Happy Thanksgiving!
Good morning. I’m taking a brief hiatus from writing my blog this week in anticipation of Thanksgiving. I don’t know about you, but I tend to value this holiday more as I get older. It’s a time for appreciating those around me and all that my family and I have to be thankful for. Of course we can and should be thankful and appreciative all year round, but I like the focus on it that the holiday brings. Oh, and the food – we can’t forget about the food.
Anyway, I wanted to share a few articles getting into the details of the latest rapid rise and shocking fall of a cryptocurrency star. This time it’s a firm called FTX, a crypto exchange that’s looking more like a Ponzi scheme of epic proportions as more information comes out.
This sort of situation is instructive because it reminds us that it’s almost always the people behind the tech who cause the problems, rarely the tech itself. Digital assets (the industry catch-all term for crypto) are the way of the future and some structures like bitcoin will eventually revolutionize aspects of our financial system. Not yet, but it’s fashionable and profitable to pretend so. Celebs and other bigwigs have jumped on the bandwagon and this, in a sense, helps to mainstream these technologies. But along the way hubris and old-fashioned greed create cautionary tales like this and, unfortunately, lost fortunes along the way.
So if you find yourself needing something to read as you digest your Thanksgiving feast check out these articles and feel thankful you weren’t (hopefully) an FTX investor.
From my family to yours, Happy Thanksgiving!
Here’s an article from Vox that provides a good overview of the situation.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23451761/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-bankrupt-binance-bitcoin-alameda
Here’s one from The Wall Street Journal offering additional detail. Let me know if you run into the paywall and I can send this to you from my account.
And here’s a longer investigative-journalist-type of article that provides a lot of detail and interesting insights into what went wrong with FTX (and it's key subsidiary, Alameda Research), the personalities, and offers some explanations as to why this happened.
Beyond that just Google “FTX collapse” and jump down the rabbit hole.
Have questions? Ask me. I can help.
- Created on .
