Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
View on GoodreadsBloomberg's Zeke Faux on the 2021-22 crypto bubble and collapse — Tether's mysterious backing, Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX rise and fall, Cambodian pig-butchering scam compounds, El Salvador's Bitcoin gambit — as a single connected story of value-from-nothing economics.
Core ideas
- The Tether question is the book's load-bearing thread — the stablecoin's reserves were repeatedly opaque, and Faux's reporting tracks the specific people and entities involved, even when full documentation is impossible.
- The pig-butchering scam compounds in Southeast Asia (Cambodian forced-labor crypto-fraud operations) are presented as the dark-side endpoint of crypto's "decentralized" rhetoric — actual humans imprisoned to defraud strangers via supposedly trustless technology.
- SBF and FTX get extended treatment; Faux had unusual access to Bankman-Fried before the collapse, and the portrait is more pathetic than villainous — a confidently incompetent operator surrounded by enablers.
Published2023
Pages304
ISBN9780593443811
ReadAug 2025
