This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human

Hello and welcome to Better Offline.

I'm your host, Ed Zittron.

This is a weekly tech show where I walk you through the good,

the bad and the stupid of a multi-trillion dollar industry

that's changed and monetized almost every part of our lives.

So you're likely aware of the tale of Sam Bankman-Fried, the curly-haired fraudster who conned

millions of people out of billions of dollars, crushing the cryptocurrency markets in the process.

He did so by creating a cryptocurrency exchange called FTX, where people could buy things like Bitcoin and Ethereum,

except it had one little catch.

He was stealing the customer funds,

keeping only a little around at any given time for people to withdraw. This meant that when

hundreds of thousands of people went to withdraw their funds at once, the entire scheme fell

apart and FDX collapsed. Bankman Fried currently sits in prison awaiting sentencing after being convicted

and several counts of fraud, including wire fraud and wire fraud conspiracy, which is appropriate,

as him and his co-conspirators at one point genuinely used a group called wire fraud chat,

and I am not kidding. Yet this isn't about SBF. There are actually two other villains in this story.

Two villains of the recent crypto crash that you might have missed, despite the fact that they're both six-foot-five and lost their customers over a billion dollars.

I'm talking about Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two brothers both alike in dignity and

appearance, the gay notoriety by suing Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, now known as Meta, in

the early days of the social network back in 2004.

...