Indifferent to a fault, I wasn’t surprised or dismayed by the collapse of FTX, which to me is just another trading platform causing just another cascade of business failures and liquidity issues. Even if it’s heartless to say, I’ll still say it: The lesson, “don’t invest more than you can lose,” is being learned again by a new crop of students at a high cost to some.

I thought I’d seen it all, but FTX has something new. When FTX filed bankruptcy on November 11, its filing listed companies that FTX neither owns nor controls as bankrupt entities! AZA Finance CEO Elizabeth Rossiello, in business for almost a decade providing cryptocurrency services in Africa, hustled out a statement about her company’s errant customer, reiterating that “our entities are not part of the FTX bankruptcy. In its disorganised haste, FTX erroneously listed our entities in their bankruptcy filing.”

Galloping incompetence in cryptocurrency? Sure. FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) went on stage with ex-presidents and prime ministers in short pants! But galloping incompetence in bankruptcy law practice? Now that’s something special.

The hot takes write themselves. SBF is the son of two Stanford law professors, both tied to the Democratic Party, one through fundraising and the other through authorship of tax legislation for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA). FTX makes things tough for US Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler, says a Fortune article tying many such threads together, because FTX was maneuvering to gain a regulatory monopoly. SBF made himself a darling on the left by advocating for regulation and giving buckets of money to politicians, mostly Democrats but also useful Republicans.

Who knows what SBF has done to “effective altruism,” a philosophy of wealth and giving that he sought to exemplify. But an article lionizing him and “EA” has disappeared from the website of venture firm Sequoia Capital. (It’s on the Wayback Machine.) Numerous recipients of FTX/SBF largesse in the nonprofit sector are likely overextended—a true loss. Will the politicians to whom SBF gave money give it back? Like I said, the hot takes write themselves.

Shifting to crypto-relevant, actual lessons, score one for the “maxis” (short for bitcoin maximalists). At their worst, this is a group of people who mindlessly deride any cryptocurrency that is not bitcoin. The congeries of coins involved in the FTX debacle included a token minted by FTX, which collapsed. This episode helps make the case—still incomplete—that bitcoin is the one true coin.

A broader and more important lesson is actually a long-standing cryptocurrency adage: “not your keys, not your coins.” The “keys” that control cryptocurrency on blockchains are the strings of letters and numbers that make up the private side in public-private key pairs. Crypto requires personal responsibility. You have to understand public-key cryptography (or the devices that understand it for you), or your assets will not be under your control. A lot of people let SBF and FTX hold their keys for them, and that’s a shame.

Related to this is the profound and increasingly important difference between “CeFi” (or centralized finance) and “DeFi” (or decentralized finance). Lots of people say that regulators are coming after crypto now that FTX has happened. But the lay of the land is very different if you are talking about centralized entities like FTX or true decentralized finance.

DeFi is computing that allows people to trade value in myriad ways without handing control to a third party. No SBFs and no FTXs. DeFi would plainly be better, but for the problem of doing financial services and transactions through “smart contracts” that are not so smart. The earliest and best example of failure in this area was the DAO.

Speaking of regulation, where were the regulators in all this? Same place they were during l’affaire Madoff—working on other things! They did less to provide false confidence to consumers in the FTX case than they did in Bernie Madoff’s because Madoff’s went on for years.

Regulatory solutions are not best for cryptocurrency, a non-jurisdictional and sometimes highly private asset. What cryptocurrency requires is a user base of people who practice self-custody of their assets, demand proof of reserves (i.e., direct consumer oversight, which blockchain makes possible), and otherwise protect themselves in financial worlds.

In other words, cryptocurrency demands users who are more sophisticated. The social change that aligns with the technology is coming at a glacial pace—a pity further revealed by FTX.

I strangely lack sympathy for FTX’s victims. The saddest note I can think of is to remember others who suffer wrongly. I imagine SBF will get out of jail while Ross Ulbricht still languishes.

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