Description

From Ben Mezrich, the New York Times bestselling author of The Accidental Billionaires and Bringing Down the House, comes Bitcoin Billionaires – the fascinating story of brothers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss’s big bet on crypto-currency and its dazzling pay-off.

Ben Mezrich’s 2009 bestseller The Accidental Billionaires is the definitive account of Facebook’s founding – and the basis for the Academy Award-winning film The Social Network. Two of the story’s iconic characters are Harvard students Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss: identical twins, Olympic rowers, and legal foils to Mark Zuckerberg. Bitcoin Billionaires is the story of the brothers’ redemption and revenge in the wake of their epic legal battle with Facebook – and the first great book from the world of bitcoin.

Planning to start careers as venture capitalists, the brothers quickly discover that no one will take their money for fear of alienating Zuckerberg. While nursing their wounds in Ibiza, they accidentally run into a shady character who tells them about a brand new idea: cryptocurrency. Immersing themselves in what is then an obscure and sometimes sinister world, they begin to realize “crypto” is, in their own words, “either the next big thing or total bulls–t.” There’s nothing left to do but make a bet.

From the Silk Road to the halls of the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Facebook boardroom, Bitcoin Billionaires will take us on a wild and surprising ride while illuminating a tantalizing economic future. On November 26th, 2017, the Winklevoss brothers became the first bitcoin billionaires. Here’s the story of how they got there – as only Ben Mezrich could tell it.

Publisher Review

Gripping . . . Ben Mezrich is a gifted writer who could make a PTA meeting dramatic and exciting * The Times * An easily digested cryptocurrency primer * Financial Times * A page turner. Sensibly, Mezrich opts to focus on action. He makes sense of bleeding-but-baffling-edge technology by following the human accessories: early-adopters, a rat pack of weed-smoking coders, dark-web pirates, libertarian philosophers and boy-wonder investors who wouldn't feel out of place in a Thomas Pynchon novel - and like Pynchon, the thrill is in a wild chase for answers to a mystery that the layperson can only grope at * Evening Standard * The book is written with a slick beauty . . . As an introduction to the rise of cryptocurrencies and the modern tech world generally, it is as painless and novelistic as could be imagined * Guardian * Bitcoin Billionaires takes us right inside the Winklevoss brothers' wild chase for redemption through a global maze of big money and backroom deals. Ben Mezrich delivers a tense, propulsive story of ambition and success * Matthew Pearl, New York Times bestselling author of The Dante Club and The Dante Chamber *