Books About the Dotcom, NFT, and Crypto Bubbles

A list of books about the dotcom, NFT, and crypto bubles that I'd like to get around to one day.

Dot-com bubble

  1. Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era (search) — John Cassidy. Best single-volume narrative of the boom and bust.

  2. Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing (search) — Roger Lowenstein. Strong on Wall Street, corporate excess, and the broader 1990s financial culture.

  3. Irrational Exuberance (search) — Robert J. Shiller. More analytical; explains asset bubbles and market psychology, published right as the dot-com bubble peaked.

  4. The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story (search) — Michael Lewis. Character-driven Silicon Valley book centered on Jim Clark and the internet-boom mentality.

  5. Boo Hoo: A Dot.com Story from Concept to Catastrophe (search) — Ernst Malmsten, Erik Portanger, Charles Drazin. Insider account of Boo.com, one of the era’s most notorious failures.

  6. eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work (search) — Randall Stross. Good for understanding VC behavior and startup financing during the bubble.

  7. The Nudist on the Late Shift: And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley (search) — Po Bronson. Captures the culture and personalities of late-1990s Silicon Valley.

Crypto, NFT, and metaverse bubbles

  1. Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall (search) — Zeke Faux. Best overall narrative of the crypto boom, FTX, scams, Tether, NFTs, and the post-2021 collapse.

  2. Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud (search) — Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman. Strong skeptical account of crypto as speculation, fraud, and casino finance.

  3. Hype Machine: Inside the Cult of Crypto (search) — Joshua Oliver. Good newer account of crypto’s boom-bust cycle, FTX, SBF, Binance, and the industry’s belief system.

  4. The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze (search) — Laura Shin. Best for Ethereum, ICO mania, DAOs, DeFi, and the ideological roots of Web3.

  5. Popping the Crypto Bubble (search) — Stephen Diehl, Jan Akalin, and Darren Tseng. Short, technical, strongly anti-crypto critique of the economics and technology.

  6. Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain (search) — David Gerard. Earlier but useful skeptical history of Bitcoin, Ethereum, ICOs, and the 2017 crypto bubble.

  7. Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (search) — Michael Lewis. Narrower focus on Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX; useful, but read alongside Number Go Up for a more skeptical frame.

  8. Tracers in the Dark (search) — Andy Greenberg. Not mainly a bubble book, but excellent on crypto crime, blockchain tracing, and the myth of anonymous crypto.

  9. Tokens: The Future of Money in the Age of the Platform (search) — Rachel O’Dwyer. Good for understanding tokens beyond crypto: platform money, gift cards, loyalty points, and digital economies.

  10. The Everything Token (search) — Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers. Pro-NFT/Web3 framing; useful as a primary-source view of what NFT advocates thought the technology could become.

  11. NFTs Are a Scam / NFTs Are the Future (search) — Bobby Hundreds. Best for the cultural and creator-side argument around NFTs, rather than detached bubble analysis.

  12. The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything (search) — Matthew Ball. Pro-metaverse but serious; useful for understanding why investors and tech firms bought into the thesis.