THE CRYPTOPIANS

A financial journalist and podcaster looks into the tangled rise of cryptocurrency.

Imagine the internecine politics that Alexander Hamilton had to endure in piecing together a dollar-based treasury. Amplify it with backchannel drama, dark web intrigues, and head-butting mad scientists, and you have the arena in which former Forbes senior editor Shin’s narrative is set. The impetus is the Wall Street collapse of 2008, roughly coincidental with the rise of bitcoin, a currency that links to no government and is heavily encrypted. It was perfect, Shin notes, for drug dealers who hitherto had to use hard currency and face-to-face encounters. “The advent of Bitcoin,” she writes, “had now made it possible for them to send their Molly, blow, or acid right to people’s mailboxes, rain or shine, in exchange for the equivalent of digital cash.” Still, the original bitcoin, for all its vaunted digital armoring, was susceptible to hacks that could cost millions and whose algorithms were clunky. Enter Vitalik Buterin, a math whiz who also had adequate people skills—and solutions for some of bitcoin’s shortcomings in the form of a new currency under the rubric of a foundation called Ethereum. The programming was a feat of endurance. So, too, is reading about it, as a sample of Shin’s text might suggest: “If there was no hard fork, then not only would the DAO contract be attackable by any copycats but so would every child DAO, meaning that anyone who hoped to withdraw their ETH from the DAO via a child DAO ran the risk of an attacker entering their child DAO and preventing them from withdrawing money.” Somewhat more accessible is the author’s account of the fraught relations between Buterin and a succession of associates, especially a CEO whom it took years for him and his board to dislodge. Buterin is rich, Ethereum endures, and cryptocurrency seems to be on the rise, but this tale is better told in Camila Russo’s The Infinite Machine.

Financial geeks and crypto devotees will be interested, but it’s a tough haul.