Until last week I hadn’t heard of FTX. Or, if I had, it never registered. That’s because high-flying Crypto currency is no more real to me than Superboy’s high-flying pet, Krypto.
My interest in Crypto has been limited to reading articles about block-chain technology and the massive amounts of power and cooling required to run the server farms that are mining the virtual currencies.
I’ve made a point of not reading about the people involved with the business of Crypto, or the exchanges they run. So, in the same way I’d never heard of Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried was unknown to me until his financial empire likewise collapsed.
Why did so many people trust their money to a kid with no track record, operating in an unregulated market? For the same reason they trusted their money to a respected Wall Street veteran running a well-established firm in a regulated market. For the same reason they voted for someone who was not only clearly unqualified to be President, but unfit to hold public office.
They fell for a sales pitch from a con man. Although it has yet to be determined if Bankman-Fried has actually committed fraud, or if he’s just a bright kid who got in over his head and was desperately looking for a way out.