Sam Bankman-Fried: evaluation

Transcript context

…For all of our listeners out there who are not familiar with the trading world, I'm going to make a way oversimplified comparison here. Imagine running Airbnb or Uber, but you don't actually have the hard part of any humans, any cars, or any Airbnbs. You just have a pure matching of supply to demand of a purely digital asset. So your variable costs are near zero or zero? Yeah. It's very near zero. It's a definitional issue like maker rebates. It's a variable cost and it just decreases your revenue, whatever, but it's basically near zero. So we felt like we've been using these products, we understand it, it's a big business, but okay, fine, whatever. I understand Amazon, sort of. It's making a lot of money. I'm not starting Amazon 2.0 tomorrow. We're going to sell socks, but they haven't thought of that one. What was the other thing? The other thing was that in theory, I think an exchange is a much more complex business than what I described. In practice, exchanges circa 2018 were not. There's a lot of other things you might think you would have to do as an exchange. You’re mostly right that you have to do them, but that doesn't mean people did do them. We're not that far removed from the Mt. Gox era at this point, right?…

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