I wasn’t immune to the incentive gradient, either. After I was dismissed from the crypto hedge fund I’d planned to work for in February 2022, I kept my distance from EA for a few months, wary of what I perceived as wastefulness and superficiality in the slice of the community I had encountered. But by May, I needed a job, and it was not hard to see that the fastest path to prosperity in the Effective Altruism world included a pit stop in the Bahamas. So I bought a plane ticket to Nassau, and within two weeks of my trip I had a fantastic position at an exciting new nonprofit organization funded by the FTX Foundation. I don’t know how to feel now about that plane ticket. On the one hand, the job I ended up in was a perfect fit. I was eminently qualified, and both I and the organization were substantially better off as a result of me joining. It introduced me to a community of earnest, introspective, devoted people, banded together to try to change the world for good, a community that I feel extraordinarily lucky to now call home. On the other hand, I was a willing participant in a web of incentives that likely compromised my epistemics and ethics. Participating in it had such high expected value — first in dollar terms, when I planned to trade crypto, and then in impact-on-the-world terms, when I went in search of an altruistic job. It seemed absurd to keep my distance just because the “vibes felt off” in the world of FTX and EA (at that point, the two were interchangeable in my mind), with no concrete cause for concern or evidence of wrongdoing in my field of vision. But if the incentives hadn’t been so strong, would I have paid more attention to the suspicious feelings in my gut?I think sometimes about the versions of me out there who would have held back from buying that plane ticket. There are alternate-universe-Rickis who smelled something rotten in FTX land and decided to stay away from that rot despite the enormous incentives not to. Those Rickis don’t end up in the Effective Altruism world. I think we would have benefited from having more of them around.

If you want to read a poorly researched fluff piece about Sam Bankman-Fried, feel free to go to the New York Times (PDF). If you want to understand what happened at Alameda Research and how Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), Sam Trabucco, and Caroline Ellison incinerated over $20 billion dollars of fund profits and FTX user deposits, read this article. (And follow me on Twitter at @0xfbifemboy!)

FTT stakers receive maker rebates as low as -0.0030%, and it costs only 25 FTT to have 0 maker fees.

*Fees for the spot market are charged in the target currency for maker orders and the quote currency for taker orders (e.g., market buy order on BTC/USD would pay fees in USD, limit buy order that executes as a maker would pay fees in BTC)