Hype Machine: How Greed, Fraud and Free Money Crashed Crypto
Hype Machine: How Greed, Fraud and Free Money Crashed Crypto

Author: Joshua Oliver

Publisher: Heligo Books

Published: 2024-03-14

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1785120980

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

'A gripping real-life financial thriller.' CLAER BARRETT, AUTHOR OF WHAT THEY DON'T TEACH YOU ABOUT MONEY 'Anybody who wants to understand the cryptocurrency mania should read Hype Machine.' LIONEL BARBER, FORMER EDITOR OF THE FINANCIAL TIMES On 2 November 2023, in one of the largest fraud trials in history, Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty of stealing billions of dollars from the customers of his crypto-exchange, FTX. How did this 31-year-old Californian in shorts and a T-shirt manage to become one of the most famous CEOs in the world? How did greed, fear and free money inflate the crypto bubble until it finally popped with devastating consequences for millions of people who lost money in the crash? Who were the enablers, investors and innovators who transformed the original promise of crypto into a digital Wild West? Hype Machine is the definitive story of the boom and bust of crypto, written by award-winning Financial Times journalist Joshua Oliver. Expansive, nuanced and eminently entertaining, it demystifies the crypto circus by following the journeys of its most influential participants and the trajectory of SBF, its enigmatic ringmaster. Oliver, who reported on the crypto crash with extensive access to SBF himself, introduces readers to the people and ideas that shaped crypto's wild rise and fall, including Arthur Hayes, Changpeng Zhao and the coterie of acolytes who surrounded FTX. Through exclusive interviews, compelling research and with ringside seats at the trial of the decade, he paints a vivid, detailed and tragi-comic picture of this defining financial moment of our times.

The Lost Bank
The Lost Bank

Author: Kirsten Grind

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-07-16

Total Pages: 401

ISBN-13: 1451617933

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Based on reporting for which the author was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Gerald Loeb Award, this book traces the rise and spectacular fall of Washington Mutual.

Crimes Committed by Terrorist Groups
Crimes Committed by Terrorist Groups

Author: Mark S. Hamm

Publisher: DIANE Publishing

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1437929591

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This is a print on demand edition of a hard to find publication. Examines terrorists¿ involvement in a variety of crimes ranging from motor vehicle violations, immigration fraud, and mfg. illegal firearms to counterfeiting, armed bank robbery, and smuggling weapons of mass destruction. There are 3 parts: (1) Compares the criminality of internat. jihad groups with domestic right-wing groups. (2) Six case studies of crimes includes trial transcripts, official reports, previous scholarship, and interviews with law enforce. officials and former terrorists are used to explore skills that made crimes possible; or events and lack of skill that the prevented crimes. Includes brief bio. of the terrorists along with descriptions of their org., strategies, and plots. (3) Analysis of the themes in closing arguments of the transcripts in Part 2. Illus.

Blockchain Revolution
Blockchain Revolution

Author: Don Tapscott

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2016-05-10

Total Pages: 421

ISBN-13: 110198015X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Blockchain technology is powering our future. As the technology behind cryptocurrencies like bitcoin and Facebook's Libra, open software platforms like Ethereum, and disruptive companies like Ripple, it’s too important to ignore. In this revelatory book, Don Tapscott, the bestselling author of Wikinomics, and his son, blockchain expert Alex Tapscott, bring us a brilliantly researched, highly readable, and essential book about the technology driving the future of the economy. Blockchain is the ingeniously simple, revolution­ary protocol that allows transactions to be simultaneously anonymous and secure by maintaining a tamperproof public ledger of value. Though it’s best known as the technology that drives bitcoin and other digital cur­rencies, it also has the potential to go far beyond currency, to record virtually everything of value to humankind, from birth and death certifi­cates to insurance claims, land titles, and even votes. Blockchain is also essential to understand if you’re an artist who wants to make a living off your art, a consumer who wants to know where that hamburger meat really came from, an immigrant who’s tired of paying big fees to send money home to your loved ones, or an entrepreneur looking for a new platform to build a business. And those examples are barely the tip of the iceberg. As with major paradigm shifts that preceded it, blockchain technology will create winners and losers. This book shines a light on where it can lead us in the next decade and beyond.

Blockchain: Capabilities, Economic Viability, and the Socio-Technical Environment
Blockchain: Capabilities, Economic Viability, and the Socio-Technical Environment

Author: Nils Braun-Dubler

Publisher: vdf Hochschulverlag AG

Published: 2020-06-16

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 3728140163

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Blockchain is widely considered a new key technology. The Foundation for Technology Assessment (TA-SWISS) has proposed a comprehensive assessment of blockchain technologies. With this publication, TA-SWISS provides the much-needed social contextualisation of blockchain. The first, more technical part of the study takes an in-depth look at how blockchain functions and examines the economic potential of this technology. By analysing multiple real-world applications, the study sheds light on where the blockchain has advantages over traditional applications and where existing technologies continue to be the better solution. The second part of the study examines how blockchain became mainstream. It explores the origins of blockchain in the early history of information technology and computer networks. The study also reveals the impact blockchain has on industrial and public spaces. Finally, it discusses the social implications and challenges of blockchain against the background of a new socio-technical environment.

The Truth Machine
The Truth Machine

Author: Paul Vigna

Publisher: Picador

Published: 2019-03-05

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1250304172

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Views differ on bitcoin, but few doubt the transformative potential of Blockchain technology. The Truth Machine is the best book so far on what has happened and what may come along. It demands the attention of anyone concerned with our economic future." —Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard, Former Treasury Secretary From Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, the authors of The Age of Cryptocurrency, comes the definitive work on the Internet’s Next Big Thing: The Blockchain. Big banks have grown bigger and more entrenched. Privacy exists only until the next hack. Credit card fraud is a fact of life. Many of the “legacy systems” once designed to make our lives easier and our economy more efficient are no longer up to the task. Yet there is a way past all this—a new kind of operating system with the potential to revolutionize vast swaths of our economy: the blockchain. In The Truth Machine, Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna demystify the blockchain and explain why it can restore personal control over our data, assets, and identities; grant billions of excluded people access to the global economy; and shift the balance of power to revive society’s faith in itself. They reveal the disruption it promises for industries including finance, tech, legal, and shipping. Casey and Vigna expose the challenge of replacing trusted (and not-so-trusted) institutions on which we’ve relied for centuries with a radical model that bypasses them. The Truth Machine reveals the empowerment possible when self-interested middlemen give way to the transparency of the blockchain, while highlighting the job losses, assertion of special interests, and threat to social cohesion that will accompany this shift. With the same balanced perspective they brought to The Age of Cryptocurrency, Casey and Vigna show why we all must care about the path that blockchain technology takes—moving humanity forward, not backward.

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble
The Great Beanie Baby Bubble

Author: Zac Bissonnette

Publisher: Portfolio

Published: 2016-03-15

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1591848008

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"There has never been a craze like Beanie Babies. The $5 beanbag animals with names like Seaweed the Otter and Gigi the Poodle drove a large swath of America into a greed-fueled frenzy as they chased the rarest Beanie Babies, whose values escalated weekly in the late 1990s. Just as strange as the mass hysteria was the man behind it. Sometimes called the "Steve Jobs of plush" by his employees, he obsessed over every detail of every animal his company ever released. He had no marketing budget and no connections, but he had something more valuable - an intuitive grasp of human psychology that would make him the richest man in the history of toys. The Great Beanie Baby Bubble is a classic American story of people winning and losing vast fortunes chasing what one dealer remembers as "the most spectacular dream ever sold.""--Back cover.

The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Author: John Perkins

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Published: 2016-02-09

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1626566755

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Featuring 15 explosive new chapters, this new edition of the New York Times bestseller brings the story of Economic Hit Men up-to-date and, chillingly, home to the U.S.―but it also gives us hope and the tools to fight back. The previous edition of this now-classic book revealed the existence and subversive manipulations of "economic hit men. John Perkins wrote that they are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. In Perkins's case the tool was debt-convincing strategically important countries to borrow huge amounts of money for enormous, development projects that served the very rich while driving the country deeper into poverty and debt. And once indebted, these countries could be controlled. In this latest edition, Perkins provides revealing new details about how he and others did their work. But more importantly, in an explosive new section he describes how the EHM tools are being used around the world more widely than ever-even in the U. S. itself. The cancer has metastasized, yet most people still aren't aware of it. Fear and debt drive the EHM system. We are hammered with messages that terrify us into believing that we must pay any price, assume any debt, to stop the enemies who, we are told, lurk at our doorsteps. The EHM system-employing false economics, bribes, surveillance, deception, debt, coups, assassinations, unbridled military power-has become the dominant system of economics, government, and society today. It has created what Perkins calls a Death Economy. But Perkins offers hope: he concludes with dozens of specific, concrete suggestions for actions all of us can take to wrest control of our world away from the economic hit men, and help give birth to a Life Economy.