“And it could all feel like a game; it could all feel unreal. It is unreal. You are trading tokens, they live on computers, many of them didn’t exist a year ago, none of them existed 15 years ago, some of them are Dogecoin, and what makes them valuable is just people’s shared agreement to ascribe value to them. You do not have to figure out how to interface with the real world, how to perfect security interests in oil cargos or evaluate the earnings quality of a ball-bearings manufacturer. The tokens beep and boop, and the balance in your account goes up.” Matt Levine with a postscript to Bloomberg Businessweek’s The Crypto Story. How Not to Play the Game. Magic beans, Bahamian penthouses, old-fashioned fraud and other important SBF-inspired insights. (Because the fraud here is so old-fashioned, the FTX story has almost nothing specifically to do with crypto, and yet, it somehow feels like it has everything to do with it.)

+ There will be much bigger economic stories to contend with in 2023. And they won’t be pleasant. A recession is coming for most developed nations in 2023, and this is where economists predict the worst.