How to Explain FTX to Your Mother Over Thanksgiving

Don't worry mom, everything is fine

Could you please pass the sour grapes?

A year ago everything was great. BTC was closing in on $70,000. DeFi was a smash success. And your uncles, who you convinced to buy Eth with their COVID stimulus, told the whole family you were a genius. 

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The interesting people in crypto are fine because FTX was never interesting.

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Now, things have changed. Blockchain is broken. Blue checks are worthless. Developers everywhere are being forced to shave off their jew-fros. 2022 has been a time of unrelenting crypto carnage, and we still don’t yet know where the contagion will stop. 

So what do you tell the family over Thanksgiving? 

Cooking a turkey sous vide in a recycling carton, Thanksgiving 2019

The past week, my phone has exploded with text messages friends and family assuming I was broke, suicidal, or on the verge of selling my body for cash (which, addictions being addictions, I’d inevitably use to buy Dogecoin). For anyone who isn’t in crypto, the collapse of FTX and its trad-friendly golden boy Sam Bankman-Fried has confirmed every salacious notion of its skeptics. Crypto is a scam. Fake money for nerds. An adderall fueled sex cult in an industry so corrupt, even the Jews can’t be trusted. 

Yet, strangely, as I look around at the aftermath, everyone I know and trust is still here. Sure, there’s lots of memes being shared, some gleeful schadenfreude, plenty of gossip and palace intrigue, but nobody that I respect has come out of the woodwork screaming about how they lost it all, how they’ve been rugged, how crypto has disappointed them for the last time. To a man, they have all had the same reaction—that’s a big bummer, but it’s time to get back to work. 

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FTX is, and has always been, a relic of the past. Its collapse is the closing of an old era, not the death of a new one. 

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This isn’t to downplay the experience of people who lost everything to effective altruism. This is to say that FTX and SBF were NEVER the future of crypto, and the people doing the smart, interesting work to build Web3 knew that. Ethereum is fine. DeFi is fine. Uqbar and Urbit (I know where my bread is buttered) are fine. I don’t blame anyone for not seeing this coming (I certainly didn’t), but I do know that the interesting people in crypto are fine because FTX was never interesting. 

The interesting people in crypto aren’t using centralized exchanges. The interesting people in crypto aren’t doing spots with Tom Brady. Frankly, the interesting people in crypto are not in finance at all. If you want to know what is legit, look not just at technology or values, but how they intersect. Look for projects that actually bring crypto closer to its stated goals—decentralization, sovereignty, democratization, sure, but also creativity and ingenuity, unlocking new digital experiences by pushing technology to its limits. FTX stood for none of those things. FTX is, and has always been, a relic of the past. Its collapse is the closing of an old era, not the death of a new one. 

That’s why all your crypto heroes (🤮) are fine now—they could never be bothered with FTX in the first place. Because FTX isn’t the story of a new technology gone wrong—it is the ancient tale of greed and narcissism getting what it always gets. Not Hal-9000 turning on its foolish humans overlord, but something more simple and familiar. Enron. Subprime loans. People in Congress accepting millions of dollars in donations from an untrustworthy lobbyist to pass regulations that neuter an emerging technology in favor of those who are already rich. 

Oops. 

But that doesn’t matter very much to your mother, who has been waiting all this time for the bottom to fall out. Who has wondered why you don’t do something a little more respectable, after all you’re so handsome and smart. Who wants to know why you can’t get a real job, or, if you have a real job, why you can’t spend your money on something she understands, like a nice set of golf clubs. 

So, when she looks at you with concern, wondering how her sweet boy got taken in by this crypto mumbo jumbo, tell her the boring truth. Someone got greedy. Someone thought they were above the rules. People who were uninformed lost a lot of money, but now, hopefully, they know better. And now the interesting people are free to do the interesting things you believe in. 

A normal guy you can trust

She may still not get it. But she’ll smile and make you take another slice of pecan pie, you’re so skinny right now (probably can’t afford to eat, she thinks sadly), and the conversation will inevitably turn to whether grandpa just said something racist, or not racist enough, and it just won’t matter. Your mom, after all, is your mom, and while she will never understand what you do—typing away all day over there, on your phone even during dinner!—she’ll alway love you, no matter how many bits you own. 

So, when your uncles pop that Brunello they’ve been saving (all uncles only drink Italian) and ask, wen dog coin moon?, tell them that things are changing.

Because the future is coming—it just probably won’t look like anything we’ve already seen.