Tibor Fischer

Like it or not, cryptocurrency is here to stay

CoinMarketCap now lists more than 18,000 cryptos - and the new billionaires are the laptop nomads who can work anywhere there’s a reliable internet

Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian wunderkind behind Ethereum. [Alamy]

There was a time when you could read a book to keep up to date about a subject. Well, that’s over. If a week is a long time in politics, in crypto it’s like a geological period. By the time a book on crypto hits the shelves it needs to be in the ancient history section.

The Cryptopians is an attempt to sum up ‘the first big cryptocurrency craze’ by Laura Shin, a financial journalist who writes for Forbes and who has a successful crypto podcast. Its scope is the first decade of crypto, from the creation of Bitcoin to the current frenzy of DeFi (Decentralised Finance) and NFTs. But the core of the book is the story of Ethereum and its coin ether, the number two crypto in terms of market cap, and arguably more important than Bitcoin because of its smart contract functionality that has sired DeFi and jpegs of rocks selling for millions. The standard line in crypto propaganda is that Bitcoin is digital gold whereas Ethereum is digital oil.

Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-Canadian wunderkind behind Ethereum, gets an intensive bio, and Shin also focuses on the infamous 2016 hack of Ethereum’s DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) that resulted in some £50 million of ether being stolen (worth billions at today’s price), so The Cryptopians has a whodunnit thread running through it.

If your dodgy government collapses you can just walk out with your capital in your pocket

Shin covers much of the same ground as Matthew Leising’s Out of the Ether, published last year. Her conclusion about the DAO culprit (not named in the book but revealed in a subsequent Forbes article) is different to Leising’s – as is her style. So many lazy, hasty cash-in works are produced by journalists that I salute Shin for her thoroughness. But that’s also the short-coming here.

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