Ben McKenzie

This was an interesting look into the rise and fall of crypto. I think I would have enjoyed the book a LOT more if the author hadn't constantly inserted himself into the narrative. Did you know he's an actor?! (Seriously though, dude's an actor!) Instead of focusing on the saga of crypto, I instead spent my time annoyed at the author constantly talking about inane things like how he's an actor and got to bro down with SBF.

I recently read Going Infinite by Michael Lewis, recommended if you're more interested in the SBF saga. I would also highly recommend watching the YouTube video "Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs" by Folding Ideas. Even though it predates the crypto crash, I found it to be basically a way better takedown of crypto than this book. ("The charges against Binance" YouTube video by Molly White is a recent look into Binance's takedown, something that hadn't happened yet by the time this book was published.)… (mehr)

An antic-crypto screed in which Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and the implosion of FTX figures heavily. I spent most of my 2020 workyear researching cryptocurrency, blockchains, stablecoins, etc., so I have an interest. I also have been a follower of the Effective Altruism movement, with which SBF was associated, so that's given me a double-interest in the FTX story. I read this with glee. It's not bad; while unabashedly anti-crypto, it doesn't come off like a bone to pick, but rather one person's not unreasonable opinion. Ben McKenzie does make constant references to his being an actor, a somewhat famous actor in his day, but I never saw anything with him in it so I didn't care. (His biggest role was on a show called the O.C. which was for people younger than me.) For an actor, he's damn smart.

He's got lots to share firsthand about SBF because he actually once scored an interview with him as well as something of a Twitter relationship. He found the guy to be really weird (no surprise there), intrinsically; and also, it just felt so weird that SBF wanted to talk to him at all - not only that, but really seemed to want him to LIKE him. McKenzie shares some insight he got form a former FBI agent: Just listen. "Tell the suspect you know he is a good person, but you need help understanding what happened..." Bad actors, all of us, need to see ourselves as good people.

So, the FTX story. I remember it well (it wasn't even a year ago). Binance, a rival crypto exchange, held tons of FTX tokens (FTT). When they announced that "concerns" about FTX's balance sheet had led to them to decide to liquidate all their FTT tokens, that was the end. The CEO of Binance, "CZ", had gotten into some kind of bicker-war with SBF, Well, all it took was the announcement of intent to sell a major quantity of FTT, and "Voila, bank run." "CZ had played his hand well."

McKenzie's problem with crypto is that it has no use case, nothing for the here and now - use cases are always presented as "Someday it could..." His fundamental problem is that it seems to misunderstand the nature of money. Money has value because we TRUST the government to back it. We TRUST that other parties will accept it as legal tender because it has the government of the USA backing it. Crypto is "trustless" - that's allegedly a feature, not a bug. But he doesn't think that the necessary trust that could make it ever be anything more than a speculative gamble can be conjured out of thin air, or out of trusting the code - code is written by people. I could see having some good arguments with the guy.… (mehr)