Number Go Up

Bloomberg investigative reporter Zeke Faux spent two years trying to answer a simple question about cryptocurrency: why was so much money pouring into tokens with no obvious purpose? Number Go Up follows the trail from glossy industry conferences to the stablecoin Tether and its murky reserves, to El Salvador staking its treasury on Bitcoin, to a Cambodian compound where trafficked workers are forced to run romance scams. Along the way Faux witnesses the rise and collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried's FTX from up close. The book reads the entire boom as a case study in incentives, hype, and the human appetite for easy money, told through immersive reporting rather than abstract finance, with a reporter's eye for the absurd and the damning detail.