In less than two decades, a nine-page paper posted to a cryptography mailing list spawned a trillion-dollar ecosystem, mass retail speculation, billion-dollar collapses, criminal empires, revolutionary financial primitives, and a global regulatory reckoning.
Along the way, anonymous founders disappeared. Billion-dollar protocols died in hours. CEOs tweeted "funds are safe" while the money was already gone. And millions of ordinary people - developers, traders, believers, gamblers - watched their screens as fortunes were made and destroyed in real time.
This is not a book about whether crypto is good or bad.
This is a history - told through the people who built it, the systems that broke, and the patterns that keep repeating.
Every chapter follows a real story: a founder, a protocol, a collapse, a breakthrough. The facts are public. The quotes are real. The timelines are documented. What this book adds is the thread that connects them - the arc from a whitepaper on a mailing list to a multi-trillion-dollar question that governments, banks, and builders are still trying to answer.
This is the story of what they built, what broke, and what survived.
