Molly Jane Zuckerman

Just last month, at a crypto happy hour, I struck up a conversation with another attendee — it turns out our families were originally from the same part of Eastern Europe, and we had both made pilgrimages to our separate ancestral villages, looking for family history.



But in the middle of my sentence about finding my great-great-grandfather’s gravestone in a small town in Romania, he quite literally held up a hand to stop me —&nbsp; “Wait, we’re not talking about crypto, and we’re at a crypto party. Also, I can’t make any sales to you, you’re a journalist.”&nbsp;



And he walked away.



The crypto industry is at times quite proud of its lack of intellectualism. And the poster boy for this anti-literary movement is none other than Sam Bankman-Fried, who once infamously <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https:/www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/">declared</a>, “I would never read a book.”



I don’t care what anyone on Twitter thinks about liberal arts degrees. I don’t care about your data on what type of college major gets you a better (read: higher paying) job later on. I don’t care about any empirical arguments you may have on why fewer English majors are better for society.



Because all of <a href="https://twitter.com/KTmBoyle/status/1659943789337640960">that</a> is wrong.&nbsp;



It’s not frivolous to want to spend your college years reading literature for the sake of knowledge alone.&nbsp;



Crypto needs more thinkers, not less.&nbsp;



So in my past five years working in cryptocurrency, I’ve found a way to quickly take the cultural and intellectual temperature of each new company I join by making everyone play the world’s simplest ice breaker: tell me your name, where you’re from, and your favorite book.



On one such first day, I felt a physical sensation of creeping disappointment as the answers started coming in. Of the roughly 15 people, I got about half “I haven’t read a book since high school,” several Malcolm Gladwells, one The Art of War, and the rest were Harry Potter. And these were adults!&nbsp;



That company ended up being closed-minded, unimaginative, and has now significantly fallen behind the rest of the market. And I do actually believe that if anyone at that company had read books, or been willing to read books, it would have made a better product.



I’ve had this argument that “readers succeed” in my head for a long time now, way before any <a href="https://twitter.com/KTmBoyle/status/1659943789337640960">liberal arts Crypto Twitter controversy</a>. I’ve gotten into plenty of heated debates at crypto events whenever I hear people espouse the importance of only studying the hard sciences to get ahead, or to only read these godawful, dry non-fiction books to succeed better in business.&nbsp;



I’m not saying that every non-reader is going to end up with the same fate as Sam Bankman-Fried (although I’d like to point out that another “proud non-reader of books” is one Kanye West). But what I have noticed in my years in this tech-based sector, without fail, is that when my colleagues (or my bosses, or my bosses’ bosses) read novels, the company was better.&nbsp;



The working environment was better, the products were better, everything was just better.



This idea of needing to be a reader in order to succeed in business is not new. In the early 2000s, there was even a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/business/10shakespeare.html">movement</a> going around to teach Shakespeare to CEOs (I tried to bring this idea to that above-mentioned company to boost their imaginations a little bit above zero, but I was shot down).



I firmly believe that our society — and particularly the crypto industry —&nbsp;needs to encourage reading, not push it further away.&nbsp;



Don’t mention The Bitcoin Standard to me if I bring up books in our crypto party small talk: I want to hear what murder mystery you’re hooked on, or what Penguin Classic you’re revisiting. Work your way through the New York Times bestseller list, read Colleen Hoover or the Bridgerton series for all I care, but just read something real.



There is no substitute for what reading literature can teach you about humanity. If you can stomach learning something from crypto’s favorite love-to-hate-em Jamie Dimon, his sense of betrayal on being fired from his big Citigroup job by a father-figure boss was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/10/business/10shakespeare.html">made more comprehensible</a> when he saw an uncanny similarity to the plot of Shakespear’s King Lear.&nbsp;&nbsp;



If we look around — at the many crypto companies collapsing, at AI already beginning to take over some jobs, at the world economy in general —&nbsp;perhaps we’ll realize it is liberal arts degrees that are the only ones worth actually pursuing.&nbsp;



If your engineering job in crypto could be replaced tomorrow by an AI robot, you might really start kicking yourself for choosing your college degree solely based on what the prevailing concept at the time was for a “safe” major.



And if you spend your free time doomscrolling Crypto Twitter, pitching people at crypto happy hours or (god forbid) reading The Network State on your Kindle, stop what you’re doing right now.



There are very few people in the world who, on their deathbeds, confess in a rattling last gasp that they wish that they had read less and worked more (with the exception of Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock, a satire).&nbsp;



To even frame the idea of reading for pleasure —&nbsp;or as it has been put, <a href="https://twitter.com/KTmBoyle/status/1659943789337640960">a Book Club major</a> —&nbsp;as something bad or good for your work life is entirely wrong. The framework itself is wrong.



Don’t let the world convince you that reading is out of style.



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<div class="wp-block-post-author-biography">Molly Jane Zuckerman is the opinion editor at Blockworks. She previously led educational content at CoinMarketCap and ran the news desk at Cointelegraph. Molly Jane is now based in New York after almost a decade in Russia, and can talk your ear off about Russia lit and detective novels. Contact Molly Jane: molly@blockworks.co</div>


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Dear Crypto: Read a Book Already

Yes, you’re tired of Sam Bankman-Fried. You’ve heard his name so much that it’s become meaningless.&nbsp;



The initials start to blend into each other —&nbsp;SBF, FTX, STX, FBF.



You may think that to truly understand what went wrong with FTX, you need to go back to when Sam Bankman-Fried started FTX.&nbsp;



Or if you know a little bit more about crypto, you may think that the real story actually begins with Sam Bankman-Fried starting Alameda Research, the trading company that came before FTX.



You’d be wrong.&nbsp;



To fully understand FTX’s spectacular rise and disastrous fall, you need to actually go back to the true beginning, to the invention of cryptocurrency itself.



At least, that’s what Brady Dale thinks.



In his book, “How the FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto’s Very Bad Good Guy,” Dale tells the story of FTX starting at the very, very, very beginning of the entire cryptocurrency movement. It’s the equivalent of someone asking you where you’re from, and your reply being “Oh, well my great-great-great-grandparents were reptiles living in what was then called Mesopotamia [&#8230;] and now I live in Brooklyn.”&nbsp;



This joke will be much funnier once you actually read Dale’s book, because he has a clear fondness for increasingly insane similes like…&nbsp;



The cryptocurrency market in 2018 froze up like a Hell’s Angel wandering into a tea party for 7th-grade-suburban girls.



Governance tokens were like acne in 2020, and DeFi was like a teenage boy who would only drink Dr. Pepper.



Or my personal favorite.



SBF was fond of repeating the phrase “I fucked up,” which would be tantamount to Grigori Rasputin going on TikTok to admit he could have done a better job of considering the best interests of the people around him.



The book chronicles the history of cryptocurrency, beginning with the invention of Bitcoin in 2009. Throughout the text, Dale directly addresses the reader (in a manner best left to Jane Eyre), as he recounts SBF&#8217;s history in the crypto markets. We are taken on a journey from his risky Asian arbitrage trades in 2017 to his emergence into the spotlight during the DeFi summer of 2020 and his eventual confirmation as crypto&#8217;s golden boy at FTX.



I will say that while the book does technically begin with the advent of Bitcoin, it does not try to explain blockchain technology to you. In fact, a section entitled “How Bitcoin Works” has one of my very favorite explanations to date; one that I will use whenever anyone ever asks me again.



Honestly, it doesn’t matter. Not for you. Not for me, either. You know how sometimes when you make a phone call the sound is terrible, but then if you hang up and try again, it’s fine. Why does it do that? Do you know? Someone does. I don’t. I bet you don’t, either. And neither of us care.



However, don’t let this fool you into thinking that this book is not crypto technical. Dale actually goes into exhaustive detail about DeFi systems and how they work (using his many similes). In fact, he takes it to the point where I feel confident that any grandmother could successfully rug an automated market maker after reading.



<h2>‘Drowning in Sam’</h2>



With Sam himself playing an outsized role in the narrative after FTX’s collapse —&nbsp;I can’t even count how many media appearances/Twitter Spaces SBF had from November up until his December arrest, and Dale doesn’t even try to — Dale’s introduction notes that he is quite literally “drowning in Sam.” A sentiment that likely rings true for anyone who followed the FTX story closely.&nbsp;



One facet of Sam&#8217;s legacy is that he shared more online than any other executive in the history of public company meltdowns. Even so, Dale’s book is still able to confirm a few morsels of information that had only been hinted at back in SBF’s November chaos.



Lingering questions such as, who were those unnamed mythical investors that SBF often cited as being ready to lend enough money to make FTX whole if only he hadn’t, “stupidly,” signed away the company by filing for bankruptcy? Tron’s Justin Sun had been one of the rumored investors —&nbsp;and Dale confirms this through Sam in his book.



Some of Dale’s major points — when he isn’t explaining how DeFi works with his droll similes — also cause you to stop and reexamine what SBF actually did, as opposed to what people thought that he did.&nbsp;



Take the famous Matt Levine interview where Sam waxed poetic about the “black box” of DeFi. Dale makes me think that we maybe really did interpret Sam’s point totally, utterly incorrectly: that his black box was meant to be purely rhetorical, and a poorly timed interruption by Levine may have derailed Sams’ explanation into a literal hyperbole he didn’t really mean to say.



I also now (kind of) know what effective altruism (EA) really is. Before this book (and to some extent, even after this book), it seemed like EA was just a fancy way of explaining why a person might donate to charity. But Dale —&nbsp;perhaps because he dabbled in the EA movement himself — really underlines exactly how EA advocates try to reframe questions about the world differently. A true EA believer, as Dale writes, tries to answer every question by being “less wrong” after gathering as much evidence as possible, but also knows that it’s impossible to ever be fully “right.”



Although understanding effective altruism does not provide an explanation for SBF&#8217;s many stupid decisions, it does give the impression that his actions were initially driven by a method to his madness.



Even in a world that makes you literally “drown in Sam,” what you won’t find is this book paying lip service to any of the salacious rumors that swirled during last winter’s SBF media coverage. This book is certainly not a tabloid. Don&#8217;t expect to find any mention, not even a hint, that SBF and Alameda ex-CEO <a href="https://blockworks.co/news/ftx-alameda-execs-plead-guilty-to-fraud-released-on-bail" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Caroline Ellison</a> engaged in an alleged on-again, off-again relationship. Nor of the duo&#8217;s <a href="https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/10/bankman-frieds-cabal-of-roommates-in-the-bahamas-ran-his-crypto-empire-and-dated-other-employees-have-lots-of-questions/">rumored</a> participation in the FTX penthouse&#8217;s &#8220;polycule&#8221; dating circle.



You also won’t finish this book knowing much more about Sam’s upbringing; there are no touching childhood memories tinged with 20-20 hindsight that fully explain why SBF became so risk-happy in his adult years. Besides Dale’s chapter defining SBF as a “geek with a swagger,” Sam simply appears fully-formed one day, working at Jane Street trading.



While I understand why Dale chooses not to dwell on the involvement of other top execs like Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang, Nishad Singh or Sam Trabucco in FTX’s demise —&nbsp;he thinks that the responsibility for the whole mess comes down to Sam alone — I believe that there are still some untold stories out there for the next SBF book. One about the group of “kids” who ran the Hong Kong (and later Bahamian) FTX offices alongside these incompetent C-suite execs.



But let’s go back to the promise of Dale’s book, dear reader, which was to explain exactly how FTX’s collapse unraveled the cult of Sam Bankman-Fried. There is no doubt that this has most definitely been explained. If you want to truly understand how the cryptocurrency industry allowed an enterprise like FTX to thrive, and a “hero” like Sam Bankman-Fried to rise, then this is the book for you.



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<div class="wp-block-post-author-biography">Molly Jane Zuckerman is the opinion editor at Blockworks. She previously led educational content at CoinMarketCap and ran the news desk at Cointelegraph. Molly Jane is now based in New York after almost a decade in Russia, and can talk your ear off about Russia lit and detective novels. Contact Molly Jane: molly@blockworks.co</div>


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