Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis

He looked less like a crypto tycoon than a first grader who needed to pee.

What were the odds of a mathematically gifted kid in the middle of Silicon Valley in the early 2000s not picking up The Fountainhead and finding his inner life inside?

He hated the way inherently probabilistic situations would be interpreted, after the fact, as having been black-and-white, or good and bad, or right and wrong. So much of what made his approach to life different from most people’s was his willingness to assign probabilities and act on them, and his refusal to be swayed by any after-the-fact illusion that the world had been more knowable than it actually was.

Life’s uncertainties often made a mockery of a probabilistic approach, but in Sam’s view there was really no other approach to take.

It was at once a plea for sound money and an appeal to mistrust. It was both financial innovation and social protest. Crypto was like the friend you’d made only because you shared an enemy.

The sort of person drawn to it, at least in the beginning, was the sort of person suspicious of big banks and governments and other forms of institutional authority.

How did everyone’s actions reflect on the probability distribution of their future behavior. The sentence told you a lot about how Sam viewed other people, and maybe himself too. Not as fixed characters—good or bad, honest or false, brave or cowardly—but as a probability distribution around some mean. People were neither the worst nor the best thing they’d ever done.