Davidzmorris

@davidzmorris

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556 Followers

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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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Today in Dark Markets, the newsletter of Financial True Crime: Gavin Newsom's caping for Artificial Intelligence is a Preview of the Worst Possbile Future. Also: How Craig Wright scammed his biggest victim; Friend.Tech is Audi 5000 https://tinyurl.com/ysexdk5t

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Finally able to announce the publisher of my book. I am staggeringly excited. It's truly life-changing news. https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/meet-my-publisher

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Every Tuesday at Dark Markets, I publish a roundup of the week's wildest, funniest, darkest tales of financial fraud, startup crime, and general malfeasance. This week's highlights include a rare non-finance story: a major development in the story of Nicholas Rossi, an alleged double rapist who has spent years feigning an English accent and insisting that he is a British man named "Arthur Knight" in an attempt to avoid extradition back to Utah. Other updates on Bolt's insane new funding round, Elon Musks's catastrophic Twitter loans, new FTX campaign finance charges ... and even a little *good* news about Babylon's new Bitcoin restaking service. Please subscribe to Dark Markets, and share with fellow fans of bumbling con-men and delusional tech freaks! https://davidzmorris.substack.com/p/arthur-knight-has-fallen

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This weekend at Dark Markets, supporters got a sneak peek at the core argument of my forthcoming book on #SBF: "Techno-Rationalism and the Denial of Death." https://tinyurl.com/54mrkj2n The Utopian #tescreal axis is deeply motivated, in ways that most adherents can't recognize, by an anxious desire to resurrect tribalist mysticism, the afterlife, and a transcendental eschatology. But they lack the imagination and strength to face the infinity of God. So they remake God as merely a robot - an artificial intelligence, the product of man's own imputed Godhood, achieved through rationality and technology. This began with Ray Kurzweil, who was more self-aware about his motives than most who came after: He wanted to resurrect his father. 1/3

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I am beyond ecstatic to announce that I just signed a contract for my SBF book. Working title: "Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried and the Mind Crimes of Silicon Valley." Details later, but it's with an S-tier press whose books I've been reading my entire life. This is a book not just about Sam, but the entire network of enablers around him, the ideas that motivated him, and the culture that created him. There has been no reckoning for many of the most culpable apologists who cost honest people $8 billion dollars. This book will be at least a step towards correcting that. In my dreams, this is my version of Bethany McLean's "The Smartest Guys in the Room." Not gonna get there, but might as well fantasize. If you're interested in learning more, a lot of preliminary drafts and research essays are on Dark Markets: https://tinyurl.com/4m5bc76y Immense thanks to Dark Markets subscribers who have been a crucial source of support over the past year.

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New from me at the upstart cypherpunk publication The Rage: a rundown of the deeper issues at stake in the Roman Storm and Tornado Cash trial. These include potentially constitutional questions about the status of code and money as speech - an in turn, exactly how protected they are. https://www.therage.co/why-your-rights-are-at-stake-in-the-tornado-cash-trial/

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https://tinyurl.com/vr2a4vx5

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Just dropped https://tinyurl.com/ypuhru8b

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If I stole this joke from you, please reply and I will add credit. In one of the wildest Dark Markets news roundups ever, we dive into Jump's likely fraud culpability, the Synapse collapse, and the truly inexplicable goings-on at CertiK. https://tinyurl.com/m2su2rc2

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