I expected a fairly lazy and hysterical recounting of the many ills of crypto when I began reading Popping the Crypto Bubble. The ambitious crypto-skeptical book was co-authored earlier this year by financial fraud writer Darren Tseng, fintech consultant Jan Akalin, and software engineer Stephen Diehl—notably, the organizers of September’s historical “no-coiner” conference. 

Diehl is the most notorious of this trio. He regales his 58,000-strong Twitter audience with a daily deluge of epigrammatic, viciously cynical talking points that are a crypto-skeptical version of the vacuous sloganeering of Bitcoin booster bros like Anthony Pompliano. 

Diehl ad nauseum blasts crypto as a “grift,” a massive “ponzi,” etc., etc., and it’s all gotten a little tiresome. What once may have read as righteous criticism has since congealed into another tedious dogma to be digested by the terminally online.

Still, Diehl et al’s book, which promises to “uncover the truth about the technology behind cryptocurrency, its political ideations and the narratives that drive the biggest economic bubble in the history of mankind,” was better than I expected. Although I was let down by a…