When Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison, the crypto world took notice, but I wonder how many people really thought about where he went wrong.
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Sure, he was convicted of fraud and conspiracy, but high-profile people from every industry have stolen money and pulled-down the house of cards around them.
I would have stopped thinking about SBF by now if he hadn’t been in crypto – but he was, so I can’t stay silent.
His failure was a failure of values because he misunderstood the reason why Bitcoin and most of crypto exists. If too many of us in crypto make the same mistakes, all of us are in trouble.
When the motivation for people running a crypto business becomes only about making themselves money, I have a problem.
I have a problem because even the governments printing money understand it would be a pointless exercise to just store it all until its value increases.
Fiat has to have some utility, otherwise it’s just paper. Many in crypto despise fiat currency, yet they talk about crypto as if it’s almost the same thing. They treat it only as an investment and forget its utility.
When I first understood the real power of Bitcoin, I knew that making myself successful was only the tip of a very big iceberg.
In my early days building a crypto company, I was offered a lot of money to sell it. I could have taken the money and lived a luxurious life, but I chose not to. I’ve always believed that crypto has the potential to change the world for the better, and I wanted to be a part of that.
I was born in Egypt , but I grew up in a nasty part of New York City called Hell’s Kitchen. It’s a different place now, but in the 80s and 90s it was pretty scary.
When I was a kid helping my parents run a newsstand in Hell’s Kitchen, times were tough, and we weren’t just battling to put food on the table. We were fighting to survive.
I saw a lot of people struggling, a lot of antisocial behaviour, and I now realize that many of the problems were caused by people having to fight tooth-and-nail to get a piece of the action.
Some wanted money for drugs, but many just wanted to pay the rent or put food on the table. It wasn’t a nice place to visit, let alone to live, work, and go to school.
My experiences in the Global South paralleled those early years in Hell’s Kitchen, and they taught me that we have to give people a place at the table. We have to give them some food, and that’s one of our values at NoOnes – “everyone eats.”
Part of our strategy is to give back 50% of our profits to the people, and we have already started to do it.
Our initiatives like cashbacks, including paying $50 to students learning how to buy Bitcoin and payouts to traders using our partner program, are already having an impact. “Everyone eats” is key because my success won’t be complete until those around me thrive, too.
SBF talked about “effective altruism” and said he donated money to the “Future Fund,” but I’m not aware of anything he built. He signed the “Giving Pledge” a few years ago, but the value of that is now exactly zero. Unlike effective altruism, I decided a long time ago that giving back had to be part of my business model. I wasn’t going to make a lot of money and then decide where to donate it.
While at Paxful, I created Built with Bitcoin and helped build 13 schools and other infrastructure in the Global South. Now, I’m taking it to the next level with NoOnes nation and the ecosystem we are building.
Some people might think I’m wasting my time and money, but it’s a business decision as much as it is an ethical one.
Satoshi thought of Bitcoin as a universal container for money that could be part of a new financial architecture. It was never meant to be just another form of investment.
Originally, when I built Paxful, it was in response to my “bullish education” – another of my core values. This belief fueled my conviction that Bitcoin and peer-to-peer technology were part of the solution to the problems with the traditional financial system.
But after witnessing the challenges faced by communities on the ground, particularly in Africa, I came to understand that these tools alone weren’t enough. We needed more than that.
In the U.S., I tried to find solutions for the problems in the Global South, but I realized I had to leave if I wanted to build what was needed. I resigned from my role and did the only thing I could do – I went home to the Global South and built the right “nation” here. That nation is NoOnes, and one of the keys to it succeeding is another core value – “revolutionary transparency.”
Revolutionary transparency, in essence, is flipping information availability on its head. I knew what I had to do when I created NoOnes because I listened to the savvy, African bitcoiners telling me their problems, and then I used that information to improve our product.
Every day we take their feedback and make our peer-to-peer marketplace better. But it won’t work if the people on the ground don’t know what’s going on – and that’s why transparency is crucial.
The transparency they talk about in the West is not revolutionary. What I’m talking about is being completely open, and that means, for example, showing anyone – not just our employees or the users of our marketplace – the CEO dashboard. Anyone can click on the link and see what I see right now. Imagine if we could see what SBF was seeing a year before the collapse of FTX?
If we are going to build a real financial ecosystem that is fair to everyone, regardless of where they were born or what passports they have, we must have the trust of the people we are building it for.
We can only gain that trust if we are completely transparent, and that’s a revolutionary idea because the people in crypto like Sam Bankman-Fried, who talk about transparency but never follow-through, hurt all of us.
The people who know me will recognize my values because I’ve been talking about them and acting upon them for years.
Apart from Built with Bitcoin and all the schools, water wells, and education centers I helped build, I co-authored the white paper for a censorship-resistant, global, peer-to-peer marketplace blueprint called CivKit. It’s open source because we need others to build their own NoOnes to help us create this new financial ecosystem that uses Bitcoin and peer-to-peer to set our money free from the prisons in the Global South that keep it locked away.
We need competitors building their own ecosystems on CivKit, or joining our NoOnes community to advocate for financial freedom in the Global South.
We need people with the right values who are willing to learn the truth about the fight we are up against and how we can build a better future for everyone.
If we want to make Bitcoin or any crypto work as it was intended, everyone has to eat, they have to be educated, and they have to trust us. We need more NoOnes nations and less FTXes if we are going to see this project through to the end.
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