Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, painted himself as a new type of smart guy who was going to change the world. This type of story has become the perfect vessel for fraud, jaycaspiankang writes.
when he got started in crypto, which, he also said, was a field made up of projects that were mostly “bullshit.” But it also was a means to an end. The world would be better if he, the smartest guy in the room, had more money to distribute, and crypto was the fastest way to get rich.
What Bankman-Fried stumbled upon, perhaps unwittingly, was the secret to actual crypto evangelism that would convert everyone, from venture-capital firms to the media. To be the crypto evangelist, you couldn’t sell people on the decentralized, libertarian future, because most of the people with lots of money have incentives to maintain the status quo. Instead, you had to convince people that you hated crypto for all the same reasons they did, but that they should invest in it anyway.
I have dabbled in cryptocurrencies since 2017. My friend Aaron Lammer and I made a podcast called “Coin Talk,” where we took a sports-talk-radio approach to all the industry scams, pump and dumps, but also what we saw as the technological and economic potential of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and whatever off-brand coin we had invested in that week.
Which is to say, we would’ve been the perfect marks for Sam Bankman-Fried’s nonchalant crypto gospel, because it lined up perfectly with both our prior beliefs and our greed. We didn’t have to want the world envisioned by libertarian Bitcoin maximalists, with its deflationary currency and social Darwinian outlook. We could just dabble in it while also poking fun at the scammers, who definitely were not like us in any way.
I imagine that many credentialled people—tech titans, philosophers, or my colleagues in the media—felt something similar when they decided that Bankman-Fried was somehow different. The past two weeks have seen a parade of
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