushing the traditional financial market.12

This is not defending the way centralized, commercial-bank backed pegged coins arose or currently operate.13 Rather it is a statement of fact: today the cyber coin world is not “too big to fail” and hopefully it never will be. Contagion can be real and should be simulated and stress tested!14 There are plenty of good criticisms to be lobbed at the “Web3” world, none of which requires making up fanciful conspiracies or playing fast and loose with technical verbiage.

If we are going to (rightly) criticize startups, investors, and other interested parties for mis-marketing “Web3” we should provide specific reasons as well as definitions. And while we are at it, let us bring a fine comb and scrutinize other hyped tech verticals that dramatically impact the well being of individuals such as: A.I. and workplace discrimination, privacy rights over data (including identity).15

Crusades can be big tent and incorporate more than just a small echo chamber of folks who (rightly) point out that a lot of cryptocurrency buzz is likely a financial grift with little real utility. Yet it is not a coincidence that perhaps the best critics are actual practioners, engineers, and architects who saw the limitations or drawbacks in certain blockchain designs and decided to build a different way. If there is a second version of this letter, it is highly recommended that input from outsiders be solicited. Including the world’s richest man, Colin Platt!

Or maybe we’ll just have to settle for a Kimberley process for Web3 claims, for both promoters and pundits alike.

End notes

  1. Depending on how it is defined, a candidate for the “original blockchain” was the Haber and Stornetta timestamping system published in 1990 (and thrice cited in the Bitcoin whitepaper). Therefore archaic blockchains had a useful niche before Bitcoin but were not capable of moving assets without a third party. Note: as they failed to provide a definition of a “blockchain” in their letter, the authors overly broad usage of “not useful” could encompass e-signature providers such as DocuSign and HelloSign. []
  2. One of the authors, Kelsey Hightower, works at Google, and a couple others work for large tech companies partly reliant on adtech revenue [e.g., monetizing personal information and data.] []
  3. SIFI intermediaries such as Swift, Euroclear, and CLS have done deep dives and pilots into “DLT.” A quick literature review pulls up the following relevant papers that the anti-coin authors may be unaware of: Distributed ledger technology in payment, clearing and settlement from the Bank for International Settlements; Distributed ledger technology for securities clearing and settlement: benefits, risks, and regulatory implications from Randy Priem; Distributed ledger technologies in securities post-trading from the European Central Bank; Distributed ledger technology in payments, clearing, and settlement from the Federal Reserve Board; The Tokenisation of Assets and Potential Implications for Financial Markets from the OCED; Digital Securities Management Bringing Private Markets Infrastructure Into the 21st Century from the DTCC. []
  4. At one point Accenture proposed an “edit” feature that does not appear to have been adopted by any chain. Stellar has implemented a feature that allows developers to “burn an asset.” []
  5. The experiments in the “dangerous” public chain space are funding and battle testing some of the new privacy and tech stacks that ‘Big Banks’ were not incentivized to build. Two examples in the U.S.: the FTX clearing proposal might be a better “exchange stack” than existing traditional finance operations and the Silvergate banking API (SEN) quickly confirms transactions based on on-chain data. Both services might not have been built even in the private blockchain world; at least they have not thus far. []
  6. To be fair, a number of financial incumbents and non-blockchain-related fintechs market their products and services as “financial inclusion.” They all attend many of the same events and sit on the same panels too. []
  7. See also the proposed E-Cash Act co-authored by Rohan Grey. []
  8. Technically Mastercoin, Counterparty, and several colored coin projects launched before Ethereum did, but they did not include a virtual machine that can run arbitrary code. []
  9. For balance, traditional financial markets also facilitate the transfer of illicit funds (money laundering) and ill-gotten gains from scams and fraud. The authors would have a stronger argument if they provided actual stats, e.g., what percentage of on-chain transactions involved illicit activities. []
  10. For instance, this coming October, a tokenized pound (‘synthetic CBDC’) on a blockchain platform operated by Fnality International will go-live in the U.K. Uptake may be slow in part because of issues around composability and because initial participants are banks that need to change the way they make payments. AntChain from Alibaba is a production chain used to settle e-commerce payments (connecting their banks to their merchants). Another example would be “perpetuals” which were conceived by Robert Shiller in 1992 and first implemented in 2016 by Bitmex, and now widespread on many major CEXs and a few DEXs. []
  11. At least two of the authors have previously cited my article on this crazy time period: Eight Things Cryptocurrency Enthusiasts Probably Won’t Tell You. []
  12. Yesterday the Japanese parliament passed a bill aimed at clarifying the legal status of “stablecoins.” Similar laws and/or guidance are expected to be brought up in other countries. []
  13. See Parasitic Stablecoins. []
  14. The Federal Reserve Board annually conducts stress tests of the U.S. financial system. Similar tests occur in other countries. Researchers at the IMF recently released a paper describing the underlying framework of GST. []
  15. U.S. legislators at the national level have failed at providing a comprehensive digital rights and privacy framework, as well as A.I. auditing guidance. These issues are arguably just as important and impactful as cryptocurrency-related topics. []

40 cointroversies to look into over the summer

2009 "Chuck E. Cheese" Game Token **FREE SHIPPING** | eBay
A real coin in a sea of many faux coins

[Note: I neither own nor have any trading position on any cryptocurrency. I was not compensated by any party to write this. The views expressed below are solely my own and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer or any organization I advise.]

Summer has nearly arrived in the northern hemisphere and several friends have reached out to ask several unanswered questions and rumors.

Note that many of the questions below are about commercial and trade secrets where there is no obligation to make the information public.

For instance, we could openly ask how much Cargill (the largest private corporation in the US) spends to manufacture its wares but they are under no obligation to provide that to anyone beyond their managers, shareholders, and regulators.

Similarly, most of the companies (and individuals) below are under no obligation to provide answers. However since we think it is in the public interest to know who benefits from certain decision-making (such as who first knew about #NoBugFix last year), we are publishing them here with the aim of answering them over time.

This is a non-exhaustive list and arranged in no particular order:

(1) We were promised a public audit, so who hacked Bitfinex in August 2016? Was it an inside job? Compromised BitGo account? Who was moving the ‘stolen’ coins last month? Will the current NY AG lawsuit versus Bitfinex/Tether reveal these details?1

(2) Ripple’s co-founders gave (granted?) ~80 billion XRP to Ripple Inc. back in January 2013 when it was still called OpenCoin. How much XRP was/is given to early investors like a16z and/or future partners?

(3) When R3 sued and settled with Ripple in 2018, rumors circulated that R3 won the equivalent of ~$500m in XRP and were limited to selling just as Jed McCaleb is constrained by.2 How much was the settlement for and how much XRP has been sold? How much do XRP sales account for R3 and other organizations revenue? For instance, Ripple has sold at least $1.1 billion in XRP to finance its operations through mid-2019. What are the ramifications if XRP is deemed a security?

(4) Three years ago several Bitcoin Core developers were allegedly involved with an astroturfing campaign (such as Antbleed) via coordination in a “Dragon’s Den” Slack room. Was this real and if so, who are these people? Are they still active?

(5) A couple years ago, Jackson Palmer and Angela Walch separately asked who were the people that had merge access in the Bitcoin Core repo. They were rebuffed and told this is a necessary secret to maintain. Is this a secret? If so, why the lack of transparency and who made this decision? How common is this secrecy in other coin projects?

(6) As Bitfinex is an investor in Blockstream, what’s the formal relationship between the two organizations today, specifically with respect to Tether?3 Do either organizations operate OTC trading desks? If so, where and how are those licensed or legally structured?

(7) It is alleged in a lawsuit that EOS organizers recycled its year-long ICO proceeds back into its own sale thereby inflating its raise and generating hype. How much actual coin money from retail investors was sent into this generally solicited ICO?

(6) In April 2017 Bitfinex (briefly) sued Wells Fargo regarding the cutting off of correspondence banking… and a week later withdrew the suit. What were the names of the Taiwanese banks that were supposedly at the center of this (non) compliance controversy? Did these banks eventually reopen accounts on behalf of Bitfinex or Tether?

(7) Based on an interview with George Fogg, a 2015 FT article pointed out that Bitcoin (and likely other coins) has a lien problem: that due to rampant thefts and DNM activity there were probably more claims on specific bitcoins than there were bitcoins.4 What percentage of bitcoin (or other coins) are encumbered today?

(8) A rumor since 2014 is that a US-based coin exchange signed a deferred adjudication agreement with the federal government due to money laundering issues. If true, will it be revealed if/when an IPO is filed?

(9) Since SAFTs are largely considered cadavers in the US, what (if anything) will happen to its creators and early promoters? Enriched and sauntering off into the sunset? Or disbarred and disgorged?

(10) Will deposit-taking coin intermediaries ever be required to comply with federal laws as banks do in the US? Will they simply end up lobbying and moving shell entities into the state of Wyoming for an SPDI?

(11) FinCEN carved out a loophole for proof-of-work miners in 2013. Yet in practice, mining pool operators can and do select or censor transactions.5 Will they be held liable as an MTO or PSP as more value is moved through their machines and regulators catch-on?

(12) It is alleged that Craig Wright has plagiarized and used ghost writers for publishing papers. Who are they and how much were they paid?

(13) Last year, a former senior executive at a US-based coin exchange is alleged to have undue influence on listing coins based on his bags. What, if any, are the internal controls erected to prevent this type of behavior in coin exchanges? Several coin creators and issuers have joined and/or created coin exchanges in the past.6 Have any of them used their position to profit off of the asymmetric knowledge on listing their coins (or others)? If so, how to prevent this in the future?

(14) Lightning Network was frequently marketed as being ‘just around the corner’ yet it appears to have stagnated in activity over the past 18 months. Who(m) is responsible for this continued delay? Will it reach its marketed potential in the next year or too much of a Rube Goldberg machine? When will LN hubs need to become compliant with the Travel Rule?

(15) Who acquired the @Bitcoin user on Twitter last year? Did the acquisition or transfer violate the Terms of Service?

(16) Regarding the revolving door: how many former regulators now work at coin intermediaries? And vice-versa: how many former coin employees work with regulators? With the push for additional stablecoins and potential CBDCs, will there be transparent interactions between regulators (and politicians) and vendors? If a single vendor oversees a proprietary codebase, how will this not result in a Hold-Up problem?

(17) At least one Chinese exchange, pre-2017, went out of its way to support scams like MMM. How many exchanges knowingly profited from allowing MMM or BitConnect-like actors to operate? Are regulated stablecoin issues such as Paxos aware of this?

(18) bitFlyer was accused of knowingly laundering money for the Yakuza. How many other exchanges have done so as well? In a given year, what percentage of exchange revenue comes from laundering the proceeds of organized crime?

(19) A conspiracy theory (joke?) is that whenever a coin exchange operator in South Korea gets a tax bill, they hack themselves in order to reduce the tax liability. Is this true and if so, how much has been pilfered?

(20) Jackson Palmer, Gwern Branwen, and others have poked into the original source code of Bitcoin and found the seeds of a marketplace and poker lobby.7 Was the original goal to also include a coin exchange or DNM?

(21) Why is Coinlab still dragging its feet during the never ending Mt. Gox bankruptcy proceedings? 8

(22) Was that really Gerald Cotten’s body or is he just mostly dead? Did Cotten act alone as the narrative leads us to believe or did Michael “identity theft” Patryn have a roll in the missing funds? As it was during their honeymoon, is Jennifer Robertson aware of anything odd about the circumstances surrounding Cotten’s death?

(23) Late last year, one of the allegations against Virgil Griffith included somehow helping move a computer system to act as a mining rig across the border to North Korea. We have heard rumors of used, second-hand mining hardware making its way across the same border in the past. Hardware manufacturers have said it is difficult to police because even if they KYC the original buyer, they have no control of where used hardware is sold over time. How much hashrate for Bitcoin or Ethereum and other PoW coins are generated out of North Korea?

(24) Common conversations at events imply that virtually every coin exchange has been hacked yet most simply eat the losses without publicly disclosing it. How many major hacks of coin exchanges in the US have still not been disclosed?9

(25) Several podcasters have openly bragged about not paying taxes on their coin dealings. For instance, the co-creator of a coin launched in 2014 from an organization based in California, now avoids California due to not having paid the state’s capital gains tax. How many others are virtue (vice) signaling? Or are they still counting on lax enforcement?

(26) Ethereum Classic (ETC) is technically the original Ethereum chain. During the debates over the ETH-ETC hard fork in late July 2016, a small handful of investors including Barry Silbert were vocally claiming on social media to support ETC.10 Several subsequent separate investigations into Silbert’s social media activity raised questions around anti-touting provisions of securities laws. If ETH or ETC was a security in 2016 due to a coordinated hard fork that was not sufficiently decentralized, who could be held liable for actively promoting a coin to unsophisticated investors? For instance, earlier this year actor Steven Seagal was penalized for not disclosing his paid endorsement of Bitcoiin2Gen (B2G). Does touting matter if a coin is or is not a security?

(27) The scandal and fallout around Joi Ito (and MIT) knowingly accepting funds from sex offender Jeff Epstein is still on-going. Last year we learned that Epstein was not just interested in Bitcoin, but he reached out to invest and fund Bitcoin-related companies and efforts (perhaps even DCI). For instance, Elizabeth Stark (from Lightning Labs) pointed out that she turned down an investment offer. Did Epstein put money into entities such as Digital Garage, which Ito co-founded?11 What about Digital Garage’s portfolio companies?

(28) The IOTA mainnet was stopped for days then weeks, and the non-anonymous founders fought in public about past grievances including funds that were supposed to build hardware devices… that were unaccounted for. The IOTA network, like EOS and Cardano, are arguably still centralized due to the smattering of nodes operated by a handful of entities. At what point are these types of networks deemed centralized money transmission operators (MTO) with the need to register with FinCEN and other similar regulators?12

(29) Where is Binance’s headquarters? Their executives often claim to not have offices – even when they are visited by the police… yet these same Binance executives appear in photo-ops on islands and jurisdictions found on the FATF blacklist. Where are they domiciled from a legal perspective? Do they pay taxes somewhere?

(30) In 2017, OKCoin and Huobi were penalized for not disclosing to their customers that they were re-investing deposits in other financial products. It is rumored that other coin exchanges have used their customer deposits and cash reserves to manipulate various coin prices which ultimately wreck retail investors, all because they can see trader’s positions and know exactly what amount of manipulation will close positions. How common is this?

(31) What happened to all of the funds donated to the dubiously self-serving ‘DefendCrypto’ effort? Recall that Kik conducted an ICO because it was running out of fundraising options… and then later sued by the SEC. Were all of the ‘community donations’ simply handed over to their lobbying organization (Blockchain Association) to spend carte blanche?

(32) Why do some coin exchanges employ outspoken tribalists or maximalists? What does this mean for how the exchange treats trades and orders for non-tribal-approved coins?

(33) How much do coin lobbying organizations charge to get fines or sanctions reduced? At least one DC-based organization removed the name of a prominent coin exchange (despite accepting their funds) after a lawsuit from NY AG was announced. Do these types of advocacy / lobbying organizations return the funds from illicit actors? When will the coin holdings of staff at coin lobbying organizations be required to be disclosed?13

(34) Over the past five years, numerous corporates and enterprises have publicly announced partnerships with more than a dozen different coin issuers. Most of these are vanity projects that end after 3-6 months. However, prior to the public announcement, it is alleged that insiders acquire coins with the expectation of a jump in prices.14 How common is this and how to remove this temptation from future decision-makers?

(35) CryptoDeleted was silenced by embarrassed social media personalities as it screen grabbed their boisterous coin shilling. How many other times has this specific type of suspension occurred on Twitter and other platforms with respect to documenting coin shills?

(36) Without providing any proof at the time, several prominent coin promoters claimed to have – or will have – donated large quantities of money to charitable organizations. In the case of Brock Pierce, more than two years ago his plans to donate $1 billion was uncritically reported on. Binance and other coin intermediaries that are in continuous legal limbo, also frequently claim to donate to causes in developing countries or for COVID-19. How much has actually been donated? Do operators believe such donations make up for listing P&D coins that fleeced retail investors?

(37) During the height of the fraudulent ICO boom days of 2017, dozens of coin funds were purportedly spun up to capitalize off the quick pump-and-dump on retail investors that was taken place globally.15 At the time, one article listed 15 such funds, most of whom appear to have fallen to the way side, and at least one (Polychain) that was sued by multiple different LPs for lack of transparency. How many of these funds got early access discounts and quietly dumped coins as soon as the coin got listed? How many actually paid taxes on the rumored ill-gotten gains?

(38) Soldering ASIC mining chips into always-on devices has repeatedly proven to be a bad deal for the consumer due to the fixed unit of labor within each device. Yet nearly every year starting with the 21.co toaster and Bitfury light bulb, a new manufacturer jumps into the fray to release yet another one of these environmental hazards. As an aggregate, how many of these all-in-one Earth sizzling devices have been shipped to consumers?

(39) Whatever happened to Halong mining? Their Dragonmint rig was repeatedly hyped by prominent maximalists back in late 2017 and early 2018. They shipped some units but they’ve been silent for a couple of years. Just one-and-done?

(40) With the release of the latest Raspberry Pi 4 and increasingly cheap SSDs, will node operators begin to (again) support larger block sizes? Aside from politics and ideology, what are the show-stopping technical reasons for not doing so? Too much to sync for a mobile device?

Bonus! Is ransomware fully dependent on the liquidity of cryptocurrencies? If so, will regulators and law enforcement eventually close down coin exchanges in order to snuff out this evergrowing parasite?

Again, this list is non-exhaustive and fairly US-centric. It also doesn’t even scratch the surface of C-level executives and apparatchiks who repeatedly use their social media platforms to push “buy the dip” memes onto unsophisticated investors.

For the future: what are some other types of questions that would serve the public interest in knowing the answer to? Recommended reading: Eight Things Cryptocurrency Enthusiasts Probably Won’t Tell You

Acknowledgements: many thanks to AC, GW, JS, CP, VB, AW, RS, AC, and CK for their feedback and suggestions.

Endnotes:

  1. Tether Inc. has repeatedly misled the public about the 1:1 backing of its coin. As it has not regularly released an independent audit, some researchers such as Nicholas Weaver, hypothesize that there could be an imbalance that inflates bitcoins price level. []
  2. Note: other partners, co-founders, and early employees are supposedly constrained by similar limits, not just McCaleb. []
  3. Did Blockstream really own a Gulfstream IV? If so, why did a small software company need one? Why did they remove their team page a couple years ago? []
  4. As we have mentioned elsewhere, a fundamental problem for all current cryptocurrencies is that they are not exempt from nemo dat and have no real fungibility because they purposefully were not designed to integrate with the legal system. []
  5. Some mining pools have a service that enables certain customers to pay higher fees to expedite transactions. []
  6. For instance, Charlie Lee (the creator of Litecoin), worked at Coinbase and claims to have had no influence on Coinbase’s decision to list Litecoin. Bobby Lee, his older brother, ran a coin exchange in China called BTCC. Back in 2014, BTCC introduced a marketing campaign for listing Litecoin (“Brothers Reunited“) which Charlie was purportedly involved in. []
  7. Update 6/9/2020: According to a reader who compiled the code: “Original Bitcoin source code included the poker lobby and an eBay-like marketplace with a review system and essentially a sub-currency called “atoms” which were kind of like seller reputation / review kudos tokens.” []
  8. As an aside, is there any additional connotation to Mt. Gox and the term Mutum Sigillium (which means a sealed deposit)? []
  9. As an aside, one US exchange allegedly confiscated and sold CLAM coins that were airdropped on its user base, without their knowledge. []
  10. Other ‘coinfluencers’ involved in the ETC split include Charles Hoskinson. []
  11. Note: Epstein interacted with several prominent voices in the coin universe, including Brock Pierce and Reid Hoffman. []
  12. Related: what about DeFi infrastructure, how many developers will be forced to adhere to rules and compliance requirements? Clearly most are not in-line with the PFMIs! Also, what was given (negotiated) with the dForce hacker? []
  13. A couple sources claim that multiple personnel at three different DC-based lobbying groups including Coin Center have large undisclosed coin holdings (such as ZEC) which are believed to be a direct conflict-of-interest with how these organizations market themselves as “neutral.” []
  14. For instance, a Fortune 100 company has investigated a former project lead who purchased a large quantity of a coin without disclosing it to the management team; it is believed this person may have even chosen to do this project with the coin issuer in the first place just for the ‘cheap’ coins because from a technical perspective, there was little merit in pursuing this architecture. []
  15. One interesting story during this time frame was in September 2017, when several Chinese government agencies launched a large crackdown of ICOs and shut down many coin exchanges. Law enforcement perused WeChat chat histories to identify P&D ring leaders. A prominent coin investor based in Shanghai was supposedly tipped off and booked a seat on a private airplane from Shanghai for Los Angeles. Upon landing this person then flew to Georgia where they had a home and remained for several months. During this time this individual, in an agreement with Chinese governmental bodies, disgorged a large part of their ill-gotten coin earnings and later returned to China. []

Book review: The Truth Machine

A friend of mine sent me a copy of The Truth Machine which was published in February 2018.  Its co-authors are Michael Casey and Paul Vigna, who also previously co-wrote The Age of Cryptocurrency a few years ago.

I had a chance to read it and like my other reviews, underlined a number of passages that could be enhanced, modified, or even removed in future editions.

Overall: I do not recommend the first edition. For comparison, here are several other reviews.

This book seemed overly political with an Occupy Wall Street tone that doesn’t mesh well with what at times is a highly technical topic.

I think a fundamental challenge for anyone trying to write book-length content on this topic is that as of 2018, there really aren’t many measurable ‘success’ stories – aside from speculation and illicit activities – so you end up having to fill a couple hundred pages based on hypotheticals that you (as an author) probably don’t have the best optics in.

Also, I am a villain in the book. Can’t wait?  Scroll down to Chapter 6 and also view these specific tweets for what that means.

Note: all transcription errors are my own. See my other book reviews on this topic.

Preface

on p. x they write:

The second impact is the book you are reading. In The Age of Cryptocurrency, we focused primarily on a single application of Bitcoin’s core technology, on its potential to upend currency and payments.

Would encourage readers to peruse my previous review of their previous book. I don’t think they made the case, empirically, that Bitcoin will upend either currency or payments. Bitcoin itself will likely exist in some form or fashion, but “upending” seems like a stretch at this time.

On p. xi they write in a footnote:

We mostly avoid the construct of “blockchain” as a non-countable noun.

This is good. And they were consistent throughout the book too.

Introduction

They spent several pages discussing ways to use a blockchain for humanitarian purposes (and later have a whole chapter on it), however, it is unclear why a blockchain alone is the solution when there are likely other additional ways to help refugees.

For instance, on p. 3 they write:

Just as the blockchain-distributed ledger is used to assure bitcoin users that others aren’t “double-spending” their currency holdings – in other words, to prevent what would otherwise be rampant digital counterfeiting – the Azraq blockchain pilot ensures that people aren’t double-spending their food entitlements.

But why can’t these food entitlements be digitized and use something like SNAP cards? Sure you can technically use a blockchain to track this kind of thing, but you could also use existing on-premise or cloud solutions too, right?  Can centralized or non-blockchain solutions fundamentally not provide an adequate solution?

On p. 4 they write:

Under this new pilot, all that’s needed to institute a payment with a food merchant is a scan of a refugee’s iris. In effect, the eye becomes a kind of digital wallet, obviating the need for cash, vouchers, debit cards, or smartphones, which reduces the danger of theft (You may have some privacy concerns related to that iris scan – we’ll get to that below.) For the WFP, making these transfers digital results in millions of dollars in saved fees as they cut out middlemen such as money transmitter and the bankers that formerly processed the overall payments system.

Get used to the “bankers” comments because this book is filled with a dozen of them. Intermediaries such as MSBs and banks do take cuts, however they don’t really dive into the fee structure. This is important because lots of “cryptocurrency”-focused startups have tried to use cryptocurrencies to supposedly disrupt remittances and most basically failed because there are a lot of unseen costs that aren’t taken into account for.

Another unseen cost that this book really didn’t dive into was: the fee to miners that users must pay to get included into a block.  They mention it in passing but typically hand-waved it saying something like Lightning would lower those costs.  That’s not really a good line of reasoning at this stage in development, but we’ll look at it again later.

On p. 6 they write:

That’s an especially appealing idea for many underdeveloped countries as it would enable their economies to function more like those of developed countries – low-income homeowners could get mortgages, for example; street vendors could get insurance. It could give billions of people their first opening into the economic opportunities that the rest of us take for granted.

That sounds amazing, who wouldn’t want that?  Unfortunately this is a pretty superficial bit of speculation.  For example, how do street vendors get insurance just because of the invention of a blockchain?  That is never answered in the book.

On p. 7 they write:

The problem is that these fee-charging institutions, which act as gatekeepers, dictating who can and cannot engage in commercial interactions, add cost and friction to our economic activities.

Sure, this is true and there are efforts to reduce and remove this intermediation. The book also ignores that every cryptocurrency right now also charges some kind of fee to miners and/or stakers. And with nearly all coins, in order to obtain it, a user typically must buy it through a trusted third party (an exchange) who will also charge a markup fee… often simultaneously requiring you to go through some kind of KYC / AML process (or at least connect to a bank that does).

Thus if fee-charging gatekeepers are considered a problem in the traditional world, perhaps this can be modified in the next edition because these type of gatekeepers exist throughout the coin world too.

On p. 8 they list a bunch of use-cases, some of which they go into additional detail later in the book. But even then the details are pretty vague and superficial, recommend updating this in the next edition with more concrete examples.

On p. 9 they write:

Silicon Valley’s anti-establishment coders hadn’t reckoned with the challenge of trust and how society traditionally turns to centralized institutions to deal with that.

There may have been a time in which the majority of coders in the Bay area were “anti-establishment” but from the nearly 5 years of living out here, I don’t think that is necessarily the case across the board. Recommend providing a citation for that in the future.

On p. 10 they write:

R3 CEV, a New York-based technology developer, for one, raised $107 million from more than a hundred of the world’s biggest financial institutions and tech companies to develop a proprietary distributed ledger technology. Inspired by blockchains but eschewing that lable, R3’s Corda platform is built to comply with banks’ business and regulatory models while streamlining trillions of dollars in daily interbank securities transfers.

This whole paragraph should be updated (later in Chapter 6 as well):

  • The Series A funding included over 40 investors, not 100+.
  • The ‘community’ version of Corda is open sourced and available on github, so anyone can download, use, and modify it. There is also a Corda Enterprise version that requires a license and is proprietary.
  • While initially eschewing the term “blockchain,” Corda is now actively marketed as a “blockchain” and even uses the handle @cordablockchain on Twitter, on podcast advertisements, and in public presentations.1
  • I am unaware of any current publicly announced project that involves streamlining trillions of dollars in daily interbank securities transfers. Citation?

On p. 10 they briefly mention the Hyperledger Project.  Recommend tweaking it because of its own evolution over the years.

For example, here is my early contribution: what is the difference between Hyperledger and Hyperledger.

On p. 11 they write:

While it’s quite possible that many ICOs will fall afoul of securities regulations and that a bursting of this bubble will burn innocent investors, there’s something refreshingly democratic about this boom. Hordes of retail investors are entering into early stage investment rounds typically reserved for venture capitalists and other professional.

This paragraph aged horribly since the book was published in February.

All of the signs were there: we knew even last year that many, if not all, ICOs involved overpromising features and not disclosing much of anything to investors. As a result, virtually every week and month in 2018 we have learned just how much fraud and outright scams took place under the guise and pretext of the “democratization of fund raising.”

For instance, one study published this summer found that about 80% of the ICOs in 2017 were “identified scams.” Another study from EY found that about 1/3 of all ICOs in 2017 have lost “substantially all value” and most trade below their listing price.

Future versions of this book should remove this paragraph and also look into where all of that money went, especially since there wasn’t – arguably – a single cryptocurrency application with a real user base that arose from that funding method (yet).

On p. 11 they write:

Not to be outdone, Bitcoin, the grandaddy of the cryptocurrency world, has continued to reveal strengths — and this has been reflected in its price.

This is an asinine metric. How exactly does price reflect strength? They never really explain that yet repeat roughly the same type of explanation in other places in this book.

Interestingly, both bitcoin’s price and on-chain transaction volume have dramatically fallen since this book was first published. Does that mean that Bitcoin weakened somehow?

On p. 12 they write:

Such results give credence to crypto-asset analysts Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar’s description of bitcoin as “the most exciting alternative investment of the 21st century.”

Firstly, the Burniske and Tatar book was poorly written and wrong in many places: see my review

Secondly, bitcoin is a volatile investment that is arguably driven by a Keynesian beauty contest, not for the reasons that either book describes (e.g., not because of remittance activity).

On p. 12 they write:

The blockchain achieves this with a special algorithm embedded into a common piece of software run by all the computers in the network.

To be clear: neither PoW nor PoS are consensus protocols which is implied elsewhere on page 12.

On p. 12 they write:

Once new ledger entries are introduced, special cryptographic protections make it virtually impossible to go back and change them.

This is not really true. For coins like Bitcoin, it is proof-of-work that makes it resource intensive to do a block reorganization. Given enough hashrate, participants can and do fork the network. We have seen it occur many times this year alone. There is no cryptography in Bitcoin or Ethereum that prevents this reorg from happening because PoW is separate from block validation.2

On p. 13 they write:

Essentially, it should let people share more. And with the positive, multiplier effects that this kind of open sharing has on networks of economic activity, more engagement should in turn create more business opportunities.

These statement should be backed up with supporting evidence in the next edition because as it stands right now, this sounds more like a long-term goal or vision statement than something that currently exists today in the cryptocurrency world.

On p. 13 they mention “disintermediation” but throughout the book, many of the cryptocurrency-related companies they explore are new intermediaries. This is not a consistent narrative.

On p. 14 they write:

If I can trust another person’s claims – about their educational credentials, for example, or their assets, or their professional reputation – because they’ve been objectively verified by a decentralized system, then I can go into direct business with them.

This is a non sequitur. Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) — in fact, the authors make that point later on in the book in Chapter 7.

On p. 15 they write:

Blockchains are a social technology, a new blueprint for how to govern communities, whether we’re talking about frightened refugees in a desolate Jordanian output or an interbank market in which the world’s biggest financial institutions exchange trillions of dollars daily.

This is vague and lacks nuance because there is no consensus on what a blockchain is today. Many different organizations and companies define it differently (see the Corda example above).

Either way, what does it mean to call a blockchain “social technology”? Databases are also being used by refugee camp organizers and financial infrastructure providers… are databases “social technology” too?

Chapter 1

On p. 17 they write:

Its blockchain promised a new way around processes that had become at best controlled by middlemen who insisted on taking their cut of every transaction, and at worst the cause of some man-made economic disasters.

This is true and problematic and unfortunately Bitcoin itself doesn’t solve that because it also has middlemen that take a cut of every transaction in the form of a fee to miners. Future editions should add more nuance such as the “moral hazard” of bailing out SIFIs and TBTF and separate that from payment processors… which technically speaking is what most cryptocurrencies strive to be (a network to pay unidentified participants).

On p. 18 they write:

Problems arise when communities view them with absolute faith, especially when the ledger is under control of self-interested actors who can manipulate them. This is what happened in 2008 when insufficient scrutiny of Lehman Brother’s and other’s actions left society exposed and contributed to the financial crisis.

This seems to be a bit revisionist history. This seems to conflate two separate things: the type of assets that Lehman owned and stated on its books… and the integrity of the ledgers themselves. Are the authors claiming that Lehman Brother’s ledgers were being maliciously modified and manipulated? If so, what citation do they have?

Also a couple pages ago, the authors wrote that blockchains were social technology… but we know that from Deadcoins.com that they can die and anything relying on them can be impacted.

Either way, in this chapter the authors don’t really explain how something Bitcoin itself would have prevented Lehman’s collapse. See also my new article on this topic.

On p. 19 they write:

A decentralized network of computers, one that no single entity controlled, would thus supplant the banks and other centralized ledger-keepers that Nakamoto identified as “trusted third parties.”

Fun fact: the word “ledger” does not appear in the Bitcoin white paper or other initial emails or posts by Nakamoto.

Secondly, perhaps an industry wide or commonly used blockchain of some kind does eventually displace and remove the role some banks have in maintaining certain ledgers, but their statement, as it is currently worded, seems a lot like of speculation (projection?).

We know this because throughout the book it is pretty clear they do not like banks, and that is fine, but future editions need to back up these types of opinions with evidence that banks are no longer maintaining a specific ledger because of a blockchain.

On p. 20 they write:

With Bitcoin’s network of independent computers verifying everything collectively, transactions could now be instituted peer to peer, that is, from person to person. That’s a big change from our convoluted credit and debit card payment systems, for example, which routes transactions through a long sequence of intermediaries – at least two banks, one or two payment processors, a card network manager (such as Visa or Mastercard), and a variety of other institutions, depending on where the transaction take place.

If we look back too 2009, this is factually correct of Bitcoin at a high level.3 The nuance that is missing is that today in 2018, the majority of bitcoin transactions route through a third party, some kind of intermediary like a deposit-taking exchange or custodial wallet.4 There are still folks who prefer to use Bitcoin as a P2P network, but according to Chainalysis, last year more than 80% of transactions went through a third party.5

On p. 20 they write:

Whereas you might think that money is being instantly transferred when you swipe your card at a clothing store, in reality the whole process takes several days for the funds to make all those hops and finally settle in the storeowner’s account, a delay that create risks and costs. With Bitcoin, the idea is that your transaction should take only ten to sixty minutes to fully clear (not withstanding some current capacity bottlenecks that Bitcoin developers are working tor resolve). You don’t have to rely on all those separate, trusted third parties to process it on your behalf.

This is mostly incorrect and there is also a false comparison.

In the first sentence they gloss over how credit card payment systems confirm and approve transactions in a matter of seconds.6 Instead they focus on settlement finality: when the actual cash is delivered to the merchant… which can take up to 30+ days depending on the system and jurisdiction.

The second half they glowingly say how much faster bitcoin is… but all they do is describe the “seen” activity with a cryptocurrency: the “six block” confirmations everyone is advised to wait before transferring coins again. This part does not mention that there is no settlement finality in Bitcoin, at most you get probabilistic finality (because there is always chance there may be a fork / reorg).

In addition, with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin you are only transferring the coins. The cash leg on either side of the transaction still must transfer through the same intermediated system they describe above. We will discuss this further below when discussing remittances.

On p. 20 they write:

It does so in a way that makes it virtually impossible for anyone to change the historical record once it has been accepted.

For proof-of-work chains this is untrue in theory and empirically. In the next edition this should be modified to “resource intensive” or “economically expensive.”

On p. 20 they write:

The result is something remarkable: a record-keeping method that brings us to a commonly accepted version of the truth that’s more reliable than any truth we’ve ever seen. We’re calling the blockchain a Truth Machine, and its applications go far beyond just money.

It is not a “truth machine” because garbage in, garbage out.

In addition, while they do discuss some historical stone tablets, they don’t really provide a metric for how quantitatively more (or less) precise a blockchain is versus other methods of recording and witnessing information. Might be worth adding a comparison table in the next edition.

On p. 21 they write:

A lion of Wall Street, the firm was revealed to be little more than a debt-ravaged shell kept alive only by shady accounting – in other words, the bank was manipulating its ledgers. Sometimes, that manipulation involved moving debt off the books come reporting season. Other times, it involved assigning arbitrarily high values to “hard-to-value” assets – when the great selloff came, the shocking reality hit home: the assets had no value.

The crash of 2008 revealed most of what we know about Wall Street’s confidence game at that time. It entailed a vast manipulation of ledgers.

This was going well until that last sentence. Blockchains do not solve the garbage in, garbage out problem. If the CFO or accountant or book keeper or internal counsel puts numbers into blocks that do not accurately reflect or represent what the “real value” actually is, blockchains do not fix that. Bitcoin does not fix that.

Inappropriate oversight, rubber stamp valuations, inaccurate risk models… these are off-chain issues that afflicted Lehman and other banks. Note: they continue making this connection on pages 24, 28, and elsewhere but again, they do not detail how a blockchain of some kind would have explicitly prevented the collapse of Lehman other other investment banks.

See also: Systemically important cryptocurrency networks

On p. 22 they write:

The real problem was never really about liquidity, or a breakdown of the market. It was a failure of trust. When that trust was broken, the impact on society – including on our political culture – was devastating.

How about all of the above? Pinning it on just one thing seems a little dismissive of the multitude of other interconnecting problems / culprits.

On p. 22 they write:

By various measures, the U.S. economy has recovered – at the time of writing, unemployment was near record lows and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at record highs. But those gains are not evenly distributed; wage growth at the top is six times what it is for those in the middle, and even more compared to those at the bottom.

If the goal of the authors is to rectify wealth inequalities then there are probably better comparisons than using cryptocurrencies.

Why? Because – while it is hard to full quantify, it appears that on cursory examination most (if not all) cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin have Gini coefficients that trends towards 1 (perfectly unequal).

On p. 23 they write about disinformation in the US and elsewhere.  And discuss how trust is a “vital social resource” and then mention hyperinflation in Venezuela. These are all worthy topics to discuss, but it is not really clear how any of these real or perceived problems are somehow solved because of a blockchain, especially when Venezuela is used as the example. The next edition should make this more clear.

On p. 29 they write:

On October 31, 2008, whil the world was drowning in the financial crisis, a little-noticed “white paper” was released by somebody using the pen name “Satoshi Nakamoto,” and describing something called “Bitcoin,” an electronic version of cash that didn’t need state backing. At the heart of Nakamoto’s electronic cash was a public ledger that could be viewed by anybody but was virtually impossible to alter.

One pedantic note: it wasn’t broadly marketed beyond a niche mailing list on purpose… a future edition might want to change ” a little-noticed” because it doesn’t seem like the goal by Nakamoto was to get Techcrunch or Slashdot to cover it (even though eventually they both did).

Also, it is not virtually impossible to alter.7 As shown by links above, proof-of-work networks can and do get forked which may include a block reorganization. There is nothing that technically prevents this from happening.

See also: Interview with Ray Dillinger

On p. 31 they write:

Szabo, Grigg, and others pioneered an approach with the potential to create a record of history that cannot be changed – a record that someone like Madoff, or Lehman’s bankers, could not have meddled with.

I still think that the authors are being a little too liberal with what a blockchain can do. What Madoff did and Lehman did were different from one another too.

Either way, a blockchain would not have prevented data – representing fraudulent claims – from being inserted into blocks. Theoretically a blockchain may have allowed auditors to detect tampering of blocks, but if the information in the blocks are “garbage” then it is kind of besides the point.

On p. 32 they write:

Consider that Bitcoin is now the most powerful computing network in the world, one whose combined “hashing” rate as of August 2017 enabled all its computers to collectively pore through 7 million trillion different number guesses per second.

[…]

Let the record show that period of time is 36,264 trillion trillion times longer than the current best-estimate age of the universe. Bitcoin’s cryptography is pretty secure.

This should be scrapped for several reasons.

The authors conflate the cryptography used by digital signatures with generating proofs-of-work.8 There are not the same thing. Digital signatures are considered “immutable” for the reasons they describe in the second part, not because of the hashes that are generated in the first.9

Another problem is that the activity in the first part — the hash generation process — is not an apples-to-apples comparison with other general computing efforts. Bitcoin mining is a narrowly specific activity and consequently ASICs have been built and deployed to generate these hashes. The single-use machines used to generate these hashes cannot even verify transactions or construct blocks. In contrast, CPUs and GPUs can process a much wider selection of general purpose applications… including serialize transactions and produce blocks.

For example: it would be like comparing a Falcon 9 rocket launch vehicle with a Toyota Prius. Sure they are nominally both “modes of transportation” but built for entirely different purposes and uses.

An additional point is that again, proof-of-work chains can and have been forked over the years. Bitcoin is not special or unique or impervious to forks either (here’s a history of the times Bitcoin has forked). And there are other ways to create forks, beyond the singular Maginot Line attack that the authors describe on this page.10

On p. 33 they write:

Whether the solution requires these extreme privacy measures or not, the broad model of a new ledger system that we laid out above – distributed, cryptographically secure, public yet private – may be just what’s needed to restore people’s confidence in society’s record-keeping systems. And to encourage people to re-engage in economic exchange and risk-taking.

This comes across as speculation and projecting. We will see later that the authors have a dim view of anything that is not a public blockchain. Why is this specific layout the best?

Either way, future versions should include a citation for how people’s confidence level increase because of the use of some kind of blockchain. At this time, I am unaware of any such survey.

On p. 34 they quote Tomicah Tilleman from the Global Blockchain Business Council, a lobbying organization:

Blockchain has the potential to push back against that erosion and it has the potential to create a new dynamic in which everyone can come to agree on a core set of facts but also ensure the privacy of facts that should not be in the public domain.

This seems like a non sequitur. How does a blockchain itself push back on anything directly? Just replace the word “blockchain” with “database” and see if it makes sense.

Furthermore, as we have empirically observed, there are fractures and special interest groups within each of these little coin ecosystems. Each has their own desired roadmap and in some cases, they cannot agree with one another about facts such as the impact larger block sizes may have on node operators.

On p. 35 they write:

If it can foster consensus in the way it has been shown to with Bitcon, it’s best understood as a Truth Machine.

This is a non sequitur. Just because Nakamoto consensus exists does not mean it that blockchains are machines of truth. They can replicate falsehoods if the blocks are filled with the incorrect information.

Chapter 2

On p. 38 they write:

Consider how Facebook’s secret algorithm choose the news to suit your ideological bent, creating echo chambers of like-minded angry or delighted readers who are ripe to consume and share dubious information that confirms their pre-existing political biases.

There are some really valid points in this first part of the chapter. As it relates to cryptocurrencies, a second edition should also include the astroturfing and censoring of alternative views that take place on cryptocurency-related subreddits which in turn prevent people from learning about alternative implementations.

We saw this front-and-center in 2015 with the block size debate in which moderators of /r/bitcoin (specifically, theymos and BashCo) banned any discussion from one camp, those that wanted to discuss ways of increasing the block size via a hardfork (e.g., Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic).

This wasn’t the first or last time that cryptocurrency-related topics on social media have resulted in the creation of echo chambers.

On p. 43 they write:

The potential power of this concept starts with the example of Bitcoin. Even though that particular blockchain may not provide the ultimate solution in this use case, it’s worth recalling that without any of the classic, centrally deployed cybersecurity tools such as firewalls, and with a tempting “bounty” of more than $160 billion in market cap value at the time we went to print, Bitcoin’s core ledger has thus far proven to be unhackable.

There is a lot to unpack here but I think a future edition should explain in more detail how Bitcoin is a type of cybersecurity tool. Do they mean that because the information is replicated to thousands of nodes around the world, it is more resilient or redundant?

Either way, saying that “Bitcoin’s core ledger” is “unhackable” is a trope that should be removed from the next edition as well.

Why? Because when speaking about BTC or BCH or any variant of Bitcoin, there is only one “ledger” per chain… the word ‘core’ is superfluous. And as described above, the word “unhackable” should be changed to “resource intensive to fork” or something along those lines. “Unhackable” is anarchronistic because what the authors are probably trying to describe is malicious network partitions… and not something from a ’90s film like The Net.

Continuing on p. 43 they write:

Based on the ledger’s own standards for integrity, Bitcoin’s nine-year experience of survival provides pretty solid proof of the resiliency of its core mechanism for providing decentralized trust between users. It suggest that one of the most important non-currency applications of Bitcoin’s blockchain could be security itself.

This last sentence makes no sense and they do not expand on it in the book. What is the security they are talking about? And how is that particularly helpful to “non-currency applications of Bitcoin’s blockchain”? Do they mean piggy-backing like colored coins try to do?

On p. 44 they write:

The public ledger contains no identifying information about the system’s users. Even more important, no one owns or controls that ledger.

Well technically speaking, miners via mining pools control the chain. They can and do upgrade / downgrade / sidegrade the software. And they can (and do) fork and reorg a chain. Is that defined as “control”? Unclear but we’ll probably see some court cases if real large loses take place due to forks.

On p. 44 they write:

As such there is no central vector of attack.

In theory, yes. In practice though, many chains are highly centralized: both in terms of block creation and in terms of development. Thus in theory it is possible to compromise and successfully “attack” a blockchain under the right circumstances. Could be worth rephrasing this in the next edition.

On p. 44 they write:

As we’ll discuss further in the book, there are varying degrees of security in different blockchain designs, including those known as “private” or “permissioned” blockchains, which rely on central authorities to approve participants. In contrast, Bitcoin is based on a decentralized model that eschews approvals and instead banks on the participants caring enough about their money in the system to protect it.

This is a bit of a strawman because there are different types of “permissioned” blockchains designed for different purposes… they’re not all alike. In general, the main commonality is that the validators are known via a legal identity. How these networks are setup or run does not necessarily need to rely on a centralized authority, that would be a single point of trust (and failure). But we’ll discuss this later below.

On p. 44 they write:

On stage at the time, Adam Ludwin, the CEO of blockchain / distributed ledger services company Chain Inc., took advantage of the results to call out Wall Street firms for failing to see how this technology offers a different paradigm. Ludwin, whose clients include household names like Visa and Nasdaq, said he could understand why people saw a continued market for cybersecurity services, since his audience was full of people paid to worry about data breaches constantly. But their answers suggested they didn’t understand that the blockchain offered a solution. Unlike other system-design software, for which cybersecurity is an add-on, this technology “incorporates security by design,” he said.

It is unclear from the comments above exactly how a blockchain solves problems in the world of cybersecurity. Maybe it does. If so, then it should be explored in more detail than what is provided in this area of the book.

As an aside, I’m not sure how credible Ludwin’s comments on this matter are because of the multiple pivots that his companies have done over the past five years.11

On p. 45 they write:

A more radical solution is to embrace open, “permissionless” blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, where there’s no central authority keeping track of who’s using the network.

This is very much a prescriptive pitch and not a descriptive analysis. Recommend changing some of the language in the next edition. Also, they should define what “open” means because there basically every mining pool doxxes themselves.

Furthermore, some exchanges that attempt to enforce their terms-of-service around KYC / AML / CTF do try to keep track of who is doing what on the network via tools from Chainalysis, Blockseer, Elliptic and others. Violating the ToS may result in account closures. Thus, ironically, the largest “permissioned” platforms are actually those on the edges of all cryptocurrencies.

See: What is Permissioned-on-Permissionless

On p. 45 they write:

It’s not about building a firewall up around a centralized pool of valuable data controlled by a trusted third party; rather the focus is on pushing control over information out to the edges of the network, to the people themselves, and on limiting the amount of identifying information that’s communicated publicly. Importantly, it’s also about making it prohibitively expensive for someone to try to steal valuable information.

This sounds all well and good, definitely noble goals. However in the cryptocurrency world, many exchanges and custodial wallets have been compromised and the victims have had very little recourse. Despite the fact that everyone is continually told not to store their private keys (coins) with an intermediary, Chainalysis found that in 2017 more than 80% of all transactions involved a third-party service.

On p. 45 they write:

Bitcoin’s core ledger has never been successfully attacked.

They should define what they mean by “attacked” because it has forked a number of times in its history. And a huge civil war took place resulting in multiple groups waging off-chain social media campaigns to promote their positions, resulting in one discrete group divorcing and another discrete group trying to prevent them from divorcing. Since there is only de facto and not de jure governance, who attacked who? Who were the victims?

On p. 45 they write:

Now, it will undoubtedly be a major challenge to get the institutions that until now have been entrusted with securing our data systems to let go and defer security to some decentralized network in which there is no identifiable authority to sue if something goes wrong. But doing so might just be the most important step they can take to improve data security. It will require them to think about security not as a function of superior encryption and other external protections, but in terms of economics, of making attacks so expensive that they’re not worth the effort.

This seems a bit repetitive with the previous couple of page, recommend slimming this down in the next edition. Also, there are several class action lawsuits underway (e.g., Ripple, Tezos) which do in fact attempt to identify specific individuals and corporations as being “authorities.” The Nano lawsuit also attempted to sue “core developers.”

On p. 46 they write:

A hacker could go after each device, try to steal the private key that’s used to initiate transactions on the decentralized network, and, if they’re lucky, get away with a few thousand dollars in bitcoin. But it’s far less lucrative and far more time-consuming than going after the rich target of a central server.

The ironic part of this is that generally speaking, the private keys controlling millions of bitcoins are being housed in trusted third parties / intermediaries right now. In some cases these are stored on a centralized server. In other cases, the cold wallet managed by hosting providers such as Xapo (which is rumored to secure $10 billion of bitcoin) does geographically split the keys apart into bunkers. Yet at some point those handling the mutli-sig do come together in order to move the coins to a hot wallet.12

On p. 47 they write:

It seems clear to us that the digital economy would benefit greatly from embracing the distributed trust architecture allowed by blockchains – whether it’s simply the data backups that a distributed system offers, or the more radical of an open system that’s protected by a high cost-to-payout ratio.

What does this mean? Are they saying to add proof-of-work to all types of distributed systems? It is only useful in the Bitcoin context in order to make it expensive to Sybil attack the network… because participants were originally unknown. Does that same problem exist in other environments that they are thinking of? More clarity should be added in the next edition.

On p. 48 they write:

The idea, one that’s also being pursued in different forms by startups such as Gem of Los Angeles and Blockchain Health of San Francisco, is that the patient has control over who sees their records.

This is one of the difficulties in writing a long-form book on this general topic right now: projects and companies frequently pivot.

For instance, a couple months after the book was published, Gem announced its “Universal Token Wallet,” a product which currently dominates its front page and social media accounts of the company. There have been no health care-related announcements from the company in over a year.

Similarly, Blockchain Health no longer exists. Its CEO left and joined Chia as a co-founder and the COO has joined the Neighborly team.

On p. 50 they write:

It was a jury-rigged solution that meant that the banking system, the centralized ledger-keeping solution with which society had solved the double-spend problem for five hundred years, would be awkwardly bolted onto the ostensibly decentralized Internet as its core trust infrastructure.

I think there are some legitimate complaints to made towards how online commerce evolved and currently exists but this seems a tad petty. As backwards as financial institutions are (rightly and wrongly) portrayed, it’s not like their decision makers sat around in the early ’90s trying to figure out how to make integrating the Web an awkward process.

On p. 50 they write:

Under this model, the banks charged merchants an interchange fee of around 3 percent to cover their anti-fraud costs, adding a hidden tax to the digital economy we all pay in the form of higher prices.

Again, like their statement above: there are some very legitimate gripes to be had regarding the existing oligopolistic payment systems, but this specific gripe is kind of petty.

Fraud exists and as a result someone has to pay for it. In the cryptocurrency world, there is no recourse because it is caveat emptor. In the world of courts and legal recourse, fees are levied to cover customer service including fraud and insurance. It may be possible to build a payment system in which there is legal recourse and simultaneously no oligopolistic rent seeking but this is not explored in the book. Also, for some reason the fee to miners is not brought up in this section, yet it is a real fee users must pay… yet they do not receive customer service as part of it.

Lastly, the Federal Reserve (and other central banks) monitor historical interchange fees. Not all users are charged the ~3% as mentioned in the book.

For instance (see below): Average Debit Card Interchange Fee by Payment Card Network

Source: Statista

On pages 52 and 53 they write uncritically about Marc Andresseen and VCs who have invested in Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies.

a16z, the venture firm co-founded by Andresseen, arguably has a few areas that may be conflicts-of-interest with the various coin-related projects it has invested in and/or promoted the past several years (e.g., investing in coins which are listed on an exchange they also are an investor and board member of such as 0x). Those ties are not scrutinized in a chapter that attempts to create a black and white narrative: that the legacy players are centralized rent-seekers and the VCs are not. When we know empirically that some VCs, including a16z, have invested in what they believe will become monopolies of some kind.

On page 54 and 55 they write about “Code is not law,” a topic that I have likewise publicly presented on.

Specifically they state:

One risk is that regulators, confused by all these outside-the-box concepts, will overreact to some bad news – potentially triggered by large-scale investors losses if and when the ICO bubble bursts and exposes a host of scams. The fear is that a new set of draconian catchall measures would suck the life out of innovation in this space or drive it offshore or underground. To be sure, institutions like the Washington-based Coin Center and the Digital Chamber of Commerce are doing their best to keep officials aware of the importance of keeping their respective jurisdictions competitive in what is now a global race to lead the world in financial technology.

This is word for word what coin lobbyists have been pitching to policy makers around the world for years. Both Coin Center and Digital Chamber of Commerce lobby on behalf of their sponsors and donors to prevent certain oversight on the cryptocurrency market.13 An entire book could probably be written about how specific people within coin lobbying organizations have attempted to white wash and spin the narrative around illicit usage, using carefully worded talking points. And they have been effective because these authors do not question the motivations and agenda these special interest groups have.

Either way, Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies were born in the “underground” and even “offshore.” It is unclear what the authors are trying to excuse because if anything, regulators and law enforcement have arguably been very light handed in the US and most regions abroad.

If anything, once a foreign registered ICO or coin is created, often the parent company and/or foundation opens an office to recruit developers in San Francisco, New York, and other US cities. I know this because all the multiple “blockchain” events I have attended overseas the past two years in which organizers explain their strategy. The next edition of this book could explore this phenomenon.

On p. 57 they write:

By The DAO founders’ own terms, the attacker had done nothing wrong, in other words. He or she had simply exploited one of its features.

Excellent point that should be explored in further detail in the next edition. For instance, in Bitcoin there have been multiple CVEs which if exploited (at least one was) could have resulted in changes in the money supply. Is that a feature or a bug?

And the most recent one, found in pre-0.16.3, was partially downplayed and hidden to prevent others from knowing the extent of potential damage that could have been done.

On p. 59 they write:

The dependence on a trusted middleman, some cryptocurrency purists would argue, overly compromises a blockchain’s security function, rending it unreliable. For that reason, some of them say, a blockchain is inappropriate for many non-currency applications. We, however, view it as a trade-off and believe there’s still plenty of value in recording ownership rights and transfers to digitally represented real-world assets in blockchains.

I think this whole section should be reworded to describe:

  1. what types of blockchains they had in mind?
  2. how the legal hooks into certain blockchains behave versus anarchic chains?
  3. being more precise with the term purist… do they mean maximalists or do they mean someone who points out that most proposed use-cases are chainwashing?

On pages 59 and 60 they write:

Permissioned blockchains – those which require some authorized entity to approve the computers that validate the blockchain – by definition more prone to gatekeeping controls, and therefore to the emergence monopoly or oligopoly powers, than the persmissionless ideal that Bitcoin represents. (We say “ideal” because, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, there are also concerns that aspects of Bitcoin’s software program have encouraged an unwelcome concentration of ownership – flaws that developers are working to overcome.)

It would be beneficial in the next edition to at least walk through two different “permissioned blockchains” so the reader can get an idea of how validators become validators in these chains. By not including them, each platform is painted in the same light.

And because they are still comparing it with Bitcoin (which was designed for a completely different type of use-case than ‘permissioned chains’ are), keep in mind that the way mining (block making) is done in 2018 is very different than when it was first proposed in the 2008 paper. Back then, mining included a machine that did two things: validated blocks and also generate proofs-of-work. Today, those two functions are completely separate and because of the relatively fierce competition at generating hashes, there are real exit and entry costs to the market.

In many cases, this means that both the mining pool operators and hash generators end up connecting their real world government-issued identities with their on-chain activity (e.g., block validation). It may be a stretch to say that there is an outright monopoly in mining today, but there is a definite trend towards oligopoly in manufacturing, block producing, and hash generation the past several years. This is not explored beyond a superficial level in the book.

On p. 60 they write:

Until law changes, banks would face insurmountable legal and regulatory opposition, for example, to using a system like Bitcoin that relies on an algorithm randomly assigning responsibility at different stages of the bookkeeping process to different, unidentifiable computers around the world.

This is another asinine comment because they don’t explicitly say which laws they would like changed. The authors make it sound like the PFMIs are holding the world back when the opposite is completely true. These principals and best practices arose over time because of the systemic impact important financial market infrastructures could have on society as a whole.

Proof-of-work chains, the ones that are continually promoted in this book, have no ability to prevent forks, by design. Anarchic chains like Bitcoin and Ethereum can only provide probabilistic finality. Yet commercial best practices and courts around the world demands definitive settlement finality. Why should commerce be captured by pseudonymous, unaccountable validators maintained in jurisdictions in which legal recourse is difficult if not impossible?

On p. 60 they continue:

But that doesn’t mean that other companies don’t have a clear interest in reviewing how these permissioned networks are set up. Would a distributed ledger system that’s controlled by a consortium of the world’s biggest banking institutions be incentivized to act in the interest of the general public it serves? One can imagine the dangers of a “too-big-to-fail blockchain” massive institutions could once again hold us hostage to bailouts because of failures in the combined accounting system.

This has been one of Michael Casey’s talking points for the past three years. I was even on a panel with him in January 2016 in which he called R3 a “cartelchain,” months before Corda even existed. His justified disdain towards traditional financial institutions — and those involved with technology being developed in the “permissioned” world — pops up throughout this book. I do think there are some valid critiques of consortia and permissioned chains and even Corda, but those aren’t presented in this edition of the book.

He does make two valid observations here as well: regulated commerce should have oversight. That is one of the reasons why many of the organizations developing “permissioned blockchains” have plans to or already have created separate legal entities to be regulated as some type of FMI.

The other point is that we should attempt to move away from recreating TBTF and SIFI scenarios. Unfortunately in some cases, “permissioned chains” are being pitched as re-enabler of that very scenario. In contrast, dFMI is a model that attempts to move away from these highly intermediated infrastructures. See also my new article on SICNs.

On p. 60 they write:

Either way, it’s incumbent upon us to ensure that the control over the blockchains of the future is sufficiently representative of broad-based interests and needs so that they don’t just become vehicles for collusion and oligpolistic power by the old guard of finance.

The ironic part of this statement is — while well-intended — because of economies of scale there is an oligopoly or even monopoly in most PoW-mined coins. It is unclear how or why that would change in the future. In addition, with the entrance of Bakkt, ErisX, Fidelity and other large traditional financial organizations (e.g., the old guard) into the cryptocurrency world, it is hard to see how “permissionless ecosystems” can prevent them from participating.

On p. 61 they write:

As we stated in The Age of Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin was merely the first crack at using a distributed computing and decentralized ledger-keeping system to resolve the age-old problem of trust and achieve this open, low-cost architecture for intermediary-free global transactions.

But as the authors have stated elsewhere: proof-of-work chains are inherently costly. If they were cheap to maintain then they would be cheap to fork and reorg. You cannot simultaneously have a cheap (“efficient”) and secure PoW network… that’s a contradiction.

See:

Chapter 3

On pages 64 and 65 they provide a definition of a blockchain. I think this could be more helpful more earlier on in the book for newer audiences.

A few other citations readers may be interested in:

On p. 66 they write:

That way, no authorizing entity could block, retract, or decide what gest entered into the ledger, making it censorship resistant.

Could be worth referencing Eligius, a pool run by Luke-Jr. that would not allow Satoshi Dice transactions because its owners religious views.14

On p. 67 they write:

These computers are known as “miners,” because in seeking to win the ten-minute payout, they engage in a kind of computational treasure hunt for digital gold.

I understand the need to make simple analogies but the digital gold one isn’t quite right because gold does not have an inflexible supply whereas bitcoin does. I’ve pointed this out in other book reviews and it bears repeating because of how the narrative of e-cash to HODLing has changed over the last few years.1516

Readers may be interested of a few real life examples of perfectly inelastic supplies.

On p. 67 they write:

Proof of work is expensive, because it chews up both electricity and processing power. That means that if a miner wants to seize majority control of the consensus system by adding more computing power, they would have to spend a lot of money doing so.

This is correct. Yet six pages earlier they say it is a “low-cost” infrastructure. Needs to be a little more consistent in this book. Either PoW is resource intensive or it is not, it cannot be both.

On p. 68 they write:

Over time, bitcoin mining has evolved into an industrial undertaking, with gigantic mining “farms” now dominating the network. Might those big players collude and undermine the ledger by combining resources? Perhaps, but there are also overwhelming disincentives for doing so. Among other considerations, a successful attack would significantly undermine the value of all the bitcoins the attacking miner owns. Either way, no one has managed to attack Bitcoin’s ledger in nine years. That unbroken record continues to reinforce belief in Bitcoin’s cost-and-incentive security system.

It’s worth pointing out that there are ways to fork Bitcoin beyond the singular Maginot Line attack. As mentioned above, Bitcoin and many other coins have forked; see this history. Hundreds of coins have died due to lack of interest by miners and developers.

It could also be argued that between 2015-2017, Bitcoin underwent a social, off-chain attack by multiple different groups attempting to exert their own influence and ideology onto the ecosystem. The end result was a permanent fracture, a divorce which the principal participants still lob social media bombs at one another. There isn’t enough room to discuss it here, but the astroturfing actions by specific people and companies in order to influence others is worth looking into as well. And it worked.

On p. 71 they write:

The caveat, of course, is that if bad actors do control more than 50 percent of the computing power they can produce the longest chain and so incorporate fraudulent transactions, which other miners will unwittingly treat as legitimate. Still, as we’ve explained, achieving that level of computing power is prohibitively expensive. It’s this combination of math and money that keeps Bitcoin secure.

I probably would change some of the wording because with proof-of-work chains (and basically any cryptocurrency), there are no terms of service or end user license agreement or SLA. At most there is only de facto governance and certainly not de jure.

What does that mean? It means that we really can’t say who the “bad actors” are since there is no service agreement. Barring an administrator, who is the legitimate authority in the anarchic world of cryptocurrencies? The original pitch was: if miners want to choose to build on another tree or fork, it’s their decision to do so… they don’t need anyone’s permission to validate blocks and attempt to update the chain as they want to. The next edition should explicitly say who or what is an attacker or what a fraudulent transaction is… these are points I’ve raised in other posts and book reviews.

Also, the authors mention that computational resources involved in PoW are “prohibitively expensive” here. So again, to be consistent they likely should remove “low-cost” in other places.

On p. 71 and 72 they write:

In solving the double-spend problem, Bitcoin did something else important: it magically created the concept of a “digital asset.” Previously, anything digital was too easily replicated to be regarded as a distinct piece of property, which is why digital products such as music and movies are typically sold with licensing and access rights rather than ownership. By making it impossible to replicate something of value – in this case bitcoins – Bitcoin broke this conventional wisdom. It created digital scarcity.

No it did not. This whole passage is wrong. As we have seen with forks and clones, there really is no such thing as this DRM-for-money narrative. This should be removed in the next edition.

Scarcity effectively means rivalrous, yet anyone can copy and clone any of these anarchic chains. PoW might make it relatively expensive to do a block reorg on one specific chain, but it does not really prevent someone from doing what they want with an identically cloned chain.

For instance, here is a list of 44 Bitcoin forked tokens that arose between August 2017 and May 2018. In light of the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash divorce, lobbying exchanges to recognize ticker symbols is also worth looking into in a future edition.

On p. 73 they write:

Many startups that were trying to build a business on top of Bitcoin, such as wallet providers and exchanges, were frustrated by an inability to process their customers’ transactions in a timely manner. “I’ve become a trusted third party,” complained Wences Casares, CEO of bitcoin wallet and custodial service Xapo. Casares was referring to the fact that too many of his firms’ transactions with its customers had to be processed “off-chain” on faith that Xapo would later settle the transaction on the Bitcoin blockchain.

This is one of the most honest statements in the book. The entire cryptocurrency ecosystem is now dominated by intermediaries.

Interestingly, Xapo moved its main office from Palo Alto to Switzerland days after Ripple was fined by FinCEN for violating the BSA. Was this just a coincidence?

On p. 73 they wrote:

Making blocks bigger would require more memory, which would make it even more expensive to operate a miner, critics pointed out. That could drive other prospective miners away, and leave Bitcoin mining even more concentrated among a few centralized players, raising the existential threat of collusion to undermine the ledger.

This wasn’t really the argument being made by the “small blockers.” Rather, it was disk space (not memory) that was — at the time — perceived as a limitation for retail (home) users in the long run. Yet it has been a moot point for both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash as the price per gigabyte for a hard drive continues to decline over time… and because in the past year, on-chain transactions on both chains have fallen from their peak in December 2017.

In practice, the “miners” that that authors refer to are the roughly 15 to 20 or so mining pools that in a given day, create the blocks that others build on. Nearly all of them maintain these nodes at a cloud provider. So there is already a lot of trust that takes place (e.g., AWS and Alibaba are trusted third parties). Because of economies of scale, spinning up a node (computer) in AWS is relatively inexpensive.

It really isn’t discussed much in the book, but the main argument throughout the 2nd half of 2017 was about UASF — a populist message which basically said miners (mining pools) didn’t really matter. Followers of this philosophy emphasized the need to run a node at home. For instance, if a UASF supporter based in rural Florida is attempting to run a node from his home, there could be a stark difference between the uptime and bandwidth capacity he has at home versus what AWS provides.

On p. 74 they write:

Without a tally of who’s who and who owns what, there was no way to gauge what the majority of the Bitcoin community, composed of users, businesses, investors, developers, and miners, wanted. And so, it all devolved into shouting matches on social media.

I wrote about this phenomenon in Appendix A in a paper published in November 2015. And what eventually happened was a series of off-chain Sybil attacks by several different tribes, but especially by promoters of UASF who spun up hundreds — thousands of nodes — and acted as if those mattered.

Future editions should also include a discussion on what took place at the Hong Kong roundtable, New York agreement, and other multilateral governance-related talks prior to the Bitcoin Cash fork.

On p. 74 they write:

A hard-fork-based software change thus poses a do-or-die decision for users on whether to upgrade or not. That’s bad enough for, say, word processing software, but for a currency it’s downright problematic. A bitcoin based on the old version could not be transferred to someone running software that support the new version. Two Bitcoins. Two versions of the truth.

The authors actually accidentally proved my earlier point: that public chains, specifically, proof-of-work chains, cannot prevent duplication or forks. Proof-of-work only makes it resource intensive to do double-spend on one specific chain.

This is one of the reasons why regulated financial organizations likely will continue to not issue long lifecycle instruments directly onto an anarchic chain like Bitcoin: because by design, PoW chains are forkable.

Also, future editions may want to modify this language because there are some counterarguments from folks like Vitalik Buterin that state: because hard forks are opt-in and thus lead to cleaner long-term outcomes (e.g., less technical debt).

On p. 75 they write a lot about Lightning Network, stating:

So, there are no miners’ fees to pay and no limit on how many transaction can be done at any time. The smart contracts prevent users from defrauding each other while the Bitcoin blockchain is used solely as a settlement layer, recording new balance transactions whenever a channel is opened or closed. It persists as the ultimate source of proof, a guarantee that all the “off-chain” Lightning transactions are legitimate.

What is not discussed in this edition is that:

  1. Lightning has been massively hyped with still relatively subdued traction
  2. Lightning is a separate network – it is not Bitcoin – and thus must be protected and secured through other non-mining means
  3. Lightning arguably distorts the potential transition to a fee-based Bitcoin network in much the same way that intermediaries like Coinbase do. That is to say, users are paying intermediaries the fees instead of miners thus prolonging the time that miners rely on block rewards (as a subsidy) instead of user fees.

Also, it bears mentioning that Bitcoin cannot in its current form act as a legal “settlement layer” as it cannot provide definitive settlement finality as outlined in the PFMIs (principle #8).

On p. 75 they write:

The SegWit/Lightning combination was in their minds the responsible way to make changes. They had a duty, they believed, to avoid big, disruptive codebase alterations and instead wanted to encourage innovators to develop applications that would augment the powers of the limited foundational code. It’s a classic, security-minded approach to protocol development: keep the core system at the bottom layer of the system simple, robust, and hard to change – some of the words “deliberately dumb” – and thus force innovation “up the stack” to the “application layer.” When it works you get the best of both worlds: security and innovation.

The authors should revise this because this is just repeating the talking points of specific Core developers, especially the last line.

Empirically it is possible to create a secure and “innovative” platform… and do so with multiple implementations of a specification. We see that in other cryptocurrencies and blockchain-related development efforts including Ethereum. The Bitcoin Core participants do not have a monopoly on what is or is not “security minded” and several of them are vocally opposed to supporting multiple implementations, in part, because of the politics around who controls the BIP process.

In fact, it could be argued that by insisting on the SegWit/Lightning approach, they caused a disruption because in point of fact, the amount of code that needed to be changed to increase the block size is arguably less than what was needed to build, verify, and release SegWit.

It’s not worth wading deep into these waters in this review, but the next edition of this book should be more even handed towards this schism.

On p. 76 they write:

But a group of miners with real clout was having none of it. Led by a Chinese company that both mined bitcoin and produced some of the most widely used mining equipment, this group was adamantly opposed to SegWit and Lightning. It’s not entirely clear what upset Jihan Wu, CEO of Bitmain, but after lining up with early Bitcoin investor and prominent libertarian Roger Ver, he launched a series of lobbying efforts to promote bigger blocks. One theory was that Bitmain worried that an “off-chain” Lightning solution would siphon away transaction fees that should be rightly going to miners; another was that because such payment channel transactions weren’t traceable as on-chain transactions, Chinese miners were worried that their government might shut them down. Bitmain’s reputation suffered a blow when revelations emerged that its popular Ant-miner mining rigs were being shipped to third-party miners with a “backdoor” that allowed the manufacturer-cum-miner to shut its opponents’ equipment down. Conspiracy theories abounded: Bitmain was planning to subvert SegWit. The company denied this and vowed to disable the feature. But trust was destroyed.

There is a lot of revisionism here.

But to start with, in the process of writing this review I reached out and contacted both Roger Ver and separately an advisor at Bitmain. Both told me that neither of the authors of this book had reached out to them for any comment. Why would the authors freely quote Bitcoin Core / SegWit developers to get their side of this debate but not reach out to speak with two prominent individuals from the other side to get their specific views? The next edition should either include these views and/or heavily revise this section of the book.

There are a few other problems with this passage.

Multiple different groups were actively lobbying and petitioning various influential figures (such as exchange operators) during this time period, not just Jihan and Roger. For instance, as mentioned above, the Hong Kong roundtable and New York agreement were two such examples. Conversely, SegWit and UASF was heavily promoted and lobbied by executives and affiliates at Blockstream and a handful of other organizations.

Regarding this “backdoor,” let’s rewind the clock and look at the overt / covert tempest in a teapot.

Last April Bitmain was alleged by Greg Maxwell (and the Antbleed campaign) of having maybe kinda sorta engaged in something called covert mining via Asicboost. Jimmy Song and others looked into it and said that there was no evidence covert was happening. At the time, some of the vocal self-identified “small block” supporters backing UASF, used this as evidence that Bitmain was a malicious Byzantine actor that must be purged from Bitcoinland. At the time, Greg proposed changing the PoW function in Bitcoin in order to prevent covert Asicboost from working.

In its defense, Bitmain stated that while Asicboost had been integrated into the mining equipment, it was never activated… partly because of the uncertain international IP / patent claims surrounding Asicboost. Recently, they announced a firmware upgrade that miners could activate overt Asicboost… a few days after another organization did (called “braiins”).

So why revisit this?

Two months ago Sia released code which specifically blocked mining equipment from Bitmain and Innosilicon. How and why this action is perceived as being fair or non-political is very confusing… they are definitely picking favorites (their own hardware). Certainly can’t claim to be sufficiently decentralized, right?

Yet in this section of the book, they don’t really touch on how key participants within the tribes and factions, represented at the time. Peruse both lists and look at all of the individuals at the roundtable that claim to represent “Bitcoin Core” in the governance process versus (the non-existent) reps from other implementations.

Even though the divorce is considered over, the tribes still fling mud at one another.

For example, one of the signatories of the HK roundtable, Adam Back, is still heckling Bitmain for supposedly not being involved in the BIP process. Wasn’t participation supposed to be “voluntary” and “permissionless”? Adam is also now fine with “overt” Asicboost today but wasn’t okay with it 18 months ago. What changed? Why was it supposedly bad for Bitmain to potentially use it back then but now it’s kosher because “braiins” (Slush) is doing it? That seems like favoritism.

Either way, the book passage above needs to be rewritten to include views from other camps and also to remove the still unproven conspiracy theories.

On p. 76 they write:

Meanwhile, original bitcoin went on a tear, rallying by more than 50 percent to a new high above $4,400 over a two-week period. The comparative performance of the pair suggested that small-block BTC and the SegWit reformers had won.

The next edition should change the wording because this comes across one-sided.

While an imperfect comparison, a more likely explanation is that of a Keynesian beauty contest. Most unsophisticated retail investors had heard of Bitcoin and hadn’t heard of Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin (BTC) has brand recognition while Bitcoin Cash and the dozens of other Bitcoin-named forks and clones, did not.

Based on anecdotes, most coin speculators do not seem to care about the technical specifications of the coins they buy and typically keep the coins stored on an intermediary (such as an exchange) with the view that they can sell the coins later to someone else (e.g., “a greater fool“).

On p. 77 they write:

Bitcoin had gone through a ridiculous circus, one that many outsiders naturally assumed would hurt its reputation and undermine its support. Who wants such an ungovernable currency? Yet here was the original bitcoin surging to new heights and registering a staggering 650 percent gain in less than twelve months.

The problem with cherry picking price action dates is that, as seen in the passage above, it may not age well.17

For example, during the write-up of this review, the price of bitcoin declined from where it was a year ago (from over $10,000 then down to around $4,000). What does that mean? We can all guess what happened during this most recent bubble, but to act like non-tech savvy retail buyers bought bitcoin (BTC) because of SegWit is a non sequitur. No one but the tribalists in the civil war really cared.

On p. 77 they write:

Why? Well, for one, Bitcoin had proven itself resilient. Despite its civil war, its blockchain ledger remained intact. And, while it’s hard to see how the acrimony and bitterness was an advantage, the fact that it had proven so difficult to alter the code, to introduce a change to its monetary system, was seen by many as an important test of Bitcoin’s immutability.

There are a few issues here.

What do the authors mean by the “blockchain ledger remained intact”? I don’t think it was ever a question over whether or not copies of the Bitcoin blockchain (and/or forks thereof) would somehow be deleted. Might want to reword this in the future.

Segwit2x / Bitcoin Cash proponents were not trying to introduce a change to Bitcoin’s monetary system. The supply schedule of bitcoins would have stayed the same. The main issue was: a permanent block size increase from 1 MB to at least 2 MB. That proposal, if enacted, would not have changed the money supply.

What do the authors mean by “Bitcoin’s immutability”? The digital signatures are not being reversed or changed and that is what provides transactions the characteristic of “immutability.”

It is likely that the authors believe that a “hard fork” means that Bitcoin is not immutable. That seems to conflate “immutability” of a digital signature with finality (meaning irreversibility). By design, no proof-of-work coin can guarantee finality or irreversibility.

Also, Bitcoin had more than a dozen forks prior to the block size civil war.

On p. 77 and 78 they write:

Solid censorship resistance was, after all, a defining selling point for Bitcoin, the reason why some see the digital currency becoming a world reserve asset to replace the outdated, mutable, fiat-currency systems that still run the world. In fact, it could be argued that this failure to compromise and move forward, seen by outsiders as Bitcoin’s biggest flaw, might actually be its biggest feature. Like the simple, unchanging codebase of TCP/IP, the gridlocked politics of the Bitcoin protocol were imposing secure rigidity on the system and forcing innovation up the stack.

This is not what “censorship resistance” means in the context of Bitcoin. Censorship resistance is narrow and specific to what operators of miners could do. Specifically, the game theory behind Nakamoto Consensus is that it would be costly (resource intensive) for a malicious (Byzantine) actor to try and attempt to permanently censor transactions due to the amount of hashrate (proof-of-work) a Byzantine actor would need to control (e.g., more than 50%).

In contrast, what the authors described in this book was off-chain censorship, such as lobbying by various special interest groups at events, flamewars on Twitter, removing alternative views and voices on reddit, and via several other forms.

The “world reserve asset” is a loaded phrase that should be clarified in the next edition because the passage above comes across a bit like an Occupy Wall Street speech. It needs more of an explanation beyond the colorful one sentence it was given. Furthermore, as I predicted last year, cryptocurrencies continue to rely on the unit-of-account of “fiat systems” and shows no signs of letting up in this new era of “stablecoins.”

The authors definitely need to remove the part that says “unchanging codebase of TCP/IP” because this is not true. TCP/IP is a suite of protocol standards and its constituent implementations continue to evolve over time. There is no single monolithic codebase that lies unchanged since 1974 which is basically the takeaway from the passage above.18

In fact, several governing bodies such as IFTF and IAB continue to issue RFCs in order to help improve the quality-of-service of what we call the internet. It is also worth pointing out that their analogy is flawed for other reasons discussed in: Intranets and the Internet. In addition, the next version of HTTP won’t be using TCP.

As far as whether innovation will move “up the stack” remains to be seen but this seems to be an argument that the ends justify the means. If that is the case, that appears to open up a can of worms beyond the space for this review.

On p. 78 there is a typo: “BTH” instead of “BCH”

On p. 78 they write:

That’s what BTC, the original Bitcoin, promises with its depth of talent at Core and elsewhere. BTH can’t access such rich inventiveness because the community of money-focused bitcoin miners can’t attract the same kinds of passionate developers.

Strongly recommend removing this passage because it comes across as a one-sided marketing message rather than a balanced or neutral explanation using metrics. For instance, how active are the various code repositories for Bitcoin Core, Unlimited, and others? The next edition should attempt to measure how to measure “depth.”

For example, Bitmain has invested $50 million into a new fund focused on Bitcoin Cash called “Permissionless Ventures.” 2-3 years from now, what are the outcomes of that portfolio?

On p. 78 they write about permissioned blockchains:

Under these arrangements, some authority, such as a consortium of banks, choose which entities get to participate in the validation process. It is, in many respects, a step backward from Nakamoto’s achievement, since it makes the users of that permissioned system dependent once again, on the say-so of some trusted third party.

This is a common refrain throughout the book: that the true innovation was Bitcoin.

But it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. Both worlds can and will co-exist because they were designed for different operating environments. Bitcoin cannot provide the same finality guarantees that “permissioned chains” attempt to do… because it was designed to be forkable. That’s not necessarily a flaw because Satoshi wasn’t trying to create a solution to a problem banks had. It’s okay to be different.

On p. 79 they write:

Most importantly, permissioned blockchains are more scalable than Bitcoin’s, at least for now, since their governance doesn’t depend upon the agreement of thousands of unidentified actors around the world; their members can simply agree to increase computing power whenever processing needs rise.

This doesn’t make sense at all. “Permissioned chains” in the broadest sense, do not use proof-of-work. As a result, there is no computational arms race. Not once have I been in a governance-related meeting involving banks in which they thought the solution to a governance-related issue was increasing or decreasing computational power. It is a non sequitur and should be removed in the next edition.

Also, there are plenty of governance issues involving “permissioned chains” — but those are typically tangential to the technical challenges and limitations around scaling a blockchain.

On p. 79 they write:

To us, permissionless systems pose the greatest opportunity. While there may well be great value in developing permissioned blockchains as an interim step toward a more open system, we believe permissionlessness and open access are ideals that we should strive for – notwithstanding the challenges exposed by Bitcoin’s “civil war.”

The authors repeat this statement in a couple other areas in the book and it doesn’t really make sense. Why? Because it is possible for both operating environments to co-exist. It doesn’t have to be us versus them. This is a false dichotomy.

Also, if any of these “permissioned chains” are actually put into production, it could be the case that end users could have “open access” to the platform, with the exception of participating in the validation of blocks. That’s pretty much how most coin users experience a cryptocurrency network today (e.g., via permissioned endpoints on Coinbase).19

On p. 80 they write:

The problem was that Bitcoin’s single-purpose currency design wasn’t ideally suited for these non-currency applications.

A side note maybe worth mentioning in a footnote is that Satoshi did attempt to build a marketplace early on but gave up.

On p. 81 they mention Nick Szabo with respect to smart contracts. Could be worth exploring the work of Martín Abadi which predates Szabo (the idea of distributed programs that perform authorizations predates Szabo’s “smart contracts”).  Mark S Miller has also done work in this area.

On p. 82 they write about Ethereum:

“Android for decentralized apps.” It would be an open platform much like Google’s smartphone operating system, on which people could design any new application they wanted and run it, not on a single company-owned server but in a decentralized manner across Ethereum’s ownerless network of computers.

This is probably not the best analogy because there is a difference between Google Android and Android Open Source Project. One of them includes proprietary tech. Also, Google can and does add and remove applications from the Play store on a regular basis based on its terms and conditions.

Lastly, someone does in fact own each of the computers that constitute the Ethereum blockchain… mining farms are owned by someone, mining pools are owned by someone, validating nodes are owned by someone. And so forth.

On p. 82 they write about Vitalik Buterin:

Now he was building a universally accessible, decentralized global supercomputer.

The next edition should drop the “supercomputer” verbiage because the Ethereum chain is only as powerful as the least powerful mining pool node… which in practice is typically a common computer located in a cloud provider such as AWS. This isn’t something like Summit over at Oak Ridge.

On p. 82 they write:

Now, with more than six hundred decentralized applications, or Dapps, running on Ethereum, he is looking vindicated. In just the first eleven months of 2017, the system’s internal currency, ether, rose from just over $8 to more than $400. By then the entire market cap for ether stood at $39 billion, a quarter that of Bitcoin’s. The success has made the wunderkind Buterin an instant multi-millionaire and turned him into a cultlike figure for the holders of ether and related tokens who’ve become rich.

The next version of the book should explicitly spell out what are the metrics for success. If it is solely price of a coin going up, what happens when the price of the coins goes down like it has in the past year?

For instance, ether (ETH), peaked in mid-January at around $1,400 and has been hovering near $100 the past several weeks. Does that mean Vitalik is no longer vindicated? Also, what is he vindicated from?

Lastly, it would be worth exploring in the next edition what Dapps are currently being used on a regular basis. As of this writing, the most popular Dapps are gambling apps (like proof-of-weak-hands / FOMO3D) and a few “decentralized exchanges” (DEX).

On p. 82 they write:

Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin only added to the complexity when he setup ConsenSys, a Brooklyn-based think tank-like business development unit tasked with developing new use cases and applications of the technology.

ConsenSys markets itself as a “venture studio” — a bit like YCombinator which incubates projects and provides some seed financing to get it off the ground. These projects are typically referred to as “spokes” (like a hub-and-spoke model).  As of this writing there are over 1,100 employees spread across several dozen spokes.  There is more to it than that and it would be interesting to see it explored in the next edition.

On p. 83 they write:

For example, the Parity Wallet, which was designed by Ethereum co-founder and lead architect Gavin Wood as a way to seamlessly engage, via a browser, with Ethereum smart contracts, lost $30 million in a hack.

Actually, Parity had a couple issues in 2017 and it is likely that the book may have been sent to publication around the same time the bigger problem occurred on November 13, 2017. The second one involved a Parity-developed multisig wallet… and $150 million in ether that is now locked away and cannot be accessed (barring a hardfork). Most developers — including those at Parity — characterize this instance as a “bug” that was accidentally exploited by a developer.

On p. 84 they write:

These kinds of dynamics, with large amounts of money at stake, can foster concerns that founders’ interests are misaligned with other users. Ethereum’s answer was the not-for-profit Ethereum Foundation, which was tasked with managing the pool of ether and other assets from the pre-mine and pre-sale- a model since used by many of the ICO token sales.

It would be interesting to explore how this foundation was created and how it evolved and who manages it today. For instance, at one point in 2014 there were conversations around creating a commercial, for-profit entity led in part by Charles Hoskinson who later left and founded Cardano.

On p. 85 they write about The DAO:

After a few modest coding changes failed, they settled on a drastic fix: Ethereum’s core developers “hard-forked” the Ethereum blockchain, implementing a backward-incompatible software update that invalidated all of the attacker’s transactions from a certain date forward. It was a radical move. To many in the cryptocurrency community, it threw into question Ethereum’s all-important claim to immutability. If a group of developers can force a change in the ledger to override the actions of a user, however unsavory those actions are, how can you trust that ledger won’t be tampered with or manipulated again in the interest of one group over another? Does that not destroy the whole value proposition?

This passage should probably be revised because of the usage of the word immutable.

Also, it could be argued that Bitcoin Core and other “core” groups act as gate keepers to the BIP process (or its equivalent) could lobby on behalf of special interest groups to push specific code changes and/or favor certain outcomes on behalf of specific stakeholders.

In either case, it is the miners that ultimately install and use the code. While some developers (like Bitcoin Core) are highly influential, without miners installing and running software, the rules on the network cannot be changed.

See Sufficiently Decentralized Howeycoins.

On p. 85 they write:

Well, in many respects, the Ethereum team operated as policymakers do during real-world crises. They made hard decisions that hurt some but were ultimately taken in the interests of the greater good — determined, hopefully, through as democratic a process as possible. The organizers went to great lengths to explain and gain support for the hard fork.

The next edition should strive to be more specific here: what exactly made the decision making around the hard fork democratic. Who participated, who didn’t participate. And so forth.

Continuing on p. 85:

And, much like the Segwit2x and other Bitcoin reform pro-miners didn’t accept it. For all intents and purposes, the fix was democratic – arguably, much more so than non-participatory democratic models through which crisis policymaking is enacted by national governments. And since Ethereum is more of a community of software engineers than of cryptocurrency investors, it was less contentious than Bitcoin’s struggle over hard-fork proposals.

This makes very little sense as it is written because the authors don’t define or specify what exactly made any of the decision making democratic. Who was enfranchised? Who got to vote and make decision? Also, how do the authors know that Ethereum is “more of a community of software engineers than of cryptocurrency investors.” Is there any hard numbers to back that assertion up?

And lastly how do we measure the level of contentiousness? Is there an objective measure out there?

On p. 85 they write about Ethereum Classic:

This created much confusion and some interesting arbitrage opportunities – as well as some lessons for bitcoin traders when their own currency split two years later – but it can also be viewed as the actions of a dissenting group non-violently exercising their right to secede. More than a year later, Ethereum Classic is still around, though it trades at a small fraction of Ethereum’s value, which means The DAO attacker’s funds – whose movements on the public Ethereum blockchain have been closely watched – are of lower value than if they’d been preserved in ETH.

I don’t think we can really say for sure how much the The DAO fund (and child DAO fundss) would be worth since that is an alternative timeline.

Also, there are some vocal maximalists that have created various Ethereum-branded tribes which are okay with The DAO attacker having access to those funds. Will be interesting to see if there are any sociological studies to reference in a new edition.

On p. 86 they write:

These hacks, and the scrambles to fix them, seem nuts, right? But let’s put them in perspective. First, is this monetary chaos anything less unsettling than the financial crisis of 2008? Or the audacity of the subsequent Wall Street trading scandals?

This is a whataboutism. Also, strangely the authors are saying the bar for judgement is as low as the financial engineering and socialized loses of the GFC. Isn’t the narrative that cryptocurrencies are supposed to be held to a higher standard because the coin creators seek to architect a world that doesn’t have arbitrary decision making?

On p. 87 and 88 they write:

When the FBI auctioned the 144,000 bitcoins (worth $1.4 billion as of late November 2017) that it seized from Ross Ulbricht, the convicted mastermind of the Silk Road illicit goods marketplace, those coins fetched a significantly higher price than others in the market. The notion was that hey had now been “whitewashed” by the U.S. government. In comparison, other bitcoins with a potentially shady past should be worth less because of the risk of future seizure. That’s hardly fair: imagine if the dollar notes in your wallet were hit with a 10 percent tax because the merchant knew that five years ago, unbeknownst to you, they had been handled by a drug dealer. To avoid these distortions and create a cryptocurrency that works more like fungible cash, Wilcox’s Zcash uses sophisticated “zero-knowledge proofs” to allow miners to prove that holders of the currency aren’t’ double-spending without being able to trace the addresses.

What the authors likely mean by “whitewashed” is probably “cleansed.” In the US there have been discussions on how this could take place via the existing Uniform Commercial Code (see Section 3.3). To date, there hasn’t been a specific update to the UCC regarding this issue (yet) but it has been discussed in multiple places such as Bitcoin’s lien problem.

As far as the “fairness” claim goes, it could be worth revising the passage to include a discussion around nemo dat quod non habet and bona fide purchasers. Legal tender is explicitly exempt because of the very scenario the authors describe. But cryptocurrencies aren’t legal tender, so that exemption doesn’t exist (yet).

Lastly, only “shielded” transactions in Zcash provide the functionality described in the passage above… not all transactions on Zcash utilize and opt-in to this mode.

On p. 89 they describe EOS. Worth updating this section because to-date, they have not achieved the 50,000 transactions per second on mainnet that is stated in the book. There has also been a bit of churn in the organizations as Ian Grigg (named in the book) is no longer at the organization, nor are employees 2 through 5.

On p. 90 they write about proof-of-stake:

One criticism of the model has been that without the electricity consumption costs of proof of work, attackers in a proof-of-stake system would simply mine multiple blocks to boost their chances of inserting a fraudulent one into the ledger.

This “nothing at stake” scenario is a valid criticism of some early attempts at building a proof-of-stake mechanism but isn’t valid for some other proposals (such as, theoretically, “Slasher“).

Chapter 4

On p. 91 they write:

It was clear that investors bought into Brave’s promise of a token that could fundamentally change the broken online advertising industry.

How do we know this was clear to investors? Anecdotally it appears that at least some investors participated as speculators, with the view that the token price would increase. A future edition should probably change the wording unless there is a reference that breaks down the motivation of the investors.

What about Civil?

On p. 96 they write about StorJ

Other models include that of the decentralized computer storage platform Storj, which allows hard-drive-starved users to access other’s excess space in exchange for storj tokens.

Could be worth pointing out that Storj had two public ICOs and it is still unclear if that will result in legal or regulatory issues. Putting that aside, currently Storj has just under 3,000 users. This stat is worth looking at again in future versions, especially in light of less-than-favorable reviews.

On p. 98 they talk about BAT:

The point is that it’s all on the community – the society of BATs users – not on external investors, to bear the risk of that happening

[…]

Once the 1 billion tokens had sold out in twenty-four seconds, it was revelead that only 130 accounts got them and that the biggest twenty holdings covered more than two-thirds of the total. Those distortions left many investors angry.

There is currently a debate around whether these types of ICOs in 2017 (and earlier) were investment contracts (e.g., securities). In the US, this has led to more than a hundred subpoenas with some quiet (and not so quiet) enforcement action.

The language used in this chapter (and elsewhere in the book) suggests that the participants involved in the ICO were investing with the expectation of profit in a common enterprise managed by the Brave team. Worth revisiting in a future edition.

On p. 102 they write about ERC20 tokens:

But because of the ERC-20 solution, they didn’t need to develop their own blockchain with all the independent computing power that would require. Instead, Ethereum’s existing computing network would do the validation for them.

This piggybacking may be initially helpful to token issuers but:

  1. it is a form of centralization which could have legal and regulatory consequences with respect to being viewed as not sufficiently decentralized
  2. in the long run this could create a top-heavy issue as miners are not being compensated in proportion to the amount of value they are trying to secure (see Section 2.1)

On p. 102 they write:

This low-cost solution to the double-spending challenge launched a factory of ICOs as issuers found an easy way to tap a global investing community. No painful negotiations with venture capitalists over dilution and control of the board. No wining and dining of Wall Street investment banks to get them to put their clients on the order book. No wait for SEC approval. Just straight to the general public: here are more tokens; they’re cool, buy them. It was a simple, low-cost formula and it lowered the barrier to entry for some brilliant innovators to bring potentially world-changing ideas to market. Unfortunately, it was also a magnet for scammers.

Could be worth updating this section to include more details on the scams and fraud that took place throughout 2017. Many of the tokens that raised capital from outside investors during this time not only have not delivered a working product, but in most cases, the token underperformed both ether and bitcoin.

Also bears mentioning that beginning in late 2017 through the time of this writing, there was a clear divergence between public sale ICOs and private sale of tokens… the latter of which basically involves a private placement to accredited investors, including the same type of funds that the passage above eschewed.

On p. 104 they write about Gnosis:

With the other 95 percent controlled by the founders, those prices meant that the implied valuation of the entire enterprise stood at $300 million – a figure that soon rose above $1 billion as the Gnosis token promptly quadrupled in price in the secondary market. By Silicon Valley standards, it meant we had the first ICO “unicorn.”

Actually, Ethereum did an ICO back in 2014 — and as the price of ether (measured in USD) increased, it is likely that ETH could be seen as the first ICO “unicorn.” But that’s not really an apples-to-apples comparison though because ETH (or Gnosis) holders do not have say, voting rights, which equity holders of a traditional company would.  Plus, “marketcap” is a poorly defined metric in the coin world (see Section 6).

On p. 104 and 105 they write:

One day, Paul received a call from a businessman who’d read one of his stories in The Wall Street Journal and wanted more information about how to get started and where to get legal advice. The man said he’d tried to reach the lawyer Marco Santori, a partner at the law firm Cooley who’d been quoted in the story, but couldn’t get through. Santori later told us that he was getting so many calls about ICOs, he simply couldn’t answer them all.

In January 2018, the SEC Chairman gave a public speech in which he singled out the “gatekeepers” (legal professionals) regarding the advice they gave clients. Could be worth revisiting who the main ICO-focused lawyers and lawfirms were during this time period and where they are now and if there were any enforcement actions undertaken.

On p. 105 they write:

“Most of these will fail,” said Olaf Carlson-Wee, the CEO of Polychain Capital, citing poorly conceived ideas and a lack of coding development. “Most of these are bad ideas from the beginning.” That said, Polychain is an investment firm that Carlson-Wee founded expressly to invest in these new projects. In fact, most of the people investing seemed to be taking a very VC-like approach to it. They understood that most of the projects would fail. They just hoped to have a few chips down on the one winner.

Carlson-Wee’s comments seem accurate insofar as the inability of many projects to execute and deliver based on the narratives each pitched investors. However, it could be worth digging into Polychain itself, which among other drama, may have “flipped” tokens due to a lack of lock-up periods.20 21

On p. 108 and 109 they compare Blue Apron and block.one (EOS). Even though it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison could be worth revisiting this in the future because of the churn and drama with both organizations.

Pages 110 and 111 aged quickly as most of the ICO rating websites and newsletters have fallen to the wayside due to payola scandals and inability to trust the motivations behind the ratings.

Similarly, the authors describe accredited investors and SAFTs. There is a typo here as the authors likely mean that an individual needs to have an income of $200,000 not $200 million. The SAFT model has fallen out of favor for several reasons that could be explored in a future version.22

On p. 112 they write about ASICs:

But developers of Vertcoin have shown that it’s also possible to create a permanent commitment to ASIC-resistance by introducing something from the real, non-digital world of social organizations: a pact. If the platform’s governing principles include a re-existing commitment from all users of the coin to accept a fork – a change to the code – that would add new, ASIC-resistant elements as soon as someone develops such a chip, the coin’s community can protect the distributed, democratic structure of a GPU-led mining network.

Putting aside the fanciful ASIC-resistance utopia that is peddled by some coin issuers, the passage above raises a couple flags.

Who gets to decide what the governing principles are? Do these principles get to change overtime? If the answer is yes to either, who are those decision makers and how are they chosen? So far, there has not really been any “democratic” way of participating in that decision making process for any cryptocurrency. How can that change in the future?

Why is a GPU-led mining network considered more democratic? In practice, most of these farms are located in basically the same type of structure and geography as ASIC-based equipment… in some cases they are swapped out over time. In light of the Sia coin fork… which clearly shows favoritism at play, a future edition of the book could include a chart or spectrum explaining how the mining of one coin more or less democratic versus another.

On p. 113 there is more discussion of ICOs and token sales as it relates to “open protocols” but in practice it has largely been reinventing the same intermediated system we have to do, but with fewer check and balances or even recourse for retail investors.

On p. 114 they speculate that:

This speaks to our broader notion that tokens, by incentivizing the preservation of public goods, might help humanity solve the Tragedy of the Commons, a centuries-in-the-making shift in economic reality.

That’s a big claim that requires evidence to back it. Let’s revisit next time.

On p. 115 they write:

Much like Wall Street bond traders, these will “make markets” to bring financial liquidity to every countervailing pair of tokens – buying some here and selling other there – so that if anyone wants to trade 100 BATs for a third of a Jackson Pollock, they can be assured of a reasonable market price.

But how does a blockchain actually do this? They mention Lykke as an startup that could help match tokens at a fair price… but to-date there is nothing listed on Lykke that really stands out as different than what you could fine at other cryptocurrency exchanges. Perhaps a future version of the book could walk the reader step-by-step through how a blockchain can enable this type of “fairness” whereas previous technology could not.

On p. 116 they discuss several projects they label as “interoperability” initiatives including Interledger, Cosmos, sidechains, and Lightning. It may be helpful for the reader to see a definition for what “interoperability” means because each of these projects — and its supporters — may be using the term in a different way. Perhaps a comparison chart showing the similarities and differences?

On p. 117 they write:

In an age where U.S. presidents peddle “alternative facts” and pundits talk openly about our “post-truth society,” using the truth machine to put a value on honesty sounds appealing.

On the face of it, that end goal seems like more than a stretch because it’s unclear how a blockchain (today) controls off-chain behavior. The example they go on to use is Augur. But Augur is a futures market and there are many of those already in existence. How would Augur or a futures market “with a blockchain” prevent politicians from lying? Walking through this process could be helpful to the reader.

On p. 118 they mention Erick Miller’s investment fund called CoinCircle… and a couple of “special value tokens” called Ocean Health Coin and Climate Coin.

Maybe worth following up in the next edition because neither has launched and each of the pitches sounds very handwavy, lacking in substance. Also, one of the ICOs CoinCircle advised – Unikrn – is part of a class action lawsuit.

Most of p. 119 and 120 come across as more political discourse, which is fine… but unclear how a blockchain in some form or fashion could directly impact the various issues raised. Perhaps the next edition could include a chart with a roadmap in how they see various projects achieving different milestones?

Chapter 5

If the reader is unfamiliar with IoT then the first 1/3 of chapter five is pretty helpful and informative.

Then there are some speedbumps.

On p. 130 they write about authenticating and verifying transactions involving self-driving cars:

The question, though, is: would this transaction be easily processed if it were based on a private blockchain? What are the chances, in a country of more than 230 million cars, that both vehicles would belong to the same closed network run by a group of permissioned validating computers? If they weren’t part of the same network, the payment couldn’t go through as the respective software would not be interoperable.

This is a red herring. Both “permissioned” and “permissionless” blockchains have similar (though not identical) scaling challenges. And interoperability is a separate issue which has been a known hurdle for years.

In fact, recently the Hyperledger Fabric team announced that it now supports the EVM. This comes a couple weeks after Hyperledger joined EEA as a member and vice-versa. Maybe none of these immediate efforts and experiments amount to many tangible outputs in the short-run but it does show that several ecosystems are attempting to be less tribal and more collaborative.

Also, the issue of payments is also separate from a blockchain-related infrastructure. Payments is a broad term and can include, for instance, a proposed central bank digital currency (e.g., “cash on ledger”)… or it can involve plugging into existing external payment systems (like Visa or ACH). It would be helpful if the next edition was more specific.

Continuing on p. 130 they write:

Other car manufacturers might not want to use a permissioned verification system for which, say GM, or Ford, is the gatekeeper. And if they instead formed a consortium of carmakers to run the system, would their collective control over this all-important data network create a barrier to entry for newer, startup carmakers? Would it effectively become a competition-killing oligopoly?

These are possible scenarios and good questions but this is kind of an unfair characterization of consortia. Let’s flip it around: why shouldn’t carmakers be allowed to build their own blockchains or collaborate with others who do? Do they need someones permission to do so? Depending on local regulations, maybe they do need permission or oversight in a specific jurisdiction. That could be worth exploring in another version.

On this topic they conclude that:

A truly decentralized, permissionless system could be a way around this “walled-garden” problem of siloed technology. A decentralized, permissionless system means any device can participate in the network yet still give everyone confidence in the integrity of the data, of the devices, and of the value being transacted. A permissionless system would create a much more fluid, expansive Internet of Things that’s not beholden to the say-so and fees of powerful gatekeepers.

That sounds well and good and a bit repetitive from earlier passages which said something similar. The passage aboves seems to be redefining what make something “permissioned” and “permissionless.” What does it mean for every device participate on a ‘decentralized, permissionless system’? Does that mean that each device is capable of building and/or creating a new block? If so, how do they choose which chain to build on?

And why is it so hard to imagine a world in which open-sourced platforms are also permissioned (e.g., validation is run by known, identifiable participants)… and these platforms are interoperable. Could be worth exploring because that scenario may be just as likely as the ones presented in this chapter.

Lastly, how does a “permissionless system” create a more fluid IoT world? These claims should be explored in more detail next time.

On p. 131 and 132 they write about IOTA, a specific project that markets itself as a purpose-built blockchain for IoT devices. But that project is beset by all kinds of drama that is beyond the scope of this review. Suffice to say that the February software build of IOTA cannot be run on most resource constrained IoT devices.

On p. 138 they mention in passing:

Exergy is a vital concept for measuring energy efficiency and containing wasteful practices; it doesn’t just measure the amount of energy generated but also the amount of useful work produced per each given amount of energy produced.

Fun fact: back in May 2014 I wrote an in-depth paper on Bitcoin mining that utilized the concept of “exergy.”

On pages 139-145 they talk about a number of vendors, use-cases, and platforms typically centered around the supply chain management world. Would be interesting to see which of these gained traction.

On p. 147 they write:

Blockchain-proven digital tokens point to what blockchain consultant and entrepreneurs Pindar Wong calls the “packetization of risk.” This radical idea introduces a negotiable structure to different phases of the chain. Intermediate goods that would otherwise be encumbered by a pre-established chain of unsettled commitments can instead be put out to bid to see if other buyers want to take on the rights and obligations associated with them.

It would be useful in this explanation to have a diagram or two to explain what Pindar proposes because it is a bit hard to follow.

On p. 147 they write:

This is why many people believe that the concept of a “circular economy” – where there is as much recycling as possible of the energy sources and materials in production – will hinge on the transparency and information flows that blockchain systems allow.

Does this mean that other “non-blockchain” systems do not allow transparency and information flows?

On p. 147 they write:

The principal challenge remains scaling. Open-to-all, permissionless blockcahins such as Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s simply aren’t ready for the prime time of global trade. If all of the world’s supply chains were to pass their transactions through a permissionless blockchain, there would need to be a gargantuan increase in scalability, either off-chain or on-chain. Solutions may come from innovations such as the Lightning Network, discussed in chapter three, but they are far from ready at this stage.

Can we propose a moratorium on additional usages of “Lightning” in the next edition unless there is significant adoption and usage of it? Also, it is unclear why the worlds supply chains should for some reason be connected onto an anarchic chain: what is the benefit of putting this information onto a chain whose operators are unaccountable if a fork occurs?

On p. 148 they write:

Instead, companies are looking at permissioned blockchains, which we’ll discuss in more detail in chapter six. That makes sense because many big manufacturers think of their supply chains as static concepts, with defined members who have been certified to supply this or that component to a finished product. But in the rapidly changing world of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, this might not be the most competitive option. Emerging technologies such as additive manufacturing, where production can be called up anywhere and delivered by anyone with access to the right software files and a sufficiently configured 3D printer, are pointing to a much more fluid, dynamic supply-chain world, where suppliers come and go more easily. In that environment, a permissionless system would seem necessary. Once scaling challenges are resolved, and with robust encryption and reliable monitoring systems for proving the quality of suppliers work, permissionless blockchain-based supply chains could end up being a big leveler of the playing field for global manufacturing.

There are way too many assumptions in this paragraph to not have somewhere written that there are many assumptions.

Is a blockchain really needed in this environment? If so, a future edition should explain how a 3D printer would be more useful connected to a blockchain than some other network. Also, this seems to be a misuse of the term “permissionless” — why does the network need to be anarchic? How would the supply chain benefit from validators who are unknown?

On p. 148 they write:

It will be difficult to marry that old-world body of law, and the human-led institutions that manage it, with the digital, dematerailized, automated, and de-nationalized nature of blockchains and smart contracts.

How are blockchains “de-nationalized”? As of this writing there are probably a couple dozen publicly announced state-sponsored blockchain platforms of some kind (including various cryptocurrency-related initiatives). This phrase should probably be removed.

On p. 150 they write about the Belt and Road Blockchain Consortium:

Hence the opportunity for blockchain technologies to function as an international governance system. Hong Kong’s role will be important: the territory’s British legal traditions and reputation for respecting property rights have made it a respected safehouse for managing intellectual property and other contractual obligations within international trade. If the blockchain is to be inserted into global trade flows, the region’s bridging function may offer the fastest and most impactful route. For Hong Kong residents who want the territory to retain its British legal traditions, that role could be a vital protection against Beijing undermining them.

From publicly available information it is unclear if the Belt and Road Blockchain Consortium has seen much traction. In contrast, the Ping An-led HKMA trade finance group has turned on its “blockchain” platform.

Chapter 6

On p. 151 they wrote about a public event held on August 5, 2015:

As far as bankers were concerned, Bitcoin had no role to play in the existing financial system. Banking institutions thrive on a system of opacity in which our inability to trust each other leaves us dependent on their intermediation of our transactions. Bankers might give lip service to reforming the inner workings of their system, but the thought of turning it over to something as uncontrollable as Bitcoin was beyond heresy. It wasn’t even conceivable.

This is a bit of a red herring. I’ve been in dozens of meetings with banks and financial institutions over the past four years and in general there is consensus that Bitcoin – the network – is not fit for purpose as financial market infrastructure to handle regulated financial instruments. Why should banks process, say payments, on a network in which the validators are neither accountable if a problem occurs nor directly reachable in case users want to change or upgrade the software? Satoshi wasn’t trying to solve interbank-related issues between known participants so this description shouldn’t be seen as a slight against Bitcoin.

Now, bitcoin, the coin, may become more widespread in its usage and/or ownership at banks. In fact, as of this writing, nearly every large commercial bank owns at least a handful of cryptocurrencies in order to pay off ransomware issues. But the passage above seems to conflate the two.

See also: Systemically important cryptocurrency networks

On p. 151 they write:

At the same time, committed Bitcoin fans weren’t much interested in Wall Street, either. Bitcoin, after all, was designed as an alternative to the existing banking system. An improvement.

This is a bit revisionist. For instance, the original whitepaper uses the term “payment” twelve times. It doesn’t discuss banking or specific product lines at banks. Banks do a lot more than just handle payments too. Satoshi attempted to create an alternative payment system… the “be your own bank” narrative is something that other Bitcoin promoters later added.

On p. 152 they discuss the August 2015 event:

In essence, Symbiont was promising “blockchain without bitcoin” – it would maintain the fast, secure, and cheap distributed network model, and a truth machine at its center that validated transactions, but it was not leaderless, permissionless, and open to all. It was a blockchain that Wall Street could control.

This has some hyperbole in it (does “Wall Street” really control it?) but there is a kernel that the authors could expand on in the next version: vendor-dependence and implementation monopoly. In the example above, the authors could have pointed out that the same market structure still exists, so what benefit does a blockchain provide that couldn’t already be used? In addition to, what do the authors mean by “cheap distributed network model” when they have (rightly) mentioned that proof-of-work is resource intensive? As of this writing, Symbiont uses BFT-SMaRt and doesn’t use PoW.

Also, the authors seem to conflate “open to all” with blockchains that they prefer. Yet nearly all of the blockchains they seem to favor (like Bitcoin) involve relatively centralized gatekeeping (BIP process) and permissioned edges via exchanges.

Again, when I wrote the paper that created this distinction in 2015, the “permissionless’ness” is solely an attribute of mining not on sending or receiving coins.

On p. 153 they write:

But these permissioned systems are less open to experiments by computer engineers, and access rights to the data and software are subject to the whim of the official gatekeeper. That inherently constrains innovation. A private blockchain, some say, is an oxymoron. The whole point of this technology is to build a system that is open, accessible, and public. Many describe them with the generic phrase “distributed ledger technology” instead of “blockchain.”

This is why it would be important for the authors to explicitly mention what “blockchain” they are referring to. In many cases their point is valid: what is the point of using a blockchain if a single entity runs the network and/or monopolizes the implementation?

Yet their argument is diminished by insisting on using loaded phrases like “open” and “public.” What does it mean to be open or public here? For instance, in order to use Bitcoin today, you need to acquire it or mine it. There can be substantial entry and exit costs to mining so most individuals typically acquire bitcoins via a trusted, permissioned gateway (an exchange). How is that open?

Lastly, the euphemism of using the term “blockchain” instead of using the term “bitcoin” dates back to late 2015 with investors like Adam Draper explicitly stating that was his agenda. See: The great pivot?

On p. 156 they write:

Though Bitcoin fans frowned upon permissioned blockchains, Wall Street continued to build them. These tweaked versions of Bitcoin shared various elements of the cryptocurrency’s powerful cryptography and network rules. However, instead of its electricity-hungry “proof-of-work” consensus model, they drew upon older, pre-Bitcoin protocols that were more efficient but which couldn’t achieve the same level of security without putting a centralized entity in charge of identifying and authorizing participants.

There is a few issues with this:

  1. Which Bitcoin fans are the authors referring to, the maximalists?
  2. Proof-of-work is not an actual consensus model
  3. There are newer Byzantine fault tolerant protocols such as HoneybadgerBFT which are also being used by different platforms

Their last sentence uses a false dichotomy because there are different security assumptions based on the targeted operating environment that result in tradeoffs. To say that Bitcoin is more or less secure versus say, an instance of Fabric is a bit meaningless because the users have different expectations that the system is built around.

On p. 157 they write about R3:

The biggest winner in this hiring spree was the research and development company R3 CEV, which focused on the financial industry. It sought to build a distributed ledger that could, on the one hand, reap the benefits of real-time securities settlement and cross-industry harmonization but, on the other, would comply with a vast array of banking regulations and meet its members’ proprietary interest in keeping their books private.

This seems like a dated pitch from a couple use cases from mid-2015 because by the time I departed in September 2017, real-time securities settlement wasn’t the primary use (for Corda) being discussed externally.

Also, the “CEV” was formally removed from the name about two years ago. See: A brief history of R3 – the Distributed Ledger Group

By the spring of 2017, R3 CEV had grown its membership to more than one hundred. Each member firm paid annual dues of $250,000 in return for access to the insights being developed inside the R3 lab. Its founders also raised $107 million in venture funding in 2017, mostly from financial institutions.

I don’t think the full details are public but the description of the funding – and what was exchanged for it – is not quite correct. The original DLG members got equity stakes as part of their initial investment. Also, as far as the Series A that was announced in May 2017, all but one of the investors was a financial institution of some kind.

On p. 157 they write:

Some of that money went to hire people like Mike Hearn, a once prominent Bitcoin developer who dramatically turned his back on the cryptocurrency community with an “I quit” blog post complaining about the bitter in fighting. R3 also hired Ian Grigg – who later left to join EOS – another prominent onetime rebel from the cryptocurrency space.

To be clear on the timing: Mike Hearn began working at R3 in October 2015 (along with James Carlyle).23 Several months later he published a widely discussed post about Bitcoin itself. Based on his public talks since January 2016, he still seems to have some passing interest in cryptocurrencies; he did a reddit AMA on /r/btc this past spring.

Also, Ian Grigg has since left EOS and launched a new startup, Chamapesa.

On p. 157 they write about me:

Before their arrival, R3 had also signed on Tim Swanson as research director. Swanson was a distributed ledger/blockchain analyst who was briefly enthused by Bitcoin but who later became disillusioned with the cryptocurrency’s ideologues. He became a vocal, anti-Bitcoin gadfly who seemed to delight in mocking its travails.

This is also revisionist history.

Not to dive too much into the weeds here – and ignoring everything pre-2014 – a quick chronology that could be added if the authors are looking to be balanced is the following:

Over the course of under four months, after doing market research covering a few dozen projects, I published Great Chain of Numbers in March 2014… which was a brief report that quickly became outdated.

Some of the feedback I received – including from Bob, an expert at a data analytics startup – was that I was too charitable towards the claims of cryptocurrency promoters at payment processors and exchanges.24 That is to say, Bob thought that based on analytics, the actual usage of a payment processor was a lot lower than what the executives from that processor told me. In retrospect, Bob was absolutely correct.

A couple months later I ended up – by accident – doing an interview on Let’s Talk Bitcoin. The original guest did not show up and while we (the co-hosts) were waiting, I ended up getting into a small debate with another co-host about the adoption and usage of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. You can listen to it here and read the corresponding long-read that provides more citations and supporting links to back up the comments I made in the podcast.

From this moment forward (June 2014) – because I fact-checked the claims and did not blindly promote cryptocurrencies – I quickly became labeled as a pariah by several of the vocal cryptotwitter personalities. Or as the authors of this book unfairly label me: “anti-Bitcoin gadfly.” To call this order of events “disillusionment” is also unfair.

Lastly, a quick fix to the passage in the book: I technically became a formal advisor to R3 at the end of 2014 (after their second roundtable in Palo Alto)… and then later in August 2015 came on full-time as director of market research (although I subsequently wore several different hats).

On p. 158 they write:

Of a similar breed was Preston Byrne, the general counsel of Eris Ltd., later called Monax which designed private blockchains for banks and a variety of other companies. When Byrne’s Twitter feed wasn’t conveying his eclectic mix of political positions – pro-Trump, anti-Brexit, pro-Second Amendment, pro-encryption, anti-software utopianism – or constant references to marmots (the Eris brand’s mascot), it poured scorn on Bitcoin’s fanatic followers. For guys like Swanson and Byrne, Bitcoin’s dysfunctional governance was a godsend.

Again, chronologically I met Preston online in early 2014. He helped edit and contributed to Great Chain of Numbers. Note: he left Eris last year and recently joined a US law firm.

This is an unfair description: “For guys like Swanson and Byrne, Bitcoin’s dysfunctional governance was a godsend.”

This is unfair for several reasons:

  • We were hardly the first people to spend time writing about the governance problems and frictions involved in cryptocurrencies. For instance this includes: Ray Dillinger, Ben Laurie, and likely dozens of others. Nor were we the only ones discussing it in 2014 and 2015.
  • Preston and I have also – separately – written and discussed issues with other cryptocurrencies and blockchains during that time frame… not just Bitcoin.

Thus to single us out and simultaneously not mention others who had similar views, paints us as some type of cartoonish villains in this narrative. Plus, the authors could have reached out to us for comment. Either way, the next version should attempt to fix the word choices and chronology.

I reached out to Preston Byrne and he provided a response that he asked to have included in a footnote.25

On p. 159 they write more about R3:

On the one hand, regulators were comfortable with the familiar membership of R3’s consortium: they were more accustomed to working with bankers than with T-shirt-and-jeans-wearing crypto-investors. But on the other, the idea of a consortium of the world’s biggest banks having say-so over who and what gets included within the financial system’s single and only distributed ledger conjured up fears of excessive banking power and of the politically unpopular bailouts that happened after the crisis. Might Wall Street be building a “too-big-to-fail” blockchain?

This is some strange criticism because many of the developers of Corda (and other pieces of software) wore casual and business casual attire while working in the offices.

Corda is not the “single and only distributed ledger” being used by enterprises. Nearly all of the banks that invested in R3 also invested in other competing entities and organizations including Axoni and Digital Asset. Thus the statement in the middle should be updated to reflect that R3 does not have some kind of exclusivity over banking or enterprise relationships.

Michael Casey has said multiple times in public (even prior to the existence of Corda) that R3 was a “cartel coin” or “cartel chain” — including on at least one panel I was on with him in January 2016.  This is during a time in which R3 did not have or sell any type of product, it was strictly a services-focused company.  Maybe the organization evolves in the future – there may even be some valid criticism of a mono-implementation or a centrally run notary – but even as of this writing there is no Corda Enterprise network up and running.26

Lastly, all of these banks are members of many different types of consortia and multilateral bodies. Simply belonging to or participating in organizations such as IOSCO does not mean something nefarious is afoot.

On p. 160 they write:

The settlement time is also a factor in a financial crisis, and it contributed to the global panic of 2008.

This is a good point and it would be great to go into further details and examples in the next edition.

On p. 160 they write:

This systemic risk problem is what drew Blythe Masters, one of the key figures behind blockchain innovation on Wall Street, into digital ledger technology; she joined Digital Asset Holdings, a blockchain service provider for the financial system’s back-office processing tasks, as CEO in 2014.

Two small quibbles:

  1. Pretty sure the authors meant to say “distributed” not “digital”
  2. Blythe Masters joined as CEO in March 2015, not in 2014

On p. 162 they write:

It’s just that to address such breakdowns, this new wave of distributed ledger system designers have cherry-picked the features of Nakamoto’s invention that are least threatening to the players in the banking system, such as its cryptographic integrity, and left aside its more radical, and arguably more powerful, features, especially the decentralized, permissionless consensus system.

This is revisionist history. Satoshi bundled together existing ideas and libraries to create a blockchain. He or she did not invent cryptography from the ground up. For more details, readers are encouraged to read “Bitcoin is worse is better” from Gwern Branwen. IT systems at financial institutions were (and are) already using various bits of cryptography, encryption, permissioning, data lakes, and distributed storage methods.

Furthermore, because the participants in the financial system are known, there is no reason to use proof-of-work, which is used in Bitcoin because the participants (miners) are unknown.

Lastly, the authors touch on it and do have a valid point about market structure being changed (or unchanged) and should try to expand that in the next edition.

On p. 162 they write:

The DTCC, which settles and clears the vast majority of US stock and bond trades, handles 10,000 transactions per second; Bitcoin, at the time of this writing, could process just seven. And as strong as Bitcoin’s value – and incentive-based security model has proven to be, it’s not at all clear that a few hundred million dollars in bitcoin mining costs would deter rogue traders in New York or London when government bond markets offer billion dollar fraud opportunities.

Firstly, at the time of this writing, on-chain capacity for Bitcoin (even with Segwit activated) is still less than seven transaction per second.

Second, it is not clear how “rogue traders” in New York or London would be able to directly subvert the mining process of Bitcoin. Are the authors thinking about the potential security delta caused by watermarked tokens and colored coins?27

On p. 162 they write:

Either way, for the firms that R3 and Digital Asset serve – managers of the world’s retirement funds, corporate payrolls, government bond issuances, and so forth -these are not security risks they can afford. For now – at least until solutions as Lightning provide large-scale transaction abilities – Bitcoin isn’t anywhere near ready to service Wall Street’s back-office needs.

But Bitcoin is not fit for purpose for regulated financial institutions. Satoshi wasn’t trying to solve back-office problems that enterprises had, why are the authors intent on fitting a round peg in a square hole?

Also, Lightning isn’t being designed with institutions in mind either. Even if one or more of its implementations becomes widely adopted and used by Bitcoin users, it still doesn’t (currently) meet the functional and non-functional requirements that regulated institutions have. Why market it as if it does?

On p. 162 they write:

There are also legal concerns. R3’s Swanson has argued that the mere possibility of a 51 percent attack – that scenario in which a minder gains majority control of a cryptocurrency network’s computing power and fraudulently changes transactions – means that there can never be “settlement finality” in a cryptocurrency transaction. That of perpetual limbo is a scenario that Wall Street lawyers can’t live with, he said. We might retort that the bailouts and various other deals which banks reversed their losses during the crisis make a mockery of “finality,” and that Bitcoin’s track record of irreversibility is many magnitudes better than Wall Street’s. Nonetheless, Swanson’s catchy critique caught on among bankers. After all, he was preaching to the choir.

So there are a few issues with this statement.

I did not invent the concept of “settlement finality” nor did ‘Wall Street lawyers.’  The term dates back decades if not centuries and in its most recent incarnation is the product of international regulatory bodies such as BIS and IOSCO. Regulated financial institutions – starting with financial market infrastructures – are tasked with reducing risk by making sure the payment systems, for instance, are irreversible. Readers should peruse the PFMIs published in 2012.

The next issue is, they make it sound like I lobbied banks using some ‘gotcha’ loophole to scare banks from using Bitcoin. Nowhere in my presentations or speeches have I justified or handwaved away the (criminally?) negligent behavior of individuals at banks that may have benefited from bailouts. This is another unfair characterization that they have painted me as.

To that point, they need to be more specific about what banks got specific transactions reversed. Name and shame the organizations and explain how it would not be possible in a blockchain-based world. Comparing Bitcoin with ‘Wall Street’ doesn’t make much sense because Bitcoin just handles transfers of bitcoin, nothing else. ‘Wall Street’ encompasses many different product lines and processes many other types of transactions beyond payments.

All in all, painting me as a villain is weak criticism and they should remove it in their next edition.

On p. 163 they write about permissioned ledgers:

They’re not racing each other to win currency rewards, which also means they’re not constantly building a wasteful computing infrastructure a la Bitcoin.

They say that as if it is a good thing. Encourage readers to look through the energy costs of maintaining several different proof-of-work networks that handle almost no commerce.

On p. 163 they write:

That’s why we argue that individuals, businesses, and governments really need to support the various hard-core technical solutions that developers are pursuing to help permissionless ledgers like Bitcoin and Ethereum overcome their scaling, security, and political challenges.

This agenda has been pretty clear throughout the book, though it may be more transparent to the reader if it comes earlier in chapter 1 or 2.

From a historical perspective this argument doesn’t make much sense. If Karl Benz had said the same thing in the 19th century about getting engineers to build around his car and not others. Or the Wright Brothers had been ‘more successful’ at suing aerospace competitors. Why not let the market – and its participants – chose to work on platforms they find of interest?

On p. 165 they write about the MIT Digital Currency Inititative but do not disclose that they solicit financial support from organizations such as central banks, some of whom pay up to $1 million a year to collaborate on research projects. Ironically, the details of this program are not public.

On p. 167 they write:

A broad corporate consortium dedicated to a mostly open-source collaborative approach, Hyperledger is seeking to develop nothing less than a common blockchain / distributed ledger infrastructure for the global economy, one that’s targeted not only at finance and banking but also at the Internet of Things, supply chains, and manufacturing.

The next edition should update that passage. All of the projects incubated by the Hyperledger Project are open sourced, there is no “mostly.” And not all of these projects involve a blockchain, some involve identity-related efforts.28

On p. 169 and again on p. 172 the authors quote Joi Ito who compares TCP/IP with “walled gardens” such as AOL and Prodigy.

That is comparing apples-and-oranges. TCP/IP is a suite of protocols, not a business. AOL and Prodigy are businesses, not protocols. AOL used a proprietary protocol and you could use TCP/IP via a gateway. Today, there are thousands of ‘walled gardens’ called ISPs that allow packets to jump across boundaries via handshake agreements. There is no singular ‘Internet’ but instead there are thousands of intranets tied together using common standards.

Readers may be interested in: Intranets and the Internet

On p. 173 they write:

Permissionless systems like those of Bitcoin and Ethereum inherently facilitate more creativity and innovation, because it’s just understood that no authorizing company or group of companies can ever say this or that thing cannot be built.

How are they measuring this? Also, while each platform has its own terms of service, it cannot be said that you need explicit permission to build an application on top of a specific permissioned platform. The permissioning has to do with how validation is handled.

On p. 173 they write:

It’s the guarantee of open access that fosters enthusiasm and passion for “permissionlessness” networks That’s already evident in the caliber and rapid expansion in the number of developers working on public blockchain applications. Permissioned systems will have their place, if nothing else because they can be more easily programmed at this early stage of the technology’s life to handle heavier transaction loads. But the overarching objective for all of us should be to encourage the evolution of an open, interoperable permissionless network.

This is just word salad that lacks supporting evidence. For the next edition the authors should tabulate or provide a source for how many developers are working on public blockchain applications.

The passage above also continues to repeat a false dichotomy of “us versus them.” Why can’t both of these types of ‘platforms’ live in co-existence? Why does it have to be just one since neither platform can fulfill the requirements of the other?

It’s like saying only helicopters provide the freedom to navigate and that folks working on airplanes are only doing so because they are less restricted with distances. Specialization is a real.

On p. 173 they conclude with:

There’s a reason we want a world of open, public blockchains and distributed trust models that gives everybody a seat at the table. Let’s keep our eyes on that ball.

This whole chapter and this specific statement alone comes across as preachy and a bit paternalistic. If the message is ‘permissionlessness’ then we should be allowed to pursue our own goals and paths on this topic.

Also, there are real entry and exit costs to be a miner on these public chains so from an infrastructure point of view, it is not really accurate to say everybody gets a seat at the table.

Chapter 7

This is probably their strongest chapter. They do a good job story telling here. Though there were few areas that were not clear.

On p. 179 they write:

But as Bitcoin and the blockchain have shown, the peer-to-peer system of digital exchange, which avoids the cumbersome, expensive, and inherently exclusionary banking system, may offer a better way.

The authors have said 5-6 times already that proof-of-work networks like Bitcoin can be very costly and wasteful to maintain. It would be helpful to the reader for the authors to expand on what areas the banking system is expensive.

And if a bank or group of banks used a permissioned blockchain, would that reduce their expenses?

On p. 181 they write about time stamps:

The stamp, though, is incredibly powerful. And that, essentially, is the service that blockchains provide to people. This public, recognizable open ledger, which can be checked by any time by anybody, acts in much the same way as the notary stamp: it codified that certain action took place at a certain time, with certain particulars attached to it, and it does this in a way that the record of that transaction cannot be altered by private parties, whether they be individuals or governments.

In the next edition the authors should differentiate time stamps and all the functions a notary does. Time stamps may empower notaries but simply stamping something doesn’t necessarily make it notarized. We see this with electronic signatures from Hello Sign and Docusign.

Also, these blockchains have to be funded or subsidized in some manner otherwise they could join the graveyard of hundreds of dead coins.

On p. 181 they write about Factom and Stampery. It would be good to get an update on these types of companies because the founder of Stampery who they single out – Luis Ivan Cuende – has moved on to join and found Aragon.

On p. 183 they discuss data anchoring: taking a hash of data (hash of a document) and placing that into a blockchain so that it can be witnessed. This goes back to the proof-of-existence discussion earlier on. Its function has probably been overstated and is discussed in Anchor’s Aweigh.

On p. 184 they discuss Chromaway. This section should be updated because they have come out with their own private blockchain, Chromapolis funded via a SAFT.

On p. 185 they write:

The easier thing to do, then, for a reform-minded government, is to hire a startup that’s willing to go through the process of converting all of an existing registry, if one exists, into a digital format that can be recorded in a blockchain.

Why? Why does this information have to be put onto a blockchain? And why is a startup the right entity to do this?

On p. 186 they mention several companies such as Bitfury, BitLand, and Ubiquity. It would be good to update these in the next edition to see if any traction occurred.

On p. 187 they write:

They key reason for that is the “garbage-in/garbage-out” conundrum: when beginning records are unreliable, there’s a risk of creating an indisputable permanence to information that enshrines some abuse of a person’s property rights.

This GIGO conundrum doesn’t stop and isn’t limited to just the beginning of record keeping. It is an ongoing challenge, potentially in every country.

On p. 188-192 they describe several other use cases and projects but it is unclear why they can’t just use a database.

On p. 193 they write:

Part of the problem is that cryptocurrencies continue to sustain a reptutation among the general public for criminality. This was intensified by the massive “WannaCry” ransomware attacks of 2017 in which attackers broke into hospitals’ and other institutions’ databases, encrypted their vital files and then extorted payments in bitcoin to have the data decrypted. (In response to the calls to ban bitcoin that inevitably arose in the wake of this episode, we like to point that far more illegal activity and money laundering occurs in dollar notes, which are much harder to trace than bitcoin transactions. Still, when it comes to perception, that’s beside the point – none of these incidents help Bitcoin’s reputation.)

This is a whataboutism. Both actions can be unethical and criminal, there is no need to downplay one versus the other. And the reason why bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are used by ransomware authors is because they are genuinely useful in their operating environment. Data kidnapping is a good use case for anarchic networks… and cryptocurrencies, by design, continue to enable this activity. The authors can attempt to downplay the criminal element, but it hasn’t gone away and in fact, has been aided by additional liquidity to coins that provide additional privacy and confidentiality (like Monero).

On p. 193 they write about volatility:

This is a massive barrier to Bitcoin achieving its great promise as a tool to achieve financial inclusion. A Jamaican immigrant in Miami might find the near-zero fees on a bitcoin transaction more appealing than the 9 percent it costs to use a Western Union agent to send money home to his mother.

This financial inclusion narrative is something that Bitcoin promoters created after Satoshi disappeared. The goal of Bitcoin — according to the whitepaper and announcement threads – wasn’t to be a new rail for remittance corridors. Maybe it becomes used that way, but the wording in the passage above as a “great promise” is misleading.

Also, the remittance costs above should be fact-checked at the very handy Save On Send site.

On p. 194 they write about BitPesa. Until we see real numbers in Companies House filings, it means their revenue is tiny. Yet the authors make it sound like they have “succeeded”:

The approach is paying dividends as evident in the recent success of BitPesa, which was established in 2013 and was profiled in The Age of Cryptocurrency. The company, which offers cross-border payments and foreign-exchange transactions in and out of Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda, reported 25 percent month-on-month growth, taking its transaction volume midway through 2017, up from $1 million in 2016.

They also cited some remittance figures from South Korea to the Philippines which were never independently verified and are old.

On p. 194 they dive into Abra a company they described as a remittance company but earlier this year they pivoted into the investment app category as a Robinhood-wannabe, with a coin index.

On p. 196 they discuss the “Somalia dilemma” in which the entire country is effectively unable to access external financial systems and somehow a blockhain would solve their KYC woes. The authors then describe young companies such as Chainalysis and Elliptic which work with law enforcement to identify suspicious transactions. Yet they do not close the loop on the narrative as to how the companies would help the average person in Somalia.

On p. 198 they discuss a startup called WeTrust and mention that one of the authors – Michael – is an advisor. But don’t disclose if he received any compensation for being an advisor. WeTrust did an ICO last year. This is important because the SEC just announced it has fined and settled with Floyd Mayweather and DJ Khaled for violating anti-touting regulations.

Chapter 8

Chapter 8 dives into self-sovereign identity which is genuinely an interesting topic. It is probably the shortest chapter and perhaps in the next edition can be updated to reflect any adoption that took place.

On p. 209 they write about physical identification cards:

Already, in the age of powerful big data and network analytics – now enhanced with blockchain-based distributed trust systems to assure data integrity – our digital records are more reliable indicators of the behavior that defines who we are than are the error-prone attestations that go into easily forged passports and laminated cards.

How common and how easily forged are passports? Would be interesting to see that reference and specifically how a blockchain would actually stop that from happening.

On p. 212 they write about single-sign ons:

A group of banks including BBVA, CIBC, ING, Societe Generale, and UBS has already developed such a proof of concept in conjunction with blockchain research outfit R3 CEV.

Earlier they described R3 differently. Would be good to see more consistency and also an update on this project (did it go anywhere?).

On p. 213 they describe ConsenSys as a “think tank” but it is actually a ‘venture studio’ similar to an incubator (like 500 Startups). Later on p. 233 they describe ConsenSys as an “Ethereum-based lab”.

On p. 216 they write about Andreas Antonopoulos:

What we should be doing, instead of acting as judge and executioner and making assumptions “that past behavior will give me some insight into future behavior,” Antonpolous argues, is building systems that better manage default risk within lenders’ portfolios. Bitcoin, he sustains, has the tolls to do so. There’s a lot of power in this technology to protect against risk: smart contracts, multi-signature controls that ensure that neither of the two parties can run off with the funds without the other also signing a transaction, automated escrow arrangements, and more broadly, the superior transparency and granularity of information on the public ledger.

There are at least two issues with this:

Nowhere in this section do the authors – or Antonopolous – provide specific details for how someone could build a system that manages default risk on top of Bitcoin. It would be helpful if this was added in the next edition.
And recently, Antonopoulos claims to have been simply educating people about “blockchain technology” and not promoting financial products.

If you have followed his affinity marketing over the past 4-5 years he has clearly promoted Bitcoin usage as a type of ‘self-sovereign bank‘ — and you can’t use Bitcoin without bitcoins.29 He seems to be trying to have his cake and eat it too and as a result got called out by both Nouriel and Buttcoin.

On p. 219 they write:

If an attestation of identifying information is locked into an immutable blockchain environment, it can’t be revoked, not without both parties agreeing ot the reversal of the transaction. That’s how we get to self-sovereignty. It’s why, for example, the folks at Learning Machine are developing a product to prove people’s educational bona fides on Blockcerts, an MIT Media Lab-initiated open-source code for notarizing university transcripts that hashes those documents to the bitcoin blockchain. Note the deliberate choice of the most secure, permissionless blockchain, Bitcoin’s. A permissioned blockchain would fall short of the ideal because there, too, the central authority controlling the network could always override the private keys of the individual and could revoke their educational certificates. A permissionless blockchain is the only way to give real control/ownership of the document to the graduate, so that he/she can disclose this particularly important attribute at will to anyone who demands it.

This disdain for ‘permissioned blockchains’ is a red herring and another example of the “us versus them” language that is used throughout the book. If a blockchain has a central authority that can do what the authors describe, it would be rightly described as a single point of failure and trust. And this is why it is important to ask what ‘permissioned’ chain they had in mind, because they are not all the same.

They also need to explain how they measure ‘most secure’ because Bitcoin – as described throughout this review – has several areas of centralization include mining and those who control the BIP process.

On p. 219 they quote Chris Allen. Could be worth updating this because he left Blockstream last year.

Chapter 9

This chapter seemed light on details and a bit polemical.

For instance, on p. 223 they write:

Many of our politicians seem to have no ideas this is coming. In the United States, Donald Trump pushes a “Buy America First” campaign (complete with that slogan’s echoes of past fascism), backed by threats to raise tariffs, tear up trade deals, boot undocumented immigrants out of the country, and “do good deals for America.” None of this addresses the looming juggernaut of decentralized software systems. IoT systems and 3D printing, all connected via blockchains and smart-contract-triggered, on-demand service agreements, will render each presidential attempt to strong-arm a company into retaining a few hundred jobs in this or that factory town even more meaningless.

Putting the politics aside for a moment, this book does not provide a detailed blue print for how any of the technology listed will prevent a US president from strong-arming a company to do any specific task. How does a 3D printer connected to a blockchain prevent a president from executing on their agenda?

On p. 224 they write about universal basic income:

This idea, first floated by Thomas Paine in the eighteenth century, has enjoyed a resurgence on the left as people have contemplated how robotics, artificial intelligence, and other technologies would hit working-class jobs such as truck driving. But it may gain wider traction as decentralizing force based on blockchain models start destroying middle-class jobs.

This speculation seems like a non sequitur. Nowhere in the chapter do they detail how a “blockchain-based model” will destroy middle class jobs. What is an example?

On p. 227 they write:

In case you’re a little snobbish about such lowbrow art, we should also point out that a similar mind-set of collaborative creation now drives the world of science and innovation. Most prominently, this occurs within the world of open-source software development; Bitcoin and Ethereum are the most important examples of that.

If readers were unfamiliar with the long history of the free open source software movement, they might believe that. But this ignores the contributions of BSD, Linux, Apache, and many other projects that are regularly used each and every day by enterprises of all shapes and sizes.

Also, during the writing of this review, an open source library was compromised — potentially impacting the Copay wallet from Bitpay — and no one noticed (at first). Eric Diehl, a security expert at Sony, has a succinct post up on the topic:

In other words, this is an example of a software supply chain attack. One element in the supply chain (here a library) has been compromised. Such an attack is not a surprise. Nevertheless, it raises a question about the security of open source components.

Many years ago, the motto was “Open source is more secure than proprietary solutions.” The primary rationale was that many eyes reviewed the code and we all know that code review is key for secure software. In the early days of open source, this motto may have been mostly true, under some specific trust models ( see https://eric-diehl.com/is-open-source-more-secure/, Chapter 12 of Securing Digital Video…). Is it still true in our days?

How often do these types of compromises take place in open-source software?

On p. 232 they write:

Undaunted, an unofficial alliance of technologists, entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, lawyers, and disruption-wary music executives is now exploring a blockchain-led approach to the entire enterprise of human expression.

What does that even mean?

On p. 232 they write about taking a hash of their first book and inserting it into a block on the Bitcoin blockchain. They then quote Dan Ardle from the Digital Currency Council who says:

“This hash is unique to the book, and therefore could not have been generated before the book existed. By embedding this hash in a bitcoin transaction, the existence of the book on that transaction date is logged in the most secure and irrefutable recordkeeping system humanity has ever devised.”

These plattitudes are everywhere in the book and should be toned down in the next edition especially since Ardle – at least in the quote – doesn’t explain how he measures secure or irrefutable. Especially in light of hundreds of dead coins that were not sustainable.

On p. 233 they write:

The hope now is that blockchains could fulfill the same function that photographers carry out when they put a limited number of tags and signatures on reproduced photo prints: it turns an otherwise replicable piece of content into a unique asset, in this case a digital asset.

This seems to be solutionism because blockchains are not some new form of DRM.

Continuing on this topic, they write:

Copying a digital file of text, music, or vidoe has always been trivial. Now, with blockchain-based models, Koonce says, “we are seeing systems develop that can unequivocally ensure that a particular digital ‘edition’ of a creative work is the only one that can be legitimately transferred or sold.” Recall that the blockchain, as we explained in chapter three, made the concept of a digital asset possible for the first time.

This is empirically untrue. It is still trivially possible to download and clone a blockchain, nothing currently prevents that from happening. It’s why there are more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies at the time of this writing and why there are dozens of forks of Bitcoin: blockchains did not make the concept of a digital asset possible. Digital assets existed prior to the creation of Bitcoin and attempting to build a DRM system to prevent unauthorized copies does not necessarily require a blockchain to do.

On p. 238 they write:

Yet, given the amssive, multitudinous, and hetergeneous state of the world’s content, with hundreds of millions of would-be creators spread all over the world and no way to organize themselves as a common interest, there’s likely a need for a permissionless, decentralized system in which the data can’t be restricted and manipulated by a centralized institution such as a recording studio.

Maybe, but who maintains the decentralized system? They don’t run themselves and are often quite expensive (as even the authors have mentioned multiple times). How does a decentralized system fix this issue? And don’t some artists already coordinate via different interest groups like the RIAA and MPAA?

On p. 240 they discuss Mediachain’s acquisition by Spotify:

On the other hand, this could result in a private company taking a technology that could have been used publicly, broadly for the general good, and hiding it, along with its innovative ideas for tokens and other solutions, behind a for-profit wall. Let’s hope it’s not the latter.

This chapter would have been a bit more interesting if the authors weren’t as heavy handed and opinionated about how economic activities (like M&A) should or should not occur. To improve their argument, they could include links or citations for why this type of acquisition has historically harmed the general public.

Chapter 10

On p. 243 they write:

Bitcoin, with its new model of decentralized governance for the digital economy, did not spring out of nowhere, either. Some of the elements – cryptography, for instance – are thousands of years old. Others, like the idea of electronic money, are decades old. And, as should be evident in Bitcoin’s block-size debate, Bitcoin is still very much a work in progress.

This statement is strange because it is inconsistent with what they wrote on p. 162 regarding permissioned chains: “… cherry-picked the features of Nakamoto’s invention that are least threatening to the players in the banking system, such as its cryptographic integrity…”

In this section they are saying that the ideas are old, but in the passage above in chapter 6, they make it sound like it was all from Nakamoto. The authors should edit it to be one way or the other.

Also, Bitcoin’s governance now basically consists of off-chain shouting matches on social media. Massive influence and lobbying campaigns on reddit and Twitter is effectively how the UASF / no2x movement took control of the direction of the BIP process last year.

On p. 245 they write:

That can be found in the individual freedom principles that guide the best elements of Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

All blockchains that involve cross-jurisdictional movement of data will likely face challenges regarding compliance with data privacy laws such as GDPR. Michele Finck published a relevant paper on this topic a year ago.

See also: Clouds and Chains

On p. 247 they write about if you need to use a blockchain:

Since a community must spend significant resources to prove transactions on a blockchain, that type of record-keeping system is most valuable when a high degree of mutual mistrust means that managing agreements comes at a prohibitively high price. (That price can be measured in various ways: in fees paid to middlemen, for instance, in the time it takes to reconcile and settle transactions, or in the fact that it’s impossible to conduct certain business processes, such as sharing information across a supply chain.) When a bank won’t issue a mortgage to a perfectly legitimate and creditworthy homeowner, except at some usurious rate, because it doesn’t trust the registry of deeds and liens, we can argue that the price of trust is too high and that a blockchain might be a good solution.

Not all blockchains utilize proof-of-work as an anti-Sybil attack mechanism, so it cannot be said that “a community must spend significant resources”.

In the next edition it would be interesting to see a cost / benefit analysis for when someone should use a blockchain as it relates the mortgage use case they describe above.

On p. 248 they talk about voting:

Every centralized system should be open for evaluation – even those of government and the political process. Already, startups such as Procivis are working on e-voting systems that would hand the business of vote-counting to a blockchain-based backend. And some adventurous governments are open to the idea. By piloting a shareholder voting program on top of Nasdaq’s Linq blockchain service, Estonia is leading the way. The idea is that the blockchain, by ensuring that no vote can be double-counted – just as no bitcoin can be double-spent – could for the first time enable reliable mobile voting via smartphones. Arguably it would both reduce discrimination against those who can’t make it to the ballot box on time and create a more transparent, accountable electoral system that can be independently audited and which engenders the public’s trust.

A month ago Alex Tapscott made a similar argument.

He managed to temporarily unite some of the warring blockchain tribes because he penned a NYT op-ed about how the future is online voting… powered by blockchains. Below is a short selection of some Twitter threads:

  • Arvind Narayanan, a CS professor at Princeton said this is a bad idea
  • Angela Walch, a law professor at St. Mary’s said this is a bad idea
  • Philip Daian, a grad student at Cornell said this is a bad idea.
  • Luis Saiz, a security researcher at BBVA said this is a bad idea
  • Joseph Hall, the Chief Technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology said this a bad idea
  • Preston Byrne, a transatlantic attorney and father of marmotology said this is a bad idea
  • Matt Blaze, a CS professor at UPenn, said this is a bad idea

NBC News covered the reaction to Tapscott’s op-ed.  Suffice to say, the next edition should either remove this proposal or provide more citations and references detailing why this is a good idea.

Throughout this chapter projects like BitNation and the Economic Space Agency are used as examples of projects that are “doing something” — but none of these have gotten much traction likely because it’s doing-something-theater.

On p. 252 – 255 they uncritically mention various special interest groups that are attempting to influence decision makers via lobbying. It would be good to see some ba