Why in the hell did we need cryptocurrency? The collapse of FTX and SBF explained, sort of

Let me ask you something: Let's say you have a lot of money, or even just a moderate, middle-class amount of money, and you're looking for someplace to keep it. That is in fact what happened to a whole bunch of people — we don't know the number yet, but we're told there were lots of them — who thought it would be a great idea to buy bitcoins or ethereum tokens or any of the hundreds of other cryptocurrency mediums with their hard earned money, rather than doing something boring with it like put it in the stuffy old bank over on Broad Street or buying stock in a boring old company like, say, Peloton. Well, folks, that's not what happened with FTX, because it turned out that what happened with all the money all these people invested with FTX, was that the company turned around and bought something called FTT's, which are described as — bear with me here — the "native token of the FTX trading platform," according to CNBC, the network that is supposed to know a whole lot about stuff involving money. Eight billion, 20 billion — the billions get thrown around like, yes, tokens in these stories about SBF as he apparently tries to understand himself how one day, there was all this money, enough to buy condos in the Bahamas and private jets and to give away to charities as part of his "ethical philanthropy" philosophy, and even enough to have one of his companies called Alameda Research, which he described as an investment bank, lend him a billion dollars — apparently a billion of the dollars that people invested in FTX, which he turned around and used to buy FTTs sold by Alameda Research but, in reality, used to fund a loan to himself. Just to give you a flavor of this guy and how he's taking the whole thing about losing tens of billions of other people's money, here is how Schleifer introduces the circumstances of the interview: "Over the course of 45 minutes, during which Sam occasionally played Storybook Brawl on his computer, we discussed…" Well, they discussed a lot of things, but that single sentence kind of tells you all you need to know about the baby-faced SBF, doesn't it?