The FTX collapse, featuring Sam Bankman-Fried, who apparently has achieved triple initial status, i.e., he’s now known as SBF, hasn’t happened in a vacuum. Another crypto company, BlockFi, a digital asset lender with “significant exposure” to FTX, is in bankruptcy.
The fascinating part?
BlockFi, the first direct casualty of crypto exchange FTX’s collapse, told a U.S. bankruptcy judge on Tuesday that the U.S. cryptocurrency lender was “the antithesis of FTX” and that it would seek to return customer funds as quickly as possible.
BlockFi filed for Chapter 11 protection on Monday, citing FTX’s collapse and volatility in the crypto markets. Earlier in November, BlockFi had paused withdrawals from its platform amid uncertainty about FTX’s stability.
BlockFi attorney Joshua Sussberg went to great lengths to distance BlockFi from FTX at the company’s first bankruptcy hearing in Trenton, New Jersey. While detailing the companies’ complex financial relationship, Sussberg emphasized BlockFi did not face the myriad issues plaguing FTX, which spectacularly imploded earlier this month, sparking fears of contagion across the industry. [Reuters, via MSN]
“No, we don’t look like this failure over here at all!” But, guys, you lent them enough currency that their failure withered your carcass as well. The magnitude of internal failure may not match the FTX blunders, but there’s still a rank odor of irresponsibility pervading you folks. Yep, without regulation the waves of putrid mismanagement will wash over everyone. And I say that after arguing that it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Object lessons are useful things.
Back to FTX and SBF, here’s a revelation about him, who incidentally happens to be all of thirty years old and was, briefly, the CEO of a largish company:
Amid all the bombshell revelations about fallen crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried, a seemingly trivial bit of information might tell us everything we need to know: He doesn’t read books.
If you’re anticipating a caveat or qualifier, you’re as out of luck as the FTX investors whose money SBF allegedly lost. “I’m addicted to reading,” a journalist said to the erstwhile multibillionaire in a recently resurfaced interview. “Oh, yeah?” SBF replied. “I would never read a book.” …
Behold, then, SBF’s reason: “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. … If you wrote a book, you f—ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.” [WaPo]
Oh me oh my. He’s beginning to sound like quite the shallow bounder, doesn’t he? I mean, how do you evaluate all the sides of an issue if you don’t know there are multiple sides?
And, by the way, what is the issue at hand?
All this stemmed not simply from an inclination toward reckless management, but from something more deeply rooted: philosophy. SBF is a believer in effective altruism. This school of thought seeks to, by its own definition, use “evidence and reason to figure out how to benefit others as much as possible.” More specifically, SBF had devoted his life toward “earning to give.” You pick a career not because you care about the career itself, or even think it’s good for the world on its own merits. You pick a career because it will make you a massive amount of money, and you can spend that money on something that is good. So SBF picked finance, and after that he picked crypto.
Ah, to be a bug on the wall. Whether ’tis more noble in one’s mind to … oh, just squish me now, eh?
I haven’t studied effective altruism, but it sounds a lot like longtermism, In fact, to prove I haven’t studied effective altruism, I just found out that longtermism is a component of effective altruism.
Hah!
The similarity, suggested in the WaPo article, to the old, old fallacy that the end justifies the means, makes me think it may be a deeply suspect philosophy. But I digress.
I wonder if this failure to indulge in long-form reading is just a symptom of deep narcissism in the MIT-trained Bankman-Fried, or if it’s a result of social media destroying the mental faculties of his generation, or if it’s yet something else.
