This has nothing to do with the technology of cryptocurrency. In fact, it's the complete opposite.

What people are doing with FTX is taking their money off of public blockchains and giving them to something like a bank or stock exchange where ultimately customer funds are accessed in secret. This is again, antithetical to cryptocurrency which has the main features of avoiding the necessity of banks for operating with digital money and having a public, mathematically verifiable ledger.

All of this nonsense is people using the interest around cryptocurrency to promote what is essentially gambling.

Some people have even theorized that they were intentionally trying to sully the reputation of the technology since it makes old fashioned financial institutions obsolete, and the family has strong ties to the establishment (with massive investments in old-fashioned financial schemes).

I'm not in this space, but this very much feels like "it isn't working because you're doing it wrong".

I'm just trying to explain what cryptocurrency is and how that is different from cryptocurrency exchanges.

Cryptocurrency speculation on centralized exchanges literally does not use cryptocurrency and it's a shame that people think that's what it is.

What cryptocurrency actually is is a secure and auditable way to do transactions and record keeping in a very large group of people. That's what I and many other people use it for. Completely unrelated to day trading, and using the actual chains.

In general in life, things don't work if you do them wrong. Things working requires doing them right.

The problem is the things that don't work right if other people aren't doing them right.

The technology enabled countless scammers and hackers to disappear with people's funds. It's daily news. Failing exchanges are just an off-chain variant.

This has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. It's just an exchange that gambled away customer deposits and then was liquidated. They're banks. We've reinvented banks with all of the drawbacks and none of the benefits.

This isn't the way cryptocurrency was meant to be used. We were meant to hold our money in our own wallets, not leave it in some centralized exchange so it can "efficiently" allocate the funds. People keep using exchanges as if they were banks and they keep getting burned in ways only banks are capable of.

So why doesn't everyone hold their crypto in their own wallets?

If this keeps happening it speaks to the fact that the current system isn't well designed.

Because they don’t know about hardware wallets or they think it’d be safe to leave their crypto to the exchanges.

Most of the newbies getting into crypto don’t know what it means to hold your keys

No true scotsman would gamble away customer deposits.