Peter Lunenfeld in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
In his new book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (2023), Michael Lewis has the difficult task of explaining why his subject, wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, co-founder of the multibillion-dollar cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who seemed tailor-made for the author’s patented oddball-outsider-disrupts-the-world shtick, was convicted for one of the biggest frauds in financial history. Like so many people both before and after crypto’s last big explosion in 2022, Lewis allows that he doesn’t know all that much about the underlying technologies, specifically blockchain, but is nevertheless compelled by the scene’s anarchic ambition. At one point, he throws up his hands and admits that crypto “often gets explained but somehow never stays explained.”
Regardless of what happens as Bankman-Fried pursues his appeals—a heavy lift, given that even his friends from math camp testified for the prosecution—there is one thing that is guaranteed. The general greed around cryptocurrencies, the nerdish interest in their underlying blockchain technologies, and the desire for something—anything—to fully commodify digital art has not abated.
More here.