"Great story. I especially enjoy the moving of the three palm trees."

Texted Meade after I sent him "'It’s not leaving until they pay me': sculptor holds Trump statue hostage/Alan Cottrill created an 18ft bronze capturing the moment the president survived an assassination attempt. He says his patrons aren’t paying up" (London Times).

There's a lot going on in this story, but keep reading, you'll get to the palm trees:

"Several billion? That's peanuts for these guys."

Reporter: Do you intend to continue selling crypto products that benefit yourself while President?

Trump: I don’t know if it benefited. Where is it today?

Reporter: You made several billion dollars

Trump: That’s peanuts for these guys pic.twitter.com/eimGxhAZeA

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 21, 2025

ADDED: I asked Grok, "How is a politician's selling of meme coin different from selling tangible items like branded hats and coffee mugs?" and then "How is it the same?"

What would it take to get us to notice this once much-talked-about topic that had fallen entirely out of the news?

The topic is NFTs.

I'm reading "More Than 20 Report Burning Eyes After NFT Festival in Hong Kong/Bored Ape Yacht Club, the collective that hosted the three-day event, said it was investigating possible causes, including UV lights used at a party on Saturday night" (NYT)

"He wore what he always wore: a wrinkled T-shirt and cargo shorts. His bare knee jackhammered up and down at roughly four beats per second..."

"... while his eyes darted left and right and collided with his interviewers’ gaze only by chance. His general demeanor was that of a kid pretending to be interested when his parents hauled him into the living room to meet their friends. He’d done nothing to prepare, but the questions were so easy that it didn’t matter. Crypto Wunderkind, read the Bloomberg chyron, while the numbers on the left of the screen showed that, in just the past year, bitcoin’s price had risen by more than 500 percent. That first TV show Natalie watched from her own desk, but later, during future interviews, she’d walk around behind Sam to confirm that, yes, his eyes moved around so much because he was playing a video game. On live TV!"

Writes Michael Lewis, in "Play it again, Sam/Inside Bankman-Fried’s last year in the crypto game" (WaPo). 

It's a long article, and Lewis has a whole book: "Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon." — #CommissionsEarned.

"Often, on live TV, Sam would not only play a video game but respond to messages, edit documents and tweet. The TV interviewer would ask him a question and Sam would say, 'Ahhhh, interesting question' — even though he never found any of the questions interesting. And Natalie knew he was just buying time to exit whatever game he was playing and reenter the conversation. Natalie didn’t know how a person was supposed to behave on live television, but she suspected it wasn’t like this.... Sam was odd on TV, but he was also odd in real life.... She decided against media training — or anything that might make Sam seem less like Sam...."

"I have come to view cryptocurrencies not simply as exotic assets but as a manifestation of a magical thinking that had come to infect part of the generation..."

"... who grew up in the aftermath of the Great Recession — and American capitalism, more broadly. For these purposes, magical thinking is the assumption that favored conditions will continue on forever without regard for history. It is the minimizing of constraints and trade-offs in favor of techno-utopianism and the exclusive emphasis on positive outcomes and novelty. It is the conflation of virtue with commerce.... The fundamentals of business have not changed merely because of new technologies or low interest rates. The way to prosper is still by solving problems in new ways that sustainably deliver value to employees, capital providers and customers.... All those new investors and crypto owners may nurse a grudge against capitalism, rather than understand the perverse world they were born into.... Speculative assets without any economic function should be worth nothing...."

Writes Harvard law and business professor Mihir A. Desai, in "The Crypto Collapse and the End of the Magical Thinking That Infected Capitalism" (NYT).

"Anyone who thought there could possibly be a 6.5% riskless (or even low risk) return in 2022 conjures an old saying - 'a fool and his money.'"

"I feel sorry for them, but yet I'm not sympathetic. Some people took their life savings into a casino and bet it all. Jeez.... The fact that people are millions 'investing' in so called cryptocurrencies tells us that we have a woefully inadequate financially educated populace. Using real money to buy fake money has got to be the most obvious con in history. And yet here we are."

From the top-rated comment on "Ordinary Investors Who Jumped Into Crypto Are Saying: Now What?/Many small investors who piled into cryptocurrencies on FTX, BlockFi and other platforms are recognizing the perils of investing in an unregulated industry" (NYT).

The article begins with an anecdote about "a 43-year-old father of two [who] put $600,000 — much of his life savings — into an account at BlockFi" because it was "marketed... as risk free, yielding 6.5 percent interest, more than [he] could get anywhere else." 

As they say: If it's too good to be true, it probably is.

"At a moment when Congress is finally debating whether and how to seriously regulate the cryptocurrency industry, a split appears to have formed in the Democratic Party."

"Some of its lawmakers are contemplating how to harness blockchain technology into a force for innovation, while scaling back its early excesses. Then there’s a group you might call the 'bullshit caucus.' 'It’s all bullshit,' Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont. told Semafor.... 'Finally, there are more people blowing the bullshit whistle,' Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. said in a Wednesday interview. 'There's been a lot of lobbying around Congress and an effort to try to scare off lawmakers. To say "Oh, crypto is just so complicated. No one can understand it. Let the crypto world remain unregulated." That is precisely the argument that was made in the run-up to the 2008 crash.'"

Writes Joseph Zeballos-Roig (Semafor).

Cryptodeath.

The London Times reports: 

The death of a Russian billionaire in a helicopter crash in Monaco has prompted speculation over possible sabotage after the sudden deaths of two other cryptocurrency industry leaders in the past month. Vyacheslav Taran, 53, was killed when the helicopter he had chartered... hit a French hillside.... A week earlier Tiantian Kullander, 30, the founder of the Hong Kong-based Amber Group cryptocurrency company, died suddenly “in his sleep”....

"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).

"Sam literally said to me, ‘The only people I think I’d wear long pants for are Congress.'"

Said Andy Croghan — a colleague of Sam Bankman-Fried's — quoted in a May 2022 NYT article, "A Crypto Emperor’s Vision: No Pants, His Rules/Sam Bankman-Fried is a studiously disheveled billionaire who made a fortune overseeing trades that are too risky for the U.S. market. Now he wants Washington to follow his lead" (NYT).

Croghan was trying to get SBF to look more conventionally presentable. He says he said, "Sam, you’ve got to cut your hair, dude — it looks ridiculous." SBF retorted: "I honestly think it’s negative EV for me to cut my hair. I think it’s important for people to think I look crazy." 

When SBF did testify before Congress, he wore long pants and was more subtly weird by doing his shoe laces like this:

 

"[T]he crypto ecosystem has basically evolved into exactly what it was supposed to replace: a system of financial intermediaries whose ability to operate depends..."

"... on their perceived trustworthiness. In which case, what is the point? Why should an industry that at best has simply reinvented conventional banking have any fundamental value? Furthermore, trust in conventional financial institutions rests in part on validation by Uncle Sam: The government supervises banks, regulates the risks they can take and guarantees many deposits, while crypto operates largely without oversight. So investors must rely on the honesty and competence of entrepreneurs; when they offer exceptionally good deals, investors must believe not just in their competence but in their genius. How has that been working out?"

Writes Paul Krugman in "Is This the End Game for Crypto?" (NYT).

Comments need to address the substance of the argument.

"The Senate has trouble keeping up with things that lobbyists prefer the Senate not keep up with."

Said Elizabeth Warren, quoted in "Congress took millions from FTX. Now lawmakers face a crypto reckoning. The stunning collapse of the world’s third-largest exchange has forced politicians to grapple with the costs of legislative inaction" (WaPo).

Since January alone, cryptocurrency exchanges and their advocates have spent more than $14.8 million to influence regulators and lawmakers, according to lobbying data compiled by OpenSecrets. Bankman-Fried and other FTX leaders... also donated more than $70 million in the 2022 election, the analysis showed.

"A spreadsheet... references $5bn of withdrawals last Sunday, and a negative $8bn entry described as 'hidden, poorly internally labled "fiat@" account.'"

"Bankman-Fried told the Financial Times the $8bn related to funds 'accidentally' extended to his trading firm, Alameda, but declined to comment further. Earlier this week, he tweeted that FTX international had $4bn in easily tradeable assets when it faced Sunday’s $5bn surge of withdrawals. 'There were many things I wish I could do differently than I did, but the largest are represented by these two things: the poorly labeled internal bank-related acount [sic], and the size of customer withdrawals during a run on the bank,' the spreadsheet adds.... Healthy companies typically have assets that match or exceed their liabilities. The spreadsheet says FTX Trading had a total of $9.6bn of assets, but it is unclear how much of that value could be realised...."

 From "FTX held less than $1bn in liquid assets against $9bn in liabilities/Vast gap highlights the dire state of Sam Bankman-Fried’s exchange before it collapsed into bankruptcy" (Financial Times).

I don't normally blog about finance. It's kind of my least favorite topic, but I was intrigued by "'There were many things I wish I could do differently than I did....' the spreadsheet adds." 

I didn't know spreadsheets experienced regret. 

The "I" is, presumably, Bankman-Fried. Here's a BBC article about him, "The fall of the FTX ‘King of Crypto’ Sam Bankman-Fried":

"Zhu and Davies are two ambitious young men, by all descriptions exceedingly smart, who appeared to understand the structural opportunity of digital currency rather well..."

"... that crypto is a game of creating virtual fortunes out of thin air and convincing other humans with traditional forms of money that those virtual fortunes deserve to be real-world ones. They built social-media cred by playing the part of billionaire financial geniuses, translated that to actual financial credit, then put billions of dollars in borrowed money to work in speculative investments they could cheerlead to success with their large, influential platforms. Before you know it, the pretend billionaire is a real billionaire shopping for super-yachts. They grokked the game, and the plan worked perfectly — until it didn’t."

From "The Crypto Geniuses Who Vaporized a Trillion Dollars/Everyone trusted the two guys at Three Arrows Capital. They knew what they were doing — right?" (NY Magazine).

ADDED: I haven't seen "grok" in a while.  That's a word coined in 1961 by Robert Heinlein in "Stranger in a Strange Land." It's not based on any other word, just, as the OED puts it, an "arbitrary formation."

"The question is whether Musk’s attempted jilting of Twitter is just one more sideshow on a general path to business glory or evidence that he’s immolating..."

"... like one of those Starship prototypes. So far, his 2022 has included multiple accusations of racial discrimination from employees; a resurfaced sexual-harassment allegation from a SpaceX flight attendant; the recall of nearly 600,000 Tesla vehicles; animal-cruelty complaints against Neuralink; the discovery of three publicly unacknowledged children; and a Wall Street Journal claim that [blah blah blah].... None of these scandals hung around for long enough to inflict much damage in part because he tweeted right through them, creating an endless diversion. Lately, there seems to be something purposeful about how Musk tweets the news, muscling his way into trending topics like a one-man bot farm. A tag cloud for one of his slower weeks may include climate, COVID, free speech, the 2024 election, abortion, gun control, the Russia-Ukraine war, UFOs, crypto, Elden Ring, the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard trial, and more. He has spread himself through every cultural jurisdiction so that he’s always the top story no matter which news bubble you’re in...."

From "What Is Elon Musk? And how is it possible that he could emerge from his Twitter debacle more culturally dominant than ever?" by Lane Brown (NY Magazine).

I love the illustration, by Cold War Steve. Please click through to see the whole image. I will share only a small part, less than 20% of what's there, but including some of my favorite parts, such as the word "shorts" (part of "Crypto Shorts" in the full image) and Trump in ("sexy" shorts):

 

"Bankman-Fried is an adherent of Effective Altruism, a utilitarian philosophy which promotes ideas like earning lots of money in order to give it all away."

"He went into finance and started donating large portions of his paychecks long before he made his first billion and still lives fairly modestly, with roommates and a Toyota Corolla, with a stated goal of giving away the vast majority of his fortune as he makes it. Critics, however, question the motives behind Bankman-Fried’s increasing involvement in politics, noting that the crypto industry has been stepping up its lobbying in Washington as lawmakers and regulators look to apply new rules to the largely unregulated industry that has likely destroyed more fortunes than it has made. He’s one of several crypto donors who have started spending large amounts of money in politics seemingly out of nowhere, just as the industry comes under scrutiny."

From "Crypto billionaire says he could spend a record-breaking $1 billion in 2024 election/Democratic cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried says he expects to spend 'north of $100 million' in 2024, with 'soft ceiling' of $1 billion" (NBC News).

Roommates!

"Now, after the leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, entrepreneurs and activists are floating ideas for an abortion-focused DAO."

"They see it as a way to provide money to women in more than two dozen states where abortion services may soon be severely restricted or banned — a kind of 'Underground Railroad for abortion,' as Reshma Saujani, the founder of Girls Who Code and a host of the 'De-Broing Crypto' podcast, put it in an interview."

I'm trying to read this (in the NYT): 

 

"DAO" means decentralized autonomous organization, and "broing" doesn't rhyme with "boing," but with "Boeing." Yes, a hyphen would help — "bro-ing" — but they wanted the prefix "de-," so the helpful hyphen would give us "de-bro-ing," so presumably that's why the decided against it. 

Anyway, I'm not enough of a fan of de-bro-i-fication to put effort into understanding crypto. I just want to say that it's silly to personify "crypto" and portray it as "joining" something called "the abortion conversation." That whole conceptualization sounds creepy to me — and I proudly own the femininity of my reaction.

Here's another feminine and completely non-bro-y reaction: I don't like the new logo-ization of the female reproductive organs. It looks like an elephant, that inclusion of the ovaries, fallopian tubes, and the vagina. Is the uterus alone too hard to recognize?

The only other thing I'd like to mention is the phrase "a kind of 'Underground Railroad for abortion.'" This isn't the first place I'm seeing the idea to be deprived of access to abortion is slavery. Is it okay — is it good — to equate present-day demands for rights to the 19th-century struggle to abolish slavery? Is it accurate? Is it moral? Is it effective political speech? I would say no to all those questions, and I have always supported a woman's sovereignty over her own body and the consequent right to access to abortion. 

ADDED: The idea of crypto participating in a conversation is a variation on the old trope "money talks."

ALSO: To state what ought to be obvious, fugitive slaves had to hide. They could not legally leave their bondage, and even if they got to a "free" state, they could be captured and, under the law, returned to their owners. If abortion becomes illegal in your state, you don't lose your right to travel. You can openly travel to another state and get an abortion. Your path is completely above ground. Yes, it's more troublesome and expensive. But don't overdramatize. It's as bad as it is but no worse than it is. You are not in the position of a slave, and you should not want to diminish the cruelty of slavery by portraying yourself in that light.

"The Limestone mine operates day and night, growing louder at night and on weekends when bitcoin’s electricity-hungry computers can take advantage of down time and lower prices on the electricity grid and ramp up their algorithmic-solving power...."

"Appalachia, with its cheap electricity from coal, natural gas and hydro, was already attractive to bitcoin miners when China, which dominated world production, cracked down on such operations last summer, worried about the volatility of digital currencies.... [R]esidents in areas that initially welcomed crypto mining are now experiencing buyer’s remorse.... Craig Ponder, pastor at the New Salem Baptist Church... compared the noise to the jet engines he heard while serving in the military. He said that the noise can make it difficult for congregants to chat with each other in the parking lot after services.... 'In a rural environment, you have a very low ambient noise level anyway, so you walk outside and a creek is gurgling, birds are chirping, but there is not a lot of man-made noise. Once you take some of these bitcoin mining facilities, the noise carries, there is nothing to hide it or mask it,' [said a sound mitigation expert].... 'This is an industry that is on fire now, and a lot of people may not have known the noise the machines make; there are a lot of inexperienced people coming into the industry, and they are causing issues,' said [John Warren, the chief executive of GEM Mining, which owns 32,000 bitcoin miners]."

From "An Appalachian town was told a bitcoin mine would bring an economic boom. It got noise pollution and an eyesore. Supporters of the crypto plant promised an expanded tax base and job creation. What residents say they got was the constant din from massive computers and equally massive cooling fans" (WaPo).

This article is mainly about how noisy the "mine" is. There's a bit about how bad it looks — "like a German POW camp," according to a commissioner who regrets voting for it. I don't know why an article that's so negative about a business doesn't mention climate change. I mean, I can easily find other articles on this subject, but isn't global warming routinely shoehorned into news articles? It's strange to see it bypassed here. Did I miss a reference? 

Anyway, the noise problem is very sad, and the climate change issue is well represented in the comments section over there. Example: "And the environmental costs are astounding. I can't believe we're getting into this kind of thing when we're trying to cut back our environmental footprint. Crypto is a climate change villain, without offering anything back."