Number Go Up

Faux is a Bloomberg investigative reporter who set out to write a quick exposé of Tether and ended up living through, and inside, the entire 2021-2022 crypto cycle: meme coins, NFTs, pig-butchering compounds in Cambodia, the Sam Bankman-Fried implosion, the Bahamas, the lot. The book is the result, and on its own terms it is excellent reporting. It is also a book Bitcoiners need to read precisely because it is the most readable, well-sourced critical account in print.

Who it's for

Readers who want a serious journalist's account of what the 2021 cycle actually looked like from the inside — the marketing, the money laundering, the celebrity endorsements, the meetings with SBF in the days before FTX collapsed. Good as a first crypto book for skeptics, and a useful corrective for true believers who only consume sympathetic media.

What it does well

The reporting is the point, and it is very good. Faux spends real time with sources, travels to the places he's writing about, and brings back specifics — names, dates, dollar amounts, transcripts — instead of vibes. His Tether chapters in particular force the question every honest Bitcoiner should be willing to sit with: how much of the 2020-2021 price action depended on an offshore stablecoin issuer with opaque reserves, and what does that mean for the asset's narrative?

The pig-butchering chapter, in which he reports from a scam compound in Sihanoukville, is some of the best on-the-ground crypto journalism written this decade. It is also a useful reminder that crypto rails carry a real and growing volume of human trafficking proceeds, and that "permissionless" cuts both ways.

Where it falls short

Faux's frame is set early — crypto is mostly nonsense — and the book bends every story to fit it. Bitcoin's actual use cases in countries with broken currencies get a paragraph or two; the long, boring, important work of Bitcoin development gets almost none. If your only exposure to the space were this book, you'd think the whole thing was Bored Apes and Bahamian polycules.

The title is also doing a lot of work. "Number Go Up" is meant as a sneer at retail speculators, and that sneer occasionally slips into the prose at the expense of the more interesting questions Faux is genuinely well-placed to ask. Read it for the reporting, not the framing. The reporting is what survives.