From the Sequoia puff-piece:

> Something of the sort must happen eventually, as the current system, with its layers upon layers of intermediaries, is antiquated and prone to crashing—the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the latest in a long line of failures that occurred because banks didn’t actually know what was on their balance sheets. Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.

aged like my baby momma's milk good lord

I'd like to read this in context; do you know where this declararion could be found? Who is speaking? Thanks!

Sequoia deleted it. You can find a cached version though at https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pizI33...

Another case of someone forgetting that the internet is written not just ink but permanent marker.

I still get sketched out that companies feel so free to "unpublish" content that they later decided was embarrassing. Traces of "Nineteen Eighty-Four"...

To be fair, if something has been deemed offensive by the everyone on the interwebs, do you leave the offensive thing there to thumb your nose at them or just remove it to at least stop the bleeding?

Fair question, but in this case it wasn't so much "offensive" as "embarrassing to the author." i.e. they're hyping up this guy who later turned out to be not as smart as he thought.

Thanks. great article. also never want to get a letter like that "your investment is marked to zero". got to love this quote from article "“Everything was rickety—there was no avoiding the ricketiness. Obviously, the line between rickety and shady is a little unclear at times, but the places that seemed like they were going to steal customer funds outright, we didn’t touch,” Singh says. “Even the best players in the space were having big problems.”

Hahahahahahahaha holy fuck.

Disclaimer: I don't usually drop comments like this that don't contribute to anything, but... lmao wow.

Its really worse than this.. This guy really LARPed the white-knight / sheriff-of-the-crypto-wild-west for years. He's the last guy anyone would have thought would pull such blatantly shady stuff like this. Before this all came out, more people in the space would have seen him in positive light than they would have seen CZ (the CEO of Binance).

Everyone should read that article. The delusion is insane

I listened on it and was definitely good and very eye opening. The delusion does seem surreal

Somewhat related, the bull run of the last decade has made it possible to run a fund and only have a 10% hit rate (absolute winners), compared to a 52% hit rate for hedge funds in the public markets. The net effect in VC must have been a sense of a "can't lose" attitude. Added to the fact that there is a herd mentality when a firm that is hot is raising money, the due diligence boils down to "other big VCs are investing and we don't want to miss out". In other words Group Think, but it doesn't matter provided the public markets are sending newly minted IPO stocks to the moon. Perhaps more turbulent public markets will enforce more stringent due diligence...

agreed. sequoia used to be the single most famous tier-1 vc and they're actually worse than the broken a16z at this point.

> "I know who I'd rather trust my money with: SBF, hands down."

This quote is complety antithetical to everything crypto is actually trying to achieve; which is a trustless financial system, a system that would be void of these sorts of melt downs.

Don't trust; verify.

That works just fine but the vast majority of cryptocurrencies just copied the flawed design of conventional fiat currencies and they fail in exactly the same ways.

While everything is dumping, RAI goes up.

If a single individual controlled all customer assets then that is the issue. No institutional checks and balances.

That’s insane.

It’s the only way any popular token has met trading demand; the vast majority of transactions have to happen off-chain, or the thing would fall over.

(but yeah it’s wild)

Brokerage houses and market makers do the same.

Ownership of publicly-traded stocks basically never changes. Cede and Company owns all of the stock.

With a lot more regulation, right?

And of course, the only reason "normal people" have "invested" in cryptocurrency is the presence of centralized exchanges like this.

These centralized exchanges are an inevitability and a requirement for crypto to function in the real world. You can't run a ponzi scheme without fresh blood, nor can you pump and dump shitcoins unless normal people can easily and quickly trade them.