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Faux came to crypto at the peak of the 2021 boom as a skeptic who suspected much of it was fraud. Tether, the stablecoin meant to be backed one-for-one by dollars, is the book's narrative spine, and he also profiles Sam Bankman-Fried before and after FTX's collapse.

Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News and a Gerald Loeb Award winner, and his reporting took him to the Bahamas, El Salvador, the Philippines and Cambodia. That legwork sets the book apart from desk-bound crypto exposes. The strongest chapters follow pig-butchering scams, in which trafficked workers held in Southeast Asian compounds are forced to lure victims into fake crypto investments.

The book was a finalist for the Edgar and SABEW awards and made best-of-the-year lists at the Financial Times and The Washington Post, among others. Wired rated it a better guide to FTX than Michael Lewis's Going Infinite. The main criticism, from Fortune's crypto editor, is that it treats the whole industry as a scam, ignores legitimate blockchain uses and leans too hard on Tether as the root of the scam economy.

Read it for a ground-level view of how a bubble's incentives pull in promoters, enablers and outright criminals, and why the money flowing in can hide the warning signs.

1. Ask what backs the token. Tether's long refusal to undergo a full audit was, in Faux's account, the industry's central red flag. Anything that promises redemption at par should be able to prove its reserves.
2. Reflexive price loops are not value. The title names the boom's logic: rising prices attract buyers who push prices higher still. When momentum is the only thesis, the exit gets crowded.
3. Fraud scales with the mania. Celebrity promoters, offshore exchanges and pig-butchering rings all grew alongside the bubble, and the sheer volume of new money hid the warning signs.
4. Offshore structure is a risk signal. FTX's Bahamas base kept it outside U.S. rules, and roughly $8 billion of customer money went missing when it failed.
5. Check the story on the ground. Faux tested crypto's claims in person, finding Salvadoran merchants who would not take bitcoin and Filipino gamers left in debt. Talking to real users beats reading the white paper.

Framed by a prologue and an epilogue, the book's twelve chapters move from the height of the boom to the 2022 bust.

1. Into the mania. Faux meets the industry's promoters at the 2021 peak, starting with Tether co-founder Brock Pierce in a chapter titled Doula for Creation.
2. Following Tether. He digs into the stablecoin's murky history and its executives, including Inspector Gadget co-creator Jean Chalopin, and asks what actually backs its tokens.
3. Sam Bankman-Fried. He profiles the FTX founder at the height of his fame, when his circle used effective altruism to justify enormous risks.
4. The fringes. He visits Axie Infinity players in the Philippines who borrowed to join a play-to-earn game, joins Bored Ape owners at ApeFest in Manhattan, and finds most merchants in El Salvador shunning bitcoin despite its legal-tender status.
5. Pig butchering. After stringing along a scammer who contacts him, Faux follows the money to forced-labor scam compounds in Cambodia.
6. The crash. The final chapter, Assets Are Not Fine, and the epilogue cover the 2022 collapse, FTX's missing billions and Bankman-Fried's last days in the Bahamas before his arrest.