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Notes -
Am now 46% of the way through the book and increasingly frustrated, because Lewis is so far up Bankman-Fried's backside. He pretty much describes Bankman-Fried deciding at this point (after the four co-founders leave) that he's going to keep lying to people to get them to stop criticising him because they now think he likes them, and Lewis writes about this as if its some amazing stroke of psychology by a genius who can read other people like open books but who they just can't understand with their puny little brains.
No, guy, the way to get people to trust you is to stop lying and being a deceitful shit, not to double down on it! Everything that happens from now on is inevitable thanks to Bankman-Fried having an inflated ego, no shred of scruples, and treating reality as if it's some kind of video game, but Lewis is still slobbering over his shoes about how poor Sammy-boy is just too pure for this fallen world.
I want to hit somebody. Everybody involved, except the EAs who got burned by Sammy-boy being a cheating no-good lying deceiver and got out early, and double the beating for Lewis.
EDIT: Even with all that being said, the book is still informative. Bankman-Fried's edge was that he got in first, but of course eventually the big boys followed and he couldn't compete with their own clout and resources, so he had to keep finding new ways to finagle the markets. He started off with the Kimchi Premium, but once that hole was plugged he had to find a new way to keep making the fast cash and he did that first with setting up Alameda Research for crypto trading, then as the big players in Wall Street trading became interested in this new money machine market and moved in, he created his own crypto exchange and token. So he survived and kept piling up the profits by jumping on to a new element of the market before the big guys moved in and took over, but naturally that couldn't last forever - FTX/Alameda Trading was just too small, never mind that they were (allegedly) making billions. That's why he was cosying up to Binance, and why CZ decided that if this was a good idea for Bankman-Fried, he'd turn down any alliance and do the same thing himself as a copy-cat.
EDIT: Three-quarters of the way through and it gets a lot better as we get into the meat of the collapse - basically because Bankman-Fried was a lying liar who never told anyone anything, refused to actually manage, dumped responsibility without information onto others and when it all came crashing down tried to displace the blame onto everyone else with his version of "I know nothing, it wasn't me". Even Lewis has to admit that his plan to resurrect FTX was stupid and unworkable, and that he was to blame because in the end he doesn't care about other people or see them as quite real, but Lewis still is convinced that the money wasn't really stolen or what have you, it's all mysteriously still there somehow in cyberspace, or maybe down the back of the sofa, if everyone just looks hard enough for it.
EDIT EDIT: Have just got to the part where John Ray appears and oh man, he's wonderful 😁 I don't care if Lewis thinks he has it in for Sammy-boy, finally there's an adult in the room!
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