“The first thing ambitious citizens who live in a republic seek is the ability not to be harmed, not only by private citizens but even magistrates: in order to accomplish this, they seek out friendships; they acquire these friends by apparently honest means, either by offering them financial assistance or by defending them from the powerful; and because this seems virtuous, they easily fool everyone.” - Machiavelli [Discourses, I.46]
I was hesitant to write about the Sam Bankman-Fried saga for a few reasons. The first of which is I don’t have a specialized knowledge about finance, and had managed to not hear of the guy until his “fortune” began to collapse. Further, I’m a crypto skeptic [though I think it has some potential good applications] and thus I don’t know a lot about how crypto …
