December 16th 2022 - From "One of Us" to "One of Them"

It can be said with great deal of certainty that the arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried was greeted as the most welcome news by all of the cryptosphere. While few dissenting voices are uncomfortable with the whole concept of government incarcerating people, even those that have apparently done incalculable damage to crypto community, overwhelming majority is looking forward to see SBF put behind bars for years of decades. And, at least by this point, practical issues like his alleged victims getting stolen money back or the opportunity to reveal the all the relevant facts of the fiasco are put to back burner. Crypto people is delighted to see SBF going down.

And this is, of course, in sharp contrast with only few months ago, when SBF was hailed as hero and messiah whose business ventures were fuelling the bull run and whose political connections were bound to boost adoption of cryptocurrencies and bring even more institutional money. Bankman-Fried’s spectacular fall of grace is, on the other hand, even more welcome news to some people who had found themselves in similar situations – Do Kwon, Zhu Su and Alex Mashinsky – whose greed and mismanagement used to be blamed for catastrophic decline of cryptocurrency prices and unprecedented wealth destruction, but who are now looking like boy scouts in comparison with the latest scapegoat.

If history teaches us anything, anti-SBF hysteria, justified or not, will be (mis)used in order to prevent some serious soul searching and learning of important lessons. When something really catastrophic happens, it is much easier to put all the blame on a single individual who would serve as scapegoat and perfect excuse to take away all the responsibility from the multitudes of other people. And many of the people who now point to SBF as the ultimate villain were very same people who used to hail SBF as ultimate hero. What allowed SBF to do what he did wasn’t any kind of sinister diabolical conspiracy of Deep State or lizard people in smoke-filled rooms. SBF only delivered, or to be precise, promised to deliver what many influential and very loud crypto people were preaching – a powerful, well-connected “insider” who was “one of us” and whose task was to bridge the gap between the still marginalised world of crypto and the Establishment. And right now, it turns out that the Establishment, embodied in politicians bought by his money, are going to do the opposite and actually go against the crypto with suffocating regulations, sweeping bans and totalitarian control of blockchains. And SBF, who enabled those politicians with the money from the crypto people, suddenly became “one of them”.

But what is the true line that separates “us” and “them”? Greed and corruption that we associate with political establishment, greedy corporations and sociopathic billionaires is not that different with what went on cryptosphere. Or, to be precise, what is going on in cryptosphere, when so many people cheer on the news of US unemployment rates going up, seeing other people’s general misery as a path toward their own wealth, fuelled by quantitative easing and easy access to the very fiat currencies crypto was supposed to replace.

It looks like that the SBF affair won’t be enough for some difficult lessons to be learned. There are still too many people in crypto willing to prefer making quick and easy money instead of using patience, hard work and common sense. And it is likely to be many charismatic, influential and hyped up individuals to be hailed as saviours that would deprive everyone the need of their personal responsibility. History teaches us that relying on such individuals is never wise, whether such individual is Donald Trump, Vitalik Buterin, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey or SBF.

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