Crypto Confidential by Nathaniel Eliason

Crypto Confidential by Nathaniel Eliason

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/730882/crypto-confidential-by-nathaniel-eliason/

"As soon as something works, it gets copied to the point of maximum stupidity."

Crypto books arrive in waves about two to three years after the bull market peak. The first books for general readers came after the 2013 cycle and explained why there might be value in bitcoin. After the 2017-18 peak there were the Ethereum books. This last cycle in 2021 produced a different sort of book, summaries of the scams and madness by journalists (or actors) running around the world trying to expose the fraud. These books include Ben MacKenzie and Jacob Silverman's Easy Money, Zeke Faux's Number Go Up, and Michael Lewis's Going Infinite. Now comes something different, and a lot more fun.

Nathaniel Eliason is a guy between jobs trying to teach himself to code. He's desperate for money because he and his wife, Cosette are about to have a baby. She's the one making the money as a realtor in the Austin housing boom after a year of the pandemic. The setting is one of the nicer things about the book, most crypto books are intensely New York-centric because journalism and publishing are based there, even if crypto is not. This is about one person's experience of the crypto boom that he shares with his friends. Some like Johnny who owns a coffeeshop and is trying to invent and market a better espresso machine and Quinn, a regular there who becomes his first crypto mentor are real life friends. Others are online, sometimes anonymously.

The scandal books above summarize and place into context stories that people who were in this sub and in the market followed and knew about. Most of the stories in Crypto Confidential are lesser known except to people in the specific areas of the market. The 2021 bull market had three big themes that were different from previous cycles: DeFi, NFTs, and gaming. All three get treatment in different sections of the book. There are chapters on Nat's experience through the year alternating with chapters with black stripes on the edges of the page that explain different aspects of crypto. The explanation chapters seem very clear and simple, I hope they'd come across that way to a complete novice.

To begin with, Nat, with Quinn's guidance focuses on DeFi farming. They start a group and find new DEXs on VFAT.

https://vf.at/

Many of the chapter headings have dates. Hmm . . . May 2021, no wonder this works out so well.

• Uniswap: ATH $44.97 May 02, 2021
• Maker: ATH $6,339.02 May 03, 2021
• Aave: ATH $666.86 May 18, 2021
• Compound: ATH $911.20 May 11, 2021
• Yearn: ATH $93,435.53 May 11, 2021

Although to be clear, they're jumping in and out of brand new stuff, not things people have heard of and are still at the top of the DeFi lists today.

As the story goes on, his new found coding skills come into play and you wonder just how miserable he makes Cosette. Overall a fun book with good information and advice.

"I was starting to understand why I'd seen people on twitter say you couldn't do crypto part time. You either hold Bitcoin and Ether and don't touch it, or you fully dive into the mania. Doing it halfway is how you lose money." Ok really just HODL BTC and ETH for most of us.

"Books like A Random Walk Down Wall Street will tell you that more-active investors, those who are constantly buying and selling, tend to do worse than those who simply buy and hold index funds. That's true in the normal stock market, but if you approach crypto speculating with the mindset of a typical retirement investor, it will get you into trouble. If you treat shitcoins and NFTs like a Vanguard index fund and keep piling money into them and never sell them, you will be exit liquidity."

Or is it all a pitch for the project he worked on?

Nat's warning at the end: https://rekt.news/de/leaderboard/