The Account You Can't See Until It's Empty

How I destroyed 18 months of trust through small decisions that felt completely reasonable at the time.

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Sam Bankman-Fried went from $26 billion to prison in eight months.

Not because FTX ran out of money. Because when people asked to withdraw their crypto, it wasn’t there.

The company didn’t fail. Trust collapsed. And when trust collapsed, everything else went with it.

But here’s what everyone misses: FTX didn’t fall apart in November 2022. It had been falling apart for years through small decisions that seemed inconsequential at the time.

Every time SBF took customer deposits for personal use. Every time he said FTX was safe while knowing it wasn’t. Every interview where he played the “responsible adult in crypto” while running the same scams as everyone else.

Small withdrawals. Nobody noticed. Until someone asked for their money back and it wasn’t there.

That’s when I realized: trust doesn’t break in one moment. It degrades through a thousand small moments before that. And most people are making withdrawals without realizing they’re spending from an account at all.

I know because I destroyed something over eighteen months without noticing until it was too late.