Isn't That Rich Podcast

This month for our MyFSB Book Club, we picked up a title that had been staring at us for a while: Number Go Up by Zeke Faux.

We will be honest with you right out of the gate. This one was tough to get through. It is technical, it is complex, and there were moments where we had to set it down and take a breath. But we are so glad we read it, because it pulled back the curtain on a world we have both been walking around pretending to understand for years. Crypto.

You know the feeling. Everybody talks about it, everybody seems to have an opinion, and you are just nodding along hoping nobody asks you a follow-up question. That was us. And if we are being real with you, we still do not fully get it. But we get it a little more now, and that is worth something.

What the book is actually about

Here is the thing. Number Go Up is not really a how-to guide for buying Bitcoin. It is the story of how crypto came to be, who the big players are, and what the whole thing actually started as.

Zeke Faux is an investigative journalist, and he wrote this book because all of his friends were buying Dogecoin and other coins, making money, and heading off to Disney World while he sat there thinking, "I just don't get it." So he did what a good reporter does. He went digging. The book follows him around the globe during the pandemic, hopping from one conference to the next, trying to meet the people behind names like Tether and FTX. These folks are basically celebrities in the chaotic world of crypto, and Zeke wanted to look them in the eye.

Finally, an explanation that clicked

For the first time, the book gave us a way to picture what crypto even is, and it involves something near and dear to every marketing and banking heart. A spreadsheet.

Faux explains that a blockchain is really just a database. Imagine an Excel sheet with two columns. Column A holds a list of people. Column B holds a number showing how much each person has. That is it. As different currencies came along, they simply added more columns. One column tracks how many bitcoins you own, the next might track Dogecoin, and so on down the line.

And here is the part that made us sit up. A bank works the same way. Your name, your balance, tracked in a ledger. So what is the difference?

The difference is that a bank does a really good job of keeping track of your money, and there is a whole system built to protect it. If you deposit a thousand dollars with us, it goes exactly where it is supposed to go. Make one wrong move sending crypto, though, and that money may vanish into an address you never meant to use, with no path to ever get it back. There is no banker in the middle catching the mistake.

So what is actually backing this stuff?

This question sits at the heart of the whole book. What is backing all of this cryptocurrency?

When there is a run on a bank, the FDIC is there. That safety net exists for a reason, and it is the sort of thing that lets you sleep at night. Right now, crypto has no equivalent. If everyone tried to pull their money out at the same moment, there would be nothing standing underneath to catch the fall. Faux even reminds readers of the old days when banks facing a run would lock the doors and refuse to let people in. You cannot do that anymore, thank goodness, but the comparison stuck with us.

There is also the matter of the paperwork. We get audited constantly. Every click we make on a computer can be reviewed, and businesses are required to show their financials so investors know where the money sits and how the returns are being made. A lot of these crypto companies never had to show a single thing. No audit, no annual report, no accounting for those sky-high returns they kept promising. That should give anybody pause.

Where crypto came from

Picture the year 2008, right at the peak of the subprime mortgage crisis. Lehman Brothers has failed, the financial world is shaking, and trust in the old institutions is running thin. Into that moment steps a mysterious figure, or possibly a group, going by the name Satoshi Nakamoto.

Nobody knows who that actually is. People have floated all kinds of theories about the identity, and to this day it remains a genuine mystery. What we do know is that this person posted a message to a cryptography email list describing a purely peer-to-peer vision of electronic cash, money that could move straight from one person to another without a financial institution in the middle. That message is the famous white paper, and it is worth a read if you want to see where the whole idea began.

The pitch landed. All sorts of people came out of the woodwork, cyberpunks and free-market dreamers alike, drawn to the promise of money that governments could not control. A crowd of coders and cryptographers even volunteered their time to build the open-source Bitcoin software. Honestly, we still cannot wrap our heads around how that came together, but it did.

Then it gets dark

We are going to level with you. This book gets heavy, and where there is money, there tends to be a shadow.

The players who called themselves altruists, the ones who claimed they only wanted to make a fortune so they could hand it back to the world and make everybody happy, turned out to be nothing of the sort. Take Sam Bankman-Fried, who set up shop in the Bahamas surrounded by lavish real estate while the giving-back part never quite materialized. A whole lot of these characters, it turns out, were simply greedy people telling a good story.

But the moment that truly stopped us cold was learning how deeply human trafficking runs through this world. There are people being held against their will, forced to hit a weekly quota of money extracted from strangers through fraud. It has a name. Pig butchering.

Faux traces one scheme through a woman known as Vicky Ho. She messaged him pretending to have the wrong number, then slowly warmed him up with compliments in what is essentially a love-bombing scam. She sent charts, promises of easy returns, and eventually a link to a fake exchange, one of those slick fake websites designed to look exactly like a real trading app. He tossed a hundred dollars in just to see where it would go. When that was not enough and she pushed for five hundred, he told her the truth about being a journalist, and she ghosted him instantly.

The reality behind Vicky is the gut-punch. Faux describes compounds where roughly a hundred people might be held captive behind barred windows, passports taken, forced to send their earnings up a chain to traffickers and then to a boss above them. It runs like a mob. Many of the people trapped inside answered what looked like an ordinary job posting, showed up for the interview, and were never allowed to leave. Some who got out had witnessed things no person should ever see.

It is a lot. We had to put the book down more than once.

Why did everybody buy in?

Here is a question we loved chewing on. Why did so many people pour money into something they did not understand?

Our answer, plain and simple, is FOMO. Fear of missing out drives more of our spending than we like to admit. Think about luxury goods for a second. The same leather, cut the same way, can be priced at fifty dollars or fifty thousand depending on the hype. If a thing feels rare and everybody wants it, people will pay. Crypto rode that exact wave.

Influence pours fuel on the fire too. When a public figure you trust gets into something, you lean in. We are all guilty of glancing at a stock on Instagram and thinking we will buy a little Tesla and never have to work again by next month. That is not how it works, of course. Good things take time.

The book captures this perfectly with the NFT craze. Paris Hilton went on Jimmy Fallon talking about the cartoon apes she had bought, and suddenly everyone had to own one. People spent thousands, and in some cases far more, on these images. Faux himself dropped twenty-five thousand dollars on one just to score an invite to a conference, then got told by other attendees that his ape was, frankly, not a good one. We cannot believe anybody spends money on any of it, and yet here we all are.

Is crypto the future of money?

We are not going to pretend we have the answer, but we do not think it is going away. There are too many people behind it, and there may genuinely be something real underneath all the noise if it can be done right.

The conversation has already moved past coins and into things like tokens and stable coins. Picture buying a house directly from a seller, with the title work triggering the next step automatically, no traditional middleman required. There could be something there. Meanwhile, our own executive team has been sitting through conference sessions and webinars about stable coin, because the banking world is watching deposits move out the door and into crypto. That raises a real question for community banks like ours. What comes next? Do we create our own coin someday? What does the regulation even look like? Nobody has fully figured that out yet.

The book also visits El Salvador, one of the first countries to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. The lesson there was humbling. Just because a government blesses something does not mean the people are on board. Faux walked into shops that advertised they accepted crypto, only to be told at the register, "We say that we do, but we don't." Too complicated, too complex, not worth the trouble.

The real villain

So who is the bad guy here? We landed firmly on the same answer. It is not crypto itself. It is human greed and the itch to get rich quick.

The big fish all wrapped themselves in the language of doing good while lying about nearly everything, right down to what their businesses actually were, just to get banks to work with them. And yet the everyday folks buying in are mostly good people hoping to make a few extra dollars. That gap is what makes the whole thing sad. Wherever there is even a whiff of money, someone will find a way to take advantage.

Would we recommend it?

Yes, with a warning. This is a genuinely good story, and it made crypto feel a little more tangible for both of us. We understand the spreadsheet now, we know where the idea came from, and we can follow the thread a bit better than before.

That said, it is not our usual read. There is a lot of grime woven through it, and we had to step away here and there. But if you want to understand the dark side of this world alongside the promise, it is worth your time. Every currency has a shadow, after all.

As for what happens next, one of us is genuinely tempted to redownload Coinbase and toss a few dollars on Bitcoin just to feel it out. The other one deleted the app and is staying put for now. That about sums up where we landed.

Here is the throughline for us, and it is the reason we do this work. When you keep your money with a community bank, real people are keeping track of every dollar, and there is a whole system of protection standing behind you. No barred windows, no mystery founders, no guessing about what is backing your account. Just neighbors looking out for neighbors.