BITCOIN BILLIONAIRES
A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
Except that, as Enrich notes at the end of his review, they probably aren't billionaires any longer. (It can be argued they never were, since "billionaire" means "possessing $1 billion," not an estimated $1B in investments.) If much dialogue is imagined, it's not strictly true. Whether the Winklevii were geniuses or were betrayed by Zuckerberg is a matter for debate (I think a $200M was way more than they deserved). And I don't see any redemption here.
Oh, well, the "a" and "of" are OK.
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Being photogenic is not a skill. A pair of spectacularly overpublicized talentless chancers. Litigate money out of an enterprise they barely influenced and put too much of their gain into the online gold rush. That's not genius, that's lazy, I don't see evidence of their 'building'.
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Talk about burying the lede: the last paragraph implies the twins didn't get much richer, if at all, but surely you could tell us whether they cashed out any of their inflated virtual hoard near the 2017-12 top, or just kept rowing over the waterfall.
On an unrelated note, Winklevoss is Dutch for "shop fox", while Zuckerberg is German for 'sugar mountain".
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Proof that God has a sense of humor. Two generally clueless human beings in the right place at the right time can get showered with gifts.
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The article excluded an essential part of the Winklevoss empire, their cryptocurrency exchange, Gemini. This is one of the most secure and trusted exchanges right now for trading Bitcoin, Ethereum and other coins. These guys are smart and they know what they are doing. And no, I am not a millennial bitcoin trader; just a sixty-year-old lady familiar with cryptocurrency.
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Even if what you say is true, it doesn’t mean much in favor of the buffoonish self-impressed Winklevoss bros. They didn’t build Gemini. They heard about it from someone at a party and invested some of their unearned cash in it. Wow, dude - geniuses.
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Given the reviewer’s disclosure that parts of the book are “imagined,” why does the Times even consider this a work of “nonfiction?”
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Whenever I come across an article or a book about the Winklevoss brothers I wish it would refer to them as the fabulous Winklevoss twins.
I mean they are so tall, so handsome, so strong, so rich, so with it, so on the cutting edge, so ahead of the curve and so full of it.
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... so ahead of the curve, so full of themselves and so full of it.
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Who cares about the Winklevoi or Zuckerberg for that matter?
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@Diogenes You, for one, since you not only read this review but commented on it.
Sounds like a typical Mezrich work. Give him credit for showing up but it is too bad his work hasn’t improved.
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Perfect heros for the age of Trump. Propped up and inflated to popping point by a complete Toady of a writer.
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The brothers are, and were, still a footnote (albeit a revealing one) to Facebook and Zuckerberg. Bitcoin might become transformational... maybe not. Rather than aggrandize the brothers, a good book can come up from their stories without adding fiction. Why add fiction and why make them giants of industry? Their own serendipitous and revealing witnessing of social networks and block chain are good enough for a good book... Mezrich needed not add ridiculous superlatives. They were builders... they had legos! Argh!
Sounds like the Emperor's new clothes were all purchased using Bitcoin.....
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While I can't comment on the book (not read), the title itself seems to be a stretch: " ... Redemption." Really? Rather, these guys are dabblers and gamblers. A winning at the races is hardly genius. Nor is redemption found there.
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If one has a billion dollars, wouldn't investing conservatively (as in CDs) be the sensible thing to do? Why would it be necessary to generate still more money with this large amount already in the bank? These guys pursued a risky investment for no apparent reason.
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This book is non-fiction. So, where is the truth among all this imagining? Meh!
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I would not trust the Winklevoss twins across the street.
Bitcoin sounds like a good thing on the surface. But when you examine the unbelievable amounts of energy needed for the technology in blockchaining, it seems like a high-tech Rube Goldberg contraption.
Currency is meant to make transactions easier and more efficient, and to make society more orderly.
When you add in the cost of the energy used to create Bitcoins, not to mention the externalities such as the pollution foisted in the making of electricity, Bitcoin probably creates less order in society.
Perhaps Bitcoin creates entropy. I can't say, but it seems to me that this question is easily solved by a physicist quant at a University.
It is said that sellers on the black market use Bitcoin. Black marketeers want an environment of less law and order. More chaos. Or you could say, more entropy.
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@Wordsworth from Wadsworth Thank you. The energy put into computing power for Bitcoin (and similar schemes/applications) is mindbogglingly wasteful.
@Wordsworth from Wadsworth You level a fair criticism but how much energy is spent making sure our existing monetary system remains secure? Think about it, every city is full of skyscrapers filled with people making sure that banks in every city operate, all those banks run massive server farms using simply staggering amounts of electricity. Rube Goldberg wastefulness is a fair criticism when applied to our very creaky monetary system as well.
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I like how you say,"He doesn’t get around to detailing the nausea-inducing fall." Are they still billionaires? How did they cope? Seems like a MAJOR oversight.
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@Robin I suspect if he chronicled the downside of the story thee Winklevii would take away their support of the project. So either 2/3 of a book or no book. What the twins overlooked is that now everyone REALLY wants to know how much capital they have left. Doh!
I can't help being a bit suspicious of this book, with its clickbait title and its focus on the positive aspects of bitcoin. The price of bitcoin is largely driven by how it's covered in the media - a positive story will drive the price up. I wonder how much this book has to do with Bitcoin's current rebound.
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"Failing to execute"?? Are you kidding? Zuck straight up stole their idea when he was supposed to be developing it for them. I think the settlement was more than fair. The exchange theyve built, Gemini is really tops in class imho.
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Over and over and over we read news items, here and elsewhere, that have a clear and important implication:
Our society needs much higher tax rates on the ultra rich.
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Last sentence of third paragraph tells all, when it is revealed that the story ends before the bubble bursts.
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If I were writing a parody novel about late-stage capitalism, this would be the story, and these would be the names.
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