Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux

CHAPTER ONE
“I Am Freaking Nostradamus!”
Brooklyn, New York
January 2021
n January 2021, at the depths of the pandemic malaise, my friend Jay sent
a message to our group chat of high school buddies saying that he’d
invested a few hundred dollars in something called “doggie coin,” and that
we 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 glancing to the side. Don’t worry about how exactly a dog joke
turns into a financial asset—even Dogecoin’s creator didn’t understand how
it happened. Like most cryptocurrencies, it had no “revenue” or “profits.”
There was no reason why it should have any value.
I told Jay all this. I said that, as a joke, Dogecoin wasn’t even funny. He
didn’t care. “I fully understand how stupid this is. That’s why it’s funny to
me,” Jay wrote.
It wasn’t like Jay was some degenerate gambler. He was a thirty-six-

year-old professional who owned a house with a pool in a nice Boston
suburb and served on two charitable boards. As he read about Dogecoin on
Reddit, he grew convinced that for some reason, other people would buy
the dog-joke cryptocurrency too. It wasn’t a crazy thing to think. During the
Covid-19 lockdowns, millions of people had downloaded apps like
Robinhood and Coinbase. Understimulated mentally and overstimulated
monetarily, they’d started tapping the buy button. These day traders
gathered on Twitter and Reddit, where they shocked Wall Street by sending
shares of left-for-dead retailer GameStop up more than tenfold, nearly
bankrupting hedge funds that bet against it. Then they took this nihilistic,
buy-it-for-the-LOLs mentality to crypto.
Dogecoin replaced politics and dad jokes in the group chat. Jay texted
us to say that Dogecoin had sponsored a NASCAR driver. I noticed Elon
Musk was talking about it too. As the price climbed from a penny to two
cents, then three cents, then five cents, I got more and more annoyed. It
wasn’t so much that Jay was making money and I wasn’t. It was more that I
knew I was right. And, okay, I was jealous.
A few days after Jay’s first text, I pulled up Drudge Report to see a
smiling Shiba Inu splashed across the news aggregator’s front page: “Reddit
Frenzy Pumps Up Dogecoin! Now Worth Billions!” Jay eventually sold out
and made several thousand dollars. Then he taunted me 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!”
Jay wouldn’t admit he’d gotten lucky. He acted like his Dogecoin score
proved his astute understanding of crowd psychology. Even after he moved
on, I didn’t. I started seeing crypto bros everywhere. They were acting like
the rising prices of the coins proved they were geniuses. And their numbers
were growing.
—
IT SEEMED LIKE everyone but me was cashing in their stimulus checks or
retirement savings and buying crypto. Whenever anyone would ask me
whether they should invest, I’d tell them I thought it was risky. But no one
listened. Just on my block in Brooklyn, one of my neighbors made enough
to renovate her kitchen and another bought a house and moved away.
The worst part was, I was supposed to be the expert on this kind of
thing. I’d spent most of my career reporting on Wall Street scammers and

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux