 numbers. Some crypto assets give investors rights over their underlying technology but many do not. Dogecoin was literally set up as a joke. Indeed, there have been at least three twists in the prevailing narratives about crypto assets. The first was that they could be used as a way of making practically frictionless payments. This tale was, however, somewhat undermined by the huge volatility in their value. A computer programmer called Laszlo Hanyecz famously paid for two pizzas with 10,000 bitcoins a few years ago. Despite bitcoin's recent fall in value, that means those pizzas cost Hanyecz the equivalent of more than $166m today. The second tale suggested crypto asse){kind=link}
The narratives peddled by cryptocurrency proponents were ultimately a work of fiction
Well, at least some good will come out of the FTX debacle and the latest crypto collapso.
Michael Lewis, the author of The Big Short, Liar’s Poker and Flash Boys, has been shadowing Sam Bankman-Fried, the now humbled founder of collapsed crypto exchange, for the last six months.
The resultant book may now have a different ending but it will now doubt be a better read for the drama of the last week.
Just a few short days ago, Bankman-Fried was being talked about as a modern-day JP Morgan and the king of cryptoland. FTX had stepped in to prop up a whole raft of tottering crypto-projects. As recently as June, the Economist described Bankman-Fried as: “Crypto’s last man standing.”