Zeke Faux on Cryptocurrency’s Boom and Bust

Apr 6, 2023

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New America 2023 Fellow Zeke Faux spoke about his book, Number Go Up, for “Three questions” in The Fifth Draft, the Fellows Program’s monthly newsletter. Faux is a senior reporter for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek, where he has spent a decade profiling and exposing the hustlers, scammers, and hedge fund managers who populate the shady side of Wall Street.

Your Fellowship project will be a book that tells the story of cryptocurrency’s boom and bust. What inspired you to pursue this topic as a book?

I resisted writing about cryptocurrency for years. One of my editors had suggested to me that readers are so naturally skeptical of crypto that there was no point in investigating any particular company. But around the time of the pandemic lockdowns, that seemed to change. Suddenly otherwise serious people were saying crypto was going to change the world. My friends were asking me if they should invest, doing it against my advice and then making a lot of money. Crypto bros were joining the ranks of the world’s richest people. I decided to see what it was all about. In reporting my first crypto story–about a coin called Tether–I met so many interesting characters I decided it could make for a fun book.

I’m fascinated by people who don’t feel the need to follow the same rules that we mostly live by. When a financier isn’t afraid of a lawsuit or even potential criminal charges, it opens up a lot of possibilities.

While cryptocurrency is the focus of your project, your previous work has covered multiple facets of the financial world, many with a common thread—a fascination with scammers and hustlers. What draws you to these stories of unlikely success?

I’m fascinated by people who don’t feel the need to follow the same rules that we mostly live by. When a financier isn’t afraid of a lawsuit or even potential criminal charges, it opens up a lot of possibilities. I can appreciate the cleverness that goes into exploiting a loophole or evading a regulation. As I told one subject, I wouldn’t be writing about you if you were just selling Nikes.

Policymakers are just now starting to put guardrails in around cryptocurrency. How do you envision your book contributing to the growing conversations around new regulations?

Even now, the debate over cryptocurrency regulation is shaped by the industry’s wildly successful public-relations engine, which has focused attention on crypto’s potential and not the industry’s actual impact. The crypto industry tells a great story about innovative technology and financial inclusion. And no one wants to naysay the next Internet. But politicians should judge the industry based on what it has actually produced of value in the 14 years since Satoshi Nakamoto mined the first Bitcoin: not much. I hope this book will cut through some of the cryptological haze and allow people to use common sense to evaluate the industry.

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