Molly White

(I am the author of the op-ed. A better version is at [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer ].)

I am very familiar with Agile and Scum, and I have seen the advantages over older paradigms such as waterfall. That being said, there are certain basic principles that the old methods and the new methods have in common. One such principle is the basic idea of having some sort of contact with the people who will be using the finished software and understanding their needs. The WMF does not do that. Instead, they build something in secret, throw it over the wall, and watch as the Wikipedia editors reject it as the steaming pile of crap that it is. They have done this again and again. Visual Editor. Flow. Mobile App. Knowledge Engine. All failures. All built without any input from the people who would be using them.

Now I KNOW that the developers are not stupid or ignorant, and I have checked as best I can and it appears that every one of them was able to create high quality software that meets the customer's needs when they were working other places. That leaves me with management as the probable culprit. And I don't think that the problem is product managers like the author of the post above this one. I think the blame is at the very top.

I would advise anyone who really wishes to understand these issues to at least read the pages linked to on my [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer ] page, especially […

Many people have alaready made sense of web3. The problem with web3? People involved in the space don't care. They are either gullible or know exactly what they are doing (scamming and claiming something that has nothing to do blockchains).

One of the earliest articles that already made sense is 5 years old this year:

- Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain, https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100

- And the follow up, Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future, https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec

We've yet to see a single "making sense" cryptobro engage with any of the points in the article. I'm not even talking about the more recent ones like Moxie Marlinspike's My first impressions of web3, https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html, or Molly White's collection of posts on blockchains and web3, https://blog.mollywhite.net/

There are more, of course. But they are all dismissed by crypto people because they don't care as long as crypto is useful for getting rich quick schemes. It's not here to save the world, or help the disadvantaged, or whatever other bullshit they sling your way.

> I want novel use-cases outside of just finance. There was a layman's NFT video suggesting they'd work as a way of doing concert tickets

Most of those "novel ways" either make no sense or make trivial things hard and hard things nearly impossible. Most people peddling (there's no other word for it) these solutions have no idea how the real world works, or what the real world needs.

> I'd love to see a readable, not-super-technical blog post that lays out the ideas people came up with (and which, if any, panned out)

6 years ago these two articles already described how many "novel ways" make no sense, no matter the intention. All the issues described remain, regardless of how many new buzzwords people come up with in the crypto space:

- https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100

- https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec

For newer descriptions of how these systems fail, see Molly White: https://blog.mollywhite.net/is-web3-bullshit/ (and other essays and talks)

Edit: There's also The Edited Latecomer's Guide To Crypto https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/latecomers-guide-to-crypto/

RE: Where the money went - The customer's money was used for the following purposes:

1. To pay for Alameda's (Sam Bankman Fried's hedge fund) and FTX's loses

2. Invest in venture capital and make acquisitions

3. Political donations

4. Charitable donations

5. Luxury real-estate, boats, etc.

6. "loans" (i.e. transfer of stolen funds) to FTX's top executives

RE: Intent - Intent was easy to prove. All of Sam Bankman-Fried's fellow executives testified against him. In addition, Sam Bankman-Fried gave several interviews after FTX's collapse where he basically admitted he lied, fucked up, etc. Also, there was a lot of documents proving Sam Bankman-Fried lied. A good example is him saying FTX was fine on Twitter (X) and then it collapsed a few days later.

Here are some good FTX resources:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/s/the-ftx-files
- Molley White did a good job covering the trial.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/united-states-attorney-announces-charges-against-ftx-founder-samuel-bankman-fried
- This site contains the government's indictment against Sam Bankman-Fried.

https://restructuring.ra.kroll.com/FTX/Home-Index
- A lot of the FTX bankruptcy documents are on this website.

> I wasn't following the case closely enough, but did the prosecution have access to Alameda source code, or was it only FTX?

This blog post [0] contains screenshots of git commits that were used as evidence in the trial. It only shows commits to FTX's source code, so I don't know if the prosecution also had access to Alameda's source code.

Given how obviously incriminating those snippets are, I don't think SBF really tried to hide his crimes. I'm not sure then why they would architecture FTX such there are no signs of front-running in their code.

Personally, my guess is that either A) the prosecution found evidence of front-running but thought that the case was air-tight enough already and they didn't want to confuse the jurors or B) Alameda didn't actually do any front-running.

[0]: https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-fraud-was-in-the-code

My Substack newsletter is literally a copy and paste from my blog - I built a custom tool for it: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/4/substack-observable/

Everything substantial I write goes on my blog.

The one challenge I'm having at the moment is where to put short "thoughts" that aren't accompanied by a link. I used to use Twitter for those, but now I'm cross-posting to Bluesky and Mastodon and Twitter - but cross-posting a "thought" doesn't feel great.

Things like this: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3lko5bg3c4s2d

I may have to invent a fourth content type for my blog (which is currently just entries, bookmarks or quotes) for this kind of very-short-form post with no link. Molly White started doing that recently so I may borrow her design: https://www.mollywhite.net/micro