Opinion: How Sam Bankman-Fried exploited the ‘effective altruism’ fad to get rich and con the world

The siren call of Bankman-Fried’s wealth blinded MacAskill and his colleagues to the void at the centre of the cryptocurrency concept itself: It’s a field rife with fraud and chicanery and lacking any cogent case for its usefulness. — Miami Herald/TNS

The most uplifting aspect of the Sam Bankman-Fried story was always that he guided his way to a putative cryptocurrency fortune of more than US$16bil (RM71.64bil) by following a philosophy of charitable giving known as “effective altruism”.

Interviewers were dazzled by Bankman-Fried’s account of the epiphany he experienced over a lunch with Will MacAskill, around the time he was graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.