Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

lenders were so desperate to make loans that they asked for almost no proof that Three Arrows would be able to pay. “One of the last calls we did someone lent me almost a billion, off a phone call,” he said. “That was uncollateralized. That’s where the system was. People needed to get dollars out the door.”

As one New York Times headline put it in January 2018, “Everyone Is Getting Hilariously Rich and You’re Not.”

By some estimates, Bitcoin mining consumed as much energy as the entire country of Argentina, population 46 million.

Over years of investigating sketchy people in the world of finance, I’d developed a rule of thumb: Scammers rarely changed their ways. If I could find evidence that someone had been dishonest in the past, there were good odds that their current venture would turn out to be fraudulent too.

Bankman-Fried cut me off, nodding, as I tried to explain more. His tone turned chipper. He said: “It’s like the narrative would be way sexier if it was like, ‘Holy shit, this is the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme,’ right?” Right.

As one person famously put it on Twitter, “Imagine if keeping your car idling 24/7 produced solved Sudokus you could trade for heroin.”

SCAMMING WAS THE one industry where the blockchain was living up to the limitless potential touted by crypto bros.

Banks face the same conflict. They profit by investing customers’ deposits. But their deposits are insured; they have regulators to keep them in check.

“You start with a company that builds a box,” Bankman-Fried said. “They probably dress it up to look like a life-changing, you know, world-altering protocol that’s gonna replace all the big banks in thirty-eight days or whatever. Maybe for now actually ignore what it does, or pretend it does literally nothing.” Bankman-Fried explained that it would