Number Go Up

Number Go Up Plot Summary

Introduction

Imagine waking up to discover your neighbor just made $50,000 overnight by purchasing a digital image of a cartoon ape. Your college roommate quit his job after turning $1,000 into $100,000 with something called "Dogecoin." Your Twitter feed is filled with stories of crypto millionaires buying lamborghinis while you're still paying off student loans. The fear of missing out becomes almost unbearable. Should you jump in too? The cryptocurrency boom of 2020-2022 represents perhaps the greatest financial mania in history—a $3 trillion delusion built on circular logic, techno-babble, and the simple mantra that prices would keep rising because they had risen before. Through riveting case studies and investigative journalism, this book pulls back the curtain on the reality behind the hype, revealing how the crypto ecosystem created enormous wealth for insiders while ultimately harming millions of ordinary people. You'll understand the psychological tactics used to lure investors, recognize the warning signs of financial bubbles, and develop a framework for evaluating future investment opportunities beyond the allure of get-rich-quick schemes.

Chapter 1: The 'Number Go Up' Phenomenon: How Circular Logic Fueled a Bubble

In January 2021, as pandemic lockdowns dragged on, a man named Jay sent a message to his high school friends group chat saying he'd invested a few hundred dollars in something called "doggie coin," and that they should too. "I don't know anything about it other than its name," he wrote. "I am very bored." He didn't even have the name right. It was called "Dogecoin," pronounced "dohj," and it was a cryptocurrency based on a meme of a Shiba Inu dog glancing sideways. Like most cryptocurrencies, it had no revenue, no profits, and no intrinsic value. But that didn't stop Jay from making several thousand dollars when he sold his holdings a few weeks later. He taunted his friends by sending selfies from a trip to Walt Disney World, financed with his trading profits. "If you listened to me when I first told you to throw $10 on Dogecoin, you'd all be $500 richer right now," Jay wrote. "I am freaking Nostradamus!" This story perfectly exemplified the core logic driving the entire cryptocurrency boom: "Number go up." This circular reasoning became a mantra among crypto believers—the price of Bitcoin or any other coin would go up simply because it had gone up in the past. The self-fulfilling prophecy created a frenzy where millions of people around the world gave in to the temptation to pull the lever on what seemed like a giant slot machine rigged to pay out almost every time. The roar of rising prices drowned out skeptics, and incomprehensible jargon became inescapable. Blockchain. DeFi. Web3. The metaverse. What these terms actually meant was beside the point. Newspapers, television, and social media bombarded potential investors with stories of regular people who invested in cryptocurrencies and got rich quick. A Dogecoin investor who turned $180,000 into $2 million. A warehouse manager who became a Bitcoin millionaire. A teenager who sold NFTs for hundreds of thousands of dollars. These stories created a powerful narrative: crypto was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to escape the drudgery of ordinary work and achieve financial freedom. Yet this massive financial mania wasn't leading to any sort of mass movement to actually use crypto in the real world. Nobody tossed their credit cards, closed their bank accounts, and abandoned the dollar or the euro in favor of cryptocurrencies. But the hucksters, zealots, opportunists, and outright scammers who created the boom got unbelievably, unimaginably, impossibly rich. The numbers got so large that even the most delusional crypto fantasies started to sound reasonable. It seemed like nothing could stop crypto's manic rise—until, of course, the house of cards collapsed.

Chapter 2: Tether's House of Cards: Banking Without Rules or Transparency

When investigative reporter Zeke Faux began looking into Tether, the largest "stablecoin" in the crypto world, he discovered a financial entity that defied conventional logic. Tether claimed that each of its tokens was worth exactly one U.S. dollar because they were fully backed by real currency. By 2021, there were 55 billion Tethers in circulation—an amount that would have made it one of the fifty largest banks in the United States. But no one knew where this $55 billion was actually stored. The company was incredibly sketchy. One of its top executives was Giancarlo Devasini, an Italian plastic surgeon turned electronics importer who'd once been caught selling counterfeit Microsoft software. Among its founders was one of the child actors from the Disney ice-hockey classic The Mighty Ducks. In an old document discovered on Tether's website, the company listed the risks of buying the cryptocurrency. The company said it could go bankrupt, or the unspecified bank holding its money could, or a government could confiscate its assets. Last on the list: "We could abscond with the reserve funds." When Faux tried to trace Tether's money, he found himself in a labyrinth of offshore entities and secretive banking relationships. The company had bounced from bank to bank, country to country, always one step ahead of regulators. At one point, Tether's executives were so desperate to move money that they considered chartering a jet and flying pallets of cash out of Taiwan. The company claimed to hold billions in commercial paper—short-term corporate debt—which would have made it the seventh-largest holder of such securities in the world. But when Faux canvassed Wall Street traders, none had ever seen Tether in the market. In the Bahamas, Faux met with Jean Chalopin, the chairman of Deltec Bank & Trust, one of the few financial institutions willing to work with Tether. Chalopin, who had co-created the animated TV series Inspector Gadget in a previous life, insisted that Tether's assets were real. "We knew the money exists! It was sitting here," he said. But when pressed about whether he knew if all of Tether's assets were secure now, Chalopin laughed. Only a quarter of Tether's money—about $15 billion—was still with Deltec. "I cannot speak about what I cannot know," he said. "I can only control what's with us." Despite all these red flags, Tether became the backbone of the entire crypto ecosystem. Traders used it to move funds between exchanges, and it served as a crucial bridge between the traditional financial system and the crypto world. If Tether collapsed, it could bring down the entire house of cards. Yet somehow, even as other crypto companies imploded during the market crash, Tether survived, raising questions about whether regulators were too afraid of the systemic consequences to take action against it.

Chapter 3: The Fall of FTX: When Effective Altruism Met Effective Fraud

Sam Bankman-Fried shuffled into his office in the Bahamas, shoeless, wearing white crew socks, blue shorts, and a gray FTX T-shirt. The twenty-nine-year-old grabbed a packet of microwavable chickpea korma, ripped it open, and started spooning it into his mouth, cold. This disheveled figure was supposedly the wunderkind of crypto, worth $22.5 billion according to Forbes, and hailed as the next Warren Buffett or J.P. Morgan for the digital age. His rise had been meteoric. Just four years earlier, Bankman-Fried had been working at Jane Street Capital, a trading firm. Inspired by the philosophy of "effective altruism"—the idea that one should earn as much money as possible to give it away to worthy causes—he quit his job and started a crypto trading company called Alameda Research. He spotted a simple arbitrage opportunity: Bitcoin was selling for about 10% more in Japan than in the United States. If he could buy Bitcoin in America and sell it in Japan, he could make a fortune. Despite logistical challenges, his team managed to earn about $15 million before the price difference disappeared. Bankman-Fried leveraged this initial success to build FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that quickly became one of the industry's largest. He relocated to the Bahamas, where crypto regulations were favorable, and started spending lavishly on marketing. FTX signed a $135 million contract to name the Miami Heat's arena and a $210 million deal to sponsor a professional video-gaming team. He recruited celebrities like Shaquille O'Neal and Tom Brady as endorsers and aired a Super Bowl ad featuring Larry David—at an estimated cost of about $20 million. When asked about his philanthropy, Bankman-Fried claimed he gave away $50 million in 2021 and planned to donate "at least a few hundred million and up to $1 billion" the following year. His stated goal was to combat existential threats to humanity, like engineered pandemics and rogue artificial intelligence. But there was a glaring contradiction at the heart of Bankman-Fried's empire. While he claimed to be motivated by utilitarian ethics and the greater good, he was running what amounted to a casino that encouraged regular people to gamble on volatile cryptocurrencies. The truth, as revealed after FTX's collapse in November 2022, was far worse than mere hypocrisy. Bankman-Fried had secretly embezzled billions of dollars of his customers' money, using it to fund Alameda Research's trading losses, purchase luxury real estate in the Bahamas, make political donations, and finance his effective altruism public relations campaign. When cryptocurrency prices crashed and customers tried to withdraw their funds, the house of cards collapsed. FTX filed for bankruptcy, and Bankman-Fried was arrested on charges of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. The boy genius who had charmed investors, politicians, and the media was exposed as running one of the largest financial frauds in history—all while claiming to be saving the world.

Chapter 4: Digital Apes and Status Symbols: Inside the NFT Bubble

In January 2022, Paris Hilton appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon to show off her latest purchase: a cartoon of an ape wearing sunglasses and a hat with a visor. She had paid about $300,000 for it. "We're part of the same community," Fallon said, proudly displaying his own ape wearing red heart sunglasses, a captain's hat, and a Breton-striped sailor shirt, which had cost him $220,000. "We're both apes." These cartoons were part of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 NFTs (non-fungible tokens) that had become status symbols among celebrities and crypto enthusiasts. NFTs are digital assets registered on a blockchain, which allows ownership to be tracked. But contrary to popular belief, NFT buyers don't own the actual image—anyone can download a copy of a Bored Ape for free. What they're buying is essentially a digital receipt proving they paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a link to a cartoon. Despite this seemingly absurd value proposition, Bored Apes became a cultural phenomenon. Professional athletes like Steph Curry, musicians like Eminem and Snoop Dogg, and actors like Gwyneth Paltrow all bought in. Justin Bieber paid $1.3 million for his ape. The collection's creators, who initially sold the apes for just $220 each in April 2021, became billionaires almost overnight. Their company, Yuga Labs, raised money at a $4 billion valuation—as much as Disney paid for Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise. When journalist Zeke Faux decided to experience the NFT craze firsthand, he purchased a Mutant Ape (a spin-off collection) for $20,680.27. The process was terrifying—he had to convert dollars to cryptocurrency, transfer it to a digital wallet that existed only as a browser extension, and make an offer on an NFT marketplace. "This was supposed to be the future of the internet and art and commerce," he wrote. "Instead, it had turned online shopping—a process so seamless and fun that some use it for self-soothing—into a terrifying ordeal." The NFT phenomenon revealed the essence of the crypto bubble: it wasn't about technology or art, but about gambling and status-seeking. People weren't buying Bored Apes because they loved the artwork or believed in some revolutionary technology. They were buying them because they thought the price would go up, and because owning an expensive digital asset conferred membership in an exclusive club. When the crypto market crashed in 2022, NFT prices collapsed along with it. The Bored Ape that Paris Hilton had purchased for $300,000 was soon worth less than $100,000, and trading volume in the NFT market dropped by more than 95%. The digital status symbols had become digital embarrassments.

Chapter 5: Play-to-Earn Poverty: How Axie Infinity Devastated Lives

In March 2020, as the world went into COVID lockdown, a twenty-eight-year-old Filipino named Arthur Lapina, known to friends as Art Art, lost his job as an assistant cook at a bar. Stuck at home in Cabanatuan City, he clicked on a Facebook ad for a colorful mobile game called Axie Infinity. The game involved building a team of three cartoon creatures called Axies and battling them against other players. What made it different from other games was that winners earned cryptocurrency tokens called Smooth Love Potions, which could be traded for real money. At first, Lapina paid about 5,000 Philippine pesos ($91) for his team and started earning around 400 pesos ($7.25) daily—an incredible 8% daily return on investment. As the price of Smooth Love Potions climbed, word spread quickly through his economically devastated town. People pawned their tricycle taxis or borrowed from loan sharks to buy Axies. Lapina became a local hero, hiring over a hundred people to play with Axies he purchased, letting them keep 60% of their earnings. His players included teachers, his grandmother, and even a police officer who Lapina had to talk out of quitting the force. The Axie craze spread throughout the Philippines and to other countries with low wages. Sky Mavis, the company behind the game, raised $152 million from venture capitalists at a $3 billion valuation. By October 2021, about two million people were playing daily. Crypto promoters hailed it as proof that blockchain technology could lift people out of poverty. "One of the main criticisms of crypto so far is that it has no real-world value or application, but Axie makes you reconsider what real-world value is," wrote investor Packy McCormick. But the economics were unsustainable. Smooth Love Potions had no use outside the game, and their supply was infinite—Sky Mavis could issue as many as it wanted. By the end of 2021, there were more than three billion potions in circulation. The price inevitably crashed, falling below one cent in February 2022. Lapina had to let his scholars go. He had spent his earnings on a house (which remained unfinished), custom anime-themed watches, and donations to a local prison. Now he had nothing left. The devastation extended far beyond Lapina. Shiela Quigan, a community organizer in Manila earning about $500 a month, borrowed $1,500 from her mother to buy Axies. Her husband would play at night after coming home from his delivery truck job. As the price of potions dropped, the couple started to argue about whether to cut their losses. They never did, and lost everything. "The company said wait for a surprise, and we will rock the world," Quigan said. She still checked the price of potions daily, hoping for a miracle. The Axie Infinity story reveals a darker truth about many crypto projects: they often exploit the most vulnerable people in society. What was marketed as economic empowerment for the developing world turned out to be a predatory scheme that left many players worse off than before. The game's economy was designed to collapse eventually, with early investors and the company's founders making fortunes while late adopters lost everything. This pattern of exploitation, disguised as innovation, repeated across the crypto ecosystem.

Chapter 6: Crypto's Dark Side: Human Trafficking and Pig Butchering Scams

One night in August 2022, Zeke Faux received a strange text message: "Hi David, I'm Vicky Ho don't you remember me?" Though his name wasn't David and he didn't know anyone named Vicky, he decided to respond. After he pointed out the wrong number, Vicky awkwardly tried to continue the conversation: "Instead of apologizing for the wrong number can we be friends? lol." Faux recognized this as the beginning of a "pig butchering" scam—so named because scammers fatten up their victims with fake friendship or romance before slaughtering them financially. Playing along, he learned that "Vicky" claimed to be a 32-year-old divorced woman from Taiwan who ran nail salons in New York. She sent heavily edited selfies that made her look like an anime character and dropped hints about her success trading cryptocurrency. After a week of chitchat, Vicky finally directed Faux to download an app called ZBXS and deposit Tether, a cryptocurrency stablecoin. When Faux revealed he was an investigative reporter, Vicky disappeared. But the scam had already claimed many victims. A project finance lawyer in Boston with terminal cancer had handed over $2.5 million. A divorced mother of three in St. Louis was defrauded of $5 million. A twenty-four-year-old social media producer lost $300,000 she inherited from the sale of her childhood home. Working with blockchain investigators, Faux traced his small payment to Vicky through the cryptocurrency system. He discovered that the scammers were using Tether because it allowed for instant, anonymous transfers with no possibility of refunds. When victims complained to Tether, the company refused to help, claiming it didn't control the blockchain or have identifying information about users—despite having frozen accounts in other circumstances. Most disturbing was what Faux learned about who was behind these scams. According to experts at the Global Anti-Scam Organization and Vietnamese hacker Ngô Minh Hiếu, many pig-butchering operations were run by criminal syndicates based in Cambodia and Myanmar. These gangs lured young men and women from across Southeast Asia with promises of well-paying jobs in customer service or online gambling. When the workers arrived, they were held captive in compounds surrounded by barbed wire and forced to work as scammers. This horrific system represented one of the largest illicit uses of cryptocurrency. While crypto advocates promised a financial revolution that would democratize money and create wealth for believers, the reality for many was a nightmare of fraud, exploitation, and human trafficking—all enabled by the same technology that was supposed to liberate them. The cryptocurrency Tether, with its instant, anonymous transfers, became the perfect tool for criminals to move stolen money across borders without detection. The industry's lack of regulation and accountability created ideal conditions for large-scale financial crime that victimized vulnerable people worldwide.

Chapter 7: El Salvador's Failed Bitcoin Experiment: Promises vs. Reality

In June 2021, El Salvador's young, authoritarian-leaning president Nayib Bukele made a stunning announcement at the Bitcoin conference in Miami: his country would adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, the first nation in the world to do so. Dressed in a backwards baseball cap, he proclaimed that Bitcoin would transform El Salvador's economy and free its people from dependence on the U.S. dollar. Jack Mallers, the American crypto executive who had introduced Bukele's Bitcoin plan on stage, had burst into tears of joy, declaring: "I'll be there. We die on this hill. I will fucking die on this fucking hill!" But when Faux asked Mallers how the experiment was working out less than a year later, he admitted he couldn't remember the last time he'd visited El Salvador. "It's very important to know that it's not my project," Mallers said dismissively. When Faux traveled to El Salvador to see the Bitcoin revolution firsthand, he found a very different reality than the crypto utopia Bukele had promised. In El Zonte, the beach town dubbed "Bitcoin Beach" where the experiment had supposedly begun, few businesses actually accepted the cryptocurrency. One restaurant displayed a handmade sign: "No Bitcoin." Its owner explained: "The tourists think everybody accepts Bitcoin." Mario García, a shaved ice vendor whose faded "Acceptamos Bitcoin" sign had been featured in promotional videos, told Faux a darker story. Despite being an unofficial Bitcoin mascot, García had been arrested at gunpoint during Bukele's gang crackdown, which had detained over 60,000 people without due process. García spent a month in prison, where he was beaten and saw inmates die. "They arrested half the world so they could have a number," he explained. Throughout El Salvador, Faux struggled to find anyone using Bitcoin for daily transactions. In downtown San Salvador, he walked through a market looking for Bitcoin users but found only skepticism. "Sometimes it's up, sometimes it's down. For me it doesn't work," said a pharmacy owner. Even at upscale restaurants catering to tourists, cashiers accepted Bitcoin reluctantly, often retrieving dusty devices from back rooms. One woman laughed at the very idea: "I don't have any money. How am I going to use it?" Meanwhile, Bukele had used government funds to purchase $100 million worth of Bitcoin, promptly losing half of it when prices fell. His grand vision of "Bitcoin City" - a futuristic metropolis powered by volcano energy with a giant Bitcoin logo visible from space - remained an empty promise. Farmworkers were being evicted to make room for the project, which showed no signs of materializing. The experiment had proven only that Bitcoin was impractical for everyday use, even when a government mandated its acceptance and provided financial incentives.

Summary

The cryptocurrency boom of 2020-2022 represents perhaps the greatest financial mania in history—a $3 trillion delusion built on circular logic, techno-babble, and the simple mantra that prices would keep rising because they had risen before. From Dogecoin to Bored Apes to play-to-earn games, the industry created increasingly absurd products that generated enormous wealth for insiders while ultimately harming millions of ordinary people who bought into the hype. When evaluating any investment opportunity, especially one promising revolutionary returns, look beyond the celebrity endorsements and technical jargon to understand the fundamental value proposition. Ask yourself: What real-world problem does this solve? Who benefits if I invest? And most importantly, what happens if the music stops and everyone tries to cash out at once? Remember that sustainable wealth creation requires creating actual value, not just participating in elaborate games of financial musical chairs where the last ones holding the assets lose everything.

About Author

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Zeke Faux

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News. He’s a winner of the Gerald Loeb Award and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Award and a National Magazine Award finalist. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three children.

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