[Full disclosure: I had two small grants (EDIT: regrants) from FTXFF, and did contract work for several orgs FTX definitely or plausibly funded]
A few times in the year before FTX broke, a friend (waiting on thumbs up to use their name) asked what I thought about funding altruistic work with crypto, was crypto maybe inherently bad, did this give us incentives to overlook bad things,...? FTX was obviously the largest part of this but he also questioned the low level crypto millionaires. Both times I remember, I countered with “is crypto worse than facebook?”
That was a sincere question, and I’m still not sure the answer for the field as a whole is “yes”. But the follow up conversation focused on my slightly edgey claim in a way that was obvious we weren’t going to act on (refuse crypto and openphil money? preposterous!), and away from the hard questions whose answers might change my actions. I wasn’t consciously trying to deflect, but if I had been I’m not sure I could have picked a better method.
There was information that was knowable in early 2022 but was not known to me (e.g. the early exodus from Alameda and the resulting bad blood, or FTX’s aggressive recruitment of naive users), and I think if I’d known about it I would have reacted differently on the margin.
[Full disclosure: I had two small grants (EDIT: regrants) from FTXFF, and did contract work for several orgs FTX definitely or plausibly funded]
A few times in the year before FTX broke, a friend (waiting on thumbs up to use their name) asked what I thought about funding altruistic work with crypto, was crypto maybe inherently bad, did this give us incentives to overlook bad things,...? FTX was obviously the largest part of this but he also questioned the low level crypto millionaires. Both times I remember, I countered with “is crypto worse than facebook?”
That was a sincere question, and I’m still not sure the answer for the field as a whole is “yes”. But the follow up conversation focused on my slightly edgey claim in a way that was obvious we weren’t going to act on (refuse crypto and openphil money? preposterous!), and away from the hard questions whose answers might change my actions. I wasn’t consciously trying to deflect, but if I had been I’m not sure I could have picked a better method.
There was information that was knowable in early 2022 but was not known to me (e.g. the early exodus from Alameda and the resulting bad blood, or FTX’s aggressive recruitment of naive users), and I think if I’d known about it I would have reacted differently on the margin.