On Cryptocurrencies and The Sam Bankman-Fried/FTX Affair As of November 29, 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced CEO of FTX and Alameda Research, is still scheduled to speak with business journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin at the annual New York Times Dealbook Summit. This shouldn’t be too surprising. Bankman-Fried, like many fraudsters before him, used the money he stole to buy political influence. And now it seems this money was well spent.

Over the next several months many will try to figure out how precisely Bankman-Fried fooled so many. Some will investigate conspiratorial explanations focussed on his political connections and connections to Ukraine. There may well be very fishy reasons for how Bankman-Fried succeeded in rapidly accumulating so much wealth and power. But on the...