Tarpley Hitt
CRYPTOCURRENCY’S BLEND OF OPAQUE TECHNICAL JARGON, obtuse regulatory schema, and flagrant gambling has, since its inception, made it a magnet for characters you could generously call “colorful.” This was the case in 1992 when a squad of anarcho-libertarian Neal Stephenson fans first started gossiping about the idea on the cryptography listserv “Cypherpunks.” It was likewise true in 2008 when someone (or multiple people) using the moniker Satoshi Nakamoto sicced Bitcoin on the internet. Nakamoto—speculated, at various points, to be a Rhodesian cartel boss, a Palm Beach County detective who died gruesomely in 2013, and a libertarian model-train collector with the misfortune 
WHEN KERRY HOWLEY PUBLISHED HER FIRST BOOK, Thrown, in 2014, bookstores labeled it a “nonfiction novel.” Its journalistic bona fides were somewhat straightforward—Howley embedded with two real lesser-known mixed-martial-arts fighters for three years, documenting the lengths they went to hone and destroy their bodies in real professional combat. The “novel” addendum stemmed from the book’s first-person narrator—a woman identified not as “Kerry” but “Kit,” a philosophy student who wanders out of an academic Husserl conference into a “Midwest Cage Championship,” where she encounters for the first time the subject of her book. Kit is earnest, pretentious, and not self-aware; that