{"id":24785,"date":"2023-02-11T19:28:38","date_gmt":"2023-02-11T19:28:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=24785"},"modified":"2023-02-11T22:38:08","modified_gmt":"2023-02-11T22:38:08","slug":"jeff-john-roberts-kings-of-crypto-the-heros-journey-of-coinbase","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2023\/02\/11\/jeff-john-roberts-kings-of-crypto-the-heros-journey-of-coinbase\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeff John Roberts: Kings Of Crypto \u2014 the Hero\u2019s Journey of Coinbase"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li aria-level=\"1\">Jeff John Roberts: <i>Kings of Crypto: One Startup\u2019s Quest to Take Cryptocurrency out of Silicon Valley and onto Wall Street<\/i> (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020 \u2014 <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3luHfZ7\">US<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3IheQyw\">UK<\/a>)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This is the Hero\u2019s Journey of\u00a0 Brian Armstrong, founder of Coinbase. The genre is mass-market corporate history. The book\u2019s really about bitcoin.<\/p>\n<h3>A Great Man for our times<\/h3>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2023\/02\/11\/jeff-john-roberts-kings-of-crypto-the-heros-journey-of-coinbase\/kings-of-crypto\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-24787\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-24787\" style=\"float: right;\" src=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/kings-of-crypto.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"451\" srcset=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/kings-of-crypto.jpg 400w, https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/kings-of-crypto-199x300.jpg 199w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a> I can barely tell you how much I loathe the writing style of popular company histories or CEO biographies. \u201cBoss erotica,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/ez.substack.com\/p\/techs-elite-hates-labor\">as Ed Zitron calls it.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The job is to describe tedious nonsense as if it&#8217;s of vital interest. Writing about the most inane guff as if it&#8217;s of significance and import. Authorised, unauthorised, they all do this.<\/p>\n<p><i>Kings Of Crypto<\/i>, Jeff John Roberts\u2019 history of Coinbase, starts with a stock scene from the genre: the interchangeable CEO\u2019s tough day dealing with some early triviality as if it&#8217;s of significance and import, and as if anyone, including the interchangeable CEO, will remember it a year later.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t mean to get stuck into Roberts here. He\u2019s trapped by genre. They all do it. Every book on Facebook, which I skimmed far too many of for my <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/libra\/\">Libra book.<\/a> Even Nick Bilton\u2019s <i>Hatching Twitter<\/i>, and that got relatively snarky.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a style, it&#8217;s mandated by editors, and it sucks. It offers no room to break the fourth wall and say &#8220;these are clearly blithering idiots as well as parasites upon humanity, and we need to bring back the guillotine.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I remember <i>Steve Jobs, the Journey Is the Reward<\/i> by Jeffrey S. Young (1988). That book masqueraded as this style \u2014 but made it extremely clear what an asshole Jobs was.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m particularly sensitive to the style because I fear having to learn it \u2014 editors love it, and I\u2019m currently nine months late on my proposal for the book on El Salvador and bitcoin. At least that one has a character or two. If you told Charles Dickens about Nayib Bukele, he\u2019d tell you to tone him down a bit.<\/p>\n<p>Editors don&#8217;t want historical material forces \u2014 they want something <i>character driven<\/i>. It&#8217;s about the <i>people<\/i>. The CEO is the Main Character.<\/p>\n<p>The trouble is that the Great Man theory of history is wrong, dumb and bad. But it&#8217;s harder to make material circumstances into a gripping tale of derring-do.<\/p>\n<p>The demand for character driven narratives fails when the characters are in fact just lucky idiots.<\/p>\n<h3>Our hero, INTERCHANGEABLE CEO with an OBSESSION<\/h3>\n<p>Brian Armstrong starts his heroic journey battling his first and deadliest foe: venture capitalists. \u201cIt was the summer of 2012, and Brian was brimming with certainty that he would build Y Combinator\u2019s next famous startup.\u201d I\u2019m sure you\u2019re riveted too.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Two and a half years later, as he walked through the doors of Y Combinator, Brian was more fixated on bitcoin than ever. By now, he had developed a special insight of his own about the currency, one that he would soon deliver to millions of people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Brian\u2019s creative genius leads him to realise there\u2019s demand for a place to buy bitcoins easily! This is an idea that nobody has had before! (Never mind Mt. Gox.)<\/p>\n<p>Brian\u2019s secret ingredient? <i>Centralisation<\/i>. Just in case you thought \u201cdecentralised\u201d meant something and wasn\u2019t just a marketing buzzword promising legal immunity that doesn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n<p>We meet co-founder Fred Ehrsam through the angst of a child of privilege who can\u2019t get really <i>into<\/i> lacrosse or Wall Street. \u201cIn fact, he was dying inside.\u201d Bitcoin was his rock\u2019n\u2019roll.<\/p>\n<p>Coinbase hires its most enthusiastic customers, and is run only just a little like a cult \u2014 \u201cCoinbase was very hierarchical, like the military. I idolized Fred as a leader.\u201d The \u201cworkaholic culture.\u201d \u201cRunning through brick walls.\u201d \u201cBrian glommed onto a cultish management fad called \u2018Conscious Leadership\u2019 that employees described as a hybrid of New Ageism and a twelve-step recovery program.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>You can&#8217;t really say \u201cIt wasn\u2019t that the founders lacked humanity\u201d straight after paragraphs of Ehrsam shouting abuse at his subordinates.<\/p>\n<p>Here is the most interesting sentence in the book:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Tasked with organizing Coinbase\u2019s first retreat, Nathalie deftly deflected Brian and Fred\u2019s idea that they do a \u2018hunt and gather\u2019 outing that would require every employee to kill their own food.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Roberts doesn\u2019t do what anyone else would have done, and ask what made them think that was ever a suitable idea. Armstrong and Ehrsam take the team to a shooting range instead.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m sure this is all perfectly normal in the startup world, and that explains a lot too.<\/p>\n<p>The rest of the book is a history of bitcoin to 2020, through the lens of the Coinbase executive suite.<\/p>\n<p>Armstrong is not interesting. He\u2019s in business to make money, not present a fascinating personality. Roberts\u2019 attempts to write Armstrong as interesting only make it clear how he just isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<h3>The real hero was the bitcoin along the way<\/h3>\n<p>Coinbase is important insofar as it\u2019s the largest actual-dollar crypto exchange and the first choice for the general public to get its cryptos. But Armstrong, or even Coinbase, isn\u2019t the point of the book. Bitcoin is.<\/p>\n<p>Jeff John Roberts is a cryptocurrency journalist, previously at Decrypt, and now running Fortune\u2019s crypto vertical. Roberts is very much an enthusiast \u2014 he\u2019s been \u201cfascinated with cryptocurrency and the role Coinbase has played in bringing it to the general public\u201d since he bought his first bitcoin from them in 2013.<\/p>\n<p>The book is really about Roberts\u2019 fascination with bitcoin. Armstrong is interesting insofar as he presents bitcoin to the masses. Bitcoin is <i>amazing<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>This attitude speaks to the hearts of the tech libertarians who read Satoshi\u2019s white paper and saw the future \u2014 and nobody else. The reader seems expected to see <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/the-conspiracist-gold-bug-economics-of-bitcoin\/\">the list of weird anarcho-capitalist promises<\/a> and want those things.<\/p>\n<p>What does bitcoin do? It\u2019s a \u201cworld-changing technology.\u201d Bitcoin promises a new world of financial liberation and government-free money. But the book doesn\u2019t show anything that would change the world \u2014 except for the worse.<\/p>\n<p>The secret ingredient is crime. \u201cThe digital money kept turning up in a whole spate of criminal activity \u2014 from money laundering to drug sales to extortion.\u201d Coinbase is shocked when \u201csome of their customers treated the company as their personal money-laundering agent for a host of crimes.\u201d Ehrsam <i>pitches to investors<\/i> that bitcoin is \u201cimmune to country-specific sanctions.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Roberts treats the pervasive criminality as an aberration in the glorious rise of (the price of) bitcoin, and never mind that evading regulation was bitcoin\u2019s original purpose \u2014 \u201cBitcoin\u2019s outlaw origins kept poking through.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Breaking laws is not an <i>aberration<\/i> in cryptocurrency. It\u2019s <i>the use case<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>The only other use case shown is speculation and <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2019\/05\/27\/the-origin-of-number-go-up-in-bitcoin-culture\/\">number go up.<\/a> The book talks a lot about how big the number is. How and why the number goes up is not interrogated.<\/p>\n<p>Bitcoin doesn\u2019t work as a payment system either: \u201cEven as more merchants accepted the currency, it became obvious to many that it was just a gimmick. Satoshi\u2019s invention, it turned out, was a lousy way to pay for things.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Bitcoin is a \u201cbona fide rival to gold\u201d \u2014 but only in the minds of those who are already true believers, and only because it failed so hard as peer-to-peer electronic cash.<\/p>\n<p>Roberts\u2019 explanation of how the blockchain works is okay. But he says Nick Szabo is Satoshi Nakamoto, then justifies this with the claim that:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Additionally, linguists have compared the white paper and Satoshi\u2019s emails with writing samples from Szabo, Finney, and other possible candidates. Szabo is far and away the closest match.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This isn\u2019t what happened \u2014 it was <a href=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2018\/12\/16\/no-nick-szabo-wasnt-satoshi-in-2014-either\/\">a bunch of final-year students promoted in a university press release<\/a>, and their professor who couldn\u2019t tell L<sup>A<\/sup>T<sub>E<\/sub>X from OpenOffice. There&#8217;s a conspiracy blog that said that evidence <em>against<\/em> this claim was evidence <em>for<\/em> it. Dominic Frisby also asked a guy in his bitcoin book. That\u2019s it.<\/p>\n<h3>The hero returns<\/h3>\n<p>If you need a history of Coinbase, this is that. I\u2019m confident this book is as factually correct as Roberts could make it. I learnt a lot about Coinbase and Armstrong. I didn\u2019t care about it.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t think Roberts was <i>trying<\/i> to depict Armstrong as a boring asshole, or Ehrsam as a sociopath \u2014 but he did.<\/p>\n<p>The book talks about the brilliance of bitcoin \u2014 but at no point makes its argument for this claim, and instead presents a string of bitcoin\u2019s failures. The only use cases shown are belief in bitcoin itself as an object of desire, and crime.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure how I&#8217;d write this book in less suffocating genre constraints. But there&#8217;s probably a story to tell about conspiracy theory thinking in good times for the business economy and how there are no new frauds. And there&#8217;s\u00a0<em>definitely<\/em> a story to tell about Coinbase&#8217;s long-time position as the cashier&#8217;s desk for the unregulated offshore casinos \u2014 which Roberts somehow never quite gets to. This would also minimise the word count directly about Armstrong.<\/p>\n<br><br><div align=\"center\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\"><img src=\"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/become_a_patron_button.svg\" alt=\"Become a Patron!\" title=\"Become a Patron!\" width=217 height=51><\/a><br><p style=\"align:center;\" class=\"patreon-badge\"><i>Your subscriptions keep this site going. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/bePatron?u=8420236\">Sign up today!<\/a><\/i><\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Great Man theory of history is wrong, dumb and bad. But it\u2019s harder to make material circumstances into a gripping tale of derring-do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[21,152,367,288,3429,3427,3428],"class_list":["post-24785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-bitcoin","tag-book","tag-brian-armstrong","tag-coinbase","tag-fred-ehrsam","tag-jeff-john-roberts","tag-kings-of-crypto"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/kings-of-crypto-header.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24785"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24785\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24821,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24785\/revisions\/24821"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}