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October 2 - October 4, 2023
“Jane Street never fired people,” said Sam. “It was cheaper to pay them to do nothing than to allow them to take trades to a competitor.”
“To truly be thankful, you have to have felt it in your heart, in your stomach, in your head—the rush of pleasure, of kinship, of gratitude,”
He thought of himself as a thinking machine rather than a feeling one.
that a person should judge his life by its consequences. MacAskill had made those consequences both dramatic and quantifiable:
If firms like Virtu and Citadel were playing a speed game, firms like Jane Street were playing a brain game.
His judgment of other people was always far more acute than their judgment of him. His
He was good at games, so he could work on things that were not super literal.”
“The law is what happens, not what is written.”
Ripple’s coin* was that, unlike bitcoin, which took vast amounts of energy to maintain, it was carbon-neutral.
Sam and his traders, using the system Gary had built, were making a quarter of a million trades each day.
“How are we going to pass an audit if we’re missing ten percent of our transactions?”
knew nothing about how to manage people—especially people so fixated on their careers as tools for maximizing the expected value of their lives.
“It felt wild for money to be the object of our focus rather than something else. I thought caring about money itself was morally bankrupt.”
“What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust,”
Flying frightened him so badly that, before takeoff, he had to medicate himself and listen to soothing music.
how did everyone’s actions reflect on the probability distribution of their future behavior?”
He just thought grown-ups were pointless.
The most important feature of FTT was that its holders were collectively entitled to roughly a third of the annual revenues of the FTX
As it gave you a share of the gross, rather than the net, it was arguably even more valuable than the stock.
Out of thin air FTX minted three hundred fifty million FTT tokens.
If he seemed older than he was, it was because he was letting go of one of the things that defines youth: hope.
He was thinking less and less about changing the world and more and more about making himself and his wife comfortable within it.
fifteen percent happiness gain if you could walk to work,”
Outside of it, they were invaluable.
Ramnik noted that people didn’t identify with companies; they identified with people.
“How do you determine something is credible?” he said. “It’s by association. Trust comes from preexisting relationships.”
given crypto product in the United States turns on whether the product is defined as a security or a commodity.
Global stocks traded $600 billion a day, crypto was now trading $200 billion each day, and the gap was closing.
Ramnik came to think that Sam’s indifference to their feelings actually heightened their interest in him.
He owned 90 percent of Alameda Research.
In a lot of ways I don’t really have a soul.
pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake.
“He’s not a showman. He’s not a salesman. He’s got a nonconventional way of thinking about building his organization. Everything is probabilities, and he’d pull these probabilities out of thin air. And then he’d change them. He’s sleeping on a beanbag. He’s doing all of this by himself. And he doesn’t seem particularly interested in our opinion on anything. Which is fine. But we were like, He’s an unusual person. We have to spend time with him in person.”
In their single-minded quest to maximize the utility of their lives, they were seeking to minimize the effect of their feelings.
his absence of feeling, or how he had never felt pleasure. (They had a term for it: anhedonia.) They’d
The Bahamas had great internet, piped in by undersea cable from Florida.
The new Solana blockchain promised to process up to sixty-five thousand transactions a second.
Binance, had five times the trading volume of FTX,
The strategy was something like the opposite of Binance’s.
They paid dividends to their owners, in the form of lower fees on the exchange and the buyback-and-burn agreements.
“we are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro.”
FTX alone as a kind of teacher’s pet of crypto.
Coinbase, compared to FTX, was a boring and bloated casino. It had fifteen times the number of employees FTX did, and only about a fifth of FTX’s volume.
Binance was the class bully, FTX the class nerd,
that 80 percent or more of the volume on the second- and third-tier exchanges, and 30 percent of the volume on the top few exchanges, was fake.
futures team inside Binance began to notice that their wash trading was losing money—and
The tungsten cube would be the first thing a visitor to the global crypto empire would see. Rising from the sea of abstraction, the earth’s most concrete object.
one of the richest people in the world, you sort of assumed the oddball must have changed. Sam hadn’t changed. The world around him had.
Twenty-four different people thought that they were reporting directly to Sam,
If there was any rule governing Sam’s life, it was that it was never allowed to bore him. “He’s like Kanye,”
