Critics, not unreasonably, said crypto had failed to offer compelling use-cases, beyond speculation. They said it was a cesspit of money laundering and terrorism (its involvement in the latter tends to be vastly overstated). They said it was dangerous for the environment. They said it could never become part of the financial system, because key financial players on Wall Street would never accept it. Some even dared to bid a valedictory “Sayonara”, as they have hundreds of times before now.

Yet today, Bitcoin is trading at around $70,000, above its previous all-time-high of about $69,000. The world’s premier cryptocurrency now has a market cap greater than silver, and many expect it to reach parity with gold within a few months. Meanwhile, the rest of the crypto market, which slumped along lifelessly for much of 2023, isn’t far behind.

So, what’s going on here? What sparked Bitcoin’s resurrection? The truth is there are five principal reasons behind its revival, the first of which may seem rather obvious…

1. You can’t kill Bitcoin

It’s awfully difficult to eradicate something like Bitcoin. Its network is peer-to-peer and decentralised, with roughly 18,000 public nodes working to validate and maintain the network daily, and they work independently. There isn’t a central point of failure or vulnerability for someone or something to stop. It’s a self-perpetuating system. And, more importantly, Bitcoin has tremendous latent support in the world: there are more than 100 million Bitcoin holders globally and, characteristically, they do not respond to political pressure. Since its emergence 13 years ago, Bitcoin has purred along efficiently, steadily growing, even in the face of massive competition and numerous hacks (particularly to exchanges and individual wallets).

This resilience isn’t directly connected to price; Bitcoin can be resistant without the price going up. But the price is based on this sense of permanence. It’s a function of everyone knowing with certainty that the Bitcoin code can’t be changed and that the issuance of new Bitcoin isn’t a political matter. Unlike fiat currencies, which are subject to central bank issuing more or less of a currency depending on the economic circumstances, the issuance of Bitcoin is predictable. That’s a unique selling point in a world where everything, even money, is increasingly politicised.

2. The arrival of ETFs

Though the Bitcoin industry takes pride in its outsider status, it has long sought mainstream support, whether from regulators or blue-blood institutions. This January, after 10 years of trying, it hit the mother lode, winning SEC approval for Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, or ETFs. These vehicles, which helped to popularise gold in the 2000s, allow everyday investors to buy into Bitcoin as if they were purchasing a conventional stock. There’s no need to own the underlying asset or to store it oneself.

This convenience is propelling a whole new generation of customers to buy into digital markets via trusted names such as BlackRock and Fidelity. Recently, daily inflows to 10 approved ETFs averaged more than $1 billion, and analysts expect more than $200 billion in trade for Bitcoin in the next couple of years. If so, crypto will have a strong underpinning, helping it to weather regulatory storms and inevitable crises. And the Bitcoin ETFs are just the start. Many expect regulators to approve Ethereum ETFs in a few months and that, eventually, wealth managers will allocate up to 5% global savings to digital assets. Bitcoin is the gateway drug: once people hold Bitcoin in an ETF, the thinking goes, they’ll move on to more exotic digital asset investments later.

3. Regulation works

People in crypto tend to hate regulators and regulation, believing that people and institutions should be able to transact freely. They complain about regulatory interference in general and particularly about the type of intervention we’ve seen over the past year from the SEC. The lack of new legislation governing crypto in the US has led to a series of arbitrary enforcement actions by that agency, leading to a deep sense of mistrust across the Bitcoin ecosystem.

However, regulation can also be a useful tool for industries seeking acceptance. The trial and prosecution of Sam Bankman-Fried last November created a sense of clearing-house, of past failures being put to bed. Finally, many Bitcoiners believe, we can all move on. Meanwhile, the EU passed its comprehensive MiCA legislation regarding crypto, creating greater regulatory certainty within the bloc and showing other jurisdictions the way forward.

4. Elite approval

If you want a cast-iron indication of the new mood around Bitcoin, look no further than Donald J. Trump. Back in 2021, Trump said that Bitcoin was “a scam” that undermines the dollar’s place as the world’s reserve currency. But now he says, if he’s re-elected, he wouldn’t seek to ban it. “I have seen there has been a lot of use of that,” Trump said recently. “I’m not sure that I’d want to take it away at this point.”

Nor is Trump the only high-profile convert. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has also U-turned, recently backing an Ethereum ETF to go with his company’s Bitcoin ETF. Even, the Financial Times and the New York Times, liberal institutions that have routinely amplified the routine criticisms of Bitcoin, are noticeably more accommodating these days, running approving articles to go along with all the jeremiads. (That said, central bankers, who have the most to lose from Bitcoin becoming serious money, are still lockstep against Bitcoin, even in the face of ETF mania.)

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5. The world is going to end

The less palatable reason for Bitcoin’s rise is that it’s a hedge against very bad things happening. Bitcoin is “disaster insurance” in a world where traditional monetary mechanisms break down. People buy it because they don’t trust central banks. That’s why more than half the adults of Turkey, to take one example, own Bitcoin: because they think it will hold its value better than the Lira.

In this way, Bitcoin is the strangest of exotic assets: its price is both an indication of financial health in capital markets, but also an indicator of deep unease with the current social settlement. On the one hand, the mainstream approval of Bitcoin arguably makes us safer because capital markets are broader-based and people are diversifying into new categories. On the other, its resurgence shows that many people are concerned that the conventional financial system — and, by extension, the broad social system it is based on — is going to fail. They want to “exit” and find something that isn’t controlled by a few dozen middle-aged white men in suits. They want decentralisation away from narrow elites controlling our lives, whether it’s Wall Street, the Federal Reserve or Big Tech.

Having said that, the demise of today’s financial system, long foretold following the 2008-9 financial crisis, hasn’t happened yet. For now, we have the curious situation of mainstream financial institutions marketing the hell out of an asset that was once created to outrun and destroy them. The question is whether this uneasy situation continues indefinitely. Will the mainstreaming of crypto mean it’s sanitised of political and social meaning; that it becomes just another financial asset? Or will Bitcoin’s success lead where hardcore Bitcoiners have always wanted to go? For now, we don’t know whether the promises of global financial revolution made by some of Bitcoin’s more Jacobinical founders will materialise. But, even as it takes another tumble, with some of the new investor funds from early this year going into reverse, we can be sure of one thing: reports of its death were greatly exaggerated.

Strangely, 2 November was the exact day, a year earlier, that CoinDesk — the news organisation where I work — had broken the story that precipitated the fall. Ian Allison’s scoop showed that much of the balance sheet propelling FTX (through its hedge fund, Alameda Trading) was composed of a stablecoin token (FTT) that FTX itself had created. In effect, our reporting showed, FTX had been swapping real people’s real money for a coin with little liquidity and no intrinsic value. And, as the trial would reveal, even this balance sheet was a fiction created by Alameda’s chief, Caroline Ellison, to make FTX look healthier than it actually was.

This was fraud, pure and simple. And over the month of the trial, SBF has been turned into the white-collar criminal par excellence, all by the same media that once fêted and foregrounded him as a charming eccentric. But, though his personal foibles have come to dominate coverage, SBF’s downfall has also been seen as a parable for the entire crypto industry. Our original story set off a tailspin of valuations and crypto prices that is only today righting itself, and the fall of FTX hurt crypto’s reputation among the public and regulators — particularly in Washington D.C., which has turned viciously on the industry and its apologists. The jury on Pearl took just three hours to reach its unanimous verdict, and to many the conclusion was peremptorily clear: crypto was and is a scam, just as SBF and FTX were. For the faithful within the crypto industry, this is a terrifying conclusion. Was FTX really representative of the fundamental wrongness of crypto, an industry that literally creates money out of thin air, as SBF had done with FTT? Or, was FTX, in fact, just a story of immature corporate governance, of structural forces that keep allowing boy-wonders like SBF to do terrible things?

I’ve covered the crypto/blockchain/web3 space as a journalist since 2014, and this is far from the first scandal it’s seen. In fact, long before SBF, I thought I’d seen every flavour of exotic financial scam going. The stories behind “BitConnect”, “Onecoin”, “QuadrigaCX”, and “Mt. Gox” are notorious, and the losses staggering. The Onecoin Ponzi scheme, for instance, started in Bulgaria and fleeced victims of $4 billion. The main perpetrator was one Ruja Ignatova — aka the CryptoQueen — who went missing for years after the scam was first discovered in 2017. She is now thought to have been murdered on a yacht by a drug lord, her remains scattered into the Ionian Sea. QuadrigaCX was a mid-size crypto exchange operating in Canada in the mid-2010s, until its founder, Gerald Cotten, died in mysterious circumstances while on a trip to India in 2019. With his death, $145 million in tokens stored on the exchange inexplicably went offline, apparently missing forever.

Covering these and many such stories was fun. The characters were outsized (BitConnect’s Carlos Matos’s speech to an investor crowd in Thailand became an era-defining meme). And the claims they made for themselves were always outlandish, from “you’re going to get rich!” to “we’re going to save the world”. A lot of the journalists covering crypto at the time believed in the underlying technology and the message of decentralisation (that banks, governments and Silicon Valley fundamentally do have too much control over our lives). But we didn’t take the industry overly seriously, because the actors involved were often not serious about following through on their promises. Crypto was an entertaining sideshow to the mainstream events happening in finance and business.

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By the time SBF came along, emerging as a boy-genius during Covid, it seemed like much of the fun-and-games was over. Crypto had grown up. Its leading companies, like Coinbase, had gone public, sanitised of their earlier ideological commitments of banking-the-unbanked and usurping central banks in controlling the money supply. The industry had disciplined advocates in Washington. Its leaders were part of the financial establishment, still on the margins to be sure, but not in the way the cypherpunks — the community of Nineties-era digital anarchists who gave rise to Bitcoin — were outside society. They had believed in utterly breaking the banks following the 2008 financial crisis, not in getting Wall Street’s assent to reshape finance for the digital age.

Then, in November 2022, salacious details about SBF/FTX began to emerge on the back of our story. SBF had been running a “cabal” of former roommates (several of whom, it was speculated, had been involved in a polyamorous tryst) out of a lavish compound in the Bahamas. It had no accounting department or risk manager, despite being a $32 billion company in an infamously risky industry. Still, many aspects of FTX made it a different type of scandal to BitConnect and the rest. SBF’s organisation had been taken seriously by serious people, including the regulators and many high-profile politicians. It had investors from blue-blooded Silicon Valley firms and it presented itself as part of the next wave of crypto development: sober, measured, media-savvy, and politically connected.

BitConnect, Onecoin, QuadrigaCX et al. had never made it onto the front cover of Forbes or Fortune. The founders of these enterprises didn’t appear before Congressional committees, as SBF was wont to do, to argue for the industry’s interests. They never had private meetings with the chairman of the SEC to argue for favourable treatment. They never paid off one third of Congress — almost 200 representatives and senators. They never appeared in primetime ads, and on-stage, with A-listers like seven-time Super Bowl winner Tom Brady, Larry David or President Bill Clinton. And they certainly never paid to rename football and baseball stadiums with their brand. This was a different crowd to the old bad boys of crypto.

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SBF’s need for attention from the media and the political class is one reason why he’s now taking such a rap for the industry’s failings. He brought it on himself. SBF, who dressed and acted in a casual way that reporters tended to like, was a media addict who revelled in his “king of crypto” status. He gave out his cell number to anyone who would listen to him, making himself available for comment at odd times, day and night. He never missed an opportunity to make a potentially viral TikTok video or eke out a little more airtime. Even after FTX’s collapse, he was still calling up every reporter he knew to try and press his innocence, even as every defence lawyer told him to stay quiet.

So, when the New York Times said that crypto was on trial in the SBF case, it was not entirely unreasonable (though definitely misleading). He was the face of crypto for a couple of years. But, to many in the industry, SBF’s incarceration proves little, because he was never a true believer. SBF never advocated for true decentralisation, as hardened Bitcoiners do. And, when he was palling around D.C. salons in 2021 and 2022, he was largely speaking for his own company, rather than for the industry as a whole. These people point out that the fraud was committed largely in dollars, rather than crypto, and it could have happened in any industry that’s lightly regulated and supervised. Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes and the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-8 managed fine without any Bitcoin or stablecoins changing hands.

But SBF really was supposed to be the chosen one who could make crypto safe for everyday users. As new laws and regulators come down in the wake of FTX, SBF may have achieved that goal, but not in the way he intended. Today, the words “crypto” and “Web3” are losing their currency, replaced by a legalistic vocabulary of “digital assets” and “tokenisation”. Intermediaries that hold crypto assets, like exchanges, now have to attest to their reserves, so it’s clear that people like SBF are not making off with people’s money for their own enjoyment. Crypto is less about financial freedom and wild speculation around funny sounding meme-coins (like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu) and more about “real-world assets”, such as treasury bonds and stocks.

Wall Street is gradually incorporating crypto into the wide financial nexus in subtle ways, exerting control over future regulation and controls. The T-shirt wearing Bitcoiners, who gave rise to the industry and made it culturally interesting, are being sidelined in favour of suits and compliance officers. This all makes the industry less fun to cover and less scandalous. But it also probably means that crypto is on safer ground: more trustworthy and predictable, and less volatile. SBF was part of a wave of crypto-sanitisers who aim was to move crypto from the anarchic fringe to the mainstream. His accidental legacy may be to make it more like the rest of finance — safe for grandma and relatively boring.

In the first decades of the last century, Arnold Rothstein, described by one social historian as “the JP Morgan of the underworld”, is widely regarded as the founder of American organised crime. Later Bernard Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried as well as the odious Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein have carried on this grim tradition, albeit with usually less lethal means.

Today, America’s most prominent malefactors are more those of privilege than products of mean streets. Their evolution is epitomised by Bankman-Fried, a graduate of MIT, who was described by the Jerusalem Post as the product of “an upper-middle class family of Jewish academics”, raised in a $4 million home near Stanford amid the elite culture of Silicon Valley. Like many would-be tech moguls, Bankman-Fried revelled in his “outsider” image — as demonstrated by his pervasively sloppy dress code — but he was also an insider whose large contributions to the Democrats won him access to White House officials even as FTX was collapsing around him.

The complex nature of Jewish economic life was shaped by history. With their homeland destroyed by the Romans in AD70, Jews, already scattered throughout the Mediterranean world, were forced to employ their smarts and connections to survive. Once Christianity became the state religion, Jews faced greater restrictions, eventually barring them from most economic activities and service in the government or army. They were, notes historian Yuri Slezkine, “a cohesive tribe of professional strangers”, as opposed to most peasants, who were not literate, knew little about how the cash economy worked and often lived their entire lives within a relatively small perimeter. With the rise of capitalism, however, these habits born of exclusion turned out to be advantageous, as originally observed by both a sympathetic Max Weber and more hostile Werner Sombart. Jews may not have been the originators of capitalism, but as the Jewish historian Ellis Rivkin has argued, they were “best positioned to benefit”.

It also helped that Jews were literate, sometimes in more than one language, with contacts and family dispersed across numerous geographies. Before the Holocaust, Jews made up the vast majority of Eastern Europe’s factory owners, bankers, lawyers and physicians. By the 1880s, Jews accounted for a bare 4% of the population of the Austrian Empire, but comprised 40% of Vienna’s gymnasium students, a pattern seen throughout Eastern Europe. They also dominated the professions and the stock exchanges. A handful rose to prominence as global banking families, most obviously the Rothschilds, who played a preeminent role in the rise of the modern European and then North American economies.

Yet such success led some to suggest Jews were by nature manipulative and dishonest, a view common among European Christians for most of the last two millennia. Two dominant archetypes emerged in terms of Jewish image — one elevated, the other despised. “From Moses the lawgiver to Madoff the shyster”, writes University of Michigan historian Jeffrey Veidlinger. “Jews have figured prominently in European myth for some 2,000 years.” They were seen either as unmatched moral exemplars or “feared and despised as imagined worshippers of the Anti-Christ, political conspirators, financial manipulators, child murderers, and threats to racial purity”.

In reality, like any ethnic group under assault, some felt compelled to break the law. As early as the 10th and 11th centuries, Jewish leaders worked to fight criminals in their communities, most urgently when the scams inspired antisemitism from outside. But Jews also sometimes were persuaded to protect those who ran afoul of secular governments, in part due to the clear antisemitic bias of such regimes. Jews arriving in America or Britain, argued historian Irving Howe, entered a new environment that was more free but they still carried attitudes from their past. “The Torah tells us to do business honestly and follow the rules of the country,” notes Rabbi David Eliezrie, a prominent Chabad author and intellectual. “But we all too often lived in countries where the rules were impossible to follow.”

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Not surprisingly, Jewish community leaders have tended to downplay the criminal element of their tribe. It’s understandable that they prefer to focus instead on Jews’ extraordinary portion of Nobel Prizes (accounting for well over 20% of all winners between 1901 and 2022 while comprising just 0.2% of global population) than engage in discussions about gangsters and schemers. The Holocaust has also tended to dominate community consciousness, given the impact on many of our families. But focusing on Jews largely as martyrs and moral exemplars constitutes, as the author Dara Horn notes, a preference, if you will, for dead Jews — as long as they provide “a service to mankind” — over living ones. Martyrdom and intellectual achievement have been elevated as the centrepieces of Jewish identity, says Steven Windmueller, a professor emeritus at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, but “there’s an embarrassment about economic success”.

In reality, of course, Jews included not only saints and savants, but also criminals, hustlers and the marginal, unmoored luftmenschen (in Yiddish a person who seems to “float on air”). In the early 20th century, Jewish gangs flourished in cities such as London, where “the Kosher nostra” competed with other ethnic gangs for control of downscale areas like the East End. Much like the Lower East Side, London’s poorer areas had filled with recent Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, living amid what one contemporary described as “an abyss of human suffering, an inferno of misery”. Some resorted to crime, like the gangs that featured in Peaky Blinders, although the vast majority on both sides of the Atlantic plodded on legally, and ultimately with good results.

Like East London, Brownsville, located in an unfashionable part of Brooklyn, served as an incubator for crime syndicates like Murder Incorporated, which essentially preformed hits for organised crime, particularly the Italian mafia. My late mother, who grew up there, charmingly described it as “a shitty place then, a shitty place now”. Raised in poverty, the New York gangsters, like Detroit’s Purple Gang and parts of Chicago’s potent underworld, engaged in protection rackets, bootlegging, prostitution, loan sharking and gambling.

To a large extent, community leaders ignored this aspect of Jewish life. Even the worst of them still occasionally attended high holy days and frequently supported synagogues and Jewish causes, including Israel. Few community icons spoke about this criminal past — even as they collected money from them. They knew about them, for sure, recalled one Detroit community leader, but “we were afraid to admit it”.

Even when I was growing up in New York and Long Island, this ambivalence remained. After all “the tough Jews” were known as people who, at a time when millions of European Jews were about to be exterminated, fought American Nazis in the streets, while their counterparts in London battled Mosley’s blackshirts. Most Jews remained law-abiding, but even in my own family, my father told me, we had both a gangster as well as a New York cop. The garment industry, which employed much of my family both as workers and owners, operated in resigned cooperation with the mob, a nagging part of everyday business. As one such individual memorably told the father of one of my high school friends: “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.”

In recent decades, the nature of Jewish crime changed. Violence, noted Meyer Lansky, has always been “a poor substitute for brains”. Crooked Jews looked for more “respectable” ways of relieving the unwary of their money; there were few multi-generational Jewish crime families. The new wave is personified by Madoff, Bankman-Fried, Weinstein and Epstein, all creatures of middle-class suburban families. Of the leading Jewish malefactors of the 20th century, only the corrupt British newspaper magnate Robert Maxwell — a survivor of the Holocaust, a military hero and father of Epstein’s partner Ghislaine — came from the truly school of hard knocks. Maxwell, a former Labour MP, died in 1991 at sea, perhaps by suicide, just as the extent of his fraud was being uncovered.

Like their more violent predecessors, these inheritors broke the rules, but not by blowing up safes, bootlegging or beating up deadbeats. Weinstein used bullying, particularly towards women, to get his way. Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell used the enticements of sex on a world of powerful figures and investors which, although it included many Jews, extended to distinctly goyishe figures like Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.

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Then there was Bernard Madoff, an ambitious but not particularly well-educated financial hustler who defrauded investors of around $65 billion. Madoff was shameless, basking in the glow of Wall Street respectability as he ran a massive Ponzi scheme until he was nailed by regulators long asleep at the wheel. Critically, Madoff’s rise grew from exploiting Jewish ties. He raised money heavily from Jewish investors and served as chairman of Yeshiva University’s business school, among other institutions; the school’s investments with Madoff cost it an estimated $100 million. Madoff also scammed major Jewish charities such as Hadassah and Elie Wiesel’s Foundation for Humanity. Overall, noted The St. Louis Jewish Light after his death in 2021, Madoff’s activities constituted an “American Jewish catastrophe”.

This contradicts the conspiratorial notion that Jews get rich at the expense of Gentiles. In reality, much Jewish crime, like ethnic crime in general, preys on their own community. Just last month, an Israeli man allegedly bilked Orthodox Jews in LA and New Jersey out of an estimated $47 million. Such revelations, however, feed antisemitic memes at a time of rising hostility to Jews across wide parts of the population.

At his height, worth over $20 billion dollars and already crowned by the New York Times as “crypto emperor” in his early thirties, Bankman-Fried personified an elite background that was less ethnically tribal. Although he likely defrauded some Jews, he seems to have engaged in little of the traditional tribal schmoozing favoured by Madoff, Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein. Instead of bilking country-club parvenus, Bankman-Fried dabbled in progressive political memes, much like his parents. He did contribute to the Democratic Majority for Israel and United Democracy Project, both supporters of Zionism. But his connections as a major Democratic donor — just like Madoff, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein — fitted him into a regime characterised by ultra-loose Federal monetary policies and lack of SEC oversight, a perfect terroir for his scam. He is also reportedly being investigated for making large, illegal political contributions.

No doubt some reflexive antisemites will refer to Bankman-Fried’s ancestry to explain his behaviour, but this misses the changes he represents. Bankman-Fried, if he is to be considered in his Jewish context, reflects something far less distinctly ethnic than Meyer Lansky or even Bernard Madoff. He is not a product of the ghetto or of the struggling middle class. He may fit the profile of malicious cleverness, but in ways more reminiscent of the new tech oligarchy than of the old tribal traditions. Like everything else, crime gradually is losing its distinct ethnic flavour. Years of acceptance and upward mobility have merged our people with our surrounding communities, and will make our failings less reflective of our heritage and more part of the general decadence of the age.

What would it be like if the ratio were reversed? What if a community emerged in which people like me, more transfixed by ideas than relationships, were the majority? Would the kid who laughed at my newspaper-reading be derided by the rest of the group, for preferring frivolous games to intellectual curiosity? What would this group be like as adults? We can, perhaps, catch a glimpse of that future, as well as some of its pitfalls, by dipping a toe into the effective altruism (EA) movement. This has been in the news recently, following the collapse of multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange FTX, and the disgrace of its founder Sam Bankman-Fried: a previously-fêted fintech wunderkind and one of the funding powerhouses behind the EA movement.

A recent Time article documented a rash of rumours from within the EA movement concerning the sexual harassment of female members, and their difficulty gaining any kind of protection or redress within the community’s “cult-like” atmosphere. In their defence, effective altruists are hardly the first group of dreamers to struggle with the tension between high ideals and rampant lust. A cursory glance at the history of communities with strong beliefs — which is to say, of religions and cults — suggests that over time this tension has warped many idealistic movements into what we can only describe as sex cults.

There’s the Fundamental Church of Latter-Day Saints, whose leader Warren Jeffs ended up with 81 wives and had a special bed made for consummating his marriages. There’s David Berg’s Children of God, who used hot young women he called “hookers for Jesus”, to recruit new members with the promise of limitless sex. Then there is the notorious Sri Bhagavan “sex cult” from the Seventies, and more recently the creepy NXIVM cult, in which members were branded with the initials of founder Keith Raniere.

The “Moonies” who so fascinated me at that long-ago birthday party never went this far. By cult standards they are stuffy centrists, most famous for conducting mass wedding ceremonies. But even here Sun Myung Moon, the founder, claimed that original sin was a consequence of Eve having sex with the serpent, and the only way to escape this sin was for the sperm of a sinless man to enter the womb of each woman to be purified. Happily for his adherents, Moon was just such a man — and early followers allege that Moon performed this “womb cleansing” ritual with the female member of each of the first 36 couples he initiated into his cult.

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Compared with these, Time’s stories from the EA community are pretty mild. But they encapsulate the same potent blend of moral intensity, tight-knit social groups and basic male horniness that recurs again and again in cults that turn into shag-fests. And what’s ironic about the re-emergence of this pattern within effective altruism is that, as a movement, it’s defined precisely in opposition to this kind of sweaty-palmed misbehaviour. A key feature of EA is the importance accorded to human rationality, and a corresponding desire to prioritise it over emotion — for example how much you care about loved ones compared to strangers. It’s distinct from the associated movements of longtermism and transhumanism, also under the spotlight since the collapse of FTX, but all three share this privileging of human reason.

Effective altruism offers individuals a supposedly objective, rational framework for maximising their ability to do good; longtermism seeks to extend that fusion of rationality and idealism into the far distant future. Transhumanism, meanwhile, proposes radically modifying the human organism, often with the aim of achieving one or more of these goals. Accordingly, other aspects of human nature must be downplayed or overcome, including anything based on affinity rather than logic. Julia Wise, for example, the longest-serving employee of Oxford’s Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA), described in 2012 how her preference for prioritising overall wellbeing over that of her immediate circle attracts her mother’s criticism: “How can you care so much about strangers and so little about your family?”

But from an effective altruist perspective this is as it should be. Wise dismisses particularistic, locally-focused charity as “inefficient”, as it’s oriented more toward community-building than maximum effectiveness, an emphasis she views as self-evidently a bad thing. And it’s not just localism that gets thrown out: among these overlapping movements, an aversion to the given and contingent extends even to our bodies. The transhumanist Elise Bohan, for example (who is cited on the Effective Altruism forum) calls for us to “upgrade our hopelessly limited ape-brains”, as she puts it, while preserving “the best parts” of our humanity — which for her means “intelligence”.

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This, then, is a subculture that really, intensely prefers ideas to people, and the abstract and systemic to happenstance and the immediate present. It moralises this too: Time quotes one woman who describes a culture where EA adherents believed “we are better than others because we are more rational or more reasonable or more thoughtful”. But why would this present particular problems for women? Well, one issue is that Wise (and arguably me too, and quite possibly also Elise Bohan) are outliers among outliers. For there’s considerable evidence, replicated worldwide, that women on average prefer people to abstractions. In other words, though relatively rare, those children who get distracted from Pass the Parcel by newspaper headlines are more likely to be boys.

And if these are indeed the people who gravitate to EA, no wonder seven out of ten EA adherents are male. Wise imagines the sex skew in her movement to be a consequence of socialisation, saying “it’s considered more normal for [boys] to care about the big picture more than household emotional politics”. But it’s not just “considered” more normal. It is more normal. And it’s more likely than not that the reasons for this aren’t just socialisation. For example, the evolutionary biologist Joyce Benenson draws parallels between sex-distinctive patterns of interaction and intrasexual competition in humans, and those of our closest primate relatives. She shows how patterns of relationship-building, care-giving and aggression differ between the sexes in ways that, in other primate species, make sense from an evolutionary perspective, arguing that these evolutionary patterns map onto human history as well.

Ironically, then, there’s something perhaps less than entirely reasonable about insisting that normative sex differences in psychological makeup should all be pure socialisation. But perhaps we can forgive the reason-lovers a bit of fidgeting. After all, the idea that humans possess evolved differences above the neck as well as below is an uncomfortable proposal, if you believe we can control what goes on in our heads — and that what’s good about us is exactly that capacity to control. For if Benenson is right, it doesn’t matter how rational our aspirations. We’ll struggle to shake our animal aspect, and its animal drives. And if this extends to occupational preferences and socialisation patterns, it extends too, as I’ve noted elsewhere, to our sexual desires, where men and women differ markedly on average — something that turned out to have less than ideal consequences for the minority of women drawn to EA and its world of ideas.

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By Ian Birrell

Accordingly, several of the reported EA misdemeanours map straightforwardly onto well-documented evolved patterns in male mate choice preference. The prominent male EA leader who told one female graduate “he needed to masturbate before seeing me” was displaying the well-documented evolved male preference for young, fertile women, and seeking to exploit the equally well-documented female preference for males with status and resources — as did the man who, as another woman reports, “groomed” her, arguing “that ‘paedophilic relationships’ were both perfectly natural and highly educational”. And we find the greater male inclination to sociosexuality (a desire for casual sex), as well as the link between high male status and multiple female partners, in the young woman who felt pressured by shame at her “irrational” preference for monogamy to join EA men’s harems, sorry, “polycules”.

One of the women quoted in Time describes the idealism that enabled this critical blind spot as a veneer of high-mindedness, that amounts in practice to “misogyny encoded into math”. But perhaps it would be more accurate to call it the monkey encoded into math. Effective altruism is hardly the first tight-knit community of ardent believers to fall prey to these patterns: it could just as easily be a different theology, and the long history of horny cults makes it clear that it often is. But it would still be the monkey. For this monkey doesn’t just leap out unexpectedly. It also sets about co-opting even the most elevated ideals in pursuit of monkey-goals, such as the overlapping pursuit of elevated status and/or more sex.

The EA community was, perhaps, especially vulnerable — for their worldview turns at least in part on a conviction that the monkey can be persuaded to stop capering, and that people can transcend the ancient, potent link between power, idealism and sexual opportunism. Instead, they got ambushed. And it’s a testament to effective altruism’s truly, ironically irrational preference for ideas over people, that its adherents ever imagined monkeys could be persuaded to listen to reason.

Yet this story of her image, like the blood-test technology that won her fame and fortune, was fake. One former colleague later revealed how a “frumpy” Holmes had adopted the look to mimic the signature style of Steve Jobs, even tracking down the exact Issey Miyake turtleneck favoured by the Apple founder. Her pose as a cool, black-clad genius worked for a while, fooling some of the best-known financiers and public figures in the United States. Then it had to be ditched in favour of dull suits to appear in court for fraud. And soon will switch to dowdy prison scrubs after her conviction and 11-year sentence.

Silicon Valley superstars love to embrace a simple style. Rich enough to buy anything in the world and puffed up with self-importance, they use clothing to send out the message that they are too important to waste their precious intellect and time on deciding what to wear every day. “I really want to clear my life to make it so that I have to make as few decisions as possible about anything except how to best serve this community,” said Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg when quizzed about his uniform of grey T-shirts and blue jeans. (This is, lest we forget, the man who set up a website to rank attractive women at university that exploded into one of the planet’s most pernicious companies.)

Sam Bankman-Fried also tapped into this approach: he presented himself as a financial prodigy who disdained societal mores while set on saving the world. He went for the scruffy skateboarder look, a man-child with an unkempt bubble of hair who even wore his T-shirt, shorts and sneakers when sitting on stage next to a former US president and a former British prime minister.

It is no surprise that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair fell for such a phoney. Yet they weren’t the only ones suckered by this high priest of cryptocurrency, who preached of earning billions through his unique financial acumen, promised to pour the money into philanthropy, and then crashed to earth with his fortune evaporating. “SBF” championed a modish millennial approach to philanthropy, that claims to harness data, in tandem with supreme brainpower, moral leadership and relentless logic to improve the cost-efficiency of charity and tackle state failures. But his downfall has exposed the hollowness at the heart of this cult that has become as much part of Silicon Valley’s uniformity as their T-shirts and turtlenecks.

The astonishing rise and fall of the disgraced crypto king began over a meal with William MacAskill, a prominent young Oxford University philosopher. This Scottish professor, guru of the effective altruism movement, persuaded the vegan SBF, then a student, to forget about devoting his life to animal welfare and instead focus on making as much money as possible for donation to good causes. So SBF duly set out to become mega-rich, ostensibly on the basis that this would let him do as much good as possible in the world, and he seduced admirers and investors alike with his sense of mission while pouring money into MacAskill’s own projects.

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Effective altruism draws its inspiration from Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher. He contends that the moral obligation to save children from hunger in a famine is no different from that of saving a child you saw drowning before you. Unfortunately, so radical and inhumane is his stance that he ends up as an eugenicist: the lives of those with disabilities are of less value, he argues, and so killing babies born with disabilities is ethically permissible. Singer is relentlessly utilitarian.

Yet his arguments lie at the root of this movement so beloved by Silicon Valley billionaires since it justifies their accumulation of great wealth on grounds that it can end up doing great good. Now, though, leading devotee Dustin Moskovitz, another of the Facebook founders, has acknowledged that effective altruism either encouraged or excused SBF’s unethical — and almost certainly criminal — behaviour. Even MacAskill, whose organisations received big donations from his shamed protege’s operations, admits he was wrong to dismiss fears that his philosophy might be “misused” to cause harm. Their church of benevolence became cover for a giant crypto-scam.

This cult of ultra-rationalism implies that it is morally better to get rich than to slave away in a badly-paid job that might be socially useful. Essentially, it tells people to work in the City rather than a care home, demeaning those who believe in public service or actually helping other human beings rather than piling up mountains of cash in tax-efficient havens to give away to their pet causes. Critics such as Timothy Noah have noted how it ignores issues such as economic inequality since its “most distinctive characteristic” was the “deftness with which it tiptoes past targets likely to offend billionaires”.

It is, of course, impossible to apply data and accountability to the future. In reality, it seems that SBF used this pretence of doing good to provide cover for a giant pyramid scheme, pretending ends justified means while he hung out with his clique overseeing a crypto con at a $40m mansion in the tax haven of the Bahamas. “You were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers,” said a Vox reporter last week after his empire had fallen. “Ya, hehe… I feel bad for those who get fucked by it,” he responded, admitting “the ethics stuff” was mostly a front and talking of a “dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths [sic] so everyone likes us”.

SBF was also the second-biggest donor to Joe Biden and the Democrats last year, handing over $37 million. Yet his veneer as a do-gooder slipped when the President’s party flirted with a wealth tax for the super-rich — who often end up paying proportionately far less to the state than fellow citizens due to armies of highly-paid accountants shifting their assets around the globe. He told the New York Times that “this could cause hugely negative collateral damage, significantly reducing the amount of innovation and taxable base in the first place”.  Elon Musk, who might have been hit for £50 billion, chimed in with a warning that this might hamper his long-termist plan “to use the money to get humanity to Mars and preserve the light of consciousness”.

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The downfall of SBF should send a stark warning to be wary of self-appointed prophets who think their wealth has given them special gifts to solve the problems of humanity. These tycoons are often little better than the robber-barons of old who used charity to atone for their rapaciousness in business — but only after becoming immensely wealthy. Note how Jeff Bezos has joined the ranks of those billionaires such as Zuckerberg and SBF pledging to give away much of their fortunes. It is a welcome trend but it reeks of hypocrisy, given that it would be so much better if the ultra-rich simply played by the same rules as the rest of us, ensuring at least that their firms pay a fair share of tax. Even that secular saint Bill Gates is not immune to such criticism when Microsoft became a case study in tax avoidance for the Senate during his reign.

Ultimately, these prophets of elitist altruism proclaim a specious and self-serving creed: they create giant fortunes by running firms exploiting their digital revolution to dodge tax and evade national borders, then bask in the glow of adulation for their philanthropy having subverted democracies, slashed government revenues and thus weakened state services. Finally, they claim to be the best people to solve some of the most pressing societal issues — although only the ones they decide to tackle on their own terms, rather than more unfashionable ones such as filling roads, funding soldiers or fashioning support for the vulnerable.

Canada’s finance minister Chrystia Freeland provided a glimpse into such attitudes a decade ago before she abandoned journalism for politics, writing a superb book called Plutocrats that exposed how a smug elite dictate public discourse and demand a system tilted even more in their favour. One billionaire Republican donor she interviewed even argued for the abolition of most taxes, praising how the super-rich “self-taxed” themselves by supporting charities of their choice rather than funding government. He demanded the state should pay tech tycoons for their contributions to society. “It’s that top 1% that probably contributes more to making the world a better place than the 99%,” he concluded, outrageously.

Many people yearn for superheroes, visionaries and wunderkinds to offer hope of salvation on a complex, messy planet. But altruism built on avarice is simply a comfort blanket for billionaires. Behind the stylised images, the sci-fi sheen of technology, the bold claims to have remodelled philanthropy, the arrogant insistence some people are so important they should be spared taxes, lies the same hubristic mentality that tarnished the aid industry. It is based on the cynical idea that a small, superior and wealthy elite knows best — and that they should not be thwarted in their drive to earn billions since they are indisputably the good guys. As two new age messiahs stumble and fall, we ought to be more sceptical over billionaire geeks posing as god-like saviours and show a bit more faith in our communal ability to resolve serious problems.