Davidzmorris

@davidzmorris

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As much as I'd love a break after finishing my book draft, there's no rest for the wicked. Immediately to work on deep dives on Perp Swaps and Memecoins for a big new PRINT crypto media project that I'm not sure is public yet but is going to be super exciting.

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One of the bone-deep pleasures of writing a book is making connections that slip past daily reporting. Example: Sam Bankman-Fried was a high schooler in Palo Alto during a decade-long surge of local teen suicides to five times the national rate. #FTX https://tinyurl.com/3e9znxxr

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I had to dive into the Hayden Davis/Coffeezilla interview, and ... Hayden may be the dumbest man alive? Favorite quote from Hayden: "Bitcoin is literally valuable because a shitload of people said it’s valuable, and because it quote-unquote isn’t controlled by anybody, that we know of.” Bro doesn't know how Bitcoin works, but he's somehow working with both Trump and Milei on tokens. Impeccable. More highlights here: https://tinyurl.com/598bjkxj

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Probably not so many people on here who need this explained, but with #FTX repayments starting, it seemed worth reiterating: The idea that FTX victims are getting a "full recovery" IS COMPLETE BULLSHIT. This post contains some simple math explaining why. MSM is swallowing the "full recovery" whole. Feel free to spread this around to those who don't get it. https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/ftxs-full-recovery-is-utter-bullshit

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Only six hours later am I realizing that today's essay ran to 2,300 words (~10 pages). Humbly, it's a good one. https://tinyurl.com/9kyy6c66

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The more I find out about the thought and movement, the more convinced I become that the suicides, murders, sub-cults, and psychotic breaks that beset Yudkowskyite Rationalism are direct consequences of the ideology. Excerpt from today's Dark Markets: https://tinyurl.com/9kyy6c66

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ChatGPT is incredibly dangerous to the very people whose limited skills entice them to use it. An output that sounds vaguely credible will be mistaken for *actual* credibility right up to the moment an expert lays eyes on. You're being sold an automated Dunning-Kruger trap.

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Tomorrow morning for Dark Markets, some thoughts on NYC congestion pricing and why everyone, everywhere seems to care so much about it.

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Happy New Year! I find myself at the start of 2025 having accomplished a huge number of long term goals, and living the life I've always dreamed of. Here are seven guidelines that helped me get there. https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/seven-ways-to-live-different

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The best single account of the events leading up to FTX's collapse is probably Brady Dale's "SBF: How The FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto's Very Bad Good Guy." Particularly grateful for this detail on how Alameda wound up with so much FTT, an asset that rightly belonged to FTX: Sam gave them all the tokens. It's emblematic of Sam's apparently *complete* ignorance of accounting rules - in a few ways. This was, he said, nominally in return for the fact that Alameda execs had been deputized to start FTX - itself fraud against Alameda investors, as noted by @dragonfly_xyz . There's no evidence there was any calculation or projection of the values behind that purported swap - hard to imagine the Alameda team's work was worth the ultimately ~$4 billion of $FTT they got.

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Today was a bad day. Bullish, the new owners of my former employer CoinDesk were found to have violated the newsroom's basic editorial independence, and punitively fired three top editors who objected. Sadly I saw this coming when the sale went through last year, because Bullish itself is an extremely suspect firm built in part on a fraudulent securities offering in 2017. I've written a summary of recent events, and of that dark history. Unfortunately, while there are still good people working there, the unavoidable conclusion is that CoinDesk, as it once was, is well and truly dead. https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/breaking-coindesk-is-dead-heres-who

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This weeks' Dark Markets news roundup (all you need to know about fucked-up finance!) is late because I absolutely had to round up @JoshuaCitarella's research into UHC shooter Luigi Mangione. The links to SBF and #FTX are too tantalizing to ignore. https://tinyurl.com/2r8w57eu

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My SBF book is gonna end a few of the careers that haven't been already

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Finally recovered from the Bangkok Plague enough to write up my highlights of Devcon 7, including a great cypherpunk rallying cry from @Narodism, an on-chain game that's actually good by @movingcastles_, and more. https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/i-survived-ethereum-devcon-7-barely

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A little over a year ago, in August, I lost my fantastic job as lead columnist at CoinDesk. Since then, I’ve been taking it easy and planning my next thing. That next thing, I’m finally ready to announce publicly, is Trithemius Strategic Communications, a boutique messaging firm focused on advancing digital privacy and autonomy technologies. http://Trithemius.net After twenty years as a writer and columnist, I’m ready to share my insights about news cycles and messaging with firms, nonprofits, and other organizations that share my desire for a better, freer future. We are named for Johannes Trithemius, the 14th century abbot and author of Steganographia, one of the earliest books on cryptography in the West.

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Ahead of tonight's HBO documentary Money Electric, I revisited an old interview with the first person to float Len Sassaman as a #Satoshi Nakamoto candidate ... and spelled out why the theory can't be right. https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/why-len-sassaman-was-not-satoshi

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Today at Dark Markets: a review summary of the excellent (and terrifying) new documentary about $BBBY by @jamesvjani, "The Cult of the Dead Stock." He found investors who act exactly like Jonestown cultists - as they're fleeced by a YouTuber. https://tinyurl.com/5n6n4rjv

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New at Dark Markets, from my SBF book: From crypto to AI, belief in the predictability of the future, the linearity of the human mind, and the reality of money lead to catastrophe. How engineers and math heads get blown up by "The Logic of the Code." https://tinyurl.com/ysj3pt29

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New today at Dark Markets: "How to Value a Crypto Token." The SBF book won't go deep into crypto tech, but crypto *valuations* are central to the story. This excerpt explains why blockspace has real value and speculative value, and how the two relate. https://tinyurl.com/34d27vva

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I can finally reveal the publisher of my upcoming book on Sam Bankman-Fried! "Stealing the Future: SBF and the Techno-Utopians" will be released in the fall of 2025 by Repeater Books. This is a huuuuuge deal - read on to learn about Repeater. But as I put it in the newsletter: HOLY FUCK. 🧵 https://tinyurl.com/4rhen3ty

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