Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall

by Zeke Faux

One group of researchers would later estimate that 80 percent of ICOs were fraudulent.

Later in the morning, the writer Michael Lewis took the stage to interview Bankman-Fried and a crypto venture capitalist. I’d grown up reading his books, like Liar’s Poker and The Big Short, and I was excited to hear what the guy who taught me how Wall Street blew up the world economy with collateralized debt obligations thought about crypto. Bankman-Fried was going to be the subject of his next book, I’d heard. Lewis looked like a prep school headmaster, wearing a blue blazer with peak lapels and a white button-down with blue accents, his floppy hair parted perfectly to the side. And as he started lavishing Bankman-Fried with praise, he sounded as if he was presenting a prize to his star pupil.

It reminded me of a maxim called the “bullshit asymmetry principle,” coined by an Italian programmer. He was describing the challenge of debunking falsehoods in the internet age. “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.

He and his co-founder had saved enough money that they’d never need to work again. The real losers were the regular people who trusted their savings to Celsius’s Mashinsky or Terra-Luna’s Kwon.

In other words, an alumnus of both MIT and the elite Wall Street trading firm Jane Street was arguing that he was just dumb with the numbers—not pulling a conscious fraud.