Review: The Devil Takes Bitcoin, a wild history of Mt. Gox and Silk Road

Jake Adelstein’s The Devil Takes Bitcoin delves into the wild history of Silk Road and the Mt. Gox collapse and the hunt for the real hacker.

If youve ever seen Jake Adelsteins prior work, such as The Last Yakuza or watched the HBO drama Tokyo Vice, you might expect his latest book, The Devil Takes Bitcoin, to be a gritty expos of Bitcoins criminal underbelly.

And youd be mostly right. Adelstein delivers a captivating memoir centered on the fall of the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world, Mt. Gox, and the crackdown on the darknet marketplace Silk Road showing what happens when good intentions, money and a flawed justice system collide. 

But its the message that sets it apart. Adelstein argues its this tragicomic series of events that ultimately propelled Bitcoin to where it is today similar to how the porn industry secretly drove the rise of the internet.

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