James Block is a junior doctor at a major university hospital in the midwestern United States. What his patients don’t know is that he has a hobby: in his spare time Block uses software to look through the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in cryptocurrencies and digital assets, exploring how much they’re really worth and who, if anyone, is getting rich from the digital investment boom.
Block is one of a group of people – bloggers and independent researchers, many of whom are anonymous and unpaid – who have helped to expose the inner workings of the financial system’s most controversial assets. These amateur sleuths have helped to reveal the workings of FTX, the $32bn crypto exchange that collapsed last month and whose founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was arrested on 12 December; he has been indicted on eight criminal charges including wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering.
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