Davidzmorris

@davidzmorris

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558 Followers

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@aaronrferguson

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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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Extensive previews at davidzmorris.substack.com!

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Probably in about six months? If you want a sneak peek there are lots of drafts at davidzmorris.substack.com.

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Many previews available at davidzmorris.substack.com!

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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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Trithemius is not currently open to new full-service clients, but orgs looking for media strategy consultation, advising, or training should reach out. You might notice our website is very bare-bones, and doesn’t have contact information. That’s partly because I wanted to get this out before I head to Devcon next week, but it’s also by design: If you know who I am, you know whether you want to work with us. And like the A-Team, if you can find us, you can hire us.

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Our primary service is helping executives and leaders turn their core ideas into compelling, convincing, honest messaging – particularly ideas that are complex or outside the mainstream. Over the past year we’ve helped clients craft and place high-profile thought leadership pieces across sectors including cybersecurity, identity, and cryptocurrency. As many of you know, I’m also currently writing a book about Sam Bankman-Fried and techno-authoritarianism, and publish a weekly newsletter, Dark Markets, covering scams and fraud. I’ve managed to balance these projects with growing Trithemius, which would have frankly been impossible if I was still working full-time as a journalist.

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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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Welcome @henryfarrell! Henry is a professor of international affairs and author of several books, including the award winning Of Privacy and Power. He has agreed to do an AMA for the /books channel. Reply with your questions (please make sure to tag him so he can easily find them)

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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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Excited to dig in to the work of Carl Neville, who has been crucial in bringing me into the Repeater fold. https://repeaterbooks.com/product/resolution-way/ Finally, a huge thank you to my former CoinDesk colleagues, above all Ben Schiller, whose faith in me has been entirely unreasonable.

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