by Matthew Leising

A double story – the founding of Ethereum; and the $55 million heist of its cryptocurrency, ether, in 2016.

Written by a journalist and based entirely on first-person interviews, it’s got credibility and an in-depth perspective. Leising spends a lot of time speaking with and admiring wunderkind founder Vitalik Buterin, Russian-Canadian child-prodigy eccentric genius who saw the potential of blockchain to do more than just serve as a ledger of a digital currency. The beauty of Ehtereum, the Avis to Bitcoin’s Hertz, the number-two-trying-harder, is that its ledger doesn’t just store coins or tokens or static things. It also stores programs, “smart contracts”, which can DO things to the things. You can have literal contracts. You can do crowdfunding. You can do anything you can dream up and code in their programming language, Solidity.

But it also stores cryptocurrency, ether, the “gas” that makes the contracts go, and a speculative currency in its own right. And basically, one day a hacker found a bug in a big important “smart contract” which allowed him to sneak in and steal ether, over and over again.

He was stopped. White-hat programmers first went in and exploited the same bug to “steal” as much ether as they could to keep it safe from the thief and be able to return it to its rightful owners… but then the hacker snuck into the stolen ether, too.

So they had to decide what to do… one option was called the “hard fork,” which meant basically rewriting history so that the hack never happened. Ether is, well, ethereal – it doesn’t exist except in the blockchain, so, why not? You can code whatever you want and make it so the hack never happened. But many objected to this, including Vitalik, as “icky.” You’re not supposed to do that. The thing about blockchains is they’re supposed to be immutable. In fact, the thief didn’t really “steal” anything or do anything wrong, right? In theory, he just ran the program a certain way, doing something that it allowed him to do. There was no fundamental bug in Ethereum. It was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. Not the hacker’s fault somebody coded something in a smart contract that they didn’t intend to.

Well, the other option was to basically invalidate the stolen ether – they could make it so that it would no longer be tradeable for other currency, making it worthless.

They chose the hard fork. This isn’t a spoiler. Anyone who cares knows.

It was a pretty good book… never really got bogged down in anything that would be over an interested reader’s head, and never got boring. (  )

by Rumaan Alam

I saw this book well described as “a disaster novel without the disaster.” All that the characters know for sure about the disaster is that power went out on the East Coast. It becomes eerier than that, but I won’t give away any spoilers.

The plot is simple. A Brooklyn family of four rents an Airbnb out near the Hamptons on Long Island. The owners of the house show up one night just a few days into their stay. The owners had been out & about in NYC when, they report, the power went out. (The power remains inexplicably still on out on eastern Long Island.) But it didn’t seem like a normal blackout – plus, their apartment in the city was too many flights up to want to climb with the elevators not working – so they drove out to Long Island to wait things out at their summer home. But things are weird. They feel weird. The Airbnb guests feel weird. And not just the awkwardness of all having to share quarters with strangers; it’s all just… weird.

I found it enthralling and scary. It’s just about how these different people respond to crisis. And the scary part was reading it during this little world crisis of our own – not knowing what chapter we are currently in, out of how many chapters, of THAT crisis.

First stirring quote: “Waist-deep water was lapping against Venetian marble, and tourists were smiling & taking snapshots. It was like some tacit agreement: everyone had ceded to things just falling apart.” Makes me feel like the way most of this country seems to just be shrugging their shoulders at 300,000 dead – crisis came, and we all just acted like such a bunch of surrender-monkeys, we would put France to shame.

Clay & Amanda, the renters, fantasize about what they will do when (they imagine) shortly they will pack up and head on home to Brooklyn… Clay wants to stop in a diner. “Chrome. Jukeboxes. Corned beef hash.” Amanda wants to go to an old-fashioned sit-down Chinese restaurant. “The only things a person ever wanted were food and home.” Preach!

“Lemmings were not suicidal; they were driven to migrate and overconfident about their ability. The leader of the pack was not to blame. They all plunged into the sea, thinking it easy to traverse as a puddle; so human an instinct in a bunch of rodents.”

The narrator is omniscient. The perspective of each character in turn is assumed. The narrator also knows exactly what is going on, but is coy about sharing it. You may be more clear than I about exactly what happened and is going to happen, but I felt I might have blinked and missed a thing or two.

Note: I own this in hardcover and am willing to lend. (  )

Did you stay home today?  100%

What local business or charity did you support?   Gotta think on that

What’s for dinner? Chicken tortellini in sauce

by David Browne

The story of the year 1970 in the lives of four top acts – the Beatles, who achieved supremacy with Let It Be, and broke up; Simon & Garfunkel, who achieved supremacy with Bridge Over Troubled Water, and broke up; CSNY, who achieved supremacy with Deja Vu, and broke up; and James Taylor, who did a lot of drugs and hooked up with Joni Mitchell.

Browne’s writing leaves a little to be desired sometimes. Example, referring to the “Canadian high-lonesome spookiness” in Neil Young’s voice. “High-lonesome spookiness” is fine, I guess, but what makes it Canadian? Browne is also unabashedly in love with these acts, which makes him too uncritical, IMHO, particularly around Simon & Garfunkel. His nonstop accolades and admiration, however, notably stop short when the topic of Ringo Starr’s solo work arises. Poor Ringo. But it’s good for fandom to have some limits.

I’m just coming off of And in the End by Ken McNab, about this very same final year in the life of the Beatles; so there were many details I had already freshly ingested. But it was still nice to get a different telling of the tale. For example, when manager Alan Klein was wooing John & Yoko, he was sure that for their lunch he had ordered “their favorite macrobiotic food.” (In And in the End, it was “macrobiotic rice,” and it was something Yoko particularly favored.)

New detail that wasn’t in the other book: when McCartney was floating the idea of leaving EMI in order to put his solo album out on another label, Harrison shot back, “You’ll stay on the fucking label. Hare Krishna.” Harrison could really make “Hare Krishna” sound like “fuck you” when angry.

I enjoyed spending time with the formerly fab four, with my BFF Neil Young, and with Paul Simon. I really should get some CSNY albums. I enjoyed learning a bit about them – though I can’t keep them straight in my head; I need to learn more. I enjoyed learning more about James Taylor, though I have no desire to own any of his albums. (  )

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Did you stay home today?  Bottle dropoff & takeout pickup were strictly outside

What local business or charity did you support?   Boy Scout bottle drive & Hatchet

What’s for dinner? Hatchet. “Baked Potato Ravioli.” Pierogies really.