The Crypto Thread

Hardware and technical stuff
264

I get the sentiment, but this is likely one of the things that present a stark contrast between Republican and Democratic thoughts and actions in these types of situations. Historically the general Republican response is to come to their defense and circle the wagons.

My reaction (and I hate to extrapolate that to a general Democratic reaction, but, again historically, it has been consistent in this regard) is to say “fuck 'em”. EDIT: also easy for me to say since I am not a direct recipient of those donantions.

265

Oh, for sure. My take was simply: sometimes – even in crypto – there are people with very good intentions who then go down a, let’s say, “thorny” path.

And yeah, if Bankman-Fried was dipping into consumer accounts for currency to make his own trades, absolutely “fuck that guy” vibes.

266

Be interesting to see where this ends up going. Jon Corzine did a pretty similar thing at MF Global (commodities brokerage) where they dipped into $700M of customer segregated funds and he managed to settle for a $5M fine and avoided jail. Obviously we don’t know the full scope here, but very interested on how this ends up going.

267

SBF put money towards good causes encouraging vaccination as well.

268

Well, MacGregor built homes for the poor and schools and hospitals but everyone still calls him Sheep-fucker MacGregor.

269

Strangely, Sequoia Capitol has retracted or hidden their glowing profile of SBF they wrote just last month. Coincidentally in unrelated news, they wrote off their FTX investment today.

Here it is archived

It’s a lengthy, fawning profile.

270

And?

Until the earnings report from Alameda research last week, no one – other than perhaps political opponents – had any reason to see SBF as anything other than a pretty amazing success story. A billionaire in the crypto space who was interested in being charitable in ways that Musk, Bezos, et al. never were.

And then Ian Allison took the Alameda Research earnings numbers to the microscop and discovered that things weren’t as they seemed and the whole house of cards came down. Until that point, however, no one had much reason to doubt him as far as I can tell.

And now that there’s reason to think that not only were his business dealings unscrupulous and possibly even very criminal, folks who had prominent dealings with him or FTX are dropping it all like a rock. The Miami Heat will drop the FTX from their arena and find a different sponsor. Same with the Mercedes F1 team.

EDIT: OK, having read that godawful tripe, I see what you mean though. You’d have thought SBF was healing the sick and turning water into wine…

271

That is some of the cringiest bullshit I’ve ever read

To be clear, SBF is not talking about maximizing the total value of FTX—he’s talking about maximizing the total value of the universe. And his units are not dollars: In a kind of GDP for the universe, his units are the units of a utilitarian. He’s maximizing utils, units of happiness. And not just for every living soul, but also every soul—human and animal—that will ever live in the future. Maximizing the total happiness of the future—that’s SBF’s ultimate goal. FTX is just a means to that end.

272

OK, that’s pretty awful hagiography. I’d be hiding that shit too if I my company had written that. Yeesh.

273

I open with a doozy: “Am I,” I ask, “talking to the world’s first trillionaire?”

Although it’s admittedly a stupid question, it’s not as stupid as it sounds. SBF has a net worth, as estimated by Forbes, that’s higher than the vast majority (80 percent) of the world’s billionaires—and, yet, he’s only gotten started. FTX is a company in its infancy.

I first tried out the trillionaire question on Michelle Bailhe, the Sequoia partner who, along with Lin, knows SBF and his company the best. “It’s a juicy question,” she said, wavering for a moment while calculating the odds. “I think he has a real chance at that.”

There’s no such hesitation from SBF. But he does quickly demur, making self-deprecating mouth noises questioning his own capacity to make such a pile, before he really starts to answer.

“Maybe let’s take a step back,” he says, only to launch into an explanation of his own, personal utility curve: “Which is to say, if you plot dollars-donated on the X axis, and Y is how-much-good-I-do-in-the-world, then what does that curve look like? It’s definitely not linear—it does tail off, but I think it tails off pretty slowly.”

His point seems to be that there is, out there somewhere, a diminishing return to charity. There’s a place where even effective altruism ceases to be effective. “But I think that, even at a trillion, there’s still really significant marginal utility to dollars donated.”

This interview has morphed into my own personal economics seminar, and Professor Bankman-Fried is my tutor. He’s as good at explaining the principles of macroeconomics as anyone out there in the world today—and I know this for a fact because I’ve subsequently watched YouTube’s best on the same subject. But SBF teaches me Macro while simultaneously playing round after round of Storybook Brawl.

Still, I’ve got my answer. And it turns out that I’ve aimed too low. A trillion isn’t enough money to fix the world’s problems, so SBF won’t stop at merely a trillion. It’s an answer that begs the next question, which SBF, ever helpful, has already anticipated: “So, is five trillion all you could ever use to help the world?”

274

Reading that makes me want to bust the guillotines out of storage.

275

Oh and also:

“Mr. Bankman-Fried? FBI financial crimes division on line 1.”

276

Whoever wrote that piece should immerse themselves in a river of shame and never emerge.

277
278

That commercial’s pretty fucked up. They essentially made a commercial of Larry David saying don’t get into crypto?

279

The full commercial had Larry David at critical points in history naysaying advances (the wheel, toilet, electricity, voting, etc.)

EDIT: I thought it was actually kind of amusing (due mostly to Larry) and the message was one necessary for crypto to make - even though obviously crypto is utter bullshit and has nothing in common with the other inventions in the commercial. At the time I felt dismay for Larry to be schilling this crap. Here is the full ad:

280

Why? Larry was no doubt compensated for his time, and I have supreme confidence his agent insisted on being paid in US dollars.

281

Do we want to rehash the merits of crypto as a product? How about FTX specifically? How many people have been swindled and scammed?

Not sure that simply because a person got paid for their endorsement should make anyone be supportive that they lent their voice to snake oil.

282

They were a huge player at the time, no way for him to know that. Of course now it smells bad.

283

Anyone with even the vaguest knowledge on crypto, something you’d think anyone looking to shill for it might consider becoming a bit more familiar with before signing on the dotted line, could see this for what it was.

I’m not terribly smart and I had exactly zero difficulty seeing this for what it is the first time I heard about it.

I will concede though I have a particularly critical view of investment schemes of any kind since once upon a long time ago I prosecuted them for a living. ;)