Are we allowed to talk about Bitcoin?

They got in over their heads on a highly leveraged bet, interest rates rose and it put an end to the party. They then committed the cardinal sin of trying to fix it with money from segregated customer accounts, and they made bad into worse. It's that simple.

I'm going to regret posting this, because the kooky tribal politics some people obsess over has zero to do with what is happening. But Sam Bankman-Fried funnelled close to $40 million dollars to Democratic Party candidates during the election cycle, and two of his deputies at FTX donated another $29 million. He was the second-biggest donor to Democrats after George Soros. His money had been buying him a seat at the table as the idiots in Congress were talking about "regulating" something they don't even understand. As it has gone on, he has been their go-to crypto guy. He was trying to buy "regulation" that was going to benefit him (and hurt others). Whatever reputation he had was built on the checks he was writing. I am sure nobody is returning his phone calls today in his hour of need.

 

Blockchain technology definitely has future applications, it's just that it is going to take time for people to work it out for themselves. Bitcoin, as the original token, very well may have value. I just can't tell you what that fair value is today, let alone what it is going to be in an uncertain future. Same with Ethereum, for its network and for its ability to store computer code.

There is going to be stronger and stronger appetite for tamper-proof decentralized financial options. These things turned into speculative bubbles. ... but those tokens are probably not just magic beans.

I look at it this way. ... in the 1990s, heading into the dot-com crash, the valuations of a lot of companies (that just slapped dot-com on their name or were investing in fiber optic technology, burgeoning e-commerce protocols and other related things) went into batshit insane territory. Many of those companies borrowed heavily in a cheap money environment for its time and didn't survive. The fact that a lot of people lost a lot of money because they got caught up in a mania didn't mean that e-commerce itself wasn't coming in our future. They weren't investing in magic beans. It was more that they were way ahead of themselves (there was some stupidity, of course; cheap money creates malinvestment) and how e-commerce was going to play out was still a work in progress. The thesis wasn't that bad. The timing and many of the details was what was bad.