Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I now take another look, perhaps our last look, at Michael Lewis' book about Sam Bankman-Fried. Once again, I will focus on a specific passage.  This time, that passage arises in the book's chapter six. In the ongoing story, it occurs when SBF is finally creating a crypto exchange, in Hong Kong in the go-go climate of early 2019.  [It didn't move much of its operation o the Bahamas until September 2020.] Lewis is talking about the difference between the crypto religionists on the one hand and the "suits" from traditional financial institutions, coming into crypto as colonizers, on the other.  The higher crypto prices rose, the greater the flood into crypto of sober-minded people in suits that people like Zane [a religionist] found insufferable. ... The Goldman guys and the venture capitalists and  the corporate lawyers turned crypto bros -- they were all part of this invasion of conventional people who wanted to make fast money without the kookiness that had made ...

I remember doing an interview in September of last year with a lawyer who did a lot of work for the cryptocurrency industry.  It was clear already that there was "trouble in River City."  In July 2022, two important crypto businesses filed for chapter 11 protection: Voyager Digital and Celsius Network. Voyager Digital was a crypto broker. Unfortunately, it extended a large unwise loan to Three Arrows Capital, a crypto fund. Three Arrows defaulted, and Voyager never recovered.  So: why did Celsius Network collapse? You ask. Well ... Celsius Network was a crypto lending company that let users deposit their digital assets into a "Celsius wallet" preliminary to pledging them as security for their borrowing. The cause of its sudden failure is a rabbit hole I don't want to go down with you. But two quick points are observable from the surface: this failure was part of the more general cooling-off of crypto activity, in the manner that "hula-hoop lending" wo...

  Welcome to money week. Today, tomorrow, and Thursday I will look from three different points of view at the whole idea of a universal medium of exchange, i.e. the idea of money. Today: who is Alexander Vinnik and why might you want to care? Vinnik is the fellow portrayed above with his arms behind his back. He was formerly the head of a bitcoin exchange, known as BTC-e. This was the Russian counterpart to FTX.  This is germane to our theme-for-the-week because as you all probably know, Bitcoin in particular and cryptocurrencies more generally are talked up as the new money, the medium of exchange that will in time replace the government fiat media to which we have become accustomed.  You all also most likely know what has happened of late to FTX and its founder.  Well ... BTC-e ended up at much the same place.  At any rate, in today's environment between Russia and the United States, the fact that there is a once-prominent Russian in custody in the U.S. is its...

At  this time of year I ask myself what were the biggest stories of the past twelve months in business/financial news.  Here are the twelve stories, by month, that especially caught my attention and that in retrospect I recommend to yours. I'll make no effort to rank their importance against one another, so I will simply order them by month.  January: Multilateral Trade Agreement. The Trans-Pacific Partnership reconstituted itself despite the US withdrawal, in an agreement announced on the 23d. This is a fine example of a broader and (for the US) an unfortunate trend. The US is locking itself out of free trade areas. To the extent free trade does work to stimulate economic productivity, the US is withdrawing from that. February: Offshore natural gas. A dispute between Cyprus and Turkey over offshore drilling rights for natural gas nearly became a war as the Turkish navy obstructed a drilling vessel.  This, too, I take as a token of a broader develo...

Those of us who care about the identity of the mysterious fellow, or combine, known as Satoshi Nakamoto have had something new to talk about in recent days. For those who don't care, you may be excused. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, here are the basics in one graf: From October 2008 to December 2010 a person or persons calling himself/themselves Satoshi Nakamoto developed bitcoin, authored a paper explaining it to the world, and engaged in discussions about it with a (then small) circle of interested parties. This was the start of something big. Bitcoin gave rise to a slew of other cryptos, and the underlying tech, the blockchain, has found and is still finding uses far beyond the issue of cryptocurrency use or value. Some people believe that the creation of Bitcoin was and is as big a deal as, say, the creation of the worldwide web. So who is he? And might he be planning a comeback in some form? Or has the comeback itself already happened and fi...