In many countries, tricking stupid people out of money is a crime. In the United States, it’s the basis of a whole economy.
Cryptocurrency is the crowning glory of this broken system. You give me a bunch of your real money, and I’ll give you some of my fake money. Fantastic! It’s like tulip mania, only instead of flowers, you get… nothing.
The collapse of FTX — the second largest crypto exchange in the world — will cost millions of customers billions of dollars. Some expect it to significantly worsen the recession, though I’m not so sure. If those folks hadn’t wasted their savings on Bitcoin, they probably would have wasted it on some other scam. (Is William Duvane still selling gold?)
In theory, this is bad news for the Democrats. Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX’s conman-in-chief, was a DNC megadonor. Many lawmakers and regulators are implicated in his racket. But in reality, they’ll be fine. You can’t arrest government officials just for breaking the law. That would set a dangerous precedent.
No, it’s the libertarians I feel bad for.
Our laissez-faire friends were the first crypto enthusiasts. The US dollar, they say, is a “fiat currency.” Since we dropped the gold standard, it is no longer based on real wealth — unlike Bitcoin, which is generated in huge warehouses full of computers known as blockchain mines (you can’t make this stuff up).
Libertarians also like crypto because it’s not issued by the government. Crypto-based…
