I don't know many of the relevant details, but I am not at all surprised that this happened. If you look at the comparators in the tweet above, they share a common bottom line, which is that someone figured out how to use the opacity of a new and poorly understood technology to bilk people out of money, thus making an entire industry look bad, even the guys who are trying to play by the rules. With Enron, it was energy deregulation; Lehman, financial derivatives; and Theranos, biotech, which is probably the easiest to bullshit about, because it's about as transparent as a brick wall to those who aren't in the industry. I think Crypto probably falls somewhere in between derivatives and biotech, given that it has the obvious financial engineering aspect, but wrapped in a tight shroud of techno-Utopia, which is exactly the place you expect bad actors to act. I don't think veen's Mt. Gox comparison is apt, because IIRC that was a hack...some suggestion of an inside job maybe, but a hack/theft nonetheless. That's an easy to digest, a story as old as time. This is deeper by a long shot, and I say that as someone who has barely scratched the surface...he had a sports arena named for his company FFS. In the popular domain, it was.
Mt. Gox was inexperienced kids with two weeks more insight into the process than everyone else fucking up. The end result was normies lost money. Was there a hacker on the inside? Probably. FTX is inexperienced kids with two parents' more nepotism into the process than everyone else fucking up. The end result was rich fucks lost money. Was there a hacker on the inside? Probably. A better comparison is Madoff - Madoff's clients thought they had an edge because Bernie Madoff was an insider (he was the chairman of FINRA's predecessor), FTX's clients thought they had an edge because their money was next to Sequoia's. The funny thing is that this isn't a crypto problem - all the shadiness has been normie bank money while all the transparency has come from the blockchain. If you aren't on FTX none of this matters. If you weren't so stupid that you bought Solana, none of this matters. And that's really the bottom line for me - I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the amount of world process controlled by rich kids who face no fucking risk. The rest of us have to work at it and most of our shit will never be seen because we didn't go to summer camp with Chelsea Clinton or some shit.
Yeah agreed, and that was kind of the point I was trying to make. Theranos has fuckall to do with blood biomarkers per se, but that's how people see it next time someone comes up with an idea for how to do blood biomarkers better. Rinse and repeat. People always end up hating the game and not just the player.The funny thing is that this isn't a crypto problem