Tuesday, December 13, 2022
SBF
This is Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX crypto exchange. He was arrested yesterday in the Bahamas and will be extradited to the United States to face charges in the Southern District of New York. FTX has collapsed, sending the crypto market as a whole into a tailspin.
SBF, as he is often known, was incredibly wealthy-- he bought out his partner in FTX, for example, for $2 billion. He made this money from selling something that was really nothing-- a set of fiat currencies that were logged on blockchain.
Because what they sold were vaporous, the price went up so long as people believed in it, and crashed when they no longer did. Many things are like that, of course-- but the less inherent value there is in the subject of the commerce, the more striking the ups and downs. And crypto, unlike real estate or a car, has absolutely no inherent value.
Two years ago, a lot of people would have loved to have been SBF. But.... things change.
