I'd followed a lot of this as it was happening, but Faux does a great job of filling in the details and adding context. He's usually a reporter with a finance/business beat, and spends most of the book wandering through the world of Crypto quietly muttering essential questions like, "Where are they getting those return numbers?" and "This is a Ponzi scheme, right?" and "What the fuck?" A lot of the book is a comedy, focusing on famous fuck-ups and oddities, the cult around the weird monkey pictures, and reality checks to the tune of that's not how any of this works!!!

There's also a more serious side, though he doesn't go into a lot of detail of the environmental cost of bitcoin mining, he certainly mentions it, and likewise mentions how much money the bubble burst wiped out. I would've liked to see a little more on the human cost of both, but he did a good job summarising them. What he does go into in detail on is the human trafficking funded by and driving a lot of the crypto economy, and how none of the boosters seem to give a shit about any of it. He also follows Crypto's adoption by Bukele government in El Salvador, and how very poorly that's gone. Faux doesn't find a good case for crypto, but he sure finds a lot of bad ones.

The through-line of the story is trying to figure out what's up with the "stable coin" Tether, and he never does quite pin that down (he'd started the book assuming it would collapse in the time it took to finish his research), aside from whatever it is being distinctly sketchy, and that no one involved cares about all the crime. The book concludes around the fall of FTX and the arrests that followed it, but before the trials (it came out in the middle of them). I suspect there's at least another book's worth of following events, but this is a solid place to start.