Written by
Wendy M Grossman, Contributor
Wendy M Grossman
Contributor
Full Bio
Posted in ZDNet UK Book Reviews
on December 14, 2021
| Topic: Blockchain
Kings of Crypto: One Startup’s Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and onto Wall Street • By Jeff John Roberts • Harvard Business Review • 256 pages • ISBN: 978-1-647820-18-3 • £22 / $30
The biggest chance at large, unearned sums of money that I ever passed up was around 2008, when a guy sitting next to me at a tech conference suggested I should mine a few bitcoin. I looked at all the technical complexity that was necessary to do it and thought it was just too much trouble (it was!).
Where there is technical complexity, as dozens of early internet startups could tell you, there is a market opportunity.
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In Jeff John Roberts’ Kings of Crypto: One Startup’s Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and onto Wall Street, the founder who seized the opportunity was Brian Armstrong, and the startup whose rollercoaster he rode was Coinbase. Vintage purists will note the use of “crypto” for “cryptocurrencies” — a recent appropriation of the word, which for decades has denoted the more general “cryptography”.
In many ways, the story of Coinbase is little different from that of most startups: guy hits on an idea, seeks funding, has some ups and downs, and becomes book-worthy by either spectacularly flaming out or by building a successful business that’s the envy of other major businesses.
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