Businessweek devotes entire issue to Matt Levine's "Crypto Story"

Bloomberg Businessweek devotes its latest issue, out Tuesday, to a 40,000-word essay about crypto by finance writer Matt Levine.

Why it matters: If you're still confused about crypto, Levine, who writes the beloved Money Stuff newsletter, offers a clear-eyed explanation. You might come away truly understanding what a crypto miner does. But that's not the only reason to read this opus.

As Levine explains, understanding crypto is also a way to take a fresh look at the financial system, writ large.

• "In the past 14 years, crypto has built a whole financial system from scratch," he writes.
• "Crypto constantly reinvented or rediscovered things that finance has been doing for centuries. Sometimes it found new and better ways to do things. Often it found worse ways."

If you like Levine for his entertaining explanations of the minutiae of finance, then you'll love his explanation of a DAO.

• It stands for “decentralized autonomous organization,” he tells you.
• Then writes: "DAOs aren’t decentralized autonomous organizations.”
• Don't worry: He then breaks down the disconnect.

Bonus: He also riffs on what it would mean to have an NFT of your soul.

Zoom out: There's such a thing as " The Cover Curse," essentially the idea that by the time a person or company or trend makes it to the cover of a mainstream magazine or video game, it's peaked or on the way out.

• Levine acknowledges that he's writing post-crypto-boom — and says that makes it a good time to talk about it. The frenzy has died down, and "we can think about what it means divorced from the lines going up."

Go deeper: The Crypto Story