In considering the fairness of the upcoming sentencing of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who faces a potential sentence of up to a century, a classic of French literature comes to mind. In Voltaire’s 1759 masterwork, “Candide,” a character justifies the execution of Admiral John Byng as a scapegoat for English military failures with the phrase “pour encourager les autres,” or in English, “to encourage the others.
Recent years have seen efforts by the SEC to rein in cryptocurrency exchanges with cases against Binance and Coinbase for allegedly operating as unregistered dealers, prosecutions of “staking” operations, whereby investors assign crypto assets to another entity in order to pool them to get rewarded with new tokens for validating blockchain transactions, lawsuits asserting coins are securities, as well as cases against social media influencers like Kim Kardashian and Lindsay Lohan for touting...