Give them this: At an age when most of us were still shooting pool, listening to Merle on the jukebox and figuring out what we wanted to do with our lives, the kids at FTX were creating a multibillion-dollar financial empire.
So what if it was fabricated? Crypto was “mostly scams and memes when you get down to it,” wrote Caroline Ellison, 28, who ran the hedge fund side of Sam Bankman-Fried’s high-tech Ponzi scheme.
Ellison was a preacher who didn’t believe in God. But she did believe, apparently, that something would come of decentralized banking, it just wasn’t clear what. “If authoritarian governments are a serious threat to civilization, which seems not totally insane, it could end up being important,” she wrote.
It’s the old fake it ’til you make it strategy, and unfortunately for FTX, its founders got caught squarely in the “fake it” stage. Still, it wouldn’t surprise if one day the seeds of these crude financial experiments grow into something useful, even if they don’t resemble the crypto train wrecks of today that seem to be occurring on a monthly basis.
After all, 200 years ago, a similar economic instrument was as derided and abused as crypto is today. It became known as a “corporation.”
For a time, it seemed that President Andrew Jackson’s populists had won. Jacksonians were intent on destroying (sound familiar?) the handful of elite families that controlled, well, everything.
At the turn of the 19th century, this balderdash about all…
