The Cryptopians

January 1, 2022
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.

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April 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.