I'm very critical of SBF and what went on here, but let's not over sentimentalise this, they gambled billions of dollars of peoples deposits, not savings. Which clearly is a crime, but you don't store your savings on a crypto exchange, BTC arguably the most reliable of the crypto-currencies is down 70% in the last year. Moves that happen once in a lifetime in real markets happened multiple times in crypto. No one reasonable has their savings in crypto exchanges.
> but you don't store your savings on a crypto exchange... No one reasonable has their savings in crypto exchanges.
Many, many, many people have absolutely bought into the crypto dream, put their savings on an exchange and absolutely ended up entirely destitute. There are swathes of evidence of exactly this.
It can be hard to tell. On one hand, as a longtime observer of spaces like r/wsb and various crypto/opensea spinoff communities, people will very seriously gamble and lose vast quantities of money (and, to be fair, sometimes win vast quantities) in risky bets that they don't understand, and then post about it on the internet as if they didn't understand what the term "betting your life's savings" meant. On the other hand, I find enough schaudenfreude in reading such posts that I can see exactly why and how someone would fabricate such a story merely for their own amusement. It's a good heuristic to take anything with a grain of salt, including this half-baked explanation from SBF on exactly what went down with FTX.
The Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan lost around a $100M because of FTX. It isn't that unbelievable that other individuals also put a significant amount of their savings into crypto. The trust for FTX was there.
It was a stupid decision, but at least from their PoV, it was only a stupid decision in hindsight.
