Sam Bankman Fried was convicted earlier tonight on all seven charges brought against him (for this case). He faces more than 100 years in prison and has reserved a spot for himself in the history books as one of the most egregious fraudsters to ever live. It's nice to see that justice is being served, but the court decision is nothing more than noise in my opinion.

There are many lessons to be learned from the saga of FTX and the egregious crimes committed by Sam and his gaggle of mouth breathers.

Don't entrust your bitcoin with centralized third parties. Especially centralized third parties that are shitcoin casinos.

If something looks too good to be true, it most likely is.

Don't trust the experts.

The last lesson is the one I worry most will fail to internalize. There are hundreds of people in the "crypto", venture capital, media and political industries who were more than happy to parade Sam around as a wunderkind and position FTX as one of the most innovative companies in the world despite clear signs that Sam had no idea what he was talking about and FTX had a particularly peculiar ascent. If you know how bitcoin works and the blue print that grifters and affinity scammers have leveraged over the last decade to lead people to the slaughterhouse of shitcoin casinos, it was glaringly obvious that Sam was not some type of genius. In fact, when you actually took the time to listen to what he said, it was abundantly clear that he was a bumbling idiot who did not understand the basics of bitcoin or the problems it solves.

I don't want to pat myself on the back too hard, but it became obvious to me that we were dealing with a run-of-the-mill scammer in the Summer of 2021 when the above clip of Sam appearing on Squawk Box was shared on Twitter. In 103 seconds Sam proved that he was 1.) a climate grifter trying to legitimize the absolutely idiotic concept of carbon credits and 2.) does not understand the beauty of bitcoin's Proof of Work consensus mechanism and why energy intensity is required, and a good thing. If you truly understand why bitcoin exists, what it is attempting to solve, and how altcoins fall short of achieving those end goals across the board it shouldn't have taken you more than two-minutes of any Sam Bankman Fried interview to understand that he was either out of his depth or overtly trying to scam people. We've come to find that the latter was the case.

Which leads back to the hundreds of people who very publicly put Sam on a pedestal. You should never take anything any of these people say about bitcoin or cryptocurrency seriously for the rest of their lives unless they come out and publicly explain that they were wrong and how they now understand why they were wrong. In my opinion, most of the people who held Sam up did so because they viewed him as a vehicle of legitimization of the pump and dumps they were looking to benefit from or simply have absolutely no idea what is going on in the space and are easily duped by shiny things. There is no in between. A disheveled "successful wunderkind" who became a "multi-billionaire" before 30 was the conduit of choice to rationalize egregious scamming and big venture checks. The scammers thought Sam fit the archetype of someone who would be able to navigate the regulatory morass and come out the other side unscathed. He was politically connected and knew how to spew vapid word salad that useless politicians would drool over. The big venture backers and celebrities that hopped on the grift saw "the next best thing" and decided to hop on board for fear of missing out.

The scammers are detestable people who should be publicly shamed and shunned by anyone who would like to see bitcoin successfully rid itself of its association with "crypto". The "experts" in venture capital who hopped onboard the hype train should never be allocated to by any serious investors because the lack of due diligence that would need to occur to stroke a check to the marble-mouthed meth addict that stole billions of dollars from his customers is awe inspiring.

This is what fiat does to the economy. It allows scammers and pompous Silicon Valley venture capitalists to leverage the grift. The funny thing about the whole saga is that it was ultimately brought down by a real cost of capital being reintroduced to the market via the Fed's rate hikes.

Final thought...

I am ready for eight hours of sleep. Probably won't get it tonight.