Sitting across from Bankman-Fried and listening to him talk about effective altruism, I couldn’t help thinking that pushing people to gamble seemed at odds with his pledge to have a positive impact on the world. Bankman-Fried was a sophisticated trader, and he acknowledged to me that many cryptocurrencies had unsustainably high prices, and that some were scams. But here he was, telling regular people to drop what they were doing, open an FTX account, and start clicking buy. “Aren’t you leading people to probably not do that well financially?” I asked. Bankman-Fried, unconvincingly, tried to
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