> It's incredible that SBF was being touted by Sequoia, WEF, Fortune, chumming it up with Clinton and Blair in the Bahamas, getting meetings and kid glove treatment with the SEC, relatively glowing profile as a "do-gooder" by the NYT.

That's the real story here.

I transcribed a discussion between Chamath Palihapitiya and Brian Armstrong and others talking about this. Here's what he was saying about all these people who've been very blind and didn't do any due diligence:

"I just want to say the second uncomfortable thing out loud which is there are a lot of venture firms in SV in this period of both not doing any work or due diligence who also took the extra step and actually created classes and teached teams how to create these tokens.

And those artifacts --those video links and artifacts-- are sometimes on their website, they're still on YouTube, they're inside of Twitter, and what these folds would do when we talked about this, the game that they played was they would get a team they would create a token, they would also buy equity at a crazy valuation, the equity was locked up but the tokens were not, and then they would put them on an exchange and sell them to unsuspecting people and they would be able to dump these tokens and if you look inside that trend those were the trend of "securities" instead it was done in an unregulated way.

They're going to start to look at a bunch of other tokens and token sales
and you're going to end up looking at some very well known venture firms in
silicon valley.

That token is not the only token that's been engineered by SV firms and it is
also no the only token that's going to zero that's been engineered by SV venture
firms site.

There's videos (still) today on some of the most well-known Venture firm sites
on how to do this.

They're instructing people how to do this. It's what they did.

but I really also hope they figure out these other tokens as well ...
... and you will see these are unregulated securities that were sold
by our brethren..."

It is, to me, about much more than "cryptocurrencies are scam".

Many in SV are deep into this. There are officials and ex- officials implicated too.

People have been dumping worthless tokens created by the tens or hundreds on people all the while the media were presenting SBF as an altruistic trustable white knight.

That's the real story here.

Complete with SBF being the biggest or second biggest donor to Biden's campain for presidency though a fund which SBF's mom (a lawyer and teacher at Stanford) was running. And SBF's father, also a lawyer and teacher at Stanford, recorded explaining how he's helping FTX with charity and regulations.

> Crypto turned into a haven for replaying every form of financial fraud ever invented on an epic speedrun against retail "investors", and a whole lot of powerful people and institutions have dirty hands. The idea all of this could be adequately explained by stupidity rather than malice strains credulity.

Exactly. I'm glad some at least this for what it actually is.

Thankfully some people warned and described the very scam SBF was pulling the day FTX launched (in 2018 ?). Before that several had already noticed Alameda Research was behind crypto market manipulation and pump and dumps of shitcoins.

The signs were all out there and nobody looked.