Wait, what? Reviewing (positively, at that) this book on this site? Am I joking? Trolling?

Nope.

Okay, yes, Faux is someone who's not a fan of BTC. And there are about fifteen pages of this book that will piss you off if you don't skip them (but they're easy to spot and skip).

But this isn't a book about Bitcoin. It's a book about scammers, mainly SBF and Giancarlo Devasini. It is, in fact the SBF book that Michael Lewis should have written, and that should have gotten the attention.

The book starts mainly as Faux's quest to track down Devasini and uncover the scams behind Tether, but in the meantime, he ends up encountering SBF a lot, so that becomes essentially a second plotline. Along the way, we get various digressions into things like Razzlekhan and the Bitfinex hack (worth it for the snark in that chapter alone), the NFT/Apes movement, Tether's central involvement in pig butchering (and the human trafficking related to it), Do Kwon, and a ton more.

If you know my tastes in fiction, you know I enjoy a lot of crime and heist novels. And that's true for nonfiction as well. I love financial crime books in general, because the processes are almost always fascinating. And Faux's an entertaining and breezy writer; he takes some incredibly complex topics and boils them down so that my mom (no dummy, but not someone with any background in the topic) could understand.

There are a few bits where it seems like he's pretending to know less than he does to bring in readers (there's a chapter in which he buys an NFT and pretends that the concept of using Metamask and Opensea is new to him; as a reporter in the field, I'm sure he knew, but it moved the story well). But he also does a great job of making all his subjects into real people, and making the entire quest entertaining.

So yeah, skip the first few pages where he describes BTC (mainly aimed at the reader with no knowledge at all), the one very short chapter when he visits El Salvador in '22 and finds no one using BTC (which was basically true then, just not now, as I understand it), and just relish the note near the end when he states that BTC the only cryptocurrency (his term) that will survive and that he wouldn't bet against, because of the drive of the community.

And in the meantime, read and enjoy the financial shenanigans of the rest of the book. Genuinely entertaining.