On SBF, I think a large part of the issue is that he was working in an industry called cryptocurrency that is basically has fraud as the bedrock of it all. There was nothing real about crypto, so the collapse of FTX was basically inevitable.
I don’t deny that the cryptocurrency “industry” has been a huge magnet for fraud, nor that there are structural reasons for that, but “there was nothing real about crypto” is plainly false. The desire to have currencies that can’t easily be controlled, manipulated, or implicitly taxed (seigniorage, inflation) by governments or other centralized organizations and that can be transferred without physical presence is real. So is the desire for self-executing contracts. One might believe those to be harmful abilities that humanity would be better off without, but not that they’re just nothing.
More specifically, the issue with crypto is that the benefits are much less than promised, and there’s a whole lot of bullshit claims on crypto like it being secure or not manipulatable.
On one example of why cryptocurrencies fail as an a currency, one of it’s problems is that it’s fixed supply and no central entity means the value of that currency swings wildly, which is a dealbreaker for any currency.
Note, this is just one of the many, fractal problems here with crypto.
Crypto isn’t all fraud. There’s reality, but it’s built out of unsound foundations and trying to sell a fake castle to others.
I don’t deny that the cryptocurrency “industry” has been a huge magnet for fraud, nor that there are structural reasons for that, but “there was nothing real about crypto” is plainly false. The desire to have currencies that can’t easily be controlled, manipulated, or implicitly taxed (seigniorage, inflation) by governments or other centralized organizations and that can be transferred without physical presence is real. So is the desire for self-executing contracts. One might believe those to be harmful abilities that humanity would be better off without, but not that they’re just nothing.
More specifically, the issue with crypto is that the benefits are much less than promised, and there’s a whole lot of bullshit claims on crypto like it being secure or not manipulatable.
On one example of why cryptocurrencies fail as an a currency, one of it’s problems is that it’s fixed supply and no central entity means the value of that currency swings wildly, which is a dealbreaker for any currency.
Note, this is just one of the many, fractal problems here with crypto.
Crypto isn’t all fraud. There’s reality, but it’s built out of unsound foundations and trying to sell a fake castle to others.