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

“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.

QUIGAN MIGHT NOT have been angry, but I was. Crypto bros and Silicon Valley venture capitalists gave Filipinos false hope by promoting an unsustainable bubble based on a Pokémon knockoff as the future of work.

In 2021, when I’d ask crypto promoters for examples of crypto being used in the real world, many pointed to the Philippines. They called Axie Infinity a new form of employment and a potential panacea for global poverty. It was the most prominent demonstration of what some had taken to calling Web3: an internet in which users own their data and it’s

Crypto bros and Silicon Valley venture capitalists gave Filipinos false hope by promoting an unsustainable bubble based on a Pokémon knockoff as the future of work.

The heist helped Kim Jong Un pay for test launches of ballistic missiles, according to U.S. officials. Instead of providing a new way for poor people to earn cash, Axie Infinity funneled their savings to a dictator’s weapons program.

“It’s not a stablecoin, it’s a high-risk offshore hedge fund,”

His plan, in other words, was to buy high and sell low. It sounded like a great way to lose money, or possibly a Ponzi scheme.

I couldn’t help thinking that pushing people to gamble seemed at odds with his pledge to have a positive impact on the world.

As one person famously put it on Twitter, “Imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin.”