


But now, Shin says she followed a trail of forensics reports, node names, IP addresses, and other pieces of evidence to a person who lives in Singapore, and is preparing to disclose the identity publicly.Ī major narrative theme in The Cryptopians lies in the power struggle between developers, who wrote blockchain code and forged its rules, and businesspeople, who funded their work and interfaced with the world. The identity of the hacker was never revealed. They don’t want human intervention: They want the blockchains to just be these autonomous things.”Įventually, following advocacy from Buterin and others, the Ethereum network chose to “hard fork”-an intervention process that essentially rolled back the network’s history as if the hack had never happened. “But in crypto, they were so wrapped in the code that it became this philosophical question for them. Any normal person who’s not a crypto person would look at that and say, ‘That’s a theft,’” Shin says. “It’s definitely the longest saga in the book. Shin spends about 70 pages charting the frantic efforts by multiple parties to reverse the damage, as well as the fierce internal and public debates happening on Reddit, Slack and other platforms.
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The hack sent the Ethereum community into a civil war about how to handle the breach. In 2016, a hacker swiped $60 million worth of Ether from the DAO, a blockchain-based venture capital firm that was supposed to revolutionize funding mechanisms. And Vitalik not having the kind of personality to really assert himself is kind of a big problem throughout the book.” “I think I was able to get more about what was going on in his head, and what people around him were thinking than other people. “I really felt like the book was a kind of coming of age story for him,” Shin says. Shin has interviewed Buterin several times, and says she hoped to show a “human side of Vitalik that hasn’t been seen before.” The book explores his childhood-at 7, he wrote a dense encyclopedia about bunnies-his social discomfort at early Ethereum conferences, and his standoffish, consensus-seeking approach to wave after wave of unfolding crises. Now 28, Buterin is one of the most fascinating characters in the cryptocurrency space: a coding savant and deep conceptual thinker whose vast technical prowess is sometimes offset by social awkwardness and aversion to confrontation.

And the main character is crypto’s frontman: Vitalik Buterin. While The Cryptopians gets very technical at some points, it also resembles something like a rock band biography, in which egos clash, decadence flows, and small dreams spiral out of control.
