The SBF trial is a reminder that crypto is a rotten business

IF YOU haven’t heard that financial storyteller extraordinaire Michael Lewis has a new book out, on the rise and fall of crypto exchange FTX founder and alleged fraudster extraordinaire Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), then you probably don’t spend an awful lot of time on the Internet. Well done, you. 

Those of you who do will know that Lewis has been generating almost as much controversy as the alleged criminal himself over the past week. But it wasn’t so much the book – the publication of which was timed to coincide with the beginning of SBF’s trial – that provoked the outrage; it was a clip from an interview Lewis gave on CBS’s 60 Minutes that was really getting people riled up. I was one of those people.

“This isn’t a Ponzi scheme,” he tells host Jon Wertheim in the short video. “In this case, they actually had a great, real business. If no one had ever cast aspersions on the business, if there hadn’t been a run on customer deposits, they’d still be sitting there making tons of money.”