Jacob Silverman

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud

by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman  · 17 Jul 2023  · 329pp  · 99,504 words

owe each other.” —ZACHARY CARTER, author of The Price of Peace “A superb and disturbing examination into the corrupt world of crypto. Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman take us on the road—from Austin to El Salvador—as they explore the bizarre new universe of finance that is filled with frauds and

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interviews, too many late nights of brain-melting research, and more than a few bizarre adventures in the world of digital funny money. My colleague Jacob Silverman and I have talked to people inside and outside of crypto, the titans of industry and the average Joes, believers, skeptics, victims, villains, and a

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bit groggy and realized the obvious: I don’t know how to write a book. Maybe there was someone who could help? A journalist named Jacob Silverman wrote an article for the New Republic that I thoroughly enjoyed: “Even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin Is a Scam.” I looked him up and realized

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on writing a book I didn’t know how to write about events that hadn’t happened yet. What could possibly go wrong? Sure enough, Jacob Silverman eventually arrived, albeit a half hour late. It wasn’t his fault; I had given him the wrong address. While I had been waiting at

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time. It felt good to talk it out, but like every audition, whether I got the job or not wasn’t up to me. Would Jacob Silverman help me write a book on crypto and fraud? He smiled, and reminded me he was planning to go on paternity leave soon. I ordered

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superpower? ° ° ° On October 7, 2021, Slate published an article with the unambiguous title “Celebrity Crypto Shilling Is a Moral Disaster,” written by yours truly and Jacob Silverman. My first byline! In the piece, we castigated the likes of Kim Kardashian, Tom Brady, Floyd Mayweather Jr., and Lindsay Lohan for their involvement in

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doing that right now with cryptocurrency. ° ° ° The day after the Super Bowl, I finally met in the flesh my first fellow crypto skeptic not named Jacob Silverman. Cas Piancey and Bennett Tomlin host a podcast called Crypto Critics’ Corner that proved a lifeline when I first stumbled into the seemingly lonely world

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in me, but I liked my chances. ° ° ° Two weeks after the Super Bowl, the headline in Variety blared: ‘The O.C.’ Star Ben McKenzie, Journalist Jacob Silverman Sell ‘Easy Money,’ Book About Cryptocurrency, to Abrams Press. After a few setbacks, Jacob and I had managed to convince Abrams Press, an imprint of

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Reveal the Workings of the World (Scribner, 2018), p. 260. 23 “minor celebrity”: Shiller, Narrative Economics, Preface, xii. 24 an article for the New Republic: Jacob Silverman, “Even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin Is a Scam,” New Republic, June 7, 2021. CHAPTER 2: WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? 27 My first byline: Ben

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McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, “Celebrity Crypto Shilling Is a Moral Disaster,” Slate, October 7, 2021. CHAPTER 3: MONEY PRINTER GO BRRR 32 For our second journalistic collaboration: Ben McKenzie

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and Jacob Silverman, “Untethered,” Slate, October 17, 2021. 32 director of compliance for Excapsa: Stuart Hoegner, “Deputy GC, Director of Compliance, Excapsa, Jan 2006–Dec 2006,” LinkedIn profile

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impact beyond energy use,” One Earth, June 18, 2021. CHAPTER 6: THE BUSINESS OF SHOW 91 our months-long investigation into . . . Binance: Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, “Why users are pushing back against the world’s largest crypto exchange,” Washington Post, April 1, 2022. 92 crypto took off in China . . . to avoid

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was Brock Pierce: Interview with Brock Pierce, Bitcoin 2022 (Miami, FL), April 7, 2022. 106 Eric Adams. . . . in the form of Bitcoin: Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, “The Embarrassment of New York’s Next Mayor Taking His Paychecks in Bitcoin,” Slate, November 5, 2021. 109 O’Leary was particularly bullish: Adam Morgan

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Bukele: Gabriel Labrador, “How Bukele Crafted a Best-Selling Political Brand,” El Faro, May 3, 2022. 119 rollout of the government’s Chivo Wallet system: Jacob Silverman and Ben McKenzie, “Nayib Bukele’s Broken Bitcoin Promise,” The Intercept, July 22, 2022. 120 a horrific spree of gang violence: Associated Press, “El Salvador

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, 2022, https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-183. CHAPTER 11: UNBANKRUPT YOURSELF 199 James Block developed an interest in fraud: Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman interviews with James Block, Spring and Summer 2022. 200 Celsius stood out: James Block, various articles at Dirty Bubble Media, https://Dirtybubblemedia.substack.com. 204

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection

by Jacob Silverman  · 17 Mar 2015  · 527pp  · 147,690 words

harmful or defamatory. For example, when I type my name into Google, the four suggested search terms are “jacob silverman duff and phelps” (an executive at Duff & Phelps, a financial services firm, shares my name), “jacob silverman sxsw,” “jacob silverman twitter,” and “jacob silverman jeopardy,” none of which is cause for worry. If one of them had been

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“jacob silverman arrest,” I might have reason to look up a reputation defender. Some disgruntled Internet users have tried suing Google

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client’s biography than to enhance it with fluffy material. When challenged, the client could always say that the Web sites must be describing another Jacob Silverman who served in two wars, published a sonnet cycle, and sits on the alumni board at Yale. Similarly, all those blog posts attacking

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Jacob Silverman for being an asshole and a tax cheat must be describing that other Jacob Silverman or still yet, a third Jacob Silverman. The effect is, as the journalist Graeme Wood put it, like Saddam Hussein’s body doubles

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habits of users similar to you. Sometimes, anonymizing is as simple as assigning a person a number instead of a name; I might not be “Jacob Silverman” in a company’s eyes, but it’s just as useful for them to know me as 5402831. And given that past studies have shown

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on privacy, 287–88, 292 Shreateh’s post on Zuckerberg’s Facebook page, 354–55 Zuckerberg, Randi, 159 Zuckerberg’s Law, 288 About the Author JACOB SILVERMAN’S work has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and many other publications. He

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under thirty. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com. Copyright TERMS OF SERVICE. Copyright © 2015 by Jacob Silverman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to

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HarperCollins e-books. FIRST EDITION Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Silverman, Jacob. Terms of service : social media and the price of constant connection / Jacob Silverman.—First edition. pages cm ISBN 978-0-06-228246-0 (hardback) EPub Edition March 2015 ISBN 9780062282514 1. Information technology—Social aspects. 2. Information technology

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman  · 9 Oct 2025  · 312pp  · 103,645 words

Ireland Limited, 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, D02 AY28, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc Copyright © Jacob Silverman, 2025 Jacob Silverman has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work For legal purposes the Acknowledgements

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

to The Verge: Casey Newton, “Facebook Takes Flight,” Verge, July 21, 2016, https://www.theverge.com/a/mark-zuckerberg-future-of-facebook/aquila-drone-internet; Jacob Silverman, “Spies, Lies, and Stonewalling: What It’s Like to Report on Facebook,” Columbia Journalism Review, January 1, 2020, https://www.cjr.org/special_report/reporting

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News

by Clint Watts  · 28 May 2018  · 324pp  · 96,491 words

. Information Agency’s mission and activities can be found in this 1998 summary: http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/usia/usia home/oldoview.htm#overview. 4. Jacob Silverman, “The State Department’s Twitter Jihad,” Politico (July 22, 2014). https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/07/the-state-departments-twitter-jihad-109234. 5

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking  · 15 Mar 2018

/09/25/opinions-concerning-accelerating-the-construction-of-credit-supervision-warning-and-punishment-mechanisms-for-persons-subject-to-enforcement-for-trust-breaking/. 101 unwavering loyalty: Jacob Silverman, “China’s Troubling New Social Credit System—and Ours,” New Republic, October 29, 2015, https://newrepublic.com/article/123285/chinas-troubling-new-social-credit-system

Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth

by A. O. Scott  · 9 Feb 2016  · 218pp  · 65,422 words

book reviewing in particular undergoes periodic fits of anxiety about the manners of critics and the feelings of authors and readers. A few years ago Jacob Silverman, writing in Slate, complained that an “epidemic of niceness” was undermining literary culture, replacing the stringent work of judgment with an atmosphere of “clubbiness and

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on the head, cosseted, and praised for the sincerity of their efforts—more or less in the way that Heidi Julavits would later demand and Jacob Silverman and Dwight Garner would later, once again, decry. It would be a mistake to suppose that Hardwick’s argument prevailed for a while, and that

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

by Elizabeth Kolbert  · 11 Feb 2014  · 308pp  · 94,447 words

the Great Barrier Reef and Its Causes,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (2012): 17995–99. “all coral reefs will cease to grow”: Jacob Silverman et al., “Coral Reefs May Start Dissolving when Atmospheric CO2 Doubles,” Geophysical Research Letters 35 (2009). in a square meter’s worth: Laetitia Plaisance et

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

by Jonathan Taplin  · 17 Apr 2017  · 222pp  · 70,132 words

be searching the tweets that got the most retweets.” We certainly are not preparing our students for a career writing “sponsored content,” like the kind Jacob Silverman described in The Baffler: Also called native advertising, sponsored content borrows the look, the name recognition, and even the staff of its host publication to

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Other Online Activities,” May 13, 2016, www.ntia.doc.gov/blog/2016/lack-trust-internet-privacy-and-security-may-deter-economic-and-other-online-activities. Jacob Silverman, “Just How Smart Do You Want Your Blender To Be?” New York Times, June 19, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/magazine/just-how

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

by Adam Greenfield  · 29 May 2017  · 410pp  · 119,823 words

, 2016, carrefour-numerique.cite-sciences.fr/fablab/wiki/doku.php?id=projetspercent3Aclitoris#photos See also ufunk.net/en/tech/imprimer-un-clitoris-en-3d/. 35.Jacob Silverman, “A Gun, A Printer, An Ideology,” New Yorker, May 7, 2013; See also Defense Distributed, defdist.org. 36.Liat Clark, “Australian Police: Exploding 3D Printed

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert  · 15 Mar 2021  · 221pp  · 59,755 words