Is the Crypto Ponzi Scheme Finally Coming to an End?
Three years ago, in early November of 2022, one of the largest financial scams of all time was unfolding when the equivalent of a “bank run” happened when the crypto exchange FTX saw $6 billion of withdrawals in a 72-hour span. Many investors, including Blackrock and celebrity athletes such as Stephen Curry and Tom Brady, lost hundreds of millions of dollars almost overnight. Billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, who was ranked the 41st-richest American in the Forbes 400, saw his fortune evaporate almost overnight, and now sits in a federal prison serving out his 25-year criminal conviction for fraud. Further reporting about Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX claimed massive corruption with things like money laundering occurring in Ukraine, as well as the lavish lifestyle of Sam Bankman-Fried and his FTX cohorts participating in sexual orgies. When this happened three years ago, Big Tech was in a free fall laying off hundreds of thousands of employees. Tesla was facing a U.S. criminal probe, and many of the giant automakers, such as Ford and Volkswagen, cut off funding for their "autonomous" self-driving vehicles. I was calling this major downturn in Big Tech investing back then as the Big Tech Crash of 2022. But a couple of weeks after the fall of FTX, something happened to direct the public's attention away from this massive corruption in Crypto Land: the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT via Microsoft, which quickly became the most downloaded app in history, and launched the current AI Bubble in spending. There were still what appeared to be some ripple effects of the great FTX crash in 2022 in March of 2023, when several Big Tech banks, such as Silicon Valley bank, failed due to bank runs. Today, some Wall Street analysts are apparently beginning to see the realities of the crypto financial world, and are sounding the alarm. They are saying that crypto currencies' best days may now be behind us. David Weidner of MarketWatch reminds us that many investors today "are young and inexperienced," and that they "listen to confident voices" on social media too much.
