This reminds me very much of an excerpt from a Michael Lewis book. A complex topic boiled down into simple analogies accessible for laypersons and personalized

This reminds me very much of an excerpt from a Michael Lewis book. A complex topic boiled down into simple analogies accessible for laypersons and personalized with character details: a childhood of odd obsessions, hints of precociousness, a good but not superstar academic career, brushing up against the more famous. And like Lewis (I enjoy his writing), breathless, and, if you actually know the subject, so simplified and over dramatic to be misleading. Not even wrong. I’m sure the book from which this is excerpted is full of fun stories and quirky characters. In the case of the “27-year old”, she’s interested in puzzles and language at a young age, which turns into studying cryptography. To the muggles, this all probably seems eccentric and obsessive, but to the average HN reader, not particularly strange. Similarly, describing her activities as “one of the strangest, most hyperactive Bitcoin users in the world” is dramatic, but undercut by “In all, Meiklejohn carried out 344 cryptocurrency transactions over the course of a few weeks.” Not criticizing Meiklejohn, whose work is clever and interesting, or the author, who is writing to his audience, but I think I will pass on the book.