Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

Big Stores could take in as much as $100,000 at a time—a huge sum back then. Top practitioners became famous, like Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil. “I have never cheated any honest men, only rascals,” Weil once told the writer Saul Bellow. “They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something.”

As soon as I bought the Mutant Ape, a thought popped into my mind: Who else would be dumb enough to buy one of these? What if I’m this industry’s final sucker?

The game itself did not exist, nor did Loot promise to make one, but NFT collectors went wild, praising the open-ended design that would let the community figure out what to build with the named items. The price for each square quickly topped $80,000.

What a Bored Ape buyer pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for is not a digital ape cartoon—it’s the ability to prove they are the one who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a digital ape cartoon.

told him it was pretty common for writers to write about, say, presidential politics without serving as president, or baseball without being able to hit a fastball. But he wasn’t convinced.

“bullshit asymmetry principle,” coined by an Italian programmer. He was describing the challenge of debunking falsehoods in the internet age. “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it,” the programmer, Alberto Brandolini, wrote in 2013.

Essentially, he was arguing that by downloading the Stepn app and walking to earn tokens, crypto bros were Ponzi’ing themselves.

Lewis said he knew next to nothing about cryptocurrency. But he seemed quite confident that it was great.

“These people are unbelievable the way they dress,” he said. “I’m here in a Brioni, these guys are in Lululemon pants. These guys are moving into the future. These are some of the worst-dressed people I ever met in my life.”