Number Go UpZeke Faux
Number Go Up
by Zeke Faux · first published 2023
13mentions
6recommended by
12HN commenters
2023–2026first – last mentioned
50% recommend50% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Investigative look at crypto's boom and collapse, with strong reporting on scam victims, Tether, and figures like SBF. It is entertaining and offers a good way into the industry's shady side.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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…altruism. I think the jury is going to have to wrestle with these two ideas, a crime versus culpability of "super smart kids" that got in over their heads. I think therein lies what will be a hung jury. 1. Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux 2. Going Infinite by Michael Lewis
on “She's the star witness against Sam Bankman-Fried. Her testimony was explosive” ↗> Lewis gave SBF all the rope he needed to hang himself with, and that was all he needed to do. Very nicely put. Book recommendations: Faux Number go up is beautifully reported, in particular on the many scam and trafficking victims, the culture (Bored Ape parties), some of the players (eg SBF, the Tether people, etc.), and the underlying anarcho-capitalist…
on “Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison” ↗Zeke Faux's Number Go Up (https://www.amazon.com/Number-Go-Up-Cryptos-Staggering/dp/05...) started as an investigation into Tether. He found some extremely suspect clues, but he wasn't able to crack it. Hopefully the feds are…
on “Federal investigators probe Tether” ↗…name, as infamous a grift as the The Money Box or The Big Store. This podcast explores a QuadrigaCX and its founder's likely faked death, digging into a few other crypto scams for parallel examples. Number Go Up by Zeke Faux (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/711959/number-go-up...) -- this book, which reads as a cross between investigative reporting and New Journalism, tracks Sam Bankman-Fried's rise…
on “A crypto founder faked his death. We found him alive at his dad's house” ↗…physically cannot leave. Laundered profits go to criminal bosses at the top (corrupting various local governments, given they constitute a significant percentage of their economies at this point). See Number Go Up by Zeke Faux for a glimpse into that (and how cryptocurrency, in particular stablecoins, in particular Tether, facilitate it). True, much of book is largely about the weird cryptobro culture and FTX collapse,…
on “U.S. sanctions cloud provider 'Funnull' as top source of 'pig butchering' scams” ↗There's quite an entertaining (and sometimes shocking) discussion with the author of Number Go Up about the book https://youtu.be/THdU00jutvo (Zeke Faux Interview with Patrick Boyle)
on “Crypto Fooled Us Once. It Will Fool Us Again” ↗Crypto has been sold many many ways, but most of it is not a stable store of value. Stablecoins are what are supposed to be stable sources of value, but Zeke Faux's book Number Go Up points out how opaque and unaccountable the companies managing these currencies are. From his reporting, their "tractor app" appears to be not so much farmers in sub-saharan Africa receiving aid payments…
on “Crypto Capture of Foreign Aid” ↗…2023 and 1 (one) small country officially recognises it (and no one actually[1] uses it there, except for small tourist attractions), no companies accept it, and criminals don't even use it anymore. [1] Number Go Up by Zeke Faux tries actually using BTC in El Salvdor. Many don't know how, some people tell him to leave, some try but it's strictly inferior to existing payment methods.
on “The U.S. Government Has $5B in Bitcoin” ↗Thank-you. The more complete story was linked at the bottom: https://archive.md/0m1rq Both excerpted from Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux.
on “The Human Cost of Cryptomania” ↗Zeke Faux’s book Number go up has a couple of chapters on scammers who are actually themselves victims of human trafficking in Cambodia. Some of the scammers in the original video sound Nigerian to me, not sure what the situation…
on “YouTuber Kitboga trapped 200 scammers in an Impossible Maze [video]” ↗According to the Zeke Faux book "Number Go Up", one needs to "own" a Bored Ape YC NFT to be admitted. The author had to pay $20,000 for one of these in order to gain admission to this event.
on “Bored Ape conference attendees wake up with eye pain, vision loss” ↗Have any numbers on this? The only numbers I could find are very modest[1]. IIRC Zeke Faux, the author of "Number Go Up" also noted that adoption is very illusory - like the "Accepts Bitcoin" stickers you see all over the place Canada when there's no functioning bitcoin payment processing inside. But besides all that,…
on “Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao Agrees to Step Down, Plead Guilty” ↗"I dislike crypto as much as the next guy but this was clearly something else than a failure of the currency itself." Zeke Faux who wrote the book "Number Go Up", a George Plimpton-styled account which was released last year, went to El Salvador and tried to use crypto as currency. https://www.wwno.org/2023-09-19/tales-from-the-world-of-cryp... BECKER: ...…
on “El Salvador abandons Bitcoin as legal tender” ↗