Thank You, SBF

(originally published on my newsletter Nov 15 2022)

Sam Bankman-Fried,

He had it all. He was a darling. He talked like Vitalik. He had a flare of altruism, seemed like a chubby nerd who grokked the levers of finance. Now he will be the guy who ruined it for the rest of us. 

So what am I thanking him for?

In an alternate universe of satire and glib, I would say thank you for being corrupt, irresponsible and a hypocrite.

Instead, I am thanking him for:

• reminding us that not your keys, not your coins still holds true

• reminding us that centralized entities will be corruptible and corrupted

• reminding us that we have many more checks and balances to put in place

• raising the bar for entrepreneurship in our space 

• raising the bar for fiduciaries in selecting managers

• and above all, the buying opportunity we have now and maturing in the next few days/weeks

In 2014, I lost hundreds of BTCs in the Mt Gox hack and more on paper wallets in my apartment. So I turned to decentralized self-custody solutions. But the reality is that decentralized solutions failed me as well. In 2020, I was the subject of a hack. I lost 1000s of ETH and my MKR CDP. All of my ETH and LP positions were drained from my Metamask wallet, likely because I signed an approval to a shady app or copy pasted a password. And I consider myself a sophisticated user of crypto. 

This taught me that the current state of crypto is not ready for mainstream adoption. We have problems to solve - user experience, security, trust problems. 

If any of you are working on or are aware of reliable "better self-custody" or approaches to keep centralized entities accountable, including "zk proofs", "proof or reserves", "on chain identifiers," I would love to hear from you. 

This post was followed by an invitation to join a Twitter space.