1-Sentence-Summary: Crypto Confidential is a gripping, fast-paced memoir that’ll place you next to Nat Eliason on his rollercoaster ride through the 2021 crypto hype cycle, from gambling on NFTs to coding smart contracts holding millions of dollars, all while explaining the terminology of this new financial frontier in a simple, understandable way.
Read in: 4 minutes
Favorite quote from the author:
What would you do if you had just sold a digital picture of a monkey for $200,000? What if someone sent you a few imaginary tokens each day, and all you had to do was press “Sell” once to make $10,000 every time?
Right now, you’re probably thinking: “Stupid questions, Nik. I’d retire in peace, of course!” But no, you wouldn’t. Chances are, if you were this wired into the crypto world, like Nat Eliason was in 2021, you’d keep right on going.
You’d think, “Oh, great, now I just need another $8.8 million,” pound another coffee, and rush to find the next Discord chat that has “some alpha” on what’s the next big thing. And, like Nat, you’d probably ruin your mental health and your finances sooner rather than later.
For this reason alone, you should read Crypto Confidential: Winning and Losing Millions in the New Frontier of Finance, Nat’s riveting memoir. But you’ll also learn all relevant crypto terminology from simple explanations, understand that the technology might hold some good after all, and realize some things just aren’t worth the money—no matter how much and how easy to get it is.
Here are 3 of my favorite lessons from this amazing book:
- In the crypto world, everything has a habit of appearing and disappearing just as quickly.
- Every time you think you’ve finally found a money cheat code, you’re about to hit “Game Over.”
- Don’t sacrifice your identity or your relationships in order to get rich. It’s never worth it.
Let’s get on to this rollercoaster, shall we?
Lesson 1: Crypto is a world of easy come, easy go.
Transparency is a key theme in the world of blockchain technology. Everything is public. Every wallet address and its balance, every transaction, and every piece of software. As a result, information spreads extremely quickly. The public can close most gaps within a day.
The consequence of this transparency is that things don’t last. Nat encounters this strange, easy-come-easy-go dynamic time and again in the book:
- When Nat first deposits some of his Ethereum to farm a new coin, he makes $110 in a single evening, but the returns diminish so quickly, he must look for another new project the next day.
- As he publishes his first smart contract—a software application on the blockchain—he makes a mistake and instantly gets hacked.
- Nat makes some money from the Iron Finance stablecoin launched on Polygon, but as soon as users discover a small pricing error, a massive bank run begins, and the brand new protocol’s 2 coins race to $0 in a matter of hours.
Since everyone can see, copy, and trace everything done by everyone else, the speed of information in crypto is insanely high, and so everything that can fail will—usually within a matter of hours, days, or maybe months, but not years.
This is why, on the one hand, it was easy for Nat to get deeper and deeper into crypto very quickly. On the other hand, it also meant he had to always keep pushing forward. Until he hit his breaking point.
Lesson 2: Whenever you think you’ve got money all figured out, you’re about to get hosed.
They say that in a bull market, every investor looks like a genius. This happened to Nat, too. Besides his early $35,000 hack, his crypto journey went exceptionally well. Nat sold an NFT at the top of the market for $200,000. Every project he put money into went up. He even learned enough Solidity, Ethereum’s programming language, to get a gig with a gaming startup and pocket one million of their project’s tokens.
To top it all off, 3 top tier crypto funds decided to invest into that company. Nat could see the millions already. Unfortunately, he could only sell a small number of his tokens each day. Meanwhile, one of the funds bought more coins in secret to dump them on the public right with the fundraise announcement and cash in twice!
Nat decided not to act on this insider knowledge. He kept his vest clean, but he also never saw his million coins turn into actual millions. “I thought I’d figured out the game and won,” he writes, “but there were levels at which I couldn’t compete.”
For all the transparency in crypto, there’s always someone with bigger pockets, a faster computer, or better connections than you. Realizing this costs most investors a good chunk of their money. It’s the number one sign that you have a problem and it’s probably time to get out, Nat says: “When you think you’ve figured out the game and you’re about to get insanely rich.”
Lesson 3: No amount of money in the world is worth sacrificing yourself or your relationship.
Without spoiling too much, in the book, it takes a good deal of stress in his marriage for Nat to finally wake up and move on from his crypto obsession. A caring wife, a new baby daughter—no one holds more power over us than the people we love. Thankfully, that power usually helps us change for the better, as it did for Nat.
But in an article about the book, Nat explains there was another reason: He was getting good at the wrong thing. “This is how success can become a curse,” Nat writes. If you’re making good money from something and people tell you you’re a genius, you, too, start thinking “this is it,” he says. “And then you wake up one day and realize you were duped.”
Nat realized that, 10 years down the road, he wouldn’t care about being a great crypto investor or programmer—but he would deeply regret not succeeding as an author. This was the second half of the courage he needed to stop trying to get rich quickly and go back to writing, something he’d loved for years already.
We’re all fallible. We all get shiny object syndrome. But it’s important we wake up eventually when we do. There’s no mountain of money high enough to justify giving up who we are or those we love the most—not even if it’s a mountain made of digital gold.
Crypto Confidential Review
Crypto Confidential is a fantastic blend of fun story and educational nonfiction. I flew through the book in 2 days. Since Nat was a beginner when he started, you’ll have no problem following along as he falls deeper and deeper down the crypto hole. He also has helpful, simple explainer sections for various terms at the end of each chapter. This is a great book to start your crypto journey off on the right foot. Grab a copy, and dive in!
Who would I recommend our Crypto Confidential summary to?
The 28-year-old crypto-curious college student, who doesn’t know the first thing about blockchain but is fascinated by it, the 39-year-old veteran “degen,” who lost more than a few dollars in the trenches of the 2021 bull market, and anyone who likes The Big Short.