Singh had testified as a prosecution witness in the trial that led to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried's conviction.

Cryptocurrency has been declared dead so many times that its supposed demise is a running joke within the industry. According to the website 99Bitcoins, the obituary of crypto’s flagship token has been written at least 477 times since 2010. A round of eulogies occurred last year, after several crypto-trading giants, including FTX, collapsed, and the Securities and Exchange Commission filed a barrage of lawsuits against major blockchain companies. “Crypto is dead in America,” said the tech investor Chamath Palihapitiya on the All-In podcast in April 2023. Publications including The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic wondered if the technology was, once again, kaput.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that crypto is back. What’s shocking is just how back it is. The total market capitalization of crypto assets this year has been within striking distance of its all-time highs in 2021. The crypto sector has been the biggest political donor in the current election cycle, surpassing even the fossil-fuel industry, with contributions flowing to candidates from both parties. In May, the House of Representatives passed a bill that included many of the policy demands of crypto lobbyists, while the Senate rolled back guidelines by the SEC designed to protect consumers of cryptocurrencies. And both presidential candidates have flirted with crypto enough that, no matter who wins in November, the market could be on the brink of a deregulation-fueled bonanza.

How did crypto bounce back so fast? Part of the answer is pure smashmouth politics: The industry started spending gobs of money—at least $130 million to date—to elbow its way into this year’s congressional races. It has also refined its sales pitch. Since the FTX meltdown, the industry has been making efforts to distance itself from the Sam Bankman-Fried school of charm. Gone are the mussed hair and grandiose talk of altruism and saving humanity. In are the MBAs and lawyers, the Ivy Leaguers who know how to speak the language of Washington persuasion. The industry’s message now: Make crypto normal. Regulate us, please. All we want is to know the rules of the road. They highlight the most mundane, inoffensive applications of crypto, while condemning the scammers who tarnish the industry’s reputation and avoiding mention of the “degens,” or degenerate gamblers, who represent much of crypto’s actual demand.

[Annie Lowrey: When the Bitcoin scammers came for me]

But the truth is that the scammers are only getting bolder, finding new creative ways to rip off retail investors. Should the crypto lobby get its way, the new regulatory regime will clear a path not just for the industry’s “respectable” wing but also for the wildcatters and criminals. If you thought crypto was a problem before, you should be alarmed. The worst is likely yet to come.

The crypto industry insists that its goal—the reason it’s spending ungodly sums of money to sway elections—is to be boring. Nothing to see here. Crypto companies say they merely seek “regulatory clarity.”

This phrase is, to be generous, a sleight of hand. Companies don’t just want clarity; they want a particular set of rules. Currently, crypto exists in a state of regulatory limbo. The SEC says that most crypto assets are securities, defined as an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.” The paradigmatic case is a share of stock in a publicly traded company. Securities are subject to a lot of rules: You can only trade them through a registered exchange, and issuers have to disclose a bunch of information about the underlying companies. That way, investors can make informed decisions about which securities to buy and which to avoid.

If digital assets are indeed securities—a position that some federal judges have accepted, at least one judge has questioned, and is currently being tested in a number of ongoing enforcement cases—then crypto operations would have to behave like other Wall Street institutions. Companies like Coinbase, for example, would need to separate their brokerage services—that is, helping their customers buy and sell tokens—from their exchange services. (This is one aspect of the SEC’s pending lawsuit against Coinbase.) Plus, crypto operations could no longer launch overnight—not legally, at least. They’d have to register with the SEC and issue thorough disclosure documents before allowing the public to invest, a burdensome and costly process that would weed out a huge share of dodgy crypto schemes with no sound business model.

The main plank of crypto’s bid for normalcy is that tokens should be considered commodities, not securities. What could be more boring than a commodity? Wheat, orange juice, coffee beans, livestock: Commodities are interchangeable, and you can trade them with other people directly. The crypto lobby says tokens are clearly commodities, since they’re fungible like bags of corn and do more than just go up and down in price. For example, users can spend tokens as “gas” to interact with a blockchain or participate in the governance and upkeep of the blockchain; they don’t merely rely on “the efforts of others.” (The SEC agrees that bitcoin is a commodity, since unlike almost every other crypto asset it has no central issuer.)

Classifying cryptocurrencies as commodities would bring them under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, rather than the SEC. The CFTC has been friendlier to crypto, going so far as to advocate for controversial deregulatory measures pushed by FTX. It’s also much smaller, with roughly one-sixth the budget and staff. With the CFTC in charge, the SEC’s long list of pending cases would disappear, and we’d probably see a lot fewer prosecutions of crypto companies.

Consumer advocates argue that exempting crypto from securities laws would make it easier for Americans to buy risky digital assets: Not only would exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken be likely to offer fringier coins—they’d be harmless commodities, after all—institutional investors like pension funds might see the new rules as a stamp of approval to dive into crypto. Hilary J. Allen, a law professor at American University who studies financial regulation, told me that designating cryptocurrencies as commodities would create a loophole that non-crypto companies could exploit. “Slap a blockchain on it,” she said, “and you too can be free from securities regulation.” Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, told me the real reason the crypto industry doesn’t want tokens to be classified as securities is that disclosure rules would expose them as financially dangerous. “If you had to fully and truthfully disclose the risks associated with crypto, the people who would engage in crypto would be near none,” he said.   

The industry deflects such arguments by downplaying its chaotic history and focusing on its more mundane use cases: stablecoins, for example, which are designed to maintain a fixed value and can be used for instantaneous peer-to-peer transactions, particularly cross-border remittances, and as a hedge against inflation. (Argentina has seen growing adoption lately.) Or, even more boring, “decentralized physical infrastructure networks,” or DePIN, which employ blockchain technology to reward users for providing public resources such as data storage or Wi-Fi.

But the rules the industry is pushing would also juice some of crypto’s most degenerate schemes. The breakout hits of 2024 are fundamentally just new ways to gamble. Polymarket, the platform where wagers are made exclusively with crypto, has taken off this year thanks to interest in betting on the election. “Tap-to-earn” games such as Hamster Kombat have surged in popularity, luring users with rewards in the form of tokens. The apotheosis of speculative crypto insanity, though, is the website Pump.fun. On Pump.fun, anyone can create a memecoin instantly—all you need to do is select a name and an image—and the site creates a market where people can buy and sell it. One recent top token was named after the internet-famous baby hippo Moo Deng. Inevitably, creators are going to absurd lengths to promote their tokens: One guy posted a photo of himself apparently using meth. Another suffered burns after shooting fireworks at himself during a livestream.

The industry doesn’t foreground these casino-like use cases, but it implicitly blesses them. Speculation is normal, advocates say. In fact, it’s what drives innovation in the first place. “Speculation, taking risks—that’s what fuels the economy,” Kristin Smith, CEO of the Blockchain Association, told me. Sheila Warren, CEO of the Crypto Council for Innovation, says that allowing people to buy and sell tokens isn’t about whether crypto is good or bad. “I don’t necessarily know that it’s net positive or negative,” she told me. “I think it’s about the ability of people to determine what they want to do with their own money.”

The biggest degen of all is on the ballot. Donald Trump clearly has no idea what a blockchain is, but he understands that it’s related to money, which seems to be enough. He has declared himself “the crypto president.” In July, speaking at a bitcoin conference in Nashville, he pledged to make the United States “the crypto capital of the planet” and called crypto “the steel industry of a hundred years ago.” In September, he stopped by a bitcoin-themed bar in New York City and spent $950 worth of bitcoin on a round of burgers and Diet Cokes. Trump has also announced his involvement in a new crypto platform called World Liberty Financial. While the details of the project are hazy, it would apparently offer a stablecoin. (The project’s launch last week saw low demand and extended outages.)

[Read: The Trump sons really love crypto]

The industry is salivating at the prospect of a Trump win. Trump has said he would fire SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, create a “strategic national bitcoin stockpile,” and free the American cybercriminal and crypto hero Ross Ulbricht from prison. Any Trump-affiliated crypto project, such as World Liberty Financial, would operate in a legal gray area unless Congress passed the new regulatory regime the industry is asking for. In other words, he has skin in the game. “It’s clear Trump would be very positive for crypto,” Smith, the Blockchain Association CEO, said.

How a Kamala Harris administration would regulate the technology is less clear, but her recent statements have given crypto fans hope. In September, she promised to help grow “innovative technologies” including “digital assets.” Then she announced that she would support regulations that enable “Black men who hold digital assets to benefit from financial innovation” while keeping those investors “protected”—a strange and careful framing that implicitly acknowledged how many Black men have lost money on crypto. These comments could just be campaign rhetoric meant to fend off attacks by the crypto lobby. But they show that Harris is listening to the industry’s arguments, particularly those couched in the language of opportunity and equity. Harris is, if nothing else, sensitive to the direction of political winds. If a newly crypto-friendly Congress were to pass the industry’s desired legislation in a bipartisan way, a President Harris might feel great pressure to sign it.

And even if Trump and Harris do nothing to help crypto, the technology has by now proved its indestructibility. As if to drive home the point, 99Bitcoin’s obituary tracker seems to have dropped off this year. The last entry is from April. I messaged the site’s owner to ask if he was still updating it. He didn’t respond.

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The day started with a whistle—a short, loud shriek coming through our bedroom window. I didn’t wake up; the noise, otherworldly but familiar, blended into my dreams. Miri, my wife, was quicker to realize the danger: “Amir, wake up, a mortar!” We leaped out of bed and sprinted down the hall toward our safe room, a thick concrete bunker, wearing only underwear.

Every house in our kibbutz, Nahal Oz, has a safe room. We live less than a mile from the border with the Gaza Strip—close enough that Israel’s Iron Dome doesn’t have time to intercept artillery aimed at us. When Hamas launches a mortar, we have seven seconds before it lands.

As soon as we shut the heavy iron door, an explosion shook the house. Then a second, and a third. Our two daughters, who sleep in the safe room, had been through this many times before. Three-year-old Galia didn’t even stir. Carmel, nearly 2, raised her head but fell back asleep once she found her pacifier.

This article has been adapted from Tibon’s new book.

It was 6:30. Miri and I took out our phones and quickly discovered that Hamas was firing on dozens of locations across Israel. Whenever violence breaks out, we immediately start packing suitcases so that we can leave the kibbutz at the first moment of quiet. Israel and Hamas would typically announce a cease-fire within 10 days, at which point we’d return and get on with our lives.

But as we were packing, Miri and I heard a sound that told us this time would be different: gunfire. It started in the fields and steadily got closer. Then we heard shouting in Arabic outside our house—a commander telling one of his men to try to break in.

We had woken up to a nightmare: The border had been breached. Hamas was here.

When we moved to Nahal Oz in 2014, no word terrified us more than tunnel. Earlier that year, Hamas had used its extensive underground network to cross the border and kill Israeli soldiers. In response, the government invested more than $1 billion in an underground border wall, digging as deep as 160 feet. Any threat of an invasion had apparently been eliminated: The military began withdrawing soldiers from the borderlands, including from the base a few minutes’ drive from our home. The aboveground border fence, equipped with security cameras and machine guns, was supposed to be impenetrable.

On the morning of October 7, fewer than four full battalions guarded the border with Gaza. (Compare that with the roughly 25 battalions posted in the West Bank.) About 200 soldiers were stationed at the nearby base. It wasn’t nearly enough. Thousands of Hamas fighters bulldozed, blew up, and broke through the fence. Drones had prepared the way by destroying its guns and cameras. By 8:30 a.m., terrorists had captured the base, killing dozens of soldiers. In recent weeks, those soldiers had told their commanders that they had seen Hamas storming large-scale models of Israeli kibbutzim—an obvious dress rehearsal. But their warnings were dismissed. Israel’s leaders didn’t think Hamas would be willing to start a war.

[Read: ‘We’re going to die here’]

Even with the local base out of commission, Nahal Oz wasn’t entirely undefended. The kibbutz has a small security team that was heading off Hamas despite being outnumbered. But there was no chance of a military force arriving quickly enough to save us from the immediate danger. Mercifully, perhaps, Miri and I remained unaware. All we could do was wait.

Within minutes of the base being overrun, I got a call from my father. Cell reception in the safe room was spotty—it would soon go out for good—but I had been able to text him explaining that we were trapped. Our call was brief. He offered me the only words of hope that I would hear for hours: “We’re coming to get you out of there.”

While my mother drove him from Tel Aviv, my father, a retired army general, called all the senior military officials he knew—the army’s chief of staff, the head of the Southern Command, the commander of the Gaza regional division. None answered, so he texted instead, warning them that terrorists were inside Nahal Oz. He received just one response: “I know.”

Rockets flew overhead as my parents entered the border region. My father put down his phone and took out a pistol. Once they got to Sderot, about 15 minutes from Nahal Oz, they saw a police cruiser parked sideways, blocking the highway. Policemen took cover behind it, shooting at some enemy my parents couldn’t see. My mother was preparing to make a U-turn when a young couple darted in front of the car. They were out of breath and—as my father recalled—“dressed for a party.” He and my mother hurriedly let them in.

As my mother drove away, the couple told my parents that they had come from a music festival. “They shot everyone,” the woman exclaimed. “Everyone’s dead.” My parents listened in terror, imagining what might be happening to us in Nahal Oz. They drove the young couple to safety and turned back for the border.

The aftermath of Hamas’s attack on the music festival (Jack Guez / AFP / Getty)

About eight miles from Nahal Oz, my mother suddenly stopped the car in disbelief. Dozens of corpses covered the highway: Israeli soldiers and policemen, civilians, Hamas fighters. Most of the cars were charred; some were overturned. Others were still running but empty inside. My father was stunned. He had served in the Israel Defense Forces for more than three decades, even operating behind enemy lines. And yet, he told me, “I’ve never seen so much death in one place before.” My mother nosed the car forward, slowly steering between bodies.

Within a few minutes, at around 10:30 a.m., my parents had to stop again. They had driven into their second firefight of the day. A soldier directed them to take cover in a nearby bomb shelter, where they discovered a heap of mutilated remains: Hamas had chased Israelis there from the festival and thrown in grenades.

As my parents walked outside in horror, three armored vehicles carrying Israeli special forces were approaching. My father was able to persuade one of the officers, Avi, to go with him to Nahal Oz. My mother stayed behind, knowing that the next phase of the journey would be the most dangerous.

Meanwhile, Miri and I were desperately trying to keep the girls quiet. We pretended to be calm for their sakes, knowing that Hamas fighters might be close enough to hear them if they cried. But around noon, when Galia and Carmel fell back asleep, we stopped pretending. The military still hadn’t come, and we had lost contact with my father. I whispered to Miri that this was all my fault; it had been my idea to live in Nahal Oz. She tried to console me, saying that she loved our life here. “We both chose this place.”

Then, briefly, my cell reception returned. It was my mother: “Dad is getting closer to you.”

My father and Avi were two miles from the border when they heard shots up ahead. Hamas fighters had ambushed a group of IDF soldiers and pinned them behind their Jeep Wrangler. My father and Avi jumped out of their car and ran toward the soldiers. A brigade of Israeli paratroopers arrived at the same time, opening fire on the Hamas fighters as my father made it to the Wrangler. He found five commandos there—two on his right pleaded for ammunition; three on his left stayed silent. Once he realized they were dead, he stripped their ammo and threw it to the survivors. Then he took an M16 for himself and killed a Hamas fighter who was rushing the car. The Israeli soldiers shot at the ambushers until the enemy fire abated. Silence fell over the forest, and one of the paratroopers announced that he’d been hit. My father ran over and saw that he’d been struck in the stomach.

[Franklin Foer: The war that would not end]

By now my father understood, based on all the violence he’d seen, that reinforcements had not likely gotten to Nahal Oz. He faced a painful decision: The kibbutz lay within reach, but the paratrooper wouldn’t survive unless he was evacuated immediately.

My father made the right choice. He saved the soldier, taking him back to my mother, while Avi and the others stayed behind to hunt for remaining Hamas fighters. She drove the paratrooper to a nearby hospital, leaving my father stranded without a car. By some miracle, he ran into a general he knew, Israel Ziv, who agreed to drive him to Nahal Oz.

Their way was clear. More than six hours after leaving home, my father reached the kibbutz. Along the perimeter fence, he encountered a group of soldiers who agreed to let him join their command. An armored vehicle pulled up, carrying the local security team that had been defending Nahal Oz on its own all day. My father listened anxiously as they reported that roughly two dozen Hamas fighters remained in the kibbutz. The terrorists had broken into at least several homes, but the security team didn’t know how many. Then another group of IDF soldiers arrived, making my father one of about 70 fighters assembled on the eastern edge of Nahal Oz. They divided themselves into teams and started searching every building in the kibbutz.

Smoke rises from the Gaza Strip on January 30, 2024, seen behind a gap in the fence bordering Nahal Oz. (Sam McNeil / AP)

It was now around 2 p.m., but Miri and I had no way of knowing. Our phones had long since died, and the room was too dark for me to read my watch. The only light came from Carmel’s glow-in-the-dark pacifiers.

We heard gunfire again, this time in the distance: short, disciplined bursts, nothing like Hamas’s wild shooting from the morning. Miri and I felt a glimmer of hope. Maybe the military had finally come.

Making his way through the kibbutz, my father saw bodies everywhere: in the road, in yards, in driveways, in houses. Most were Hamas fighters. Many still held their weapons. By 4 p.m., he had reached our property. Everything in sight had bullet holes—the house, our two cars, our stroller. A dead terrorist lay on the front porch with a rocket-propelled grenade in his hand, pointed at our next-door neighbors. Two others blocked the sidewalk in front of our door. Another had died next to our lemon tree.

My father walked up to the exterior wall of the safe room, took a deep breath, and smacked the covered window. We heard a bang and then a familiar voice. The air inside was hot and thick by then; we worried that we were running out of oxygen. Galia was the first to speak. “Saba is here,” she said simply, using the Hebrew word for grandfather. I could hear the exhaustion in her voice, but for the first time in hours, she sounded happy.

My father shouted for us to open the front door. It took me a second to start moving. I imagined a terrorist hiding in the house, waiting for me to emerge. Slowly I felt my way through the darkness and opened the safe-room door. The light was overwhelming. I covered my eyes and crept to the front of the house toward my father. We embraced as soon as he stepped in the door. For a few moments, we stood there silently, holding each other.

By evening, the soldiers had finished searching the kibbutz and killed almost 30 Hamas fighters. They had found the bodies of 15 of our neighbors, including a family who were clinging to one another in their safe room when terrorists broke in.

The kibbutz would be evacuated soon, but in the meantime, the soldiers began assembling survivors in our house. By 7 p.m., we had more than 40 people inside, including about 10 young children huddled in the safe room. Rumor spread that those of us who were missing had been kidnapped and smuggled into Gaza.

In the midst of all this, Ruti, a woman who lived across the street, asked Miri where she could find a pot for cooking. Miri seemed confused: “What are you talking about?” But Ruti insisted. “I know we’ve all had a very long day, but there are 10 children sitting in that little room, and they need to have dinner.”

Miri accompanied Ruti to the kitchen. With the help of another neighbor, they made pasta for everyone in the house. As I watched people eating—the children in the safe room, their parents in the living room, and the soldiers on the porch, visible through the cracks that bullets had left in our windows—I realized that Ruti was doing more than feeding us. She was telling us, in very few words, that because we were alive, we were going to have to live.

This article has been adapted from Amir Tibon’s new book, The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands.