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Crypto-promoting athletes go quiet during crash

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Michael Silver joins Brother From Another to discuss Tom Brady's evolution off the field from his days in New England to now "coming out of his shell" in Tampa Bay.

One of Tom Brady’s favorite products to push on the public is cryptocurrency. Recently, however, crypto has been crashing.

The New York Times recently explained that some of the highest-profile athletes who have promoted cryptocurrency have clammed up during the sell-off.

For example, Crypto.com declined to make 76ers center Joel Embiid available to the Times to discuss his partnership with the company. Efforts by the Times to secure comment from Lakers star LeBron James, who starred in the Crypto.com Super Bowl commercial earlier this year, were unsuccessful. Tennis star Naomi Osaka, an “ambassador” for the crypto exchange FTX, “sadly is overseas and not available,” the Times was told.

Brady hasn’t been spoken about crypto during the crash. He last tweeted about his FTX partnership on April 27.

Regardless of whether crypto inherently operates as a Ponzi scheme (some experts say it “encourages evangelism”) or merely provides the context for Ponzi schemes to emerge, the whole industry seems to be premised on the notion that, the earlier you buy, the more money you’ll make as the value goes up.

As a result, the first ones in get paid, and the last ones in potentially get screwed.

A sell-off is basically a reset of the entire market, where the winners take their profits and the losers count their losses. Then, once it all bottoms out, the smart money gets back in.

Once they do, that’s when everyone else will be told to buy, buy, and buy some more -- laying the foundation for the profits that will be harvested at the next crash.

So keep that in mind whenever you hear Matt Damon (or maybe it’s Mark Wahlberg; I can never tell) starts telling you once again that fortune favors the brave.

Perhaps the more accurate saying is the epigraph to The Godfather: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

A crime may be in front of every great fortune, too. Especially after the sell-off ends and the evangelism starts all over again.