Philippe Bogdanoff

“The room was so big it probably had its own zip code.”
― Michael Sears, Mortal Bonds

“What happened is what was supposed to happen. You only get to choose what happens next.”
― Michael Sears, Mortal Bonds

“The new crypto exchanges had no regulators. They acted as both exchange and custodian: they didn’t just enable you to buy bitcoin but also housed the bitcoin you’d bought. The whole thing was odd: these people joined together by their fear of trust erected a parallel financial system that required more trust from its users than did the traditional financial system. Outside the law, and often hostile to it, they discovered many ways to run afoul of it. Crypto exchanges routinely misplaced or lost their customers’ money. Crypto exchanges routinely faked trading data to make it seem as though far more trading had occurred on them than actually had. Crypto exchanges fell prey to hackers, or to random rogue traders who gamed the exchanges’ risk management.”
― Michael Lewis, Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

“The problem with such categories is that because democracy is multidimensional, there are multiple ways to be partially democratic.”
― Levitsky/Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War