That’s what Bitcoins are—numbers in a spreadsheet. There is nothing else. Without the spreadsheet, the Bitcoins don’t exist.

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.

Big Stores could take in as much as $100,000 at a time—a huge sum back then. Top practitioners became famous, like Joseph “Yellow Kid” Weil. “I have never cheated any honest men, only rascals,” Weil once told the writer Saul Bellow. “They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something.”

“These people are unbelievable the way they dress,” he said. “I’m here in a Brioni, these guys are in Lululemon pants. These guys are moving into the future. These are some of the worst-dressed people I ever met in my life.”

this means that I believe the right action is the one that maximizes total ‘utility’ in the world (you can think of that as total happiness minus total pain).”

The next section explains how this works exactly, and I promise I’ll do my best to keep it interesting, but you can skip it if you want—you are now an expert on Bitcoin and the blockchain.

From the beginning, I thought that crypto was pretty dumb. And it turned out to be even dumber than I imagined.

The heist helped Kim Jong Un pay for test launches of ballistic missiles, according to U.S. officials. Instead of providing a new way for poor people to earn cash, Axie Infinity funneled their savings to a dictator’s weapons program.

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it,” the programmer, Alberto Brandolini, wrote in 2013.