Youthful, engagingly shaggy and barely 30, Bankman-Fried emerged in 2021 and 2022 as a cryptocurrency guru who, almost uniquely in a market known for rip-offs, knew how to do things right and proper. He told congressional committees, financial pundits and — most critically — investors and clients that his FTX exchange was rigorously audited and operated by rules and practices that kept customer funds absolutely secure.

None of that was true. FTX's internal accounting was so slipshod that its executives and traders had no real idea of how much money they had or where it was; the crypto tokens it issued were valued at its whim; and Bankman-Fried raided customer accounts to cover losses at his related enterprises.

He was enabled to do all this because the value of crypto as an asset is nebulous in the extreme. The market itself is fraudulent. As I wrote last year, Bankman-Fried exploited the vacuity of crypto by slathering it over with what sounded like profundities but were vacuous at their core. He could not have done so if there actually was anything genuine about crypto — his claims would have been weighed against market realities.

What is amazing about this case is how many people got snowed. Members of Congress hung on his words and gleefully accepted his campaign donations. FTX cut deals to place its name and logo on Miami's pro basketball arena and the uniforms of Major League Baseball's umpires, and paid up for a glitzy commercial during the 2022 Super Bowl, starring Larry David.

The author Michael Lewis wrote a slavishly promotional book about him that has been shown, if not a work of fiction, then a description of a fictional world in which Bankman-Fried actually was a successful entrepreneur.

Through it all, Bankman-Fried portrayed himself as a humanitarian with global aspirations, infused with a philosophy of charitable giving known as "effective altruism." Its theme was that penny-ante contributions to local charitable institutions was as nothing, compared with the moral imperative to make as much money as one could, and then give it away.

This sounded novel, but it was old wine in a new bottle, the laundering of wrongdoing through conspicuous displays of spiritual piety or good works.

On Nov. 2, a federal jury convicted Bankman-Fried on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. After weeks of sometimes abstruse testimony, it took jurors only four hours to reach a verdict.

That brings us back to the pre-sentencing reports. The main point of disagreement between Bankman-Fried and the government is the size of the loss suffered by FTX investors and customers. That's unsurprising, because that's the most important sentencing factor in federal financial fraud cases. The government's estimate of more than $10 billion in losses is so large it exceeds the maximum figure cited as a guideline many times over.

Bankman-Fried's attorneys say there are no losses. They quote a lawyer for FTX's debtors as stating during a bankruptcy hearing that "customers and creditors ... are expected to get back all of their money."

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