Laura Shin - The Cryptopians - Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze

THIS BOOK IS the culmination of more than three years of reporting and writing. It is based on more than two hundred interviews conducted on background, meaning that, for the most part, I promised not to attribute information to any particular source. Not everyone in the book chose to speak to me, but I was able to interview nearly all the main players, including all eight Ethereum cofounders, as well as many additional people whose names do not grace these pages.

To depict events, I combed through archived internet pages, social media postings, block explorers, forums, and other online materials, as well as documents, emails, screenshots, photos, recordings, videos, and other files my sources generously shared with me. In many cases, I was able to re-create dialogue from text chats, and for spoken conversations, I sometimes obtained recordings; when I did not have the language verbatim, I did my best using multiple sources memories. Im especially grateful to the technical people who gave me their time and energy and to blockchain and crypto data and analytics providers Chainalysis, Coinfirm, CoinMarketCap, CryptoCompare, Etherscan, ShapeShift, Smith + Crown, TokenData, and YCharts, who helped me parse blockchain data and track peoples movements on-chain and/or gave me other data, charts, and analytics to paint a fuller picture. For prices, I generally used CoinMarketCap; for earlier crypto history, I used Bitcoincharts and either Mt. Gox or Bitstamp prices, depending on the time frame.

For the infrequent cases in which I wasnt able to verify specific details around what happened when, I used my best judgment, letting stronger, more specific memories take precedence (unless they could be cross-checked in other ways and disproven) and/or going with the most likely or logical version of events based on other known facts.

In recounting these events, many of which occurred online, Ive chosen to leave in all typos, mispunctuations, miscapitalizations, and other grammatical and spelling errors without a sic . There were so many that it became more distracting to note them than to let them live on in all their internet-y glory.

To make it easier to follow this unwieldy, decentralized story about a subculture with a sprawling set of actors and its own jargon, Ive included a list of characters up front, as well as a timeline and glossary in the back. However, for those of you who dont care about spoilers, youll miss much of the story if you only skim the timeline.

Disclosure: Some companies in this book have been sponsors of my podcasts and/or videos. They are CoinDesk (owned by Digital Currency Group), ConsenSys, Cosmos, Kraken, Microsoft, ShapeShift, and Tezos. Also, in September 2021, I began writing a Facebook Bulletin newsletter.