Every time the market isn't performing well, someone writes lengthy nostalgic pieces about how great the crypto space would be if SBF were still around. The logic here is deeply flawed.

First, SBF's massive external investments back then were funded by misappropriated FTX user assets in the first place. Alameda Research misappropriated a total of $13.3 billion. It's like using stolen money to buy lottery tickets—even if Anthropic's valuation skyrockets later, it doesn't change the fact of illegal misappropriation or give it any moral justification.

Second, SBF invested in over 470 projects with a total of $5 billion deployed, and the vast majority went to zero, including various DEXs and liquidity mining pools. The $500 million invested in Anthropic might be worth over $30 billion today if FTX hadn't collapsed. But does that make him a visionary "investment genius"? Not necessarily. More likely, SBF had access to tens of billions in misappropriated funds and was throwing money around indiscriminately with a wide net—he simply happened to hit a few decent projects. This is survivorship bias.

Third, even if SBF/FTX were still major shareholders in Anthropic, what does that have to do with crypto? Why do people think that AI leaders represented by Anthropic would take crypto to the moon? This brain-tingles logic is pure wishful thinking from the crypto community. There are crypto projects everywhere trying to ride the AI wave, but how many major AI projects have expressed that they actually need Crypto?

Perhaps what people really miss isn't SBF—it's that wild era when anyone could get rich by violently pumping the price of altcoins and going all-in recklessly.