Next to all those, though, there’s an extraordinary waste of human creativity. As Matt Levine chronicled in a recent Bloomberg BusinessWeek story, the institutions created by crypto enthusiasts were little less than a mirror financial system, complete with protocols for lending money, creating derivatives, writing contracts, and settling trades. The fact that this architecture was structurally compromised, and has collapsed under its own weight, doesn’t take away from the mass of ingenuity that went into creating it.

At an end-of-term party at my children’s school earlier this month, I found myself chatting to a friend about the collapse of FTX, the crypto exchange run by Sam Bankman-Fried. To my surprise, my friend — a thoughtful, gentle doctor and father of three — had a more than academic interest in the…