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Yes, I maintain that it's a peculiar element of Jewish culture, although definitely not some exclusive behavioral pattern.
You're missing the nuance, it seems. Most of the fraud I've seen in my life has been perpetrated by Eastern Slavs, whether in cooperation with other peoples or not. Spanish picaresca is an indisputably Gentile genre. Recently, I've enjoyed watching one Lupin the 3rd movie (sans the leftie moral lesson of «let's punch Nazis and, crucially, break overpowered alien artifacts promising infinite clean energy, yay*), a Japanese take on a French trickster archetype. The Chinese are stereotyped as untrustworthy, which I guess makes CZ only more remarkable. And so it goes.
But fraudsters, tricksters, scammers and chutzpahmancers are qualitatively different. Maybe it's a matter of Bell curves or indeed, verbal tilt. The thing is, chutzpah, at least the kind I talk about here, the hugely consequential kind, looks like this. It's not mere trickery but an unmistakable flavor of in-your-face narcissism and layers upon layers of galaxy brain plotting, the flashy but ultimately degenerate mixture of high and low traits, especially in positions of authority, responsibility and power where people don't expect to see it these days. Or indeed, like TheDag reminds us, consider Adam Neumann. What does one call this nonsense if not chutzpah?
And as for relative trustworthiness of Russians and Chinese: on average, we might not be better. And if I see a Gentile who gets hyped like «SBF», I'll be suspicious. But this very hyping – all this «ultra genius» and «savior» – is not normal and not something Russians and Chinese do. Vitalik is, far as I can tell, a bona fide visionary who didn't simply want to cash in on the crypto craze, and he's rather humble for how grandiose his vision is. CZ is a rogue with low time preference and mild libertarian politics, and he offers a contract I can believe and get behind.
Not so with FTX and Alameda. Accordingly, I have never touched their shit and am very happy for it, although they've still managed to hurt my capital by setting the market in general on fire.
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