The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

by Laura Shin

Overview

The story of the idealists, technologists, and opportunists fighting to bring cryptocurrency to the masses.

In their short history, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have gone through booms, busts, and internecine wars, recently reaching a market valuation of more than $2 trillion. The central promise of crypto endures—vast fortunes made from decentralized networks not controlled by any single entity and not yet regulated by many governments.

The recent growth of crypto would have been all but impossible if not for a brilliant young man named Vitalik Buterin and his creation: Ethereum. In this book, Laura Shin takes readers inside the founding of this novel cryptocurrency network, which enabled users to launch their own new coins, thus creating a new crypto fever. She introduces readers to larger-than-life characters like Buterin, the Web3 wunderkind; his short-lived CEO, Charles Hoskinson; and Joe Lubin, a former Goldman Sachs VP who became one of crypto’s most well-known billionaires. Sparks fly as these outsized personalities fight for their piece of a seemingly limitless new business opportunity.

This fascinating book shows the crypto market for what it really is: a deeply personal struggle to influence the coming revolution in money, culture, and power.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541763012
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	02/22/2022
Pages:	496
Sales rank:	42,143
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Laura Shin is a writer, crypto journalist, and podcaster. A former senior editor at Forbes, she left the magazine in 2018 to commit to her podcasts and videos, Unchained and Unconfirmed, which have had over 14 million downloads and views. Shin has spoken about and led discussions on cryptocurrency at places such as TEDx San Francisco, the IMF, Singularity University and the Oslo Freedom Forum. She lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

04/11/2022

Shin, host of the Unchained podcast, digs into the origins, triumphs, and tribulations of the Ethereum blockchain in this perhaps too thorough account. In October 2008, a white paper by a “person or group named Satoshi Nakamoto” described how individuals could “bypass banks” and send money through the internet. Five years later, 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin, the owner of Bitcoin magazine, saw a flaw with how most cryptocurrencies worked: “each project was building a blockchain” for just one function, and he figured out how to create a single blockchain on which people could perform many functions. From this idea came Ethereum, and soon Buterin brought developers and funders on board, and the company exploded as an open-source platform on which users could code their own applications. Shin describes Ethereum’s dramatic early days and the ensuing conflicts fueled by big personalities and erratic behavior, as when the Ethereum Foundation’s executive director was banned from posting on Slack when she hadn’t “slept for 30, 40 or 50 hours.” The narrative of Ethereum’s history is extremely detailed, sometimes to a fault, and can get lost in the weeds of dryly parsing pricing and development delays. Readers, though, with a reasonable grasp of blockchain technology will find this worth the cost of admission. Agent: Kirby Kim, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Deeply researched, this book is an important body of work and must-read for the inside story of Ethereum, complete with all of its grit and drama.”—Willy Woo, Bitcoin analyst

“The most authoritative account yet of Ethereum. Laura Shin is deeply sourced in the crypto world and this is reflected on every page. The Cryptopians also casts new light on Vitalik Buterin, showing the human side of Ethereum’s founding genius as never before.”—Jeff John Roberts, executive editor of Decrypt and author of Kings of Crypto

“A story of high drama played out in the big stakes world of crypto currencies and cutting-edge technologies with a cast of characters worthy of a thriller novel. Except: this incredible tale is all true and the hero of the story—Ethereum—has gone on to even greater things.”—Raoul Pal, cofounder and CEO of Real Vision

“Shin’s compelling, blow-by-blow account of the remarkable birth and growth of Ethereum shows that its spectacular wealth generation was not without struggle. By Shin’s telling, the story of Ethereum is a grand human drama. For all the talk of decentralized, code-based ‘virtual machines,’ a successful crypto project’s biggest challenge is surviving internecine conflicts and the egos of its brilliant but humanly flawed founders.”—Michael J. Casey, chief content officer at CoinDesk and coauthor of The Age of Cryptocurrency and The Truth Machine

“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.”—Kirkus Reviews

“This isn't the first book on Ethereum but, thanks to author Laura Shin’s meticulous research and deep crypto pedigree, it's the most authoritative…There will be dozens more books about crypto in the coming years, but Shin has written the definitive one on early Ethereum.”—Decrypt

“Worth the cost of admission.”—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2021-12-15
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.

Kirkus Reviews