Sam Bankman-Fried and Matt Levine on How to Make Money in Crypto | Odd Lots

Matt Huang, a prominent investor, spoke for many crypto fans when he said on Twitter: “Crypto may look like a speculative casino from the outside. But that distracts many from the deeper truth: the casino is a trojan horse with a new financial system hidden inside.”

It’s not quite a pyramid scheme or ponzi, but it’s darn close. The only way everyone keeps making money is if other people keep putting more money into the system, which either requires more people or deeper pockets from existing people.

For all the talk about how crypto is changing the world, the vast majority of token-based projects are short term games that structurally devolve into glorified pyramid schemes. Inflated expectations lead to the classic boom-bust cycle where speculative intent runs ahead of reality, and eventually, it all falls down.

For a technology that’s billed as an architecture of the future, crypto is powered by a discourse that’s rooted in the past. Perhaps that’s why so few cryptocurrency-based, Web3-style projects meaningfully address big, future-facing problems. Instead, they seem to want to re-create financial structures that already exist, only with new people at th... See more