{"id":6139,"date":"2022-11-10T04:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-10T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci02afea4cb00025f0"},"modified":"2025-09-28T17:47:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T22:47:14","slug":"systems-thinking-to-learn-from-ftxs-mistakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/business\/systems-thinking-to-learn-from-ftxs-mistakes","title":{"rendered":"Using Systems Thinking To Learn From FTX\u2019s Mistakes"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"bsf_rt_marker\"><\/div><p><em>This is a transcribed excerpt of the \u201cBitcoin Magazine Podcast,\u201d hosted by P and Q. In this episode, they are joined by Matthew Pines to talk about China&#8217;s plan for world domination and why FTX and Binance are \u201clike a bug hitting the windshield\u201d in terms of the general macroeconomic scene.<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"youtube-embed\" data-video_id=\"BBc8HI4oklc\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"BINANCE TO BUY FTX!\" width=\"696\" height=\"392\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/BBc8HI4oklc?feature=oembed&#038;enablejsapi=1\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=BBc8HI4oklc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Watch This Episode On YouTube<\/a> Or <a href=\"https:\/\/rumble.com\/v1slzzk-binance-to-buy-ftx.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Rumble<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Listen To The Episode Here:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/chinas-plan-for-global-domination-w-mathew-pines\/id1459884105?i=1000585643116\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Apple<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/episode\/1EwHcKH7kEcMs4Brf7fJtO\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Spotify<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/podcasts.google.com\/feed\/aHR0cHM6Ly9iaXRjb2lubWFnYXppbmUubGlic3luLmNvbS9yc3M\/episode\/N2RkMjE5NDItOGMxNy00NDY3LTkyNjEtMmZhNzI5NGJiN2M5?sa=X&amp;ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwjwrc6cvKH7AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQAQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Google<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Libsyn<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Matthew Pines: We made these typical imperial hubristic mistakes with Iraq and we had a Great Financial Crisis that sort of focused on internal politics, and geopolitics kind of went to the backburner or became a domain of Sunday news shows. \u201cAre we gonna do an Iraq surge or are we gonna do a reset with Russia?\u201d Or whatever. <\/p>\n<p>Now, it&#8217;s gonna become present because it filters into every aspect of your lives Where you get your stuff. Is that gonna come the next time? I think COVID sort of woke us up to this. I think we felt that it was just gonna be like a temporary disruption and then everything was gonna just settle back to normal. That\u2019s not the case.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why Taiwan matters. That&#8217;s why these things matter because they&#8217;re highly path dependent. We live in a very highly non-linear, coupled dynamic system where the butterfly flaps its wings and you get a hurricane. It&#8217;s why you have to pay attention. <\/p>\n<p>Why focus on all the little things? Because those little things can turn into very big things very quickly. FTX is a good example of this. \u201cOh, there&#8217;s some weirdness going on with CZ and why did he just post that thread?\u201d And then, all of a sudden, the token falls by 90% in a day.<\/p>\n<p>Like these systems we built look stable and then they break. That&#8217;s why I like Bitcoin because Bitcoin&#8217;s one of those systems that is by definition decentralized, so it can absorb lots of shocks. The China mining ban was a great example where it took a massive hit exogenous shock boom. But then the hash rate is at all-time highs. Doesn&#8217;t mean the dollar price is gonna be stable by any means; it&#8217;s gonna likely be highly volatile. But these are very different models for how you think about building systems and that&#8217;s what attracts me a lot about Bitcoin is that they model a type of system that assumes nothing&#8217;s gonna work out and assumes that things are gonna break. You just need to build resilience and redundancy, decentralization to those systems, so you&#8217;re not vulnerable to single points of failure. You&#8217;re not vulnerable to an opaque balance sheet or a single person making a bad decision, and then that has cascading implications to everyone who is anywhere nearby.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s sort of my broader thesis to kind of connect these things, why it&#8217;s so important to look at FTX and be like, \u201cWe should draw lessons learned on this.\u201d You&#8217;ll see it reflected in asset prices, but if you&#8217;re not a day trader, if you&#8217;re not trying to time the tops and bottoms, it really doesn&#8217;t matter to you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Matthew Pines lays out China\u2019s plan for world domination while reflecting on Bitcoin and the mistakes FTX made when building their inferior system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2520,"featured_media":6140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1826,347,828,1680,1216,1853],"class_list":{"0":"post-6139","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-bitcoin-magazine-podcast","9":"tag-china","10":"tag-ftx","11":"tag-macroeconomics","12":"tag-podcast","13":"tag-systems"},"author_data":{"id":2520,"name":"Bitcoin Magazine","nicename":"bitcoin-magazine","avatar_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/bitcoin-magazine-logo.jpeg"},"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/img_7087.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2520"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}