Essential reading for anyone playing—or thinking of playing—in the crypto sandbox.
A cautionary tale about the (frequent) pitfalls and (infrequent) profits in the cryptocurrency game.
Borrowing a page and title from Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, Austin-based “crypto insider” Eliason delivers the same sort of behind-closed-doors exposé of how things really work, in this case the shadowy world of cryptocurrency. He opens with a personal tale, chronicling how he watched aghast as the trading operation he’d put into place was hacked by a potential blackmailer. The hacker had something to work with, a nice pot of digital money that Eliason had assembled, and which represented early success: “A year earlier, I never could have dreamed of making this kind of money.” Blame it all on his desire to learn how to code and then realizing that other coders weren’t slogging at 9-to-5 jobs but instead gambling on crypto and making considerable, if often evanescent, fortunes. As Eliason and many other tech writers have shown, crypto is a gamble, one based on riding a boom until just before it busts and then selling while the selling is good. There’s plenty of potential left in crypto, argues the author, especially given the inherently liberating possibilities of blockchain technology. There’s also all the risk inherent in praying that the “greater fool theory” will hold long enough for the investor to make a few bucks—or a few million bucks—in the crypto marketplace. Eliason’s anecdotes are both entertaining and instructive, and unlike many books on Bitcoin et al., this one doesn’t require background in either computers or economics. More useful, and worth the price of admission, are his notes on the warning signs of disaster, one in particular being “when you think you’ve figured out the game and you’re about to get insanely rich.”
Essential reading for anyone playing—or thinking of playing—in the crypto sandbox.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780593714041
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.
Prolific writer Benedict has long blended two interests—sports and business—and the Patriots are emblematic of both. Founded in 1959 as the Boston Patriots, the team built a strategic home field between that city and Providence. When original owner Billy Sullivan sold the flailing team in 1988, it was $126 million in the hole, a condition so dire that “Sullivan had to beg the NFL to release emergency funds so he could pay his players.” Victor Kiam, the razor magnate, bought the long since renamed New England Patriots, but rival Robert Kraft bought first the parking lots and then the stadium—and “it rankled Kiam that he bore all the risk as the owner of the team but virtually all of the revenue that the team generated went to Kraft.” Check and mate. Kraft finally took over the team in 1994. Kraft inherited coach Bill Parcells, who in turn brought in star quarterback Drew Bledsoe, “the Patriots’ most prized player.” However, as the book’s nimbly constructed opening recounts, in 2001, Bledsoe got smeared in a hit “so violent that players along the Patriots sideline compared the sound of the collision to a car crash.” After that, it was backup Tom Brady’s team. Gridiron nerds will debate whether Brady is the greatest QB and Bill Belichick the greatest coach the game has ever known, but certainly they’ve had their share of controversy. The infamous “Deflategate” incident of 2015 takes up plenty of space in the late pages of the narrative, and depending on how you read between the lines, Brady was either an accomplice or an unwitting beneficiary. Still, as the author writes, by that point Brady “had started in 223 straight regular-season games,” an enviable record on a team that itself has racked up impressive stats.
Smart, engaging sportswriting—good reading for organization builders as well as Pats fans.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982134-10-5
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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