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The Cryptopians
- Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze
- Narrated by: Laura Shin
- Length: 15 hrs and 13 mins
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Publisher's summary
The story of the idealists, technologists, and opportunists fighting to bring cryptocurrency to the masses.
In their short history, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have gone through booms, busts, and internecine wars, recently reaching a market valuation of more than $2 trillion. The central promise of crypto endures—vast fortunes made from decentralized networks not controlled by any single entity and not yet regulated by many governments.
The recent growth of crypto would have been all but impossible if not for a brilliant young man named Vitalik Buterin and his creation: Ethereum. In this book, Laura Shin takes listeners inside the founding of this novel cryptocurrency network, which enabled users to launch their own new coins, thus creating a new crypto fever. She introduces readers to larger-than-life characters like Buterin, the Web3 wunderkind; his short-lived CEO, Charles Hoskinson; and Joe Lubin, a former Goldman Sachs VP who became one of crypto’s most well-known billionaires. Sparks fly as these outsized personalities fight for their piece of a seemingly limitless new business opportunity.
This fascinating book shows the crypto market for what it really is: a deeply personal struggle to influence the coming revolution in money, culture, and power.
PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
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By: Jacquie McNish, and others
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The Starfish and the Spider
- The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
- By: Ori Brafman, Rod Beckstrom
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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If you cut off a spider's leg, it's crippled; if you cut off its head, it dies. But if you cut off a starfish's leg it grows a new one, and the old leg can grow into an entirely new starfish. The Starfish and the Spider argues that organizations fall into two categories: "spiders", which have a rigid hierarchy, and "starfish", which rely on the power of peer relationships.
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Centralized and decentralized models
- By Chan Meng on 12-07-07
By: Ori Brafman, and others
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Alibaba
- The House That Jack Ma Built
- By: Duncan Clark
- Narrated by: Jim Meskimen
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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In just a decade and a half, Jack Ma, a man from modest beginnings who started out as an English teacher, founded Alibaba and built it into one of the world's largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend. Alibaba's $25 billion IPO in 2014 was the largest global IPO ever. A Rockefeller of his age who is courted by CEOs and presidents around the world, Jack is an icon for China's booming private sector.
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Strange: Best part of story happens "off-screen"
- By Tristan on 09-02-16
By: Duncan Clark
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Googled
- The End of the World as We Know It
- By: Ken Auletta
- Narrated by: Jim Bond
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In Googled, esteemed media writer and critic Ken Auletta uses the story of Google's rise to explore the inner workings of the company and the future of the media at large. Although Google has often been secretive, this book is based on the most extensive cooperation ever granted a journalist, including access to closed-door meetings and interviews with founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, CEO Eric Schmidt, and some 150 present and former employees.
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Audio production could have been better
- By David on 11-12-09
By: Ken Auletta
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Frenemies
- The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (And Everything Else)
- By: Ken Auletta
- Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross
- Length: 12 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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An intimate and profound reckoning with the changes buffeting the $2 trillion global advertising and marketing business from the perspective of its most powerful players, by the best-selling author of Googled. Advertising and marketing touches on every corner of our lives, and is the invisible fuel powering almost all media. Complain about it though we might, without it the world would be a darker place. And of all the industries wracked by change in the digital age, few have been turned on its head as dramatically as this one has.
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Good; not for beginners
- By DV on 10-05-18
By: Ken Auletta
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The Zeroes
- My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane
- By: Randall Lane
- Narrated by: Randall Lane
- Length: 12 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Magazine entrepreneur Randall Lane had a prime seat at Wall Street's biggest greed fest. The Zeroes is a memoir about the excesses and bad behavior of an outsider who got pulled into a crazy, self-contained world.
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A very entertaining tale
- By andy on 11-03-13
By: Randall Lane
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Dethroning the King
- The Hostile Takeover of Anheuser-Busch, an American Icon
- By: Julie MacIntosh
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 12 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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How did InBev, a Belgian company controlled by Brazilians, take over one of America's most beloved brands after barely a whimper of a fight? With timing - and some unexpected help from powerful members of the Busch dynasty, the very family that had run the company for more than a century. From the very heart of America's heartland to the European continent to Brazil, Dethroning the King is the ultimate corporate caper and a fascinating case study that's both wide-reaching and profound.
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Good Story but Narration Can be Annoying
- By Ken on 10-21-11
By: Julie MacIntosh
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Conspiracy of Fools
- A True Story
- By: Kurt Eichenwald
- Narrated by: Robertson Dean
- Length: 30 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Say the name 'Enron' and most people believe they've heard all about the story that imperiled a presidency, destroyed a marketplace, and changed Washington and Wall Street forever. But in the hands of Kurt Eichenwald, the players we think we know and the business practices we think have been exposed are transformed into entirely new, and entirely gripping, material.
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Great Story
- By Adam M Pokorski on 06-06-06
By: Kurt Eichenwald
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Exposure
- Inside the Olympus Scandal: How I Went from CEO to Whistleblower
- By: Michael Woodford
- Narrated by: Michael Woodford
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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When Michael Woodford was made president of Olympus - the company to which he had dedicated thirty years of his career - he became the first Westerner ever to climb the ranks of one of Japan’s corporate giants. Some wondered at the appointment - how could a gaijin who didn’t even speak Japanese understand how to run a Japanese company? But within months Woodford had gained the confidence of most of his colleagues and shareholders.
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Starts off great, then gets stupid
- By Happy Mountain on 10-21-21
By: Michael Woodford
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The Asylum
- The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market
- By: Leah McGrath Goodman
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 16 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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They were a band of outsiders unable to get jobs with New York's gilded financial establishment. They would go on to corner the world's multitrillion-dollar oil market, reaping unimaginable riches while bringing the economy to its knees. Meet the self-anointed kings of the New York Mercantile Exchange. In some ways, they are everything you would expect them to be: a secretive, members-only club of men and women who live lavish lifestyles; cavort with politicians, strippers, and celebrities; and blissfully jacked up oil prices to nearly $150 a barrel while profiting off the misery of the working class.
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A far better book than its come-on implies
- By Philo on 01-05-14
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Boss Life
- Surviving My Own Small Business
- By: Paul Downs
- Narrated by: Jonathan Hogan
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1986, fresh out of college, Paul Downs opened his first and last business: a small company that built custom furniture. With no idea how to run a business or how to build custom furniture, Downs spent a year teaching himself the business, and in 1987 he hired his first employee. That was when things got complicated.
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Just a story
- By Marsha on 12-31-15
By: Paul Downs
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Reality Check
- Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition
- By: Guy Kawasaki
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 14 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In Silicon Valley slang, a "bozo explosion" is what causes a lean, mean, fighting machine of a company to slide into mediocrity. As Guy Kawasaki puts it, "If the two most popular words in your company are partner and strategic, and partner has become a verb, and strategic is used to describe decisions and activities that don't make sense"...then it's time for a reality check.
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The Reality of Reality Check
- By Ben on 08-18-09
By: Guy Kawasaki
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In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”? As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity—with a dash of FOMO—would morph into a two-year globe-spanning quest.
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sensationalist hero worship by parties that have investment in ETH
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keep narrative to economics related topics
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The internet of today is a far cry from its early promise of a decentralized, democratic network of innovation, connection, and freedom. In the past decade, it has fallen almost entirely under the control of a very small group of companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. In Read Write Own, tech visionary Chris Dixon argues that the dream of an open network for fostering creativity and entrepreneurship doesn’t have to die and can, in fact, be saved with blockchain networks.
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Great intro to why you should care about blockchain tech.
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The Bitcoin Standard
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When a pseudonymous programmer introduced “a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party” to a small Online mailing list in 2008, very few paid attention. Ten years later, and against all odds, this upstart autonomous decentralized software offers an unstoppable and globally-accessible hard money alternative to modern central banks. The Bitcoin Standard analyzes the historical context to the rise of Bitcoin, the economic properties that have allowed it to grow quickly, and its likely economic, political, and social implications.
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Less Bitcoin, more old Austrian Economics Vendetta
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NFTs aren’t just pictures on the internet, or a fad that has come and gone. Rather, they're a new technology for creating digital assets and providing irrefutable proof of ownership. NFTs open up markets that have never before existed, and are already revolutionizing commerce and brand-building at everything from hot startups to Fortune 500 companies. Kominers and Kaczynski have created a framework that explains what NFTs are, why they’re valuable, and how businesses can leverage them to build highly engaged and intensely loyal communities around their products and brands.
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Over the last decade, a single innovation has massively fueled digital black markets: cryptocurrency. Crime lords inhabiting lawless corners of the internet have operated more freely—whether in drug dealing, money laundering, or human trafficking—than their analog counterparts could have ever dreamed of. By transacting not in dollars or pounds but in currencies with anonymous ledgers, overseen by no government, beholden to no bankers, these black marketeers have sought to rob law enforcement of their chief method of cracking down on illicit finance: following the money.
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Could not put this down
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Rinsed
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Money laundering has been around for centuries. For as long as people have been stealing money, there's been an industry ready to wash it. But recent tech innovations have created vastly complex new systems for laundering that threaten to overwhelm authorities, destabilise economies and disrupt societies. Ranging from the flamboyant luxury of Dubai hotels to quiet coastal Ireland, from the UK to Nigeria and from Indonesia to North Korea, Rinsed is a truly global relevatory investigation into the new army of innovative launderers ... and the consequences for all of us.
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Almost but not quite plagiarism
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What listeners say about The Cryptopians
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Todd Hickman
- 08-09-22
Pretty Good
Pretty good but material has been previously covered in other works. Would be much better if it weren't the 4th book I'd read about ETH.
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- Mmx
- 12-05-22
Why no chapter titles?
Although it was hard to keep track of all the characters and threads, this book was still helpful for my purpose of learning the history of Ehereum and how it’s governance works (or does not work).
This is also the first audiobook read by the author that I did not find the narration distracting. (In fact, it was very enjoyable.)
I don’t understand why the chapters have no real titles though— it feels like lazy storytelling. Even if Shin had made a deliberate choice to name chapters based on dates, I wish she had explained this choice in the preface.
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- Michelle Ramsauer
- 10-10-23
Movie script material
Laura is the best voice in CRYPTO. She is a pleasure to listen and absolutely well versed.
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- Mike Truong
- 04-04-22
Human context behind Ethereum's Story
Premise: Talented kids without people skills stumble onto a technology worth a pile of cash, this is the story about what happend, who controls it, and who gets butt hurt.
The Twist: it plays out exactly like what you would expect.
Epilogue: ##Spoiler Warning## ETH survives.
Great book overall, I'd recommend it to the average person. As a person who peripherally follows this industry (and a believer), this book is a rare (and useful) perspective on the industry from a professional. Internet sources on crypto; blogs, influencers, new projects, are all slanted in predictable ways. In short, it's just a bunch of unprofessional people slinging whatever they are selling/holding. this is where Laura Shin is super useful, in that she tells the story of this amazing technology - methodically and professionally.
So the summary of the book: Ethereum was built by talented people without much real life world experience. I like how Laura emphasizes how the founding team, as they were trying to get ETH off the ground, absolutely LOVED watching Game of Thrones together. Unfortunately, they didn't realize the game of thrones being played around them in real time. So you get a bunch of these early 20's kids, talented builders, low social skills, who fall apart in predictable ways. Ego, prestige, manipulation from "finance people" all add up to give ETH a rocky start. Lots of players confusing being early/lucky with being a talent god.
Another element of this industry that speaks to Laura's research. Crypto is filled with the "fog of shame". They have their flashy winners, and the losers (like the ones who invests in the market top), fades back into the fog of shame in hopes that their mistakes will be forgotten by society. There's winners and losers in the ETH foundation, and it was refreshing that Laura was able to penetrate this fog and get some perspectives from all parties.
One thing I didn't like about the book was that it was difficult to follow all the names that are thrown out. There should be more character development for at least the main characters, and maybe last names should be used more often.
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- Cliente de Amazon
- 05-15-22
Bad story telling
Amazing story, bad story telling, and also some kind of bias in the way things are told from the author.
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- Herschel
- 01-09-23
Excellent!
Thanks Laura for the accurate accounting of the development of Ethereum. If you had not done the research, no one else probably would have. Excellent listen!
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-27-22
Real stories about real people. So much deeper than technological fetishism.
I have no doubt that in the decades to come this story will be a movie. This book is a MUST READ. Laura Shin reveals the motivations and stories of the humans responsible for making potentially some of the most powerful and abstract technologies of our time. The book provides some answers for many of the most elusive questions around crypto - who are these people; where did they come from; what are their motives; what happens behind the scenes at the foundations, offices, conventions, and “the spaceship” (the Ethereum founders’ shared house)?
This is the most comprehensive, well-sourced, and compelling narrative I’ve found for better understanding the people building in the crypto space. If you listen to interviews with crypto’s main players, don’t try to read between the lines, just read Laura’s book.
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- Henri A.
- 03-29-22
Good book for those in the crypto community
Good way to learn about what happened behind the scenes and in the early days of Ethereum. Well researched ans well written.
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- D. Young
- 08-16-22
Excellent research and in-depth information
The language is pretty vulgar throughout. Could have used a good thorough edit. Maybe in the second edition.
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- SPR
- 03-30-22
Crash course in crypto
Great book with a ton of details on the development of ETH and the various influences in the Web 3 space.
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