November 26, 2022

"When your founder spends almost $40 million on politics, is that not necessarily out of excitement to do good and be regulated appropriately?"

"... Is this very good, invisible, costly fabric that I was also given to have made into the finest robes to show my commitment to effective altruism … nothing? Is it nothing? Please tell me if it’s nothing."

Writes Alexandra Petri in "Come to think of it, maybe I don’t understand cryptocurrency" (WaPo).

28 comments:

tim in vermont said...

"Politics"

Couldn't bring themselves to say "Democrats" and a small amount to Republicans that voted to impeach Trump, plus a payoff to McConnell. who withheld funding from key races, just "politics."

Michael said...

.
Petri may not know crypto, but she has the right genes to understand politics as well as money laundering.

Achilles said...

Of course SBF Wanted more crypto regulations.

He bought all the regulators. That is how it works.

FTX had special status with the SEC and SBF’s family friend Gary Gensler. Maxine Waters is hair of the finance committee and was blowing him kisses.

This story has no disruptive technology in it. Just standard corruption and regulatory capture.

tim maguire said...

Satire is dangerous. Especially today when it’s a tightrope walk being plausible enough to carry the ring of truth yet still absurd enough that people understand it’s satire.

Jersey Fled said...

It was nothing.

michaele said...

Sometimes I'll read through some comments on a Washington Post story. It always amazes me how Trump's name will be brought up dripping with contempt and loathing over a topic that has nothing to do with him. Here's one that caught my eye: "Best description ever. You give them your money and get nothing in return. How did Trump miss out on this?"

JAORE said...

In my youth I believed the path to prosperity was hard work. The path to wealth was developing a "better mousetrap", marketing your invention and selling a ton of them.

Now I believe the path to wealth is to support/bribe a politician to give your product a huge advantage. Even better is to get a government contract as a sole source.

Your mousetrap doesn't even have to be better...

Helps to explain why 10's of millions are spent on a political race leading to a $200k salary.


Nonyabidness said...

Look how quickly they attempted to tarnish Elon Musk by claiming, falsely, that he took Bankman-Freid money.

This guy and his mother and father engineered one of the biggest robberies on the planet and are now sitting in the Bahamas sunning it up in the penthouse of their multi-million-dollar real estate empire.

Where is the DoJ? Roaming the halls outside school board meetings looking for soccer moms to arrest.

The United States is a disgrace. And we surely deserve the scorn.

Temujin said...

" Is this very good, invisible, costly fabric that I was also given to have made into the finest robes to show my commitment to effective altruism … nothing?"

Yes. It is nothing. The fact that you think you can purchase altruism is proof that you don't understand the concept of it. That you think you purchase a badge as a receipt, to display your nobility, or worse, a crypto token to show your altruistic goodness, is embarrassing. The thinking: I can simultaneously make thousands...or millions on these things while looking like I'm doing good! That's the main thing that sticks out to me. It's not actually doing anything for anyone. It's thinking that you are appearing good to those in your favored circles.

An altruistic person might just go out and do something for someone else- without looking for anything back from it, without any notoriety required, no 'me-too' jumping into the groupthink of being part of a movement. Altruism, in reality, is about self-sacrifice. We can debate the positives or negatives of self-sacrifice and where it leads to, but in this case, none of it had anything to do with altruism. That word was just the hook to bring in the billions from lefties who are so enamored with 'looking good' while doing nothing.

iowan2 said...

Con man

Its short for Confidence Man.
Definition:
A person that tells people what they want to hear, to ingratiate themselves to persons, so they can scam them out of money.
See; "The Music Man"

"Tells people what the want to hear" As in lies to win them over.

See also. "If its to good to be true...it is."

BUMBLE BEE said...

Like the Clinton Foundation, just another democrat cheat.

Yancey Ward said...

"Maxine Waters is hair of the finance committee"

You misspelled wig.

Big Mike said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Big Mike said...

I don’t know much about cryptocurrency, either, but I know what self-dealing is.

Mike Sylwester said...

Democracy Dies in Darkness!

n.n said...

Authoritarianism remains viable through redistributive change schemes.

Levi Starks said...

There is a relationship of duality with cryptocurrency.
It is both everything and nothing simultaneously.
In order for it to exist you must believe it exists.
Simon Peter could walk on water only so long as he believed he could walk on water.

Michael K said...

Now I believe the path to wealth is to support/bribe a politician to give your product a huge advantage. Even better is to get a government contract as a sole source.

You've got the right idea in today's Washington. Albert B Fall was a piker compared to the Democrats like Clinton and Obama. The first Obama campaign turned off verification for credit card donations. The Palestinians and Saudis were appreciative. Clinton and Bush raised lots of money for the Haitians but the Haitians never saw it.

Kevin said...

"When your founder spends almost $40 million on politics, is that not necessarily out of excitement to do good and be regulated appropriately?"

Raimondo can drop that on breakfast.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

YouTube is now full of people telling stories about how SBF was a fraud.

Where were they when the fraud was riding high?

YouTube short

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Does “full faith and credit” extend to the “something” she’s looking for here? I’m not a lawyer.

Mismanagement speaks louder than donations and altruistic promises… at least so far.

See Trump secret docs mar-a-lago storage story for stuff difficult to explain away even for most ardent supporters.

robother said...

Alexandra Petri:
I kind of thought that not having any accounting, per se, was maybe a “crypto thing”? Like, if you know that you have someone’s money, and there is any record showing that you have it, then it’s not crypto anymore?

One might assume that is mere satire, but at the Bankruptcy Court:

The central issue Tuesday was whether FTX would be forced to expose the identities of those to whom it owes money. Lawyers for FTX even went so far as to say that exposing the creditors would “disincentivize participation in the case” and could make it harder for the company to recoup funds...

wildswan said...

From Silicon Valley to Silly Con: SB Hairy talks to WS Jumbo. "I've always been virtually broke but not really until the Regulators wanted Cash for Cover-Ups. I said, 'Don't you want your bribes to be invisible?' But they didn't, not that invisible, and they cleaned me out like taxpayer. Ironic, really. "

Bruce Hayden said...

“This guy and his mother and father engineered one of the biggest robberies on the planet and are now sitting in the Bahamas sunning it up in the penthouse of their multi-million-dollar real estate empire.”

“Where is the DoJ? Roaming the halls outside school board meetings looking for soccer moms to arrest”

A question was asked a couple days ago - why haven’t there been any arrests made yet by the FBI? The obvious answer is that the $40 million or so was bribe money to the Democrats to keep their hands off, and in today’s highly politicized DOJ and FBI, that means protection from those agencies. They see their job as destroying Trump and the MAGA movement, and not as going after the perps in multi billion dollar Ponzi schemes.

Lurker21 said...

"Satire" and "humor" come out now that SBF and FTX are officially designated hate objects, but if you were an FTX underling grumbling last month about "effective altruism" your grumbling would be like a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it.

gpm said...

>>Maxine Waters is hair of the finance committee

OK, intended or not, that was funny.

--gpm

Ray - SoCal said...

https://www.opensecrets.org/featured-datasets/49

$57 million Democrats

$22 Million GOP

By top 3 Exec at FTX

My gut feeling is there is more donations via dark money, supposedly “non partisan” Pacs.

Old and slow said...

The beauty of cryptocurrency political donations is that they needn't be public at all.