A CBC Best Canadian Nonfiction Book of 2020
 
In a book equal parts travelogue and pandemic guide, the journalist Ethan Lou examines the societal effects of COVID-19 and takes us on a mesmerizing journey around a world that will never be the same.

Visiting Beijing in January 2020 to see his dying grandfather, the Canadian journalist Ethan Lou unknowingly walks into a state under siege. In his journey out of China and—unwittingly—into other hot zones in Asia and Europe, he finds himself witnessing the very earliest stages of a virus that will forever change the world as we know it.

Lou argues that the coronavirus outbreak will have a far greater impact than SARS, for example, simply because China is now many more times integrated with the increasingly interconnected world. Over decades, globalization has crafted a world painfully sensitive and susceptible to shocks such as this pandemic. A crisis like it has thus been long overdue—and we have yet to see it unfold fully. In our integrated world, events that may previously be isolated now ripple farther and wider and in ways we do not expect and cannot foresee. We have not seen the worst, and if and when we outlast this pandemic, nothing will ever be the same. Decisions now—or indecisions—will shape and define the world for decades.

These ideas are fleshed out through the virus’s spawning and how it spread, the unprecedented measures to contain it and an examination of past pandemics and other crises and how they shaped the world–and an argument for why this one’s different. Lou shows how drastically the virus has transformed the world and charts the greater and more radical shifts to come. His ideas and arguments are framed around his unintentionally tumultuous journey around the world, whose path the virus seemed to follow until he landed safely in quarantine in a small town in Germany, where he was able to take stock and start telling his story.

There is the Bitcoin story of the headlines, but there is a more important one behind them: tangled plots sprawling like roots deep underground, entire worlds in which we are just passersby. In Once a Bitcoin Miner, journalist and author Ethan Lou takes listeners on a richly told first-person narrative through the proverbial cryptocurrency Wild West. From investing in Bitcoin in university to his time writing for Reuters, and then mining the digital asset, Lou meets the late Gerald Cotten (of QuadrigaCX) and a co-founder of Ethereum and hangs out in North Korea with Virgil Griffith, the man later arrested for allegedly teaching blockchain to the totalitarian state. Coming of age during the 2008 financial crisis, Lou’s generation has a natural affinity with this rebel internet money, this so-called millennial gold, created in the wake of that economic storm. At once a personal story of adventure and fortune, this book is also a work of journalistic rigor, a deep dive into this domain that everyone hears about yet nobody truly knows and into the lives of the fast-talkers, the exiles, the ambitious, and the daring, forging their paths in a new world harsh and unpredictable.