Ever seen those superhero movies where Batman hunts down the villain and leaves him hogtied in cables for the police to mop up? That’s what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried. The internet hunted down the fraud, collected indisputable evidence, and delivered him gift-wrapped to the government. Then everyone from Elon to India yelled online for a full month till the state finally, grudgingly picked him up.

Now that he’s been convicted, we’ve been treated to a bizarre rewriting of history in which obviously the system worked because it was shamed by Twitter into pursuing an obvious crook. And yes, it was Twitter that drove the government to act. How do we know? Because the entire case was broken on crypto Twitter, from beginning to end!

• It was Ian Allison revealing that SBF had no money, not Dan Primack asking whether SBF could cure world hunger

• It was Erik Voorhees playing hardball with SBF on Bankless, not Joe Weisenthal throwing him softballs on Odd Lots

• It was David Z. Morris calling FTX a crime, not David Yaffe-Bellany claiming SBF was a philanthropist

• It was Crypto Twitter proving SBF was a fraud, not NYT Dealbook clapping for that fraud

• And it was Twitter posting about SBF’s donations to Democrat politicians, even as those same politicians were welcoming him to Congress

NYT, Congress, Bloomberg, Axios — all these establishment organs failed where Coindesk, Bankless, and Crypto Twitter succeeded. Not a single corporate journalist, politician, regulator, or policeman thought to investigate SBF until Erik Voorhees smelled a rat and Ian Allison found the rat. In fact, even the least self-aware corporate journalist in modern history admitted that citizen journalists “outshine traditional media on coverage of FTX implosion.”

So: yes, the only reason SBF was even exposed, let alone convicted was because of people posting on Twitter. Twitter is important! That’s why the regime didn’t want Trump to post on there, doesn’t want you to post on there, and doesn’t want Elon to let you post on there. As far back as the Arab Spring, it was clear that Twitter could topple regimes. And in this case, it toppled the regime’s #2 donor, “one of the people who is among the most responsible for [Biden] being in office.” Needless to say, this was not an outcome any establishment figure sought before the events of Nov 2022.

Ok. With that out of the way, let’s do the long version, just to make sure the actual history of this wretched episode is properly recorded somewhere.

No, the system did not work.

If you get the last question right on a test after failing everything else, you get an F. And that’s what happened here. The system we pay trillions of dollars for failed in almost every respect but the very last. The politicians failed, the journalists failed, and the regulators failed. The criminal justice system eventually succeeded, but only after failing everywhere else — and then too only after the Internet built the entire case for them.

Why do we say the system failed?

• Let me know when the politicians SBF helped elect with stolen funds tender their resignations, starting with Biden.

• Let me know when the journos who flacked for SBF publish lengthy retractions.

• Let me know when the regulators who attacked Bitcoin ETFs while meeting with SBF admit they’re incapable of regulation.

• And let me know when the state admits they only pursued the case after the Internet assembled unambiguous evidence of his guilt, slicing through his many deceptions.

Obviously, none of this will ever happen. SBF’s stolen money helped swing elections across the country. These actions will never be unwound, which means SBF in essence took one for the team — and the bad guys got away with it again.

Point: the entire sordid SBF saga isn’t some great triumph for the US establishment! It’s as much an indictment of them as it is of him. Fortunately, we do have the internet. And as we’ll detail, it was that decentralized network that really caught SBF — not the centralized state.

Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane, shall we?

Recall that SBF was the #2 donor to Democrats after Soros himself. It’s admitted that he was one of the people most responsible for putting Joe Biden in the White House, with what is now admitted to be stolen money. Democrats like Maxine Waters praised him for being “candid” and “welcomed” him to testify to Congress even after his fraud was public, and literally blew him kisses at Congressional hearings.

In fact, Waters — the sitting Chair of House Financial Services — was “surprised” that SBF was arrested before he had the prestigious opportunity to make his case before Congress. Why was she surprised? Perhaps because SBF had been working closely with her and others on capturing the regulatory state, through a bill that would have criminalized decentralized finance but benefited SBF’s personal finances.

So, the politicians failed in their nominal job of passing laws that are in the best interests of the public. SBF legally bribed them into pushing legislation that would favor his centralized business over everyone else’s, much like what’s now happened in AI. And Bankman-Fried would have succeeded too, but for those nosy kids on the Internet.

Next, remember that SBF was the toast of the town in mainstream media. Corporate journalists like NYT’s David Yaffe-Bellany tirelessly flacked for SBF before, during, and even after his monstrous swindle came into public view. In fact, the New York Times not only platformed SBF after millions knew he’d stolen billions, they even gave him a loud round of applause!

The contrast to other crypto coverage couldn’t be starker. For years, the media’s message was that Bitcoin was a fraud, but Bankman-Fried was a friend. He showered stolen money on NGOs and media outlets like Semafor and ProPublica, and in return they anointed him “JP Morgan of crypto.”

So, the journalists completely failed in their nominal job of informing the public. SBF played the “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us”, and made sure the journos believed he was their ideological tribesman. Thus they wrote nice things about him, and would have continued to — again, if not for those nosy kids on the Internet.

Also remember that the regulators failed. Gary Gensler met with SBF privately, an audience given to very few, all while attacking countless other projects publicly in cases they’ve now lost. The meeting mentions “conditional no action relief”, which in regulatorese translates to “we will not pursue enforcement against FTX.”

So, the regulators also failed in their nominal job of (a) flagging bad projects and (b) passing good projects. Instead they spent their time meeting with SBF while attacking Bitcoin ETFs. And why? Probably because SBF pushed for more regulatory power and greased the hands of the right politicians. So the regulators granted him special favors like private meetings, and Congress steered crypto regulation to his preferences — all of which he would have gotten away with, if not for those nosy kids on the Internet.

And what exactly did those nosy kids on the Internet do? Well, they blew the case wide open.

It started with crypto investor Nick Tomaino tweeting that FTX was suspect in both its trading activity and its policy advocacy. It continued with crypto CEO Erik Voorhees politely confronting SBF on the Bankless crypto podcast. And it culminated in crypto outlet Coindesk publishing an article by Ian Allison on SBF’s shenanigans that blew the fraud wide open.

Again: none of this was driven by legacy media, politicians, regulators, or police — which is why even WaPo admitted that citizen journalists “outshine traditional media on coverage of FTX implosion.”

After Coindesk’s revelations, things moved quickly. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao sold his stake, SBF claimed assets were fine, and the community immediately tested his claims. And this is the decentralized “fact check” that actually did him in. You see, because of Satoshi’s invention, Samuel Bankman-Fried couldn’t continue the fraud by minting fake funds on his centralized server, as he did for his trading firm. Once millions of people found that they couldn’t move their money to a decentralized blockchain, the illusion collapsed, and so did his exchange.

This truly cannot be emphasized enough: no legacy journalist, politician, regulator, or policeman caught Sam Bankman-Fried! Only the blockchain did. Up to the very end, SBF was saying that “FTX is fine, assets are fine”. But because of what the blockchain represents, millions of people around the world were able to independently fact check him by testing their ability to withdraw and then viewing the results on chain. SBF could deceive a failed State, but he met his match in the decentralized Network. He couldn’t enable withdrawals because he wasn’t good for the money.

In short: the Network succeeded where the State failed. It was Crypto Twitter that asked the hard questions, that did the actual citizen journalism, that found the unambiguous smoking gun proof in the form of insufficient onchain balances, and that published that proof on the internet. It was the Network that was able to come to a firm decentralized consensus that he didn’t have the money, even while State loyalists kept portraying SBF as a “billionaire”. All the police did from that point on was a slow, grudging mop-up.

As mentioned, the internet had cryptographic proof that SBF was a criminal on a historical scale by Nov 11, 2022 when FTX paused withdrawals and its onchain balance of BTC dropped from 20,000 to 1. SBF and his cronies lied to the public continuously during this period about having plenty of funds, but the reason he couldn’t enable withdrawals is because he couldn’t lie to the Bitcoin blockchain.

Millions of witnesses could independently confirm the fact that SBF had stolen their money by monitoring the Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains. Like Batman, internet volunteers had delivered SBF to the police hogtied and with indisputable evidence stapled to his chest.

And then…nothing. For weeks, SBF went on his Good Morning America tour. He got fawning coverage from Yaffe-Bellany at the New York Times, which even other journos were appalled by at the time. He got to make his case at Dealbook to a rousing round of applause. He was “welcome” to testify before Congress by the chair of House Financial Services, a privilege that (to say the least) isn’t typically how white collar prosecutions begin. And he was left free to roam around, tweet, and otherwise spread uncertainty for weeks.

Why?

We need to drill into this point because one of the core lies being circulated online right now is that of course the state is completely trustworthy, and only a paranoid lunatic would think it was internally conflicted about arresting SBF during this period. To address this, we’ll need to first discuss (a) trust in the police, then (b) the timeline of the pickup, and finally (c) the tension in the party.

The first question is: should we have simply assumed it’d all turn out fine? No. Remember, Democrats spent much of 2020 screaming about abolishing the police. Then, with SBF suddenly they pivoted to “lol, can’t believe you didn’t trust the police!”

But we don’t trust the police. Because the SBF case didn’t happen in a vacuum. Faith has legitimately been lost in America’s once-admirable legal system.

After all, thanks to Soros prosecutors, crime is de facto legal in major American cities. Hard drugs are sold in public. Supermarkets and trains are looted in broad daylight. Car windows are smashed, and everything is grabbed. Mobs block roads and swarm passerby at BLM