FTX Kept Your Crypto in a Crypt Not a Vault
Sam Bankman-Fried doesn't read books. As he explained in a profile on Sequoia Capital's website (which will be an assigned text in journalism courses for the rest of time), “I would never read a book.” “I'm very skeptical of books,” he said. “I don't want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”
This error is not irremediable, because Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-defunct crypto exchange FTX, is likely soon to have a lot of time for reading.
I, by contrast, as the author of many books, am very skeptical of Sam Bankman-Fried. As I noted on May 1: “There is a great deal of loose talk among the crypto bros.”
How about this from Sam Bankman-Fried, … who was asked to explain the practice of yield-farming on Bloomberg's “Odd Lots” podcast. Yield farming, to put it simply, is borrowing someone else's crypto tokens in exchange for your own “governance tokens,” and then exchanging the borrowed tokens for higher-yielding DeFi (decentralized finance) instruments.
Bankman-Fried's explanation:
Like this is a valuable box as demonstrated by all the money that people have apparently decided should be in the box. And who are we to say that they're wrong about that? … And so then, you know, [the governance] token price goes way up. And now it's a $130 million market cap token because of, you know, the bullishness of people's usage of the box. And now all of a sudden, of course, the smart money [goes and pours] another $300 million in the box and … it goes to infinity. And then everyone makes money.
My comment was: “Never mind the Wild West; this is the Wacko West.”
At a conference I attended in late September, Bankman-Fried was one of the speakers in a session devoted to
Read more on tech.hindustantimes.com
