Sam Bankman-Fried and Matt Levine on How to Make Money in Crypto

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:16)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Tracy, the coins. Time to talk about the coins again.

Tracy Alloway (0:21)

The coins? You mean like, you know, fiat coins, right?

Joe Weisenthal (0:26)

No, the electronic digital coins that people are really into trading. You know what?

Tracy Alloway (0:31)

It feels like it's been a while, hasn't it?

Joe Weisenthal (0:34)

Well, so this is the crazy thing. This is what makes crypto difficult for me, which is that if you like, and I've said, maybe you said this before, but if you step away for like a month, then you like focus on other stuff, like the price of corn or wheat or oil or something.

Tracy Alloway (0:49)

Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Joe Weisenthal (0:50)

Yeah, and then you come back to crypto and it's like the entire narrative has completely changed. There's all this new terminology, new tokens that you've never heard of. Like you can't step away from it for a minute, let alone a month and feel like you have any sort of hope of understanding what's going on.

Tracy Alloway (1:05)

It does feel like it requires a certain intensity to make it in crypto.

Joe Weisenthal (1:11)

And then after that month, it's like, well, I'm already so behind, I don't want to come back. And next thing you know, you're like three or four months behind. So we have to reverse it. We have to catch back up with what's going on.

Tracy Alloway (1:19)

Yeah, we need to reverse that. I mean, I am vaguely aware of some of the big picture stuff that has been happening. So I'm looking at the price of Bitcoin at the moment. It's just under 40,000.

It is weird, and I think you wrote about this, it is kind of strange that in this environment, Bitcoin hasn't been doing better.

Joe Weisenthal (1:37)

I know. So here's what I've been thinking about, which is that the prices, especially the big ones, there's always tokens going to the moon, but the prices of the big ones, overall market cap, rough year, kind of gone sideways in the last year or more down, but the interest in the space continues to be unabated, and it feels like every day, someone is leaving a big bank or a big fund to do something new in crypto, crypto hedge fund, crypto VC, interest in investing in the space does not seem to have abated at all, even with the price of Bitcoin sort of going sideways to down.

Tracy Alloway (2:13)

No, absolutely. And also the other thing that sort of happened is rather than crypto going off and being its own ecosystem, which if you think back to Bitcoin and its origins, that was really kind of the point of the whole thing, but it feels like crypto as a whole is becoming more and more integrated with the existing financial system, or at least with Wall Street.

And so, you see people who are collecting NFTs and now they're talking about the bond market and interest rates, which is kind of funny. But you're right, we haven't spoken about it for a while and we should definitely rectify that.

Joe Weisenthal (2:45)

So I wanna know basically what all this new money entering this space is doing. And something I've been thinking about is that in 2018, you could make a fortune essentially just buying Bitcoin, or maybe 2017, 2018, buying Bitcoin in the US and selling it in Japan because the market was so inefficient that there were multiple prices around the world and you can make a ton of money doing that. These days, I suspect that the market is vastly more efficient than it was back then.

On the flip side, I also get the impression that compared to TradFi, that the spreads are still a mile wide and that there's still big opportunities for all this money coming into the space. So I'm very, let's have a conversation about how to make money in crypto. Let's do it. All right, I'm really excited. We're gonna be bringing back, it's his third time on the show, the one and only Sam Bankman-Fried SBF. He's the co-founder of FTX.

And we're also gonna be joined by Matt Levine, Bloomberg Opinion columnist. We had them both on last fall. Everyone liked hearing them discuss the state of the markets together. So we figured let's have them both back on. So Sam and Matt, thanks to both of you for coming back on Odd Lots.

Sam Bankman-Fried (3:55)

Of course.

Joe Weisenthal (3:57)

Absolutely, so Sam, let's start with you. Actually, you guys have a big conference coming up at the end of April, the FTX Salt Conference, Crypto Bahamas, the Bahamas being your new corporate home, which sounds pretty nice.