Catching Up to Crypto by Ben Armstrong

At the end of 2022, I vowed to start the new year with a column called So you don’t have to.

The idea was simple: I read crypto books, watched fluff documentaries and played Ponzi games. So, after torturing myself enough, I would report back with an honest review.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t have started with a more vile, vanilla and hypocritical book than Getting to grips with crypto: Your guide to Bitcoin and the digital economy by the equally despicable, vanilla and hypocritical Ben “BitBoy” Armstrong.

The book is only 204 pages long (but trust me, it feels much longer), with nearly 50 of them devoted to notes and indexes. The notes, in this case, include a bunch of referral links to four crypto exchanges, BitBoy’s BitLab Academy ‘course’, and a few portfolio trackers and trade analysis. These are all found in the section titled “Essential Resources and Tools of the Trade.”

But let’s start with a couple of points before chapter one.

You join a cult

First, Raoul Pal wrote the foreword to the book. His page of bland statements can be largely ignored, except for the fact that he calls BitBoy a “deep expert in the space.” I’m not sure how BitBoy is a deep expert at anything other than pandering to audiences and bad projects, but Raoul doesn’t go out of his way to explain.

Maybe he was happy to write the foreword because BitBoy lets him shill the company and Twitter handle at the end.

Next up, in the foreword, BitBoy describes the literal “come to God” moment that brought him into the realm of cryptocurrency: “The Lord spoke to me in a dream… [and said] By the end of the year [my wife and I] would be millionaires.”

It’s probably fair to file it under “cultish and shallow”. I mean, imagine God comes to you in a dream and all he says is, “You will make a lot of money!”

This is to say that while some cults – like religious fanaticism or fantasy novels-turned-pseudo-religions – can be interesting to watch from the outside, BitBoy’s attempt at a modern version of Dianetics turns out to be even less convincing and to ultimately. boring, with a mantra similar to “crypto is the future, money is good.”

I hate this already

It was in the introduction that I realized I already hated BitBoy’s Picking up to crypto. While describing his first interactions with Bitcoin in (allegedly) 2012, he made a number of statements that not only make no sense, but aren’t even true. For example:

• In 2012 and 2013, “it was much more difficult to sell Bitcoin than to buy.”

• He claims that there was no information to refer to in 2012, but only attempts to find videos on YouTube.

• BitBoy cites “Crypto Crow… Ian Balina” and “Ivan on Tech,” as good resources available in 2017, but all named individuals are associated with deceiving the public and relying on ref links for income.

But despite all that, what sickened me the most was the line: “The cliché ‘Rome wasn’t built in a day’ has proven true in my career as a crypto YouTuber.“

Read more: Who is BitBoy Crypto and why does everyone hate him?

BitBoy is all about repetition without personality

Most of the chapters in this book are inflated slogans about Austrian economics, propaganda touting the benefits of deflationary currency, brief discussions of why decentralization is best for privacy, and of course why cryptocurrencies are destined to take over the world.

There are countless hypocrisies scattered throughout the pages of this book, from the starting point of his godly desire to become a millionaire to his repeated claims that fiat is “a worthless piece of paper.”

Unfortunately, these instances of insincerity are not funny, witty, or even fascinating. It’s just tiring.

Recommendations (before we move on)

While intense and loud criticism for something as heinous as Picking up to crypto is necessary (after all, without it someone might mistakenly go out and buy it), I also think it’s worth pointing people in the right direction if they want to read up on some of the topics covered in the book.

First of all, there is a wonderful book by former New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper entitled Digital goldwhich does a fantastic job of going through the early history of Bitcoin and those involved.

Second, the BitMEX Research-sponsored book by Jonathan Bier called The blocksize war: The battle over who controls Bitcoin’s protocol rules is a thorough explanation of the debate between so-called ‘big blockers’ and ‘small blockers’ and does a much better job of detailing the details.

Finally, Laura Shin’s The cryptopis: Idealism, greed, lies and the creation of the first major cryptocurrency craze does a much better job of objectively looking at the rise of Ethereum and its founders.