Kings Of Crypto — The Hero’s Journey of Coinbase — Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain
- Jeff John Roberts: Kings of Crypto: One Startup’s Quest to Take Cryptocurrency out of Silicon Valley and onto Wall Street (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020 – USA, UK)
This is the Hero’s Journey of Brian Armstrong, founder of Coinbase. The genre is mass market corporate history. The book is actually about bitcoin.
A great man for our time
I can hardly tell you how much I detest the writing style of popular business stories or CEO biographies. “Boss erotica”, as Ed Zitron calls it.
The job is to describe boring nonsense as if it is of vital interest. Writing about the most insane goof like it’s important and important. Authorized, unauthorized, everyone does this.
Kings Of CryptoJeff John Roberts’ history of Coinbase starts with a stock scene from the genre: the replaceable CEO’s tough day dealing with some early trivialities as if it is of importance and importance and as if anyone, including the replaceable CEO, will remember it a year later.
I don’t mean to get stuck on Roberts here. He is trapped by genre. They all do it. Every book on Facebook, of which I skimmed far too many for my Libra book. Even Nick Bilton’s Hatching Twitterand it was relatively tight.
It’s a style, it’s imposed by editors, and it sucks. It leaves no room to break the fourth wall and say “these are clearly noisy idiots as well as parasites on humanity and we need to bring back the guillotine.”
I remember Steve Jobs, the journey is the reward by Jeffrey S. Young (1988). That book masqueraded as this style – but made it extremely clear what a piece of shit Jobs was.
I’m particularly sensitive to the style because I dread having to learn it—editors love it, and I’m currently nine months behind schedule on my book proposal about El Salvador and bitcoin. At least it has a character or two. If you told Charles Dickens about Nayib Bukele, he would tell you to tone him down a bit.
Editors don’t want historical material forces – they want something character driven. It’s about human beings. The CEO is the main character.
The problem is that The Great Man theory of history is wrong, stupid and bad. But turning material circumstances into a gripping tale of derring-do is more difficult.
The demand for character-driven narratives fails when the characters are actually just lucky idiots.
Our hero, INTERCHANGEABLE CEO with an obsession
Brian Armstrong begins his heroic journey by battling his first and deadliest enemy: venture capitalists. “It was the summer of 2012, and Brian was full of certainty that he would build Y Combinator’s next famous startup.” I’m sure you’re trapped too.
Two and a half years later, when he walked through the doors of Y Combinator, Brian was more fixated on bitcoin than ever. Now he had developed a special insight of his own about the currency, one that he would soon deliver to millions of people.
Brian’s creative genius makes him realize that there is a demand for a place to buy bitcoins easily! This is an idea that no one has had before! (Don’t forget Mt. Gox.)
Brian’s secret ingredient? Centralization. Just in case you thought “decentralized” meant something and wasn’t just a marketing buzzword promising legal immunity that doesn’t exist.
We meet co-founder Fred Ehrsam through the anxiety of a privileged child who cannot grow up properly into lacrosse or Wall Street. “In fact, he was dying inside.” Bitcoin was his rock’n’roll.
Coinbase hires its most enthusiastic customers, and is run just a bit like a cult – “Coinbase was very hierarchical, like the military. I idolized Fred as the leader.” “The workaholic culture.” “Running through brick walls.” “Brian threw himself into a management cult called ‘conscious leadership’ that employees described as a hybrid of New Ageism and a twelve-step recovery program.”
You can’t really say “It wasn’t that the Founders lacked humanity” right after the episode with Ehrsam shouting abuse at his subordinates.
Here is the most interesting sentence in the book:
Tasked with organizing Coinbase’s first retreat, Nathalie deftly deflected Brian and Fred’s idea that they do a “hunt and gather” trip that would require each employee to kill their own food.
Roberts doesn’t do what anyone else would have done, asking what made them think that was ever a suitable idea. Armstrong and Ehrsam take the team to a shooting range instead.
I’m sure this is completely normal in the startup world, and it also explains a lot.
The rest of the book is a history of bitcoin to 2020, through the lens of the Coinbase executive suite.
Armstrong is not interesting. He is in business to make money, not present a fascinating personality. Roberts’ attempt to write Armstrong as interesting only makes it clear how he just isn’t.
The real hero was bitcoin along the way
Coinbase is important in that it is the largest crypto exchange for actual dollars and the first choice for the general public to get their cryptos. But Armstrong, or even Coinbase, is not the point of the book. Bitcoin is.
Jeff John Roberts is a cryptocurrency journalist, formerly of Decrypt, now running Fortune’s crypto vertical. Roberts is very much an enthusiast – he has been “fascinated by cryptocurrency and the role Coinbase has played in bringing it to the general public” since he bought his first bitcoin from them in 2013.
The book is really about Roberts’ fascination with bitcoin. Armstrong is interesting to the extent that he presents bitcoin to the masses. Bitcoin is fantastic.
This attitude speaks to the hearts of the tech libertarians who read Satoshi’s white paper and saw the future—and no one else. The reader seems to expect to see the list of weird anarcho-capitalist promises and want those things.
What does bitcoin do? It is a “world-changing technology.” Bitcoin promises a new world of economic liberation and stateless money. But the book doesn’t show anything that would change the world – except for the worse.
The secret ingredient is crime. “The digital money continued to appear in a whole wave of criminal activity – from money laundering to drug sales to extortion.” Coinbase is shocked when “some of its customers treated the company as their personal money laundering agent for a variety of crimes.” Ehrsam pitches to investors that bitcoin is “immune to country-specific sanctions.”
Roberts treats the pervasive criminality as an aberration in the glorious rise of (the price of) bitcoin, never mind that evasion of regulation was bitcoin’s original purpose – “Bitcoin’s illicit origins continued to shine through.”
Breaking laws is not one aberration in cryptocurrency. It is the use case.
The only other use case shown is speculation and the number is increasing. The book talks a lot about how big the number is. How and why the number rises is not questioned.
Bitcoin also does not work as a payment system: “Although several merchants accepted the currency, it became obvious to many that it was just a gimmick. Satoshi’s invention, it turned out, was a lousy way to pay for things.”
Bitcoin is a “bona fide rival to gold” – but only in the minds of those who are already true believers, and only because it failed as badly as peer-to-peer electronic cash.
Robert’s explanation of how the blockchain works is ok. But he says that Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, and justifies this with the claim that:
In addition, linguists have compared the white paper and Satoshi’s emails with writing samples from Szabo, Finney and other possible candidates. Szabo is a long way from the closest match.
This wasn’t what happened – it was a bunch of seniors who were promoted in a university press release, and their professor who couldn’t tell LONETEX from OpenOffice. There is a conspiracy blog that said that proof against this claim was evidence to it. Dominic Frisby also asked a guy in his bitcoin book. That’s it.
The hero returns
If you need a history of Coinbase, this is it. I am confident that this book is as factually correct as Roberts could make it. I learned a lot about Coinbase and Armstrong. I didn’t care about it.
I don’t think Roberts was samples to portray Armstrong as a boring arsehole, or Ehrsam as a sociopath – but he did.
The book talks about the brilliance of bitcoin – but at no point argues this claim, instead presenting a number of bitcoin’s flaws. The only use cases shown are the belief in bitcoin itself as an object of desire, and crime.
I’m not sure how to write this book in less stifling genre constraints. But there is another story to tell about conspiracy theory thinking in good times for the business economy and how there are no new scams. And that’s it definitely a story to tell about Coinbase’s longtime position as the treasurer’s desk for the unregulated offshore casinos — which Roberts somehow never quite gets around to. This will also minimize the word count directly about Armstrong.
