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31:31Now PlayingLive-streamed on August 26, 2024
Andrew Chow, technology correspondent at Time Magazine, discusses his recent book Cryptomania: Hype, Hope, and the Fall of FTX’s Billion-Dollar Fintech Empire.
Andrew Chow then joins, diving right into a background on the roots of Bitcoin and the crypto movement as an honest attempt to provide a decentralized alternative financial rail that removed the industry of exploitative and extractionist middlemen that pushed the global economy into crisis in 2008, exploring both the democratizing and shadier ends of Bitcoin’s early uses, playing a central role in both providing revolutionary movements alternative funding mechanisms and facilitating criminal exchange, all on a global scale. After expanding on some of the misleading claims about Bitcoin’s criminal uses, Chow begins to wade into the great build and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire, walking through how his Wall Street roots and effective altruist ideology led him to see the realm of crypto as a volatile market in a power vacuum, ripe to be taken advantage of, resulting in FTX taking off as an unregulated crypto exchange that all went through the bank account of one, financially reckless individual, with zero checks or balances whatsoever. Chow then dives into the particular role political donations played in SBF’s reckless spending, before slowly walking through the crypto collapse that SBF made so inevitable, and the complete erosion of the faith that its once-idealist community had in it, exploring its rebirth over the ongoing election as hedge fund-backed bipartisan lobby pleading for legitimacy at the feet of US political and financial institutions. Emma wraps up the free half with some coverage of Elizabeth Warren’s direct call-out of the Harris campaign’s (and Biden Administration’s) refusal to abide by domestic (or international) rule of law when it comes to arming Israel.
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