Porchlight Business Book Awards season is here.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

By Zeke Faux

The "rollicking" ( The Economist ), "masterfully written" ( The Washington Post ) account of the crypto delusion, and how Sam Bankman-Fried and a cast of fellow nerds and hustlers turned useless virtual coins into trillions of dollars--hailed by Ezra Klein in The New York Times as one of the "Books That Explain Where We Are" FINALIST: the Edgar Award (Fact Crime), t he Macavity Award (Nonfiction), t he Porchlight Business Book Award, the SABEW Best in Business Book Award A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times DealBook, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, The Globe and Mail, Irish Examiner, Morningstar, The Verge, Wired In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream.

READ FULL DESCRIPTION

Quantity Price Discount
List Price $28.99  
1 - 24 $24.64 15%
25 - 99 $17.97 38%
100 - 249 $17.39 40%
250 - 499 $16.81 42%
500 + $16.52 43%

Quick Quote

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit

Non-returnable discount pricing

$28.99


Book Information

Publisher: Currency
Publish Date: 09/12/2023
Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9780593443811
ISBN-10: 0593443810
Language: English

What We're Saying

January 11, 2024

Looking for the year's best Current Events & Public Affairs books? Porchlight's Marketing & Editorial Director Dylan Schleicher has you, and those books, covered. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

January 11, 2024

The harrowing, highly entertaining inside chronicle of how FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and a cast of fellow nerds and hustlers convinced the world to send trillions of dollars of real money to buy useless virtual coins. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

November 30, 2023

These 40 books spoke to us—and we believe speak to each other—in a way that furthers the conversations we need to have in the organizations we work in, the communities we live in, and the societies that shape us. With them as a guide, we can make decisions that better shape each, in turn. READ FULL DESCRIPTION

Full Description

The "rollicking" (The Economist), "masterfully written" (The Washington Post) account of the crypto delusion, and how Sam Bankman-Fried and a cast of fellow nerds and hustlers turned useless virtual coins into trillions of dollars--hailed by Ezra Klein in The New York Times as one of the "Books That Explain Where We Are"

FINALIST: the Edgar Award (Fact Crime), the Macavity Award (Nonfiction), the Porchlight Business Book Award, the SABEW Best in Business Book Award A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times DealBook, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, The Globe and Mail, Irish Examiner, Morningstar, The Verge, Wired
In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked--but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named "digital asset"? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity--with a dash of FOMO--would morph into a two-year, globe-spanning quest to understand the wizards behind the world's new financial machinery. Faux's investigation would lead him to a schlubby, frizzy-haired twenty-nine-year-old named Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF for short) and a host of other crypto scammers, utopians, and overnight billionaires. Faux follows the trail to a luxury resort in the Bahamas, where SBF boldly declares that he will use his crypto fortune to save the world. Faux talks his way onto the yacht of a former child actor turned crypto impresario and gains access to "ApeFest," an elite party headlined by Snoop Dogg, by purchasing a $20,000 image of a cartoon monkey. In El Salvador, Faux learns what happens when a country wagers its treasury on Bitcoin, and in the Philippines, he stumbles upon a Pokémon knockoff mobile game touted by boosters as a cure for poverty. And in an astonishing development, a spam text leads Faux to Cambodia, where he uncovers a crypto-powered human-trafficking ring. When the bubble suddenly bursts in 2022, Faux brings readers inside SBF's penthouse as the fallen crypto king faces his imminent arrest. Fueled by the absurd details and authoritative reporting that earned Zeke Faux the accolade "our great poet of crime" (Money Stuff columnist Matt Levine), Number Go Up is the essential chronicle, by turns harrowing and uproarious, of a $3 trillion financial delusion.

About the Author

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News and a National Fellow at New America. He's a winner of the Gerald Loeb Award and the American Bar Association's Silver Gavel Award and a National Magazine Award finalist.

Learn More

We have updated our privacy policy. Click here to read our full policy.