I will read just about anything even remotely related to bitcoin, so I eventually got around to reading this book. The author, Ben Mezrich, writes both novels and non fiction. He tells a pretty good story here. The narrative pace is brisk and keeps your interest. He admits to using some of his fiction talents to make up details. He also does everything he can to make the Winklevoss twins look good throughout the book. Perhaps they slipped him a few bitcoin, or maybe he was just feeling bad for the way he trashed them in The Social Network. I don’t know, but at times his fawning praise became almost unbearable. I stayed with it, though, because I enjoyed reading about Bitinstant, Charlie Shrem, Roger Ver, Eric Vorhees, etc.

The events he described were all post Zuckerberg and Facebook. You get the sense that this book is a deliberate attempt to rehabilitate the twin’s image. It doesn’t work, at least for me. Maybe it is my ideological bias, but I wound up rooting against the twins in every major conflict depicted in the book. Most surprisingly to me, Roger Ver was the hero of this story. Having not discovered bitcoin in a meaningful way until just after the Blocksize Wars, I always thought of Ver as the bitcoin cash shill. Mezrich portrays him as the evil crypto anarchist poisoning young Charlie Shrem’s mind, while the twins try to save him from Ver’s criminal ways. Ver saw bitcoin as revolutionary-resistance money for the people. The twins wanted Charlie to get a haircut and shave, quit smoking weed, put on a suit, and start helping to make bitcoin more corporate. They wanted government control of their shiny new asset. I had to wonder whether the twins, or Mezrich, for that matter, ever stopped to think about why bitcoin was created? Did they ever read what’s etched into the genesis block? More than anything, they seemed to want banks and the government controlling bitcoin. By the end of the book, rather than changing my image of the twins, Mezrich proved that the common stereotypes of them are accurate. The Winklevii were and are rich, entitled elites who have no interest in changing the status quo.

You can find examples of this attitude throughout the book, but it was particularly evident after Charlie Shrem’s arrest for his facilitation of Silk Road transactions. Here’s an example:

For me, this places them squarely in the current Michael Saylor/ BlackRock camp, which hopes to incorporate bitcoin into the fiat financial world.

By the end of the book, I also wondered whether the twins, and Mezrich, really understand bitcoin at all. Here’s a passage from Mezrich’s Epilogue. The irony of the juxtaposition is lost on Mezrich:

Next sentence:

Should you read the Bitcoin Billionaires? Probably. There are plenty of entertaining anecdotes from bitcoin’s colorful history. Mezrich’s brisk, gimmicky prose makes for good light reading. You have to try to ignore his incessant Winklevoss ass-kissing. If you can do that, you will enjoy it.