How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet with Ethereum
In «The Infinite Machine», Camila Russo achieves something technical books on Ethereum cannot: she makes the story of the world's second-largest blockchain matter as a human narrative.
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Crypto journalist Camila Russo (ex-Bloomberg, founder of The Defiant) narrates the birth of Ethereum: Vitalik Buterin's journey from child prodigy to founder of the world's second cryptocurrency, the founding team's internal struggles, early hackathons, the DAO fork, and the evolution into the smart contract platform that became DeFi, NFT, and Web3 infrastructure. Impeccable journalism.
In «The Infinite Machine», Camila Russo achieves something technical books on Ethereum cannot: she makes the story of the world's second-largest blockchain matter as a human narrative. A financial journalist specialising in crypto, Russo traces Vitalik Buterin's life from his childhood in Russia and Canada to the conception and launch of Ethereum in 2015, weaving the protocol's history with portraits of co-founders — Gavin Wood, Joseph Lubin, Charles Hoskinson — and the tensions that marked the project's early years. The book's implicit thesis is that Ethereum was not the product of a solitary genius but of a constellation of extraordinarily different individuals who found each other at the right moment, with all the friction that entails. The DAO attack in 2016 and the hard fork that followed — one of the most controversial episodes in crypto history — occupies several chapters and is narrated with a level of detail no other book matches. The critique: the book prioritises narrative over technical and economic analysis, and readers with finance or technology backgrounds may find the later chapters excessively dramatic. For understanding how Ethereum was born and who built it, it is the reference source.
Ideal for readers interested in crypto ecosystem history, investors seeking narrative context on Ethereum, and anyone curious about the human dynamics behind transformative technology projects.
FactThe DAO attack in June 2016 resulted in the theft of approximately 3.6 million Ether, equivalent to roughly $50 million at the time; the subsequent hard fork, approved by the majority of the community, restored the funds.
