Uuuh, that doesn’t look good Sam Bankman-Fried, but you are not the only one bleeding. This unkempt kid with the gamer look and sandals to complete the nerdy outfit (I’m actually not sure about the sandals, but let’s be honest, that could have added to his deceptive image of the innocent math genius / self-sacrificing ethicist) might have singlehandedly kickstarted the final collapse of the always-suspicious-to-some crypto industry. Obviously, whether it is a complete knockout or just a simple misstep causing a few years of delay is still undecided, but given the nature of the story, the fact that it was the industry’s poster child himself proving that the whole show was just a mere trick with befooled HODLers and a corrupt elite, it will not be easy for the masses to forget this incident and once again see crypto for more than what it truly is – a way for a few tech savvy kids to cheat lazy and financially desperate people in pursuit of easy gains out of their money.
And yes, the crypto world did have a capturing ethos to gain popularity with. So much talk about disintermediation, decentralization, democratization, and all the other flexible benefits. The alluring vision of a world without gatekeepers where ordinary people could take their destiny in their hands and have complete control over their digital existence. The message was undeniably there, making the impression that crypto was after something grand and selfless, but obviously, it was the mirage of easily attainable wealth that led to billions of dollars in investments and average people turning their precious savings into worthless crypto assets.
Sam Bankman-Fried, aka “Scam Bankrun-Fraud”, as some creative ones would lately call him on social media, had a keen eye for the treasure that was slowly revealing itself. He didn’t just join crypto to amass vast fortunes through a few easy steps, but instead, he embraced the whole story about crypto being a force for good and became this altruistic, benevolent man pledging to give away his wealth while he was living the ‘frugal’, mission-driven life of working hard and sleeping on an uncomfortable bean bag. Obviously, all this took place in a multi-million-dollar penthouse in the Bahamas, adding just one more unmistakable sign that someone was being misled. But anyway, enough of history-recital because I’m not here to tell the tale of how SBF’s supposedly invincible FTX exchange has, pretty much in the blink of an eye, collapsed because there are better informed people than me to do that. Instead, I would like to focus on some less crypto-related aspects of recent events, on what has truly suffered from the mess that surrounds the now controversial figure of SBF.
Idols Take Ages to Build, and Minutes to Raze – Not that We Should Build Them in the First Place
The truth is, the majority of people are cute beings. The moment we see an uncool kid, so not the one who made it to the football team or who was the most popular during the high school years, but the one who got bullied, we want to see the nerd succeed. Handsome people are successful already, and the irony is, most of them are wealthy on top of it. This seems like an unfair advantage, so we all hate it. Lawyers and managers in their fancy suits, expensive cars, and all the exclusive events to which we never get invited. The Elite. The Harvey Specters of the world drinking their cocktails in the adoring company of beautiful ladies (escorts obviously) on the secluded terraces of sky-high buildings. Luckily, the internet has changed everything. Those who got bullied in a different age, the Sheldons and Leonards of past decades, are finally coming out on top of society because they are the ones who know the art of coding. Just look at the rich guys of recent years – teeny-tiny Jeff Bezos cursed with boldening, Mark Zuckerberg, the robot, with his shiny forehead and inability to socialize normally, and Bill Gates, the seemingly innocent yet creepy old guy we should all fear. They were not the cool kids in their teenage years. They were the ones who outlasted everyone else as virgins. And they probably got bullied for it. But then, Karma, the way we Westerners see it, intervened and these former ‘losers’ are the kings of today.
The whole FTX & Alameda Research crew fits this image. Just take a look at the disheveled style of Sam Bankman-Fried with his uncontrollable mop of hair and lack of athletic masculinity, or his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, with her gigantic glasses and high-pitched giggling. Put it frankly, while they got featured on the cover page of many magazines, Vogue has never joined the list. Their success with these credentials was pretty much a pre-ordained thing. Two math geniuses taking over the world of boring beauty and mundane normality. Theirs was the success story we love seeing, so we keep on creating it.
Obviously, even without a hungry audience SBF would have made it rich. He did discover himself the difference in the price of Bitcoin on different exchanges. He is a smart kid, so he took the chance and cashed in. But the rest is our doing. It was the world that embraced him, that praised him like a king, that branded him as a crypto wunderkind and posted his humbly smiling face on every street. It was the greedy investors of Silicon Valley who stood in the queue to throw money at him, the sensation-seeking journalists who put him on the front page of magazines and made him the face of the crypto industry, and us, the millions using his exchange, who got swayed by his humble looks and disguise to seek altruistic aims.
FTX’s sudden collapse might seem like just another implosion within the unregulated crypto industry, a simple case of failure detached from the rest of reality. Some former hardcore believers are disenchanted, and the overall majority see this ‘incident’ with vaporized customer funds and insider trading as one additional case proving the inability of crypto to live up to its forged appeal. But, in my opinion at least, this story scars way deeper than the world of blockchain. It doesn’t only tarnish the already embattled image of Effective Altruism, an Illuminati-style movement in search for immeasurable wealth to spread more efficient goodness, but it shows our own repeated incapacity to find the right leaders and right projects.
Marketing knows that people are captured by compelling messages. And people know that marketing knows this, that marketing has identified the trick to seek out their friendship. So, we are rather cautious these days. We have a growing list of personality-traits that can’t be trusted. Politicians of the establishment, regardless of what they say to believe in and to be pursuing, are just players of a corrupt game instead of representing the masses. Actors and other media personalities only smile on TV while in real life they are terrible beings. CEOs and ultra-rich owners of big Fortune500 companies are purely driven by capitalistic greed instead of the betterment of society. And recently, even Big Tech with algorithms and user-data misappropriated has made it to the blacklist.
Then emerges crypto with a very convincing story. It attacks everything we have come to hate. It is developed by an even nerdier gang than the software engineers of the previous phase. By this time, the technology used is completely incomprehensible for the masses, but the user-interface has improved so much in recent years that all we see is a few minimalistic apps and buttons to click. And it says that we are in control of everything that is happening. And above all, we get to make tons of money by doing absolutely nothing. Adjusted for inflation, it took approximately $260 billion to have Project Apollo succeed, and now we get to make it all the way to the moon just by HODLing. The 21st century is truly amazing, and as Molly White has (ironically) put it, “Web3 is going just great”.
I get it, after all, crypto indeed seemed like the perfect project we all wanted. It had all the characteristics a project needed to elicit our empathy and galvanize our energy. There’s the group of genius underdogs concocting something mysterious yet technologically undeniably sophisticated and therefore great. In addition to this league of nerds is this empowering message that the internet will be fixed as the average users are handed back the power to control it. And, to top it off, it does resonate quite well with our most innate wish, to make money easily. But under this bewitching façade of fight between good and evil, easy money, and world-changing deeds lies the truth that is part of a significantly longer and older chain than blockchain. A list of events that initially made us believe that something great was happening until the inevitable moment of the bubble bursting and we left on the side disillusioned, misled, robbed, and wounded.
We can’t even blame Sam Bankman-Fried for pulling off just another scamming trick because it’s us who always end up doing the very same thing. The sad truth is that for the moment we kind of fit Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity, after all, we keep on repeating past mistakes over and over again while expecting different results, and obviously, those different results are not coming because we ourselves never change. We always “turn to an unbroken succession of leaders” who promote their own causes and movements instead of looking for solutions in ourselves. We fall prey to the message that something is happening instead of actually doing something.
Blank Pages Do Exist, but They are Rare
Every new movement could be different. Crypto could have been different. Sam Bankman-Fried could have been the nice guy who was building a legit business and was willing to share his wealth. But once again, another person misused the faith, naivety, and adorable excitement of the crowd to amass greater riches and influence through pulling off an elaborate scam. He knew what we wanted, and he did just that. The preying-on-the-desperate movement in the form of crypto asking for our financial investment was already there, and it had the right ethos to capture our fascination and interest. It just needed that one last weird figure who could really convince the rest that crypto was more than just a Ponzi Scheme-style project of greed, deception, and selfishness.
SBF had really tailored his image in a way that it could provide the world with that humble, trustworthy & righteous crypto billionaire, an altruistic do-gooder in pursuit of boundless wealth which we could all access if we bought all the right tokens. His much-touted belief in serving society the most effective way one can didn’t only shield him from the scrutiny of the masses, but overall made the whole crypto industry itself exempt from the critique of common sense. The whole world got worked up into such a frenzy that, after years of hesitancy and calling it bullshit, even traditional finance realized that they wanted in because there were moments which made it seem that pluralistic ignorance about the lack of real value created might indeed lead crypto prices growing infinitely.
But well, the world is actually not boundless, so this story of endless wealth created out of thin air did come to an end. And with that, another idol of ours has just fallen. But it’s not crypto only that bleeds after this event, but our precious capacity to believe in something and beam with excitement. The world is once again bewildered with disillusionment. And our list of people with characteristics that can’t be trusted is slowly growing endless. This is the true harm caused by the collapse. That once again people got misled, their excitement squandered on the wrong project. Obviously, this is not the first deceptive incident, so people will work themselves through the disenchantment. However, especially at a time when trust in society is already at ridiculously low levels, the question arises for how long one can bear disappointment, and when the inflection point will come when disillusionment crystallizes and turns permanent.
By looking at the newly revealed personality of SBF, he himself was clearly a victim of such hopelessness, throwing doubt on all the beliefs and visions he had earlier professed. He has come to see the world as a game of winners and losers where ethics is nothing more than a product of “stupid Western wokeness”. If people like him stayed silent, then such negative views about society would not make much of a difference. However, the unfortunate truth is, often it seems like that these people are the most active to go out there and preach about greatness, tapping into and contradicting the very despondency they themselves have. And people fall for their fake frankness, and they easily let their guards down when someone is finally ‘going against’ the establishment.
Through such scams, through cases that are unfortunately not isolated affairs, the world is slowly embracing a rather negative and nihilistic sentiment, and that on the long run just can’t be the foundation for true, society-wide greatness. On the contrary, we are in a pickle exactly out of this hopelessness, and Sam Bankman-Fried just put more fuel on the fire with his own fakeness. I can only hope that other inspiring figures of our time have a past and presence true to the image they have created about themselves because society’s patience is not limitless, and its collapse might mean permanent disillusionment instead of sparking a revolutionary mindset.
But, in order to shield the world from such regrettable turn of events, the best approach we could take is if we altogether dropped this idea of praising a few ‘wunderkinds’ as saviors of our planet, and instead, we would become heroes of our own stories ourselves. Truth is, that really is the only way we can materialize the message crypto had, and regain control over our – both physical and digital – existence.
So, stop buying stupid tokens and waiting for the chance to cast a vote on your favorite candidate, and instead, just go out there and be driven by the dreams you yourself have. And then, this whole crypto saga will seem like a way more trivial incident.
I have spoken.
