Daily Herald opinion: Bankman-Fried case reminds us to heed well-known lessons about greed and risk

The case of Sam Bankman-Fried is indeed a sad morality tale. And, perhaps just as sadly, a familiar one.

An apparent magician spins gold out of thin air and attracts the adoration of millions, only to be discovered as a manipulative fraud and face harsh punishment for his deceit.

We should pay attention to lessons from the past. They often become lessons of the present.

In Bankman-Fried's case, it may be tempting to see a sympathetic protagonist. After all, he spread around his apparent wealth from managing cryptocurrency investments to various charities and causes and talked of one day giving it all away.

But we know now that Bankman-Fried was no accidental villain. As one prosecutor told the jury that would later convict Bankman-Fried on seven counts of fraud, "thousands of people lost billions of dollars" because of his intentional deceptions.

We at first may feel some compassionate impulse toward the potential life sentence facing a seemingly guileless 31-year-old financial savant, but it turns out Bankman-Fried is no more deserving of sympathy than the elderly Bernie Madoff, whose abject greed was more transparent in the crash of the Ponzi scheme that sent him to die in prison.

More important, though, are the lessons for the rest of us in the Bankman-Fried story, lessons wrapped in the timeworn truths of cliché.

The first is advice that should be branded into the consciousness of all would-be investors: "If it sounds to good to be true, it probably is." Pie-in-the-sky promises may be alluring. They rarely come true in the end.

The second applies especially to those who could be taken in by every get-rich-quick scheme from hoarding Beanie Babies to the expectations of Bankman-Fried's mystical cryptocurrency operation: "Look before you leap." Know what it is that is clamoring for your attention before you throw your lot in with it.

Whatever potential there is for cryptocurrency to change the world of finance, it has always been a risky subject for investment and a complicated one. The heady early promises that it would make the traditional finance system obsolete took their appeal from that which made them dangerous. They were valuable precisely because they were such a premature long shot.

Many cryptocurrency advocates applauded Bankman-Fried's conviction as reason for faith in the industry. Perhaps so, to some degree, though it still feels like a field crying out for stronger regulation.

In the meantime, we have at least Bankman-Fried's bitter end as a reminder that ancient moral lessons remain relevant in the most modern of times.

Or, as The New York Times quoted Damien Williams, the top federal prosecutor for Bankman-Fried's case, "The crypto industry may be new, but this kind of fraud, this kind of corruption, is as old as time."