I'm writing you at a moment when Bitcoin is sitting around $65,000 — down from over $100,000 just a few months ago. The Fear & Greed Index is in Extreme Fear. ETF investors have been underwater for 25 days straight.

If this is your first pullback, welcome. This is part of it.

If you stay in this world long enough, you'll find these moments come around. And for me, this is always when the real work happens. Do I still believe in this? Is the thesis still intact? So I go back to the research.

This time, I went deep into the harshest critics — the economists, regulators, and technologists who think crypto is a solution looking for a problem, or worse. I put my investing thesis through the wringer. That work is coming in a separate series.

But the book I'm releasing now isn't that.

I started this project because I wanted to build an onramp — a place you can come to get up to speed quickly on the myths and mechanisms driving this industry, without needing a technical background or a tolerance for hype.

What I found, the deeper I went, is that crypto is one of the most extraordinary real-life experiments in power and coordination that I've ever encountered. It is exposing the dynamics of our financial world in ways nothing else does — not because it has all the answers, but because it is forcing the questions into the open.

That's what this book is about.