The Mysterious Mr. Nakamoto: A Fifteen-Year Quest to Unmask the Secret Genius Behind Crypto
by Benjamin Wallace · 18 Mar 2025 · 431pp · 116,274 words
, 2021. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT more than $5 billion worth of bitcoin: Arnold Kirimi, “MicroStrategy CEO Won’t Sell $5B BTC Stash Despite Crypto Winter,” Cointelegraph, January 20, 2022. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A man in Wales: Chris Morris, “The Welshman Who Accidentally Threw Out 8,000 Bitcoin
Fixed: Why Personal Finance is Broken and How to Make it Work for Everyone
by John Y. Campbell and Tarun Ramadorai · 25 Jul 2025
boast of their profits and persuade others to pile in—with all-too-evident misery for the late arrivals when prices eventually fall in a “crypto winter.” Luck has particularly pernicious effects when it is confused with skill. As we have discussed, people typically exaggerate their own skill; they also tend to
Money in the Metaverse: Digital Assets, Online Identities, Spatial Computing and Why Virtual Worlds Mean Real Business
by David G. W. Birch and Victoria Richardson · 28 Apr 2024 · 249pp · 74,201 words
important in driving scalability in the more decentralized environment of web3. Token cusp We are writing this book in the shadow of the so-called crypto winter: a period of depressed cryptocurrency and cryptoasset trading activity following the well-documented collapses of major crypto players such as Three Arrows Capital and Sam
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global financial stability has spurred activity to create better regulatory frameworks based on ‘same activity, same risk, same regulation’ (Financial Stability Board 2022). When this crypto winter has passed and tokens become a regulated but wholly new kind of digital asset – a cross between corporate paper and a loyalty scheme – there will
The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum
by Camila Russo · 13 Jul 2020 · 349pp · 102,827 words
2013. But practical uses were still unheard-of, and soon Bitcoin plunged back to around $500, leaving most of these experiments frozen in the first crypto winter. True believers kept tinkering, and the Bitcoin community kept growing, populated mostly by young men with some background in tech or economics, who leaned libertarian
Confessions of a Crypto Millionaire: My Unlikely Escape From Corporate America
by Dan Conway · 8 Sep 2019 · 218pp · 68,648 words
coins, expanded globally, quadrupled in size, and is valued at more than six billion dollars. My former client, BitGo, had a great year despite the crypto winter. They introduced a professional-grade custody solution for institutional investors and extended their multisig wallet to support sixty-two crypto assets, many of them tokens
Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman · 17 Jul 2023 · 329pp · 99,504 words
in a mess of crashing token prices, fraud, and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement actions in the spring of 2018, leading to a prolonged “crypto winter.” The token-mania of 2017 helped show that a different way was possible. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies didn’t have to be money or a
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emergency capital infusions and loan packages from FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, who had ended up in the business of picking survivors for the oncoming crypto winter. One of them was BlockFi, another crypto lender that offered huge, and unsustainable, interest rates on customer deposits. SBF gave BlockFi an emergency loan of
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continued his apology tour, crypto brayed for blood, hoping to sacrifice SBF on the altar of industry villainy and then move on, building through the crypto winter that had already set in. On December 12, hours after he publicly declared that he didn’t expect to be arrested, SBF was arrested in
Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts · 15 Dec 2020 · 226pp · 65,516 words
. Wall Street Comes Calling 9. Brian Has a Master Plan 10. Uncle Sam Comes Calling 11. Initial Coin Insanity 12. Coinbase Crackup PART THREE From Crypto Winter to the Crypto Future 13. Hangover 14. “Getting Our Asses Kicked” 15. Power Struggle 16. Bitcoin Triumphant 17. The Future of Finance Epilogue Index Acknowledgments
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coins are not ‘lost.’ Apologies for the delay, it is definitely not the experience we want to be providing to our customers.” PART THREE * * * From Crypto Winter to the Crypto Future 13 Hangover “The telephone blasted Peter Fallow awake inside an egg with the shell peeled away and only the membranous sac
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San Franciscans and New Yorkers alike basked in the glorious days of late spring. But in crypto circles, they were calling this period of time “crypto winter.” The phrase sprang from the lips of depressed investors and ricocheted around social media. As crypto prices continued to slide ever downward, it became clear
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the chill of crypto winter would not yield to a spring for a long time to come. • • • A burst of investment in crypto in early 2018, such as Peter Thiel
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attend the Oracle of Omaha’s annual charity lunch, but then canceled amid reports he was being investigated by the Chinese government.) The fallout from crypto winter spread to unlikely places. On the sweeping plains of Rockdale, Texas, town leaders had extended their finest southern hospitality to woo the crypto-mining giant
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profile showed Olaf looking defiant in front of a bookshelf that displayed two copies of Infinite Jest. • • • On Market Street, Brian and Coinbase also endured crypto winter. A total collapse in prices—bitcoin would tumble a full 85 percent to just over $3,000 by December of 2018—delivered a gut-punch
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WeWork, whose plans for an IPO blew up spectacularly amid reports of its CEO’s penchant for tequila shots and smoking weed. What’s more, crypto winter offered Coinbase a desperately needed respite. If 2017 had been a wildly successful party, then 2018 would be a year to clean up all the
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, would raise $1 billion for the cause. As Asiff built the corporate team and Brian nurtured noble ambitions to save the world, the hangover persisted. Crypto winter dragged on. Safe in its financial fortress, Coinbase waited patiently for spring. Nearly too late, the company would realize this was a terrible mistake. 14
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new frontiers of crypto rather than perfecting its corporate finance game. • • • The cash bonanza of 2017, it turned out, did create complacency. Coinbase entered the crypto winter believing it could simply wait for the next upswing while spending its time snapping up smaller companies and patching up its battered infrastructure. This was
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amid growing opposition to Asiff’s corporate vision as Balaji amassed more allies and more power, but it also came down to dollars and cents. Crypto winter had dragged on for so long that even Coinbase began to feel pinched. It didn’t help that word leaked to the longtime San Francisco
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in the Bluxome Street days when Coinbase was a small startup. Outside, a heatwave was descending on New York. And crypto winter was beginning to thaw. 16 Bitcoin Triumphant The depth of crypto winter came on December 15, 2018. On that day, the price of bitcoin dipped to $3,200—more than 80 percent
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Armstrong, Brian, 155, 206 in Beijing, 81–83 blog posts by, 109–111, 161 Coinbase culture and, 49–51 Covid-19 and, 222 on the crypto winter, 173 Dimon and, 211–213 first meeting with Fred, 13–14 in funding rounds, 33–37 on the future of Coinbase, 219–220 Gemini and
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–223 crashes, 40, 160–161, 165–175 creation of, 4–5 criminal activity with, 17–18, 30–31, 58–60, 79, 107–108 in the crypto winter, 172–175 decentralization and, 8–9, 12, 104–105 Ethereum compared with, 88–93 federal efforts to prosecute, 17–18, 20 future of, 224–225
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cap tables, 215 Carlson-Wee, Olaf, 24–30 on bitcoin valuation, 62 on Coinbase’s complacency, 177–178 on the crypto bubble, 148 in the crypto winter, 172 on dApps, 188 departure from Coinbase, 95–96, 157 hedge fund of, 223 on hiring, 38–39 legacy of, 220 on Mt. Gox, 57
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Street office, 37–38, 66–67 capacity issues at, 151 Chicago and, 192 cold storage at, 43–44 competition for, 54–55, 178–181 the crypto winter and, 172–175 culture at, 39, 49–51, 67–68, 189–190 currencies added to, 96–97, 181–182, 187–190, 196 customer acquisition at
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–161, 165–175 exchanges of, 127, 215–216 Libra, 205–207 as property versus currency, 122–126 swindles using, 141–145 See also individual currencies crypto winter, 170–175, 198, 201 Custody, 209 cypherpunks, 23, 99–100 CZ. See Zhao, Changpeng DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization), 90–93, 145–146, 169–170 dApps