The Missing Crypto Queen - Jamie Bartlett

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 ISBN:  978-0753559581

Verdict:  👍👍 

This is an overwhelming story of an ex-McKinsey Consultant who executed, what could have been biggest scam ever, selling the concept of getting in early and becoming rich to a product that just didn’t exist - a block chain is miles away from a centralised SQL Database


As someone who has a genuine interest in distributed ledger technology, cryptocurrency and the hype around the narrative which promotes a replacement of traditional currency to a single independent global digital currency.

 In my opinion it would have been great to move the first paragraph on p148 to earlier in the book i.e.,’’ One -Coin was technically three different scams rolled into one.” A Ponzi Scheme, Pyramid Scheme, and a fake cryptocurrency

Page 35 for me highlighted a key aspect in that “Ruja instead contracted a Bulgarian IT firm, who in turn outsourced some of the work to some Indian developers, who ’forked’ the original Bitcoin Blockchain (in other words) copied it and added a few tweaks to make it their own)”.

It was interesting to read in chapter 8 that OneCoin had a ‘trio of Christian promoters’ and ‘OneCoin’s Sharia -compliant certificate’ – how is was that even possible for what in essence was a promotion of a get rich scheme? maybe it was that constant thread of the fear of missing out (FOMO) or just pure greed that sucked people into the scam

I found chapter 33/4 a bit disappointing where the author presents a few guesses to where Ruja could be - using “It’s possible “and “One tantalising possibility” which were annoying (Hence 2 thumbs)

I would recommend reading this book as it tells a great story which is not yet over.


Location: London, UK

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