> Mark Karpelès only received suspended sentences and spent no time in jail

He was in jail from August 2015 to July 2016, if his wikipedia article is correct. The suspended sentence came after that.

I would argue that the risk:reward is still very heavily weighted toward reward.

I would happily spend a year in jail for $1bn+

This seems like an unnecessarily harsh take.

For example, some fintech companies aren't groundbreaking from a tech perspective, but they make big strides on efficiencies from legacy systems. As long as you deliver value and are capturing some of that value, a business can be made.

A rule of thumb I've used in both career and investment decisions is that to make money, at a minimum, one has to be in the vicinity of where money moves.

Fintech - in any of its forms, as you note - takes the maxim to its conclusions and seeks rent over transactions themselves, which gradually inclines it towards zero-sum "find a mark to dump my toxic assets on" shenanigans. So the industry perpetually leverages itself into fragility on the backs of "rip to them but i'm different" leadership and whomever they can convince to come along. At the nation-state level this creates nasty entanglements of regulatory capture and debt that let market leaders who play the game well make rules for themselves and pay off enforcing bodies, which contributes to macro-scale misalignments in who is getting funded or regulated for what, and therefore many "ills of the market".

The tech of crypto assets themselves, on the other hand, is antifragile in construction: Winning at the trading game does not result in regulatory capture or bailouts, since the settlement ultimately takes place on-chain, and on-chain is an automated consensus, one relatively hostile to political machination. Rent-seeking doesn't scale up well with this kind of asset. You can pull a small-time scam, but it doesn't lead to an empire lasting for generations. And if your asset becomes too hard to trade in because you've come up with some crafty way of polluting it or gatekeeping it, it's substitutable in a way that state-backed instruments are not. Price survival over a crypto bear market is a pretty strong signal for a project, and as the market gets bigger it attracts bigger players trying to remake the rules with a slant so that they can win. It's escalated every cycle, and really is a phenomenon beyond retail now.

What this past cycle entailed was an attempt by larger fintech players to muscle in on the crypto game and apply various strategies to capture it by adding obfuscating instruments in the name of liquidity and yield. The ones who survived made an early exit or successfully derisked, but many of them committed to their strategy in a way that ensured they would lose. And from here on, the only remaining escalations of that game involve some of the largest amounts of capital on the planet - the biggest banks, or actual governments.

There are many fintech companies that I see as hugely important in disrupting finance, which is desperately in need of disrupting. The various new banks and companies like Wise are dragging the industry into the 21st century, though the incumbents are still failing disastrously.

The problem with fintech is it is about integrity, and cashing out on integrity is generally counterfactual. Like cashing out on Idealism. Well if it's strictly cash, it can be done, like if there's no interest in prostitution of the resources, merely a form of liquidity and cooperation, yes.

But to buy a Lamborghini? Only with an excellent, satisfying reason.[1] Like anything. Are you a man who wants to have sex with a girl who is underage? You can, if you marry her. But she's not an adult, so there's no possibility of a prenuptial agreement, you can marry her if you can accept that.

"Half."

--Eddie Murphy

[1] And not in the way people imagine it, like the hedonism of the noughts, showing off like that horrible show "MTV Cribs." Yeah they're literally cribs, not masochists like a real man ie fasting and running track and field. That's exactly what they are, cribs for babies. And then, on a recurring reddit post, they tell you all those cribs you saw were fake, when really many of them were real--telling you on blogs that "only Red Man's crib was his true living conditions"--just pulling the rug under you. They filmed actual places, they were all different, they didn't have the tech to fuck with that back then. Yeah they rented some houses for a week, but those houses were still meant to be cribs for babies. And it's a demonic show--a demonic channel--yeah it looks like MTV is beautiful but...no yeah suppose they're beautiful, that's the fastest way to learn what's up.