[HN Gopher] FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online...
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FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating
scandals
Author : abriosi
Score : 282 points
Date : 2022-11-14 12:38 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.poker.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.poker.org)
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| I wonder if there are cases of large scams where the perpetrators
| are smart enough to avoid being caught.
|
| Not all criminals end-up behind bars.
|
| I suspect that some scams can go unnoticed for long enough.
|
| I also suspect that scam opportunities are exploding.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Sure. Look into any dictator that was installed by the CIA.
| Emboldened by their power and shady alliance with the US, they
| usually go on a financial crime spree--stealing billions.
| sbarre wrote:
| Any kind of electronic gambling setup is amenable to insider
| scams.
|
| Keep it low-key, don't get greedy, and you can probably milk it
| forever.
| linuxftw wrote:
| > perpetrators are smart enough to avoid being caught.
|
| IMO, many startups are scams on some level. VC A funds company
| X. VC A also funds company Y. Company Y 'decides' to use
| company X's hot new product and has a lofty enterprise license.
| This happens a few more times. Company X now has very large
| revenues, VC's friends at big-nation-bank decide it's time to
| IPO and cash out.
| joecasson wrote:
| I wish a VC's recommendation or direction was all it took to
| get a deal done. Getting a "lofty Enterprise license" through
| procurement is so much harder than you are stating. They can
| make an introduction, sure, but very few VCs are
| micromanaging to the point of determining a portfolio
| company's tech stack.
|
| Source: a decade of VC funded Enterprise saas company selling
| experience
| bombcar wrote:
| However there have been cases of a product being used
| internally because a board member recommended it. I've seen
| small versions of it myself.
| linuxftw wrote:
| My source: Worked for a startup hosting company, our
| biggest clients were backed by the same VC's as us.
| michael1999 wrote:
| Lots of people building real businesses do shady things on the
| way up. John Hempton wrote up a great example of this about a
| failed short play against Steve Madden Shoes[0]. Steve Madden
| may have been a fibber, but he made shoes people wanted to buy.
| The value of the shoes was larger than the fakery.
|
| But when you are selling financial services, this kind of
| fakery almost always blows up because the accounting is the
| product. And if the accounts are fake, the thing is fake. Fake
| accounts always leave a hole that can only grow with each cycle
| of fraud. Dan Davies wrote a great book titled "Lying for
| Money" on the whole sorry process[1]. Galbraith called it the
| "bezzle".
|
| [0] - http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2011/05/steve-madden-
| count... [1] -
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38605195-lying-for-money
| michael1999 wrote:
| Lol. Just discovered that Munger coined febezzle to describe
| the "wealth effect" a boom/bubble produces. That gap between
| value created and quoted market cap can grow very large even
| without manifestly criminal activity. This is effectively a
| "bezzle", and likewise, will only grow until it explodes.
| Which is why the longer a bubble runs, the more painful it is
| when it pops.
|
| http://mungerisms.blogspot.com/2009/09/philanthropy-round-
| ta...
| Gasp0de wrote:
| Tether is one of them, I suppose. No one has been caught (yet).
| xiphias2 wrote:
| It's not that they are smart.
|
| It seems more to me like governments don't want to take
| financial crimes (specifically fiditiary duty) seriously, as it
| would make precedent for bankers who do the same crimes, just
| less visibly (bailouts).
| JofArnold wrote:
| More likely it's a question of resource. I expect there's
| more crimes than people available to prosecute.
| new2this wrote:
| Clickbait title. Tether is only vaguely mentioned and there is
| nothing related to Tether operations- only to an employee at
| Tether.
|
| While this article covers an interesting topic, the title is
| clearly an attempt to bandwagon on the "Tether is next" narrative
| while contributing nothing substantial to the conversation
| shkkmo wrote:
| Tether is pretty specifically, if briefly mentioned. What is
| vague is the description of what provable role Stuart Hoegner
| had with UB's lawbreaking.
| [deleted]
| mrleinad wrote:
| Larry was right for once [1].
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH5-rSxilxo
| simongray wrote:
| Larry the character maybe; not Larry the real person.
| mrleinad wrote:
| I'm really not sure where the line is between those two.
| simongray wrote:
| The real one is promoting crypto by playing a "foolish"
| version of himself on camera in exchange for money.
| mrleinad wrote:
| I don't see anything wrong there. He got paid to make an
| ad, and it's clear that's what it is.
|
| If he was promoting FTX on his own personal account like
| so many "influencers" do, then I would be ok criticizing
| him.
| mring33621 wrote:
| I loved these commercials but they failed to convince me
| to put any money in FTX, or crypto altogether.
| [deleted]
| snake_plissken wrote:
| There is no difference tho? The show is about him playing
| himself.
| themgt wrote:
| It's incredible that SBF was being touted by Sequoia, WEF,
| Fortune, chumming it up with Clinton and Blair in the Bahamas,
| getting meetings and kid glove treatment with the SEC, relatively
| glowing profile as a "do-gooder" by the NYT.
|
| All while FTX had a Chief Regulatory Officer who was basically a
| career white-collar criminal. It beggars belief that anyone who
| dug half an inch into this story wouldn't have seen 90,000 watt
| flashing red warning signs.
|
| Crypto turned into a haven for replaying every form of financial
| fraud ever invented on an epic speedrun against retail
| "investors", and a whole lot of powerful people and institutions
| have dirty hands. The idea all of this could be adequately
| explained by stupidity rather than malice strains credulity.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/business/sam-bankman-frie...
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| > Crypto turned into a haven for replaying every form of
| financial fraud ever invented on an epic speedrun against
| retail "investors", and a whole lot of powerful people and
| institutions have dirty hands. The idea all of this could be
| adequately explained by stupidity rather than malice strains
| credulity.
|
| This was clear years ago. That is why I've been avoiding crypto
| like the plague.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| The question is, did the VCs get tokens along with their
| investments? They may have already made money from selling them
| before the collapse while giving a sheen of respectability to
| FTX. That would make sense because then they wouldn't need to
| do any diligence.
| lzooz wrote:
| Sam Bankman-Fried donated $40M to the Democratic Party, making
| him the second-biggest donor of the party.
| jimcavel888 wrote:
| [deleted]
| pjc50 wrote:
| Like most political donors, he gave to both sides. https://ww
| w.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2022/11/11/checks--...
|
| " The $69 million spent by Bankman-Fried and his deputies on
| the 2022 midterms likely would've done little to plug FTX's
| reported financial hole, but it couldn't have hurt. Bankman-
| Fried told Forbes last month that "in the end, I care about
| policy more than politics," adding that "my giving has been
| bipartisan, and my goal is to help support great policy
| makers." Bankman-Fried has supported
| Republicans during this cycle, primarily through his $2
| million contribution to the blockchain and cryptocurrency-
| focused GMI super PAC. But the bulk of his giving, including
| $27 million to the Protect Our Future super PAC and $6
| million to the House Majority super PAC, has gone to support
| Democrats. Bankman-Fried told Forbes last month that "much of
| this was for primaries, rather than D vs R general elections"
| ($33 million of his contributions were made during the first
| four months of 2022.) "
| yonaguska wrote:
| I'd be interested to know exactly which primaries he
| donated to. The two sides are not Democrat/Republican, it
| should be finally obvious to everyone else after these
| midterms that the sides are actually Trump Republicans vs
| Democrats+GOP.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Eh, all political parties have significant internal
| factionalism which isn't very well reported. That's why
| the US has primaries. It's just remarkable how well
| coalition discipline holds within the Republican party -
| any Republican will back any other Republican, at least
| in public.
|
| It seems SBF was backing/bribing pro-crypto candidates.
| Balgair wrote:
| Looking on the bright side:
|
| This whole crypto failure is going to act as a bit of an
| 'innoculant' for any relaxation of financial laws. If anything,
| it should lightly strengthen support for further financial
| regulation of Wall Street and the like. All responses to any
| loosening up of the banks can reasonably be countered with
| 'Yeah, but look at what happened with Crypto.' So I guess
| that's at least something.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| Clinton and Blair are old. I'm starting to think this is no
| different from a scammer extracting a credit card number over
| the phone from your formerly astute great aunt.
| indymike wrote:
| > Crypto turned into a haven for replaying every form of
| financial fraud ever invented on an epic speedrun against
| retail "investors"
|
| Best description of all that is wrong with crypto. It's a human
| problem, not a tech problem.
| hash07e wrote:
| hef19898 wrote:
| What anti-semtism are talking about?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| The funny thing is Michael Lewis (Moneyball, Flash Boys, The
| Big Short) has been following Sam around for the last six
| months. He just got an incredible ending to his book.
| bmitc wrote:
| Is there more to this? As in, he was actually in the Bahamas
| documenting things and Sam? This was not a red flag to anyone
| at FTX or involved with FTX?
| Mistletoe wrote:
| No he was writing a book about SBF before all this went
| down. Probably about how awesome he was. Although you could
| be right and I'm sure he had some hunches it was all a mess
| after digging deeper. Then he got an incredible M. Night
| Shyamalan twist at the end.
|
| SBF and crew were probably basking in their own genius too
| much to realize how most Michael Lewis books end up. They
| probably thought they were more Moneyball than The Big
| Short.
| bmitc wrote:
| It will be interesting to see/read what comes out his
| investigations and research. It's almost a certainty that
| a dark comedy drama will come out of this ala _Don 't
| Look Up_ and _The Big Short_.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Wait, wasn't the NYT supposed to take a very critical look at
| everything in "tech", as a matter of editorial policy? Why were
| they giving such a glowing (no pun intended!) endorsement of
| crypto, of all things? Something doesn't add up here.
| burkaman wrote:
| Did you read it? I would not call it glowing at all, it seems
| pretty matter of fact and actually somewhat negative if you
| read between the lines. Opening with an anecdote about some
| scripted banter with Anthony Scaramucci (not a name that NYT
| readers have any good associations with), and then:
|
| > The laughter has faded. Over the last few days, the
| collapse of a so-called stablecoin called TerraUSD has sent
| the crypto market into meltdown, accelerating a dramatic
| sell-off that tanked the price of Bitcoin and Ether, the two
| most valuable cryptocurrencies. At Baha Mar, Mr. Bankman-
| Fried was throwing a giant party for the industry; this past
| week, he was attempting to restore calm, tweeting long
| threads about the state of the market.
|
| Then discussing how his awkward, unkempt appearance is
| actually calculated and intentional. And look at the final
| paragraph:
|
| > Outside, the convention center was emptying, as hundreds of
| crypto enthusiasts headed for the airport. It was the calm
| before the coming meltdown. To leave the resort, guests had
| to walk through the Baha Mar casino, the largest in the
| Caribbean, a brightly lit hall of flashing slot machines.
|
| The whole thing is framed around this guy hanging out with
| celebrities and lobbying government officials while his
| market crashes. Reading it for the first time 6 months after
| it was written, I think it holds up as an accurate profile
| with a bit of foreshadowing of what was to come.
| doorman2 wrote:
| Crypto doesn't pose an existential threat to the NYT business
| model like social media and search do. I.e. The NYT is in the
| advertising business. Google, Facebook, et al are direct
| competitors.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > The NYT is in the advertising business. Google, Facebook,
| et al are direct competitors.
|
| The NYT is in the "providing content to lure people to
| advertisers" business. They don't sell ads to third
| parties. They could be very symbiotic with Google, for
| example. If Google was searching their content, bringing
| readers in, and supplying ads. But, instead, Google scrapes
| their content and helps people never visit their site at
| all.
| doorman2 wrote:
| > The NYT is in the "providing content to lure people to
| advertisers" business.
|
| What does that mean? The NYT sells ads, i.e. you can pay
| the NYT to have your advertisement shown in the NYT.
| Google sells ads, i.e. you can pay Google to have your
| advertisement shown in Google results. The NYT and Google
| sell the same thing. They are competitors.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The NYT's business model is to sell their customer's
| eyeballs to advertisers. While Google does that with
| search results, they have a big arm that sells random
| third party eyeballs to advertisers, and then splits the
| money with the site supplying the eyes. I would
| characterize the first of Google's businesses and the NYT
| business as "providing content" and the second as
| "advertising".
|
| In fact, the NYT outsources their ads to Amazon's
| advertising business.
| doorman2 wrote:
| Google's first party platforms (Search and YouTube)
| account for 85% of ad revenue [0]. Search alone accounts
| for 72%. I'm not really sure how AdSense is relevant to
| the discussion. Google is clearly a huge competitor to
| the NYT.
|
| [0]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/0001
| 65204422...
| twright wrote:
| I think crypto aligned itself more with finance in the last
| year or two. E.g. Super Bowl ads, big bank partnerships and
| that may influence how a company is covered. The culmination
| of this was Roose's "Latecomer's Guide to Crypto" which was
| generally uncritical.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Perhaps that default-critical stance is just how they thought
| to solicit "donations" from the industry.
| headsoup wrote:
| The dollars add up, every time.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Not for Wirecard, or FTX.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| SBF likely hired a PR firm that pitched the story to a writer
| they're friendly with.
| settrans wrote:
| In case you're not being facetious, Sam was the single second
| largest donor to the Democratic Party.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| He donated in the primaries. He told the democrats he would
| donate again in the general, but didn't. Like a month ago
| there was articles like "Where is the $100MM Sam promised
| the Democrats, he's donated nothing in the general"
| [deleted]
| Marazan wrote:
| To Democratic Primary races. To get the pro-crypto
| candidate over.
| headsoup wrote:
| What a lovely democratic process it is, candidates
| weighing up which industry interest has done the best job
| at wooing them. SBF is another reminder of how far down
| the list of priorities integrity actually sits (not that
| he succeeded here, but that he's in good company in the
| approach).
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| And one of the great innovations of crypto is sending
| untraceable money to corrupt politicians.
|
| The Chinese banned it. Unfortunately Americans genuinely
| believe they are above corruption.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The average America has little _personal_ experience with
| corruption. I wouldn 't dare even suggest to a cop that
| he take a bribe to make my speeding ticket go away, while
| in many other countries that sort of low-grade corruption
| is standard. I think this experience leads many Americans
| to falsely believe that America is generally free of
| corruption, which of course isn't true in the higher
| rungs of society. Rich people in America commonly bribe
| politicians, universities, etc. It's a whole different
| game for them, they play by a different set of rules that
| most Americans have never been exposed to.
|
| (I think it works this way across the anglosphere, not
| just America. The average Briton can't bribe the average
| British cop, but their royals/etc certainly pay to make
| crimes go away.)
| [deleted]
| rideontime wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of us have questions that Kevin Roose won't
| answer.
| jmull wrote:
| ...NYT...Why were they giving such a glowing (no pun
| intended!) endorsement of crypto
|
| I don't think they did.
|
| To check my memory, I clicked on to the "Cryptocurrency"
| keyword to see the crypto-related stories going back. It's
| mostly reporting news (which is mainly bad) and skepticism.
|
| Is the next crypto narrative is going to be "why didn't the
| media save us?" I guess it makes about as much sense as all
| the previous crypto narratives.
| _jal wrote:
| "The lamestream media, whom I never listen to, failed to
| warn me!"
|
| Anyone else remember those folks who suddenly realized
| climate change was actually happening and immediately
| started whining about how the media failed to tell them?
|
| People failing to think critically about how media works
| while simultaneously whining about how the media works will
| never cease to amuse me. It is almost exactly like taking a
| bus to the end of the line and then yelling at the driver
| for taking you there.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > It's incredible that SBF was being touted by Sequoia, WEF,
| Fortune, chumming it up with Clinton and Blair in the Bahamas,
| getting meetings and kid glove treatment with the SEC,
| relatively glowing profile as a "do-gooder" by the NYT.
|
| That's the real story here.
|
| I transcribed a discussion between Chamath Palihapitiya and
| Brian Armstrong and others talking about this. Here's what he
| was saying about all these people who've been very blind and
| didn't do any due diligence:
|
| _" I just want to say the second uncomfortable thing out loud
| which is there are a lot of venture firms in SV in this period
| of both not doing any work or due diligence who also took the
| extra step and actually created classes and teached teams how
| to create these tokens.
|
| And those artifacts --those video links and artifacts-- are
| sometimes on their website, they're still on YouTube, they're
| inside of Twitter, and what these folds would do when we talked
| about this, the game that they played was they would get a team
| they would create a token, they would also buy equity at a
| crazy valuation, the equity was locked up but the tokens were
| not, and then they would put them on an exchange and sell them
| to unsuspecting people and they would be able to dump these
| tokens and if you look inside that trend those were the trend
| of "securities" instead it was done in an unregulated way.
|
| They're going to start to look at a bunch of other tokens and
| token sales and you're going to end up looking at some very
| well known venture firms in silicon valley.
|
| That token is not the only token that's been engineered by SV
| firms and it is also no the only token that's going to zero
| that's been engineered by SV venture firms site.
|
| There's videos (still) today on some of the most well-known
| Venture firm sites on how to do this.
|
| They're instructing people how to do this. It's what they did.
|
| but I really also hope they figure out these other tokens as
| well ... ... and you will see these are unregulated securities
| that were sold by our brethren..."_
|
| It is, to me, about _much_ more than "cryptocurrencies are
| scam".
|
| Many in SV are _deep_ into this. There are officials and ex-
| officials implicated too.
|
| People have been dumping worthless tokens created by the tens
| or hundreds on people all the while the media were presenting
| SBF as an altruistic trustable white knight.
|
| That's the real story here.
|
| Complete with SBF being the biggest or second biggest donor to
| Biden's campain for presidency though a fund which SBF's mom (a
| lawyer and teacher at Stanford) was running. And SBF's father,
| also a lawyer and teacher at Stanford, recorded explaining how
| he's helping FTX with charity and regulations.
|
| > Crypto turned into a haven for replaying every form of
| financial fraud ever invented on an epic speedrun against
| retail "investors", and a whole lot of powerful people and
| institutions have dirty hands. The idea all of this could be
| adequately explained by stupidity rather than malice strains
| credulity.
|
| Exactly. I'm glad some at least this for what it actually is.
|
| Thankfully some people warned and described the very scam SBF
| was pulling the day FTX launched (in 2018 ?). Before that
| several had already noticed Alameda Research was behind crypto
| market manipulation and pump and dumps of shitcoins.
|
| The signs were all out there and nobody looked.
| user3939382 wrote:
| To say this as gently as I can, do you really think people like
| Blair or the Clintons are the good guys?
|
| HSBC teaches us that the US govt happily approves of financial
| crime as long as it's large and they get their cut:
| https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n...
|
| Madoff's mistake was probably not sharing with the right
| people, and that the optics were a bridge too far.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Also, this is Alameda's CEO.
|
| https://youtu.be/aW6SqLXw944
|
| Un fucking believable.
| mariusio wrote:
| Already gone, do you have a mirror?
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Here you are:
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/BVjZsLafkz8?feature=share
| gruez wrote:
| I don't get it. What's supposed to be outrageous/"Un
| fucking believable" about that video? I watched the video
| once, and checking the transcript, the things she said
| were:
|
| 1. "yeah absolutely could pull it off without my math
| degree I use very little math" - given that her position
| is a CEO (ie. leadership), it seems plausible that she
| doesn't use her math degree in the day to day. Also, the
| clip has zero context as to what the question actually
| was.
|
| 2. "being comfortable with risk is very important" -
| Would you rather have a hedge fund CEO that's _not_
| comfortable with risk?
|
| 3. "we tend not to have things like stop losses I think
| those aren't necessarily great risk management tool" -
| ...which is true. Stop losses are basically market orders
| that get placed when the price drops below a certain
| amount. It's true that they can stop losses, but it could
| also lead you to sell at the bottom and at the worst
| price.
|
| 4. "trying to think of a good example of a trade where
| I've lost a ton of money um well I don't know I probably
| don't want to go into specifics too much with" - This is
| one of these questions where you need to have a prepared
| answer for, because answering it any any
| honest/unprepared way would make you look bad. The
| closest real life example would be something "what is
| your greatest weakness" or "what was the biggest fuck up
| in your last job". Obviously she didn't have one
| prepared, hence the response.
| nullc wrote:
| > It's true that they can stop losses, but it could also
| lead you to sell at the bottom and at the worst price.
|
| Worse, in relatively illquid (and circuit breakerless)
| markets like the fringe cryptocurrencies they were
| investing in, stop losses can easily result in selling at
| absurd prices and can even be manipulated to do so. There
| was even a lawsuit against FTX for exploiting them.
|
| E.g. say something is trading at $105 after falling a bit
| and you believe there are significant stop loss orders at
| $100 (perhaps aided by exchange insider knoweldege), you
| see that there is very little volume on the order book
| below $100. You then put in a huge buy wall at $10...
| sell down to $100 to trigger the stop losses, then laugh
| as idiotic stop losses dump coins into your $10 wall.
|
| Moments later the asset is trading at $101 again.
|
| In large liquid markets they're less risky because
| someone will usually hop up and take the deal at $99 so
| even though you get burned a little it usually won't be
| too bad. But cryptocurrency markets, particularly for the
| fringe scamcoins FTX was investing in are just not very
| liquid.
| ogogmad wrote:
| > we tend not to have things like stop losses I think
| those aren't necessarily great risk management tool
|
| It seems to me that you _need_ to have a stop loss to
| prevent blowing up when you have leverage. This sounds
| like one of those strategies that might work most of the
| time, but will eventually lead to bankruptcy, like
| picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer.
|
| I haven't read Mark Spitznagel's latest book, but it's
| all about problems like this.
|
| It also suggests that this hedge fund was run by amateurs
| that hadn't learnt the lessons of other overleveraged
| funds like LTCM.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| Also relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/yty
| 80b/maybe_the_...
| Pidaymou wrote:
| Says removed
| ekianjo wrote:
| > a "do-gooder" by the NYT.
|
| sbf was giving tons of cash to the democratic party so NYT cant
| find anything bad to say about him
| COGlory wrote:
| I'll have you know he donated to both sides: He also gave
| $5,800 to 6 different left-leaning Republicans.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/michelatindera/2021/10/21/the-w.
| ..
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| that's not much compared to the $40 millions he gave to the
| democrats...
| [deleted]
| kibwen wrote:
| Did you even bother to read the article? Because the answer
| for everyone here seems to be "no", have a read that doesn't
| require a click:
|
| _A growing force in political fund-raising, he has a super
| PAC that recently gave more than $10 million to a Democratic
| congressional candidate who supports some of his
| philanthropic priorities._
|
| _In public, Mr. Bankman-Fried can sometimes seem
| uncomfortable, tapping his foot or twirling a fidget spinner.
| But the awkwardness is part of a calculated self-
| presentation. Over countless tweets, interviews and TV
| appearances, he's positioned himself as a mad-scientist-cum-
| diplomat -- a straight-talking brainiac willing to embrace
| regulation of his nascent industry and criticize its worst
| excesses._
|
| _Now Mr. Bankman-Fried is trying to leverage his fame to set
| policy in Washington, at a moment when the risks of crypto
| trading are growing increasingly stark; he makes regular
| trips to the Capitol from his base in the Bahamas, meeting
| with regulators and testifying in Congress. If he's
| successful, he could become one of the most influential
| figures in the new era of technological experimentation that
| supporters call web3, writing the rule book for a slew of
| risky investment products that are increasingly reshaping the
| internet, finance and even the arts._
|
| _But his detractors say his advocacy is driven by self-
| interest. His political contributions have prompted
| complaints that he's distorting the competitive landscape to
| advance his own agenda. And the charm offensive in Washington
| has alarmed consumer advocates who argue that FTX is
| exacerbating the volatility in crypto markets and putting
| investors at risk._
|
| _FTX serves as a portal to the crypto world. With the click
| of a button, a curious investor can turn dollars into
| Bitcoin, Dogecoin or Ether. It's as simple as buying paper
| towels from Target -- except that the value of a digital
| asset can be wiped away overnight amid the types of market
| gyrations that have sent cryptocurrency prices crashing over
| the past month. In the United States, crypto exchanges occupy
| a regulatory gray area: It remains unsettled whether the
| tokens are securities, commodities or something else
| entirely. Mr. Bankman-Fried has been pitching a regulatory
| structure with expanded authority for the Commodity Futures
| Trading Commission, which is smaller and less aggressive than
| the Securities and Exchange Commission and has traditionally
| been more sympathetic to the crypto industry._
|
| _FTX is headquartered in the Bahamas partly because 80
| percent of its $1.1 billion in global revenue stems from a
| trading instrument that remains illegal in the United States.
| On the FTX platform, investors can borrow money to make
| enormous bets on the future prices of cryptocurrencies,
| leading to potentially astronomical gains -- or catastrophic
| losses._
|
| So not only is the article extremely up-front about the fact
| that SBF donated to the Democratic primaries (and as far as I
| can tell, none at all to the general election), it's far from
| "glowing" (it's a banal, if colorful, profile) and, contrary
| to the parent commenter's claims, nowhere does it claim that
| he is a "do-gooder", rather using the phrase in the context
| of how EA advocates think of themselves.
|
| The sheer irony of people railing against misinformation in
| media while willfully misinforming people on social media.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| With every crypto collapse there seems to be an associated
| failure by the media to do any real digging. The same thing
| happened with Theranos where, with a few exceptions, the media
| fawned over Elizabeth Holmes.
|
| It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their jobs
| or they've always been this bad and I'm just getting older.
| There are plenty of earlier scams and bubbles (Enron, dot-com
| bubble) that slipped under the radar until thing went to shit,
| so I suspect the latter.
| mountainb wrote:
| Journalists who do puff profiles on business and political
| figures don't do any investigating. Investigative journalists
| who investigate on their own initiative are rare. Most just
| ride on the coat-tails of plaintiff lawyers, prosecutors, and
| public scandals as in this case. It's not really clear if
| newspapers suffer reputational harm from puff pieces that are
| later repudiated.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| People on this site routinely post links to evade paywalls.
| They celebrate ad blockers. But now many of the same people
| are wondering why "the media" didn't stop a tech fraud? You
| get what you pay for.
| cokeandpepsi wrote:
| It's not the media's fault these people commit crimes
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| It's the media's fault if they cannot be bothered to Google
| for two minutes that the chief lawyer at Alameda/FTX
| happens to be involved in a big poker scandal which...
| defrauded players.
|
| Especially when there were tweets as old as 2018 at the
| very least describing the very scam Alameda/FTX/SBF was
| pulling.
|
| @bitfinex'ed, a Twitter account which exposes tether for
| the scam it is since maybe a decade (and tether _shall_
| eventually fall), has been posting proof of all the
| wrongdoings. Including the ties between Alameda an Deltec
| (tether 's bank in the Bahamas) since the very start of the
| scam.
|
| It's also the media's fault that they re copy/pasting
| everywhere that it's "leveraged trades gone wrong, sending
| SBF in a death spiral".
|
| That's not the story at all yet that's what these _scummy_
| media are publishing.
|
| The story is that the goal was, from day one, to not only
| defraud people/investors but also to do a regulatory
| capture of the crypto exchanges market by greasing
| politicians and working hand in hand with officials and ex-
| officials who all knew each other.
|
| If there were still investigative journalists around,
| there's material for quite a story.
|
| But it's better to present SBF as an altruistic woke kid
| who, sadly, was sent into a death spiral after a few bad
| leveraged trades.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| You are missing the fact that we are dealing with an
| audience that WANTS TO BE FOOLED.
|
| Going against the narrative is brave but it doesn't pay
| the bills. Besides would it even matter? Does anyone on
| r/cryptocurrency even care what the MSM writes?
| Throwawayaerlei wrote:
| Aren't there a _whole_ lot more people who are wondering
| what this _crypto_ is and whether they should invest in
| it?
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| You need to have massive balls to go after billionaires and
| their army of lawyers.
|
| And the public doesn't help with their hero worship of tech
| douchebags.
| eternalban wrote:
| > slipped under the radar
|
| No, sorry, that is their job description. But since we're
| using radar as analogy, let me introduce to your new friend,
| IFF (Identify, Friend or Foe).
| r00fus wrote:
| I think the radar analogy is flawed at best w/r/t the
| press.
|
| Part of the problem is that the press is owned/regulated by
| the people in the very institutions that fund the scammers.
| bmitc wrote:
| It's not just the media. The investors are the primary ones
| to blame here, in my opinion. They literally gave hundreds of
| millions a of dollars to a company with a compliance officer
| with a history of financial fraud and scams and then touted
| the CEO as a boy wonder. The fact that they invested lended a
| lot of credence, for better or worse, to FTX.
| boplicity wrote:
| > It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their
| jobs
|
| It's not that "the media" has gotten worse at their jobs.
| Rather, there simply _a lot less funding_ for reporters. The
| hit in funding has become much worse in local reporting --
| especially local newspapers. However, if this is viewed as a
| training ground for the few large national /international
| news organizations, it's easy to see how this has a profound
| impact for even the large and well funded publications.
|
| There's simply _much less reporting_ happening than their
| used to be, and it 's a real problem.
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/07/13/u-s-
| newsroo...
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/626459/number-
| employees-....
| bmelton wrote:
| I don't know if this is right or wrong, but if I were
| running a news agency, I would think that glowing puff
| pieces would be one of the first things I'd eliminate in
| the event of a financial crunch.
|
| Is there a reason we think they persist?
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Why? Glowing puff pieces are a reliable, dirt cheap
| source of revenue
| mccorrinall wrote:
| The first statistic you link is a newsroom statistic. This
| cut makes sense, because newspaper now get their news from
| big agencies.
|
| Newsrooms are completely different from investigative
| digging into stuff.
| [deleted]
| pasc1878 wrote:
| But who collects the stories for the agencies - it used
| to be the local reporters who are the ones gone. This is
| the point of the statistic
|
| I am in UK and look at my local papers - the number of
| stories is massively down and the report numbers are much
| smaller. One reporter now for several London boroughs
| when there used to be several for one.
|
| Who is looking at local government now?
| cguess wrote:
| No one, and (though I'm not sure this is true in the UK
| as well, though I imagine it is) it's pretty much 100%
| private equity's fault. They bought up every local paper
| they could, saddled them with the debt (how that's a
| thing that's allowed in accounting I will never
| understand), and then claimed the Internet killed them.
|
| Yes, news orgs could have adapted faster, but most
| privately held papers were in the black. Only when the
| debts and insane growth expectations were added were they
| dying.
|
| Private equity is ruining modern democratic institutions.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Agreed about privat equity in general but the UK papers
| are all owned by media groups I think so no PEs fault
| here.
|
| The issue is lack of advertising revenue. No local
| classified adds or local firms. All gone to Facebook.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > a lot less funding for reporters
|
| There's plenty of funding for and to reporters who aren't
| trying to discover the truth but instead manufacture it.
| in_cahoots wrote:
| Apparently SBF had 'donated' millions to ProPublica to
| cover effective altruism. These institutions are so
| desperate for funding that they're having to get creative
| just to survive. I'm not sure what's worse, no media or
| one that pretends to be neutral but is actually in the
| pockets of private donors.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think this is an odd take, given that it was the WSJ that
| broke the Theranos story and CoinDesk that broke the FTX
| story.
|
| Yes, true investigative reporting is rare (and expensive),
| but good work is still being done.
|
| For the media at large, given the volume of stuff you can
| read, much of it is plain "story-telling" or "narratives",
| and I do think the media is more likely to go with things
| that fit the narrative of the day than look at things with a
| critical eye.
|
| With Theranos, the media absolutely wanted to highlight a
| "female Steve Jobs", and Holmes used that to her advantage.
| Similarly, with SBF, given all the smarmy characters in
| crypto, he fit the narrative of "the good guy", "the next JP
| Morgan" coming to save the financial system for good.
| BoardsOfCanada wrote:
| > Yes, true investigative reporting is rare (and
| expensive), but good work is still being done.
|
| Still, it's weird to have to read about this at poker.org
| first instead of any "respected" news source.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I read about Friedberg's ties to the poker scandal in
| other sources last week. It's not exactly a "scoop" given
| that it's all a matter of public record and has been so
| for a long time.
|
| There was an editorial on CoinGeek in _February_ casting
| doubt on SBF and pointing out the poker scandal:
| https://coingeek.com/ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-fried-isnt-who-
| you-...
| BoardsOfCanada wrote:
| Thanks for the link. This makes the WaPo & co puff pieces
| even more baffling.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I think it is worth noting that Theranos went after people
| who investigated them. Used the enormous war chest and high
| profile backers to crush anyone who challenged the official
| narrative. How many nascent stories get killed because a
| broke reporter feels threatened?
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| How many "journalists" wrote glowing puff pieces about
| Holmes and Theranos, when they could have simply written
| about other companies and people instead? Quite a few as I
| recall.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| News begets more news. I am not going to fault a reporter
| for getting in on the current zeitgeist.
|
| Unless you are comically bad at crime, bad actors will
| maintain some level of misdirection to conceal their
| malfeasance. There are only so many hours in a day, there
| is not time to do a deep dive report on everything that
| comes across the desk (most of which would match the
| official narrative). Theranos took years of concentrated
| effort to expose, with a large amount of risk (real or
| implied) to those involved.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| At least with Theranos, the was the media excuse of "new
| technologist isn't sharing the secrets of her device yet, but
| she showed enough to get big-names as investors and #37 on
| the Fortune list with as much revenue as MSFT is signed on to
| the tech to make it seem believable".
|
| With Enron, they were very very good at obfuscating their
| scam. But it was the WSJ affiliate that was the first mover
| on Enron being fishy. A major short seller saw that article
| and shorted the stock, then turned a tip into another
| reporter. That reporter then pretty much started its
| downfall. It was, possibly, the best example of the media
| being the guardians against a scam since the internet
| started.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Enron was unlike Theranos, in that Enron was originally a
| legitimate company while Theranos was a scam from the
| beginning. Enron was a company that sold natural gas, a
| real product, that became a scam as they used increasingly
| dodgy accounting practices to push their stock ever higher.
| Theranos on the other hand never had a real product, and
| before Theranos even started Holmes was informed by experts
| (particularly Phyllis Gardner) that it would never work.
|
| In the early days of Enron, an investigative journalist
| would have found a real gas trading company. But at no
| point in the history of Theranos would an investigative
| journalist worth their salt have found a real company.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| All these are true. But I don't get how that relates to
| what I said.
|
| Although, in the early days, a journalist wouldn't have
| found the gas trading. While Enron traded oil early on,
| they pretty much built the gas trading industry at the
| same time they were becoming more scammy.
| brookst wrote:
| "The media" is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with
| liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and
| feed their families.
|
| Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and
| experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a
| handful in the world at any given time.
|
| So IMO, "they've always been this bad" is the answer, but
| it's not entirely fair. Kind of like saying the cooks at
| McDonald's have always been this bad; in fact it has never
| been their job to do world-class work.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| Dominos would be my counterpoint: their pizza was just bad
| and they could do better. And they did.
|
| I think it's entirely possible that an industry with low
| competition and high nepotism could just be doing their
| jobs poorly.
|
| Isn't that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?
| brookst wrote:
| Dominos is still terrible from a gourmet food
| perspective. They went from abysmal to merely bad. Which
| is fine at that price point and value prop.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Yeah, when did they get better? They've added more MSG
| over the last couple decades, I'm pretty sure, and kicked
| it up _a lot_ when they publicized that they were re-
| formulating their sauce a decade or so ago--and, to be
| fair, they 're far from alone in that, if you want a
| Pizza Hut pie that's about the same quality as a 1995
| Pizza Hut pie, you're going to be paying more like $25
| than $10 and you won't be getting it from Pizza Hut, all
| those chains been cutting quality and adding MSG for
| years to try to avoid raising prices--but haven't gotten
| better, except at making you regret eating it.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| > They've added more MSG over the last couple decades
|
| You say this as if it's an inherently bad thing. There's
| nothing wrong with some MSG as a flavor enhancer.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| They already had some. Now there's a _ton_. And it 's not
| to make it better, but to cover for the fact that all the
| other components have gotten a lot worse.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Dominos is still terrible from a gourmet food
| perspective._
|
| They're not trying to be gourmet food, they're trying to
| be fast food. They were very bad by even that low
| standard, and they became better by that standard. I'm
| still not a fan, but to give credit where credit is due,
| they did improve.
| brookst wrote:
| Oh, 100% agreed there. But in a a larger conversation
| about "the media", Dominos is analogous to a large, mass-
| market, low cost outlet, not the media in general. It's
| entirely possible that TMZ or People Magazine had similar
| improvements that still keep them below the radar of
| someone serious about the product.
|
| So yeah, some credit, that's fair. But I think the lesson
| is that good management recognizes when quality is
| falling off the bottom of the bottom rung, and makes
| adjustments to get back on that bottom rung.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| That's exactly my point:
|
| We can both recognize the limits of mass market news and
| think that, eg, CNN is delivering a product below that
| standard.
| chris11 wrote:
| > Isn't that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?
|
| How is Rogan an an example of good journalism? He doesn't
| do background research or push back on guests.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _"The media" is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds
| with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends
| meet and feed their families._
|
| Sounds like the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense" from _Thank You
| For Smoking_ , in which a tobacco lobbyist excuses himself
| by saying he has a mortgage to pay.
| brookst wrote:
| > Sounds like the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense" from Thank
| You For Smoking, in which a tobacco lobbyist excuses
| himself by saying he has a mortgage to pay.
|
| It's not a "defense", it's just reality. When it snows,
| do you say that sounds like the "triple point defense" of
| frozen water?
|
| People are by and large fallible. I am. And we're wired
| to prioritize our immediate family over nebulous ideas
| like The World Must Know The Truth. I am full of nothing
| but admiration if you are the rare exception who is doing
| only the most principled of things, with complete
| confidence that everyone you work for is upright, and
| that you have optimized your labor to produce the most
| good for the world in general, not just you and yours.
|
| But I honestly don't blame those "Yuppie Nuremberg"
| people, and if you see shallow news reporting as the
| moral equivalent of lobbying for tobacco, I can't really
| disagree. I just don't have the energy to pass moral
| judgment on everyone, so I'm content with understanding
| the phenomenon.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| So the onus on reporters to ferret out fraud has the same
| moral weight as tobacco lobbyists? Except they make
| $35k/year, get fired every 6 months as their newsrooms
| undergo layoffs due to lack of clicks, and get sued for
| investigating anyone powerful enough to matter? Can't
| imagine why more people don't sign up for that.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Let's say the onus is on reporters to not take money in
| exchange for glowing coverage. Having a mortgage to pay
| is no excuse. If you can't be an honest reporter, don't
| report at all. I think that's a reasonable standard to
| hold them to. If you can't hack it as an honest reporter,
| then go get a job in retail or something.
|
| Anybody who took money from these people is not a victim.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Is there any evidence at all that any of these reporters
| were taking money vs. just writing up company press
| releases as news? And more generally, how do you square
| this stance with the near universal HN view that tech
| coverage is too biased against tech companies?
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _Is there any evidence at all that any of these
| reporters were taking money vs. just writing up company
| press releases as news?_
|
| Yes. Being discussed now on HN:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33593234
|
| > _And more generally, how do you square this stance with
| the near universal HN view that tech coverage is too
| biased against tech companies?_
|
| Cynically, they give negative coverage by default to
| encourage "charitable giving". When the org starts
| "donating" money to journalists, the tone of the coverage
| flips.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I'd rather get paid like a tobacco lobbyist (or a FAANG
| developer) than a journalist. Our society has clearly
| shown us what it values.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| The duty not to harm is far stronger than the duty to
| help.
| ok123456 wrote:
| It wasn't just 'The Morning Call.' It came from the top
| from the elite, international, consensus making
| publications like The New York Times and the Washington
| Post. These are the papers of record that have the
| resources to still do real journalism. We're harangued by
| them how 'democracy dies in darkness' every time we click
| one of their links, and yet they chose to give all these
| guileless grifters flattering coverage more often than not.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Doesn't Fox News make tons of money? Do you think they
| could capitalize on this failure of what you describe as
| the papers of record and start doing investigative
| journalism into financial and tech businesses?
| ok123456 wrote:
| Fox News is primarily a cable news network that
| republishes some of their work as articles. Television
| isn't really a medium that lends itself to long form
| investigative journalism.
|
| Why would they bother with it when what they're doing is
| way more profitable? They also have a reputation for
| being the partisan press. They'd have to completely
| rebrand to get into a less lucrative area.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I'm told that all press is the partisan press of one side
| or the other, but it seems that there is little to no
| investigative reporting done by the conservative media -
| I wonder if it's an opportunity.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > it seems that there is little to no investigative
| reporting done by the conservative media
|
| There is, but if you're ever exposed to it it's probably
| in the context of brutal point-by-point debunking. On
| account of how it tends to be hilariously bad. Like that
| recent Mules "documentary" from D'Souza, or various
| Sinclair must-run pieces. Typically they're just very-
| slanted advocacy masquerading as investigative reporting.
| Or they take the form of popular opinion-jockeys running
| special "expose" episodes that are also mostly or
| entirely easily-dismissed-with-public-info BS.
| Collectively, these _seem_ to sate the conservative
| demand for conservative-flavored investigative
| journalism, and are all much cheaper than doing actual
| investigation, especially since you 'll always find
| something to "expose" and there are never any dead-ends
| wasting time and money (since there's no need for actual
| substance behind the whole exercise).
|
| If you mean from actual newsrooms, sure, those don't do
| much investigative reporting, but then there aren't a lot
| of conservative newsrooms. And it's not like the non-
| conservatives ones do much, either, with a few
| exceptions.
| leereeves wrote:
| Unless you actually watch conservative media, you won't
| know about their investigative reporting, because it will
| rarely be mentioned in Democrat media.
|
| And if it is mentioned, it is dismissed as
| misinformation, like Hunter Biden's laptop.
| ok123456 wrote:
| Prefacing this with the coordinated media blackout on the
| laptop story was horrendous. You couldn't even send a
| message using Messenger to a friend about it.
|
| The long form journalism that the partisan press
| produces, both sides here, amounts to little more than
| fan service. It's incapable of investigating things out
| of public interest without it relating to their kayfabe.
| MSNBC can produce thousands of hours about Trump/Russia,
| but the for the Snowden leaks you get a few seconds of a
| professional talking head, who had to take off his
| lanyard with his CAC right before taping, telling you how
| Snowden is a bad man.
| jen20 wrote:
| Fox News is not investigating complex issues because
| investigating complex issues is not within their remit.
| Their remit is to repeat simple memes that form easy
| sound bites for viewers receptive to that kind of thing.
|
| The WSJ on the other hand has excellent investigative
| journalism which is usually well separated from
| conservative partisan commentary - see Carreyrou as a
| good example.
| darkerside wrote:
| 60 minutes and PBS NewsHour beg to differ
| ok123456 wrote:
| Those don't make money.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| They don't but European countries fund independent
| journalism and documentary makers. Check out IDFA.
|
| https://www.idfa.nl/en/
| SkipperCat wrote:
| Shout out to Frontline. Probably the best television
| investigative journalism I've ever seen.
| brookst wrote:
| How do their audiences compare to everything else on TV?
| The fact there are two, made three, programs out of...
| what, 1000 programs a week? I wouldn't take that as
| evidence that broadcast TV is well suited for long form
| journalism.
|
| They're often good material. But they are way way way
| fringe. 60 Minutes especially is probably only still
| around because it would be a public embarrassment to kill
| it.
|
| I mean, the heavy metal sonic aesthetic is not well
| suited for Mariachi music. The fact that Metalachi exists
| and has a following doesn't disprove the hypothesis.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| you're missing something. Fox News makes tons of money
| precisely because they don't actually investigate. If
| they did, they might find something resembling the truth
| and their audience is pretty firmly opposed to that.
| MrPatan wrote:
| > "The media" is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds
| with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends
| meet and feed their families.
|
| It's even worse. 50 years ago that's still what they were,
| but they had the "power" of defining reality. Politicians,
| millionaires, and other actually powerful people had to
| suck up to them or with the narrative-shapers against them
| they would have real problems.
|
| But that reality is breaking (if not totally broken).
| Social media, feed algorythms, recomendation engines, etc,
| are taking those narrative-shaping powers from them. So
| they get less respect.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and
| experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a
| handful in the world at any given time.
|
| Correct answer.
|
| People dramatically underestimate the extent to which
| reporters are stenographers: they go to relevant people,
| get quotes, write some background around the quotes (which
| itself is derived from previous statements), and hit
| publish.
|
| Almost every business article you see is push-driven. The
| business being covered will issue a press release and it
| gets rewritten into articles.
|
| The press are pretty good at attribution: if the NYT says
| that "Bob said X", you can be pretty sure that an NYT
| reporter heard Bob say X. That doesn't tell you anything
| about whether X is true or not.
| banannaise wrote:
| This has become noticeably more true as newsrooms are cut
| to the bone. Content volume over content quality, because
| volume is what gets the ad dollars.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| I wonder if there's a viable market for a news outlet
| which has as its distinguishing core principle the
| guarantee that it will never use any material from press
| releases (or equivalently unsolicited, self-interested
| messaging) as unqualified sources, except for narrow
| cases when no other source was available. And in such
| cases it is accompanied by an unambiguous indication
| (really unambiguous, like a different color font for any
| portions of the article text directly and solely derived
| from such sources) that the information presented therein
| should be trusted on the same level as motivated hearsay
| from a single source, because that's what it is.
|
| But of course this would be expensive to operate,
| difficult to insulate from corruption and compromise, and
| unlikely to be popular with advertisers, whose objectives
| constitute the epitome of conflicted interest with such
| an outlet's stated core principle.
| brookst wrote:
| I don't think that model is compatible with news, where
| one of the value props is being fast.
|
| As you shade over from news to analysis, there are
| outlets like that. The Economist comes to mind; I don't
| think I've ever felt that their content was written from
| press releases. But it's also at least a day, usually a
| week, later than the actual news.
|
| There's probably a project management style triangle
| here: fast, accurate, and, um. Some third thing. Pick
| two.
| xorcist wrote:
| VCs buys anything they think they can unload on PE, funds, or
| even retail later down the line.
|
| It's not specific to crypto. Theranos was a similar fraud, and
| so was WeWork.
|
| They can make a public spiel about how they were deceived as
| long as they want, but to anyone following them at the time it
| was obvious they were going in with their eyes open. Whether
| the product works or not is simply not their top priority when
| making an investment.
|
| edit: I'd like to point out to the people who clearly disagree
| with the above that the dude running this scheme from Bahamas
| was openly taking drugs and playing videogames in meetings with
| investors. It's even mentioned in the VC material. Yet they did
| shower him with money. Please do tell what kind of due
| diligence could possibly miss the warning flags that maybe this
| company wasn't completely honest?
| winternett wrote:
| Jack from Twitter pumped crypto and NFTs heavily as well. It
| was likely a coordinate plot that will never result in
| punishment, but regardless, the money is gone. Many were warned
| that it was fraudulent early though... A whole lot of people
| lost their money based on pure willful ignorance, and that
| can't be given a pass either.
| chaosbolt wrote:
| arisAlexis wrote:
| This has nothing to do with Tether the author added it jut as a
| sauce, hilarious
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Stuart Hoegner, another former UB lawyer, holds a similar
| regulatory-compliance post with rival crypto firm Tether
|
| Both Tether and FTX hired former white collar criminals from
| the same company to head their regulator compliance.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| You justify this title because of some other company hired an
| unrelated lawyer that worked on a case with another lawyer 15
| years ago? Seriously now lol
| jjulius wrote:
| >You justify this title... Seriously now lol
|
| What's with the snark? The title itself _is_ technically
| accurate. That _is_ "a link". There's nothing to justify.
| What you want to do is debate the strength of that link.
| That's fine, but it does nothing to change the accuracy of
| the title. A connection is a connection, like it or not.
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| Tether has similarly been caught in the past using the funds
| behind their supposedly "fully backed" tokens for highly
| speculative investment. So far it's just such a big scam that
| no one has been able to create a large enough run to topple
| it... so far.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Not really but it's a long discussion. In any case in this
| sense the author coul also throw other kinds of conspiracies
| unrelated. True journalism ! Add your sauce
| rideontime wrote:
| Yes, really.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Because you read it on Reddit right? Send any proof you
| have to the NY district attorney and SEC if you know
| inside info. Don't be this internet guy.
| rideontime wrote:
| Way ahead of you. ;)
| bedhead wrote:
| As if crypto wasn't useless enough, it's always at the center of
| endless scams. What's it gonna take for people to walk away from
| this poison?
| hef19898 wrote:
| A new poison? Crypto is the latest promise of fast, easy money.
| There will be new ones.
| once_inc wrote:
| "Crypto" is useless. Bitcoin isn't. Maximalists have been
| warning against this stuff happening for nearly a year now.
| Ever since Luna collapsed, those voices grew louder, but the
| yield-farming degenerates chose not to listen.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > "Crypto" is useless. Bitcoin isn't.
|
| What unique properties does Bitcoin have that makes it useful
| that other cryptocurrencies don't, beside first mover
| advantage?
| once_inc wrote:
| Bitcoin is provably the only decentralized system that has
| permissionless, borderless, digital scarcity. Other
| cryptocurrencies are less secure (the many direct forks,
| such as Bitcoin Cash and the like), less decentralized
| (Solana, BNB), less permissionless (any system that can be
| halted by its operators) or less scarce (Ethereum's
| emission schedule can be changed by a single organisation).
|
| Bitcoin's value (not in terms of money, but in terms of
| usefullness) is an emergent property of the combination of
| proof of work, the difficulty adjustment, and its peer-to-
| peer nature. Other cryptocurrencies suffer because their
| founders have changed one or more of those properties in an
| attempt to "fix bitcoin" (bigger blocks! faster blocks!
| more blocks!), but that cripples the resulting emergent
| value.
|
| If Bitcoin is directly cloned as Coinbit, and miners flock
| to it, and it achieves a greater total hash rate than
| Bitcoin, then its value supersedes Bitcoin's. Bitcoin's
| first mover advantage makes this unlikely (though non-
| zero).
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > less decentralized (Solana...
|
| SBF is deeply tied to Solana. It's reported
| SBF/FTX/Alameda were sitting on close to $1bn worth of
| Solana up to a few days ago. Some are apparently locked.
| This makes him the biggest holder of Solana. Centralized
| indeed. Now of course these "$1bn" are in that worthless
| Solana scamcoin which already fell from $32 to $13 since
| the news. So I take that that $1bn is now more like $400m
| or something, and shrinking fast.
|
| It's possible that, like with Serum, SBF was involved in
| the creation of Solana from the very start (I take it
| more independent journalist are going to dig on that: I
| don't expect mainstream media to do much research that
| said).
| gitfan86 wrote:
| You are describing a pyramid scheme, but in word salad
| format.
| rglover wrote:
| What? Where is the pyramid scheme in this? Not once do
| they mention anything involving individuals having to
| coax other individuals into it.
|
| It's 100% voluntary and makes zero promise of some
| fantastical ROI (unlike every non-Bitcoin
| cryptocurrency).
| rednerrus wrote:
| There's no value unless you coax other individuals into
| it.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| To be fair, there's no value in stuff like Twitter, stamp
| collections, the US dollar, etc unless you coax other
| individuals into them (in some cases by using armies).
|
| It's a function true of pyramid schemes and any system
| that relies on network effects to be of any real value.
|
| Not that I care about Bitcoin one way or the other.
| rglover wrote:
| The good news is you don't need to coax anybody. Once you
| study how it works (legitimately), you realize it has a
| ton of intangible value [1] and can trade with others who
| think the same. Anybody who disagrees can choose not to
| use it.
|
| It's quite beautiful. It's universally frowned upon in
| the Bitcoin community to tell people they're going to
| make X in X time frame. All of that nonsense takes place
| with the Ethereum/shitcoin crowd which gets conflated
| with Bitcoin.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33586717
| gitfan86 wrote:
| I think we are on the same page. Some people like to own
| and trade bitcoin. Some people like to own and trade
| Beanie Babies.
|
| Some people may think this is a silly comparison because
| one of these things was fueled by a get rich quick FAD
| and the other has at least some real value in the real
| world.
|
| But they are pretty similar in that they will be worth
| whatever people want to pay for them in the long run.
| xorcist wrote:
| Not sure if the question is meant seriously but there are
| important differences between a serious attempt of private
| currency and any one of the "less serious":
|
| Bitcoin has a real multi stakeholder maintainership, where
| no single party can hard fork the currency or change the
| rules in any important way from the ones the users signed
| up for. This is what people mean when they say hard forks
| should be close to impossible to pull off. The only
| exceptions are where there is absolute consensus, such as
| pure security issues.
|
| Closely related to the above, the issuance model is clearly
| known to everyone in advance and will not change. The
| issuance is not the same thing as the consensus rules. That
| helps force stakeholders to play fair.
|
| There is no founder or foreground representative that has
| an undue influence in development. Even the core developers
| will have to convince everyone that their changes are sound
| and will not change the rules of anyone's investment, and
| more often than not, ends up with them dropped if consensus
| can not be reached.
|
| Again related to the above, there was no pre-mine. Since
| there was no central party, no one owned any coins before
| the public blockchain started. So no one could sell or
| promise any future winnings. There's this whole founding
| myth to build culture on, and npt everything may be true,
| but what's clear is that an effort was made to prove there
| was no pre-mine (someone included today's paper in the
| genesis block, before which per the protocol no coins can
| exist).
|
| The first mover advantage does not enter this. You could
| start a new serious attempt at a currency along the same
| lines as above, but very few bother when you are competing
| with outright scams. Personally I believe we have to wait
| some time to shake out the scammers before we can see any
| serious attempts at competing.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I'm guessing the logic is something along the lines of _"
| all crypto is crap... except for the crypto I have of
| course."_
| once_inc wrote:
| You guessed wrong.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| You own no BTC then? That's strange for somebody who
| evidently thinks it so great.
| nuclx wrote:
| Privacy coins aren't. The problem with Bitcoin is, that it
| CAN be regulated to death.
| once_inc wrote:
| And privacy coins come with the appended issue that
| software issues could hide an inflation bug, which isn't
| provable at that moment. Is Bitcoin anonymous? Nope, but
| with some diligence, you can be quite protected.
| nuclx wrote:
| I don't see an advantage in holding Bitcoin over say,
| stocks, other than speculation, if for every transaction
| you have to choice to either identify yourself or produce
| tainted Bitcoin.
| rglover wrote:
| Preservation of wealth independent of the state (both
| issuance and forfeiture).
| Bud wrote:
| svara wrote:
| > Friedberg, who served as FTX's general counsel before taking on
| the company's regulatory role, was recently described by
| Coingeek's Steven Stradbrooke as being "almost comically
| inappropriate" for the job. The description appears apt, given
| Friedberg's long history of not complying with various
| jurisdictions' regulations, but rather, evading them.
|
| Can't make this up. Reads to me like, on the contrary, they
| couldn't have found anyone more qualified.
| NBJack wrote:
| This whole thing sounds like a Netflix movie waiting to happen.
| lcole14 wrote:
| Might be coming sooner than you think:
| https://theankler.com/p/hwood-ftx-frenzy-as-michael-lewis
| hef19898 wrote:
| At that rate Netflix will have to do some serious selection
| movies if they want to be ready for the next economic down
| turn in 10 years or so.
| [deleted]
| CPLX wrote:
| > The second near-failure of UB occurred when the site was
| riddled by extensive credit-card fraud during its first year or
| so of operations. That led parent company ieLogic to develop an
| antifraud software suite called ieSnare that was so effective
| that the company was able to license it to other online concerns.
|
| That's a pretty interesting little side story.
| RL_Quine wrote:
| Feels sort of nonsensical honestly. Credit card anti fraud is
| entirely reactionary, there's no magic bullet, you're just
| papering over the cracks of an absolutely broken payment
| system. Every service will see different fraud, it will always
| be changing, there's no one fits all solution. Very frequently
| the "rules" of the systems aren't solid and everybody trying to
| exploit them knows that.
| CPLX wrote:
| It piqued my interest enough to google it and it seems like
| it's actually a notable thing in the online betting world and
| is indeed fairly sophisticated and purpose-built.
|
| One example blog post: https://csgobetting.com/iesnare-how-
| youre-being-made-paranoi...
| theCrowing wrote:
| There is a German saying: "Wo ein Trog ist kommen die Schweine."
| roughly translates to "Where there is a trough - the pigs will
| come." Rather fitting for all the crypto meltdowns in the last
| years.
| [deleted]
| thejosh wrote:
| Also "schadenfreude" :-).
|
| (pleasure derived by someone from another person's misfortune).
| [deleted]
| hef19898 wrote:
| Also a nice word, but not the same as OP bon mot.
| TheMaskedCoder wrote:
| Actually, this seems like a rather interesting defense of
| crypto. To use the metaphor, did the trough _create_ the pigs?
| Or did it only draw a horde of pre-existing pigs to one place?
| Perhaps the amount of quasi-criminals that we are seeing in the
| crypto sector right now is just a sign that crypto was highly
| successful and not a condemnation of crypto in and of itself.
| wffurr wrote:
| Successful at what, enabling criminal activity?
| Semaphor wrote:
| You are half right. It obviously did not create the pigs, but
| the "trough" is the place for easy pickings: Crypto. Of
| course Crypto did not create scammers, scammers simply have
| an easy time scamming people there.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| Agreed 100%, but troughs are good for other things besides
| feeding pigs. I hope the actually innovative, non-scam
| projects don't have their name tarnished too much by all
| the pigs.
| sebastialonso wrote:
| Am I understanding this correctly? The very fact that the
| Crypto scene was filled with criminals is direct evidence
| that "it works"?
|
| Is this a soft implication that the same scene should
| "continue" to exist as it currently is?
| louwrentius wrote:
| Crypto has attracted almost every type of criminal under the
| sun, to the detriment of 'regular' people who got conned into
| this stuff and is now left holding the bags.
|
| That German saying is on point and really sad.
| threeseed wrote:
| > Crypto has attracted almost every type of criminal under
| the sun
|
| This is actually quite a profound statement.
|
| Is there actually anything in human history that can come
| close to rivalling this ?
|
| We have everyone from teens promoting shitcoins on TikTok, to
| household celebrities like Matt Damon, to white collar
| criminals, to arguably VCs, all the way to nation states like
| Iran and North Korea.
| tsukikage wrote:
| Whenever you have a space where boundaries are not imposed
| and actions merely have externalities rather than
| consequences for the actor, malicious actors that find it
| difficult to act how they want elsewhere flock to this
| space; this makes being in that space more and more
| painful, and so if the space remains lawless, people who
| can exist elsewhere abandon it, until the space is
| inhabited mostly or only by malicious actors.
|
| We see this in online communities. We see it in the real
| physical world. And, yes, we are seeing it play out in
| crypto.
|
| An online community without restrictions or boundaries
| doesn't look like one's fond memories of university dorm
| chats over a glass of wine; it looks like 4chan or the dark
| web.
|
| A country without effective governance doesn't look like
| the romanticised media depictions of the wild west or your
| favourite science fictional post-scarcity anarchy utopia;
| it looks like Somalia.
|
| A financial system without regulations doesn't look like
| your family kitty; it looks like, well, the crypto
| ecosystem.
|
| Humans can't do better unless we all start to consistently
| choose cooperate/cooperate in prisoner's dilemma, and one
| quick look at, well, any community anywhere today shows we
| are a long way away from that.
|
| This is not a technical problem, and cannot be solved with
| a technical solution. Humans do not know how to solve it. I
| wish we did. Historically, the most aspirational attempts
| to solve this problem have been the ones with the most
| gruesome outcomes.
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| Years back when TOR was new I stumbled on a site selling
| "family videos with kids" for ethereum. Soured me on crypto
| enough never to fall for it.
| Stranger43 wrote:
| Doing the wild west days America had a bunch of what was
| called wildcat currencies issued by private banks with
| dubious backing in either non existing gold reserves or
| over inflated property holdings.
|
| look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking it's
| kind of an interesting period in finance that got kind of
| forgotten as it did not exactly end well.
| umeshunni wrote:
| I read a comment somewhere along the lines of
|
| "Crypto is a great experiment where people who didn't
| live in the 19th century get to relive at 10x speed all
| the bank runs and regulatory changes that happened then"
| nullc wrote:
| Early in Bitcoin we came across the 1923 "Reminiscences
| of a Stock Operator", https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/60979
| -- which described some of the scams we were seeing
| cropping up.
|
| Much of the altcoin industry seems to have picked it up
| as an instruction manual.
|
| (Not that there aren't scams in Bitcoin land-- but
| they've mostly been concentrated into the altcoin
| ecosystems, which tend to be overweight in the exuberant
| and gullible even compared to Bitcoin. It's completely
| unsurprising to see the FTX implosion happening at a
| scamcoin casino who's CEO had been publicly attacking
| Bitcoin -- it would have been much more surprising to see
| it at a Bitcoin only or mostly organization)
| blantonl wrote:
| The western United States was pretty wild for a while until
| it was "tamed"
| pibechorro wrote:
| Incorrect. There was less violence overall in the wild
| west. Modern America has insane violence at much larger
| scales (inner city gang violence in Chicago, millions of
| civilians killed over the past 2 decades via Iraq, Drone
| programs, etc).
|
| The wild west was only wild because Hollywood needed a
| narrative.
| nradov wrote:
| You shouldn't be down voted, this is largely correct.
| High rates of violence in the "wild west" are a myth
| created by Hollywood.
|
| https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=6182
| xbar wrote:
| I would clarify further. High rates of violence were an
| exaggeration of 19th Century East Coast newspapers that
| created a myth that was perpetuated by Hollywood.
| astura wrote:
| It was downvoted because it was an irrelevant, off topic
| rant. The question was about financial fraud, not
| violence.
| LastTrain wrote:
| Interesting. Do you have any sources of information to
| back that up? It contradicts my perception of things, and
| I would like to know if I've been operating under a
| faulty understanding. Example: according to this [1]
| article : per-capita murder rates were something on the
| order of 30/100000 in colonial times, 15/100000 in the
| "wild west" period compared to 6/100000 today.
|
| [1] https://blogs.berkeley.edu/2010/06/16/a-crime-puzzle-
| violent...
| roflyear wrote:
| Lol that's not true at all. Why spout nonsense?
|
| First our cities today are as safe as they have ever
| been. Crime is slightly up from 2018 but 2018 was the
| lowest ever. Small bumps in crime are not usual.
|
| Second, googling murder rates in that region is possible
| and they are an order of magnitude greater than even the
| worse US cities.
| matt_s wrote:
| I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to be in
| advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say
| lines convincingly.
|
| We don't have written accounts of the tulip craze but I
| would imagine there were a lot of nefarious activities
| underway then. This is more global and the movement of
| money is transparent but anonymous in some ways. I think a
| hard part for a criminal enterprise like a drug cartel is
| the cash to crypto laundering that needs to happen in the
| amounts that it needs to. My guess is it was easier for
| shady banks and other crypto products to do shady things
| since its all just bits and bytes.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to
| be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance
| and say lines convincingly.
|
| I disagree. It's super weird that we accept "well I was
| just doing it for the money" as an excuse from people who
| are often already insanely wealthy.
| brookst wrote:
| If there's a moral obligation to fully vet the industry
| and operations of a company before accepting a short
| contracting job from them, why would one's bank balance
| matter?
| Wyoming23 wrote:
| Every choice and action a human makes is on some spectrum
| of consent.
|
| At one extreme is a literal "gun to their head" moment
| where it's obvious there was no real choice and
| correspondingly the person shouldn't be held responsible
| (eg, someone points a gun at you and says hand over your
| wallet. That doesn't mean you really "gave" your wallet
| to them).
|
| At the other end of the spectrum is a person with a
| tremendous amount of power, freedom and choice- eg, a
| rich person living in a Western country, making a
| decision where they have lots of options and/or can opt
| out or decline an opportunity freely.
|
| It's easier to forgive a person doing something unethical
| to survive than a person living in luxury doing something
| unethical to have slightly more luxuries.
| matt_s wrote:
| Does everyone fully vet their companies executive suite,
| board of directors and operations before accepting a job?
| Or the bank they use? Or the owner of the coffee shop
| they frequent?
|
| Everyone walks around with a computer in their pocket
| built in a factory where people were to have known to be
| treated poorly, possibly to the point of suicide and then
| they use that device to type in comments about moral
| superiority.
| brookst wrote:
| Yes. And wait until you hear about how US railroads,
| which we in the US all depend on, were built.
|
| Civilization is a story of gradual improvement. Insisting
| that _anything_ be completely beyond reproach overnight
| is not a productive view. And yet some people can 't
| resist.
| toss1 wrote:
| And many if not most celebrities happily and frequently
| turn down jobs to protect their reputations. And that is
| not only turning down reputable jobs, but jobs for
| perfectly respectable businesses, because they don't want
| to sell out. I was literally reading of one yesterday,
| where George Clooney turned down $35 million for a day's
| work on an airline advertisement.
|
| Sure, they can almost always find someone willing to do
| the advert. But that does not absolve that person of the
| moral consequenses of doing the work.
|
| >>I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to
| be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance
| and say lines convincingly.
|
| The exact same moral structure can be said about this,
| even though it is an extreme example: "I would give a
| pass to any assassin that was paid to kill the targets.
| They are paid to accurately deliver lethal doses of
| bullets or toxins and ensure that the targets end up
| dead."
|
| Obviously, none of us would consider giving a pass to the
| assassin because it was a "professional paid job", even
| if (s)he was doing to feed his/her starving family.
|
| Why should we give a pass to the actors? While different
| levels and directness of harm, both are taking money to
| do harm to others.
|
| [0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/george-
| clooney-35-million-one...
| matt_s wrote:
| You're comparing murder to an actor speaking lines in a
| 30 second commercial. Its an advertisement and you are
| questioning people's morals.
|
| If any of the actors did any research they likely were
| convinced it was a solid thing to do at the time. It
| could have even been a "oh so-and-so is doing an ad, then
| I'm in" type of thing. Its pretty obvious whoever was
| involved at FTX was pretty convincing and doing
| wrong/illegal things behind the scenes so that's why I
| said they should get a pass.
| toss1 wrote:
| Thanks for changing your argument, and validating my
| point.
|
| Your first argument was that "...paid to be in
| advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and
| say lines convincingly."; i.e., you justified it on the
| fact that they were paid professionals; the type of work
| doesn't matter and no judgement should be done.
|
| Now, you admit that there is indeed a moral/amoral issue
| in making advertisements, but argue that in this case the
| FTX players must have been good liars and the actors must
| have been fooled.
|
| Considering the actors to have reasonably vetted the
| thing as worthwhile & ethical, but having been fooled, is
| indeed a much better grounds to give someone a pass.
|
| Especially so for the celebs who also invested their own
| money and have now lost it.
|
| Of course the assassin example is extreme, I said so, and
| selected it because extremes can make the point more
| obvious. That makes it no less valid. I'm not questioning
| people's morals -- I making obvious the foundational
| element that something being a "professional job" does
| not remove the actions from the sphere of moral
| judgement.
|
| Certainly the celebs who invested along with promoting
| the thing were also fooled. That does not mean that they
| were absolved of moral judgement because it was a
| professional job, but that they can indeed be judged and
| given a pass because they were also fooled. Sure, the end
| result of both is that they pass, but the reasoning
| matters.
|
| Your second argument is a good one in probably most
| cases; the first was not.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| [deleted]
| pibechorro wrote:
| 3rd party exchanges and banks.. basically like it always has.
| Crytpo, aka your keys, are still fine.
| peteradio wrote:
| Reminds me of the American phrase "What exactly were you
| expecting?!"
| mberning wrote:
| It's amazing to me that enough people still believe in the crypto
| scam to keep pumping BTC above $15k. I guess they are still
| managing to mint fools at a fast enough pace to keep the price
| up.
| scrlk wrote:
| It's likely that market makers are holding the ~$15k floor to
| prevent a liquidation cascade.
| ahtihn wrote:
| Market makers aren't in the business of keeping prices up.
|
| Market participants that do this aren't market makers
| anymore.
| acdha wrote:
| Tether appears to have been doing this for years. At some
| point they're going to have a real audit and that's likely
| to be very interesting.
| tootie wrote:
| Is everyone fleeing exchanges and just buying classic BTC and
| Eth?
| 2sk21 wrote:
| How does one buy Bitcoin or Ethereum outside of exchanges?
| AustinDev wrote:
| https://localbitcoins.net/ There are other options as well.
| mozman wrote:
| Why even use an exchange?
| bombcar wrote:
| Because people want to speculate and transaction fees are
| high outside exchanges.
| tootie wrote:
| Why buy crypto at all? Irrational behavior.
| rxyz wrote:
| BTC has survived a lot of "crypto scams" though
| k__ wrote:
| What's collapsing again and again are the companies that try to
| force TradFi ideas onto the DeFi ecosystem.
|
| So, in terms of "crypto scam," there's nothing to see here.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| [deleted]
| maeln wrote:
| > He had vowed to give up to $1bn to political candidates
| linked to causes he supported, a pledge from which he later
| backed away.
|
| I can too promise the moon and never deliver.
| [deleted]
| maeln wrote:
| Every collapse has been self made. I don t see how the
| institution have anything to do with that.
| k__ wrote:
| Sorry. With institutions, I meant companies like FTX.
| JustLurking2022 wrote:
| Except those are the same companies bringing in all the
| buyers of crypto that prop up the price. Without scammers,
| the price drops like a rock.
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| https://www.ft.com/content/428c7800-c72d-4c59-9940-4376fea6e...
|
| > Sam Bankman-Fried stormed on to the US political scene with
| multimillion-dollar donations that led lawmakers, particularly
| Democrats, to believe he was ushering in the next generation of
| donors. But in a matter of days, his business empire collapsed
| into bankruptcy and the prospect of millions more in donations
| evaporated.
|
| https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-joe-bid...
| (https://archive.ph/BBpQN#selection-417.0-424.0)
|
| > The 30-year-old Bankman-Fried has been a major force in
| Democratic politics, ranking as the party's second-biggest
| individual donor in the 2021-2022 election cycle, according to
| Open Secrets, with donations totaling $39.8 million. That ranks
| only behind George Soros (about $128 million) but ahead of many
| other big names, including Michael Bloomberg ($28.3 million).
| What's more, he had promised to spend far more on Democrats
| moving forward, predicting in May that he'd fund "north of $100
| million" and had a "soft ceiling" of $1 billion for the 2024
| elections.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Sorry, why is this comment relevant to the parent?
|
| Because he donated money to Democrats it makes people still
| want to invest in cryptos, is that the message?
| flanked-evergl wrote:
| Don't blame crypto for a fraudulent organization that was
| more politically connected than almost any other
| organization.
|
| If you want to complain about BTC, complain about BTC. FTX
| was not BTC.
| andybp85 wrote:
| it's that money talks, especially to people who don't
| understand technology enough to spot obvious bullshit.
| which of course isn't a justification for anything other
| than why the price of bitcoin is relatively impervious to
| logical analysis.
| stephc_int13 wrote:
| A very large pool of people have skin in the BTC game, some of
| them are billionaires with market manipulation power, like the
| Winklevoss twins.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _billionaires with market manipulation power, like the
| Winklevoss twins_
|
| The Winkelvoss's net worth [1] is less than half of FTX's
| shortfall alone [2]. These folks didn't get rich by giving
| their money away.
|
| [1] https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-
| businessmen/tyler-...
|
| [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-10/sam-
| bankm...
| louwrentius wrote:
| I don't think there are enough people believing in crypto or
| specifically BTC. I believe that it's all insider trading, and
| fraud that keeps the price above $0.
| paulpauper wrote:
| It's a dead cat bounce. It fell 20% in a week, so a tiny bounce
| is expected. It will be faded soon enough. (already is).
| Probably 12k soon.
| Gasp0de wrote:
| It's not Bitcoin that is the scam, it is companies run by
| criminals to steal peoples money.
| max51 wrote:
| Would it be less a scam for you if they did a 1-to-1000 split
| and 1BTC was 15$?!
|
| Using the sticker price to decide if a crypto/stock is a scam
| or not a very good idea.
| HebericNewt wrote:
| If someone offered you 1BTC for $10k right now you would bite
| their hand off. At $14k it would be still some of the easiest
| money you've made in your life.
|
| Even if you have the most cynical opinion of cryptocurrency,
| you must admit it's alive and well. It is as long as there are
| enough people who believe that it is - and your honest answer
| to the above would reveal that you know that to still be very
| true.
| Kudos wrote:
| If someone offered me 1BTC for $10k right now, I would assume
| I'm being targeted or scammed somehow, since crypto is rife
| with grifters and fraud.
| mberning wrote:
| Sure, I'm not stupid. I would turn around and sell it to some
| other fool. And thats the problem. There is honestly no price
| I could buy it at where I would be willing to hold.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| https://i.imgur.com/fsCmqVh.png
|
| I just don't understand all of the "BTC will never fall
| below <some level not far from the current price>"
| thinking.
| herendin wrote:
| You say you can't understand, but the chart you yourself
| posted (to illustrate price volatilility) also shows a
| 12,000% increase in price in less than 8 years, up to
| today.
|
| Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but
| maybe _that_ , the improbable 12000%, is the thinking
| that you're trying to understand?
| rednerrus wrote:
| You're making a stronger counter argument than you think.
| BTC only gets a 12,000% increase because you recruit a
| bigger fool to pay $16,059 than the fool who paid
| $16,058. The only value that you've offered here is that
| you can eventually find a fool big enough to pay
| $1,925,760.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| That's my point - given the extreme volatility (and the
| fact that it was trading below $1K less than 6 years ago)
| why would anyone think there's some floor below which the
| price of BTC will never fall? Please don't bring up
| mining costs, which are completely irrelevant here.
| herendin wrote:
| >There is honestly no price I could buy it at where I would
| be willing to hold.
|
| Really no price? Even given the opportunity to buy at $10,
| you still wouldn't hold?
| alexanderchr wrote:
| If you believe its value is going down you wouldn't want
| to hold at any purchase price.
| mberning wrote:
| Are you confident it won't go to $5? I'm not.
| factsarelolz wrote:
| I would be very confident I could sell before it hits $5.
| [deleted]
| throwaway290 wrote:
| What if you're asleep when it falls?
| factsarelolz wrote:
| Uhhh you set a stop loss number.
|
| If it hits x sell. So if I was given a coin currently
| "worth" $15,000 for $5. I could set a stop loss of $6 and
| always make a profit since my initial investment was $5.
| Asleep, awake, doesn't matter.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Stop losses can fail when prices are falling quickly
| enough.
| factsarelolz wrote:
| Set multiple stop losses? $6, $5.99, $5.75, etc, etc. if
| one fails one of the others will catch it. Hell as long
| as it sells before $5.01 I'm profitable. Simple as.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| That's not how stop losses work. If things are falling
| fast enough, You could have one trade at $7, and the next
| trade at $4. Sorry, you still lost money.
| [deleted]
| owaislone wrote:
| What difference would that make? You can invest $50k at
| $10k a piece or $10 a piece. In both cases it can easily
| go to $5k or $5.
| ethagknight wrote:
| And it's the same argument as Santa Claus in the movie The
| Elf. So long as enough people stand in Central Park singing
| the same song, all is well, just be sure to leave before the
| party is over, the Clausometer goes to 0, and the police
| horses trample you.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| Oh absolutely. Had I known the absurdity of crypto would
| still have been going on this long, I would have set up a
| bunch of rug pulls and run away with the money.
|
| Interrst rate hikes kill zombie companies. Scams put dumb
| people under the lash of their betters.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _Scams put dumb people under the lash of their betters_
|
| Continuing this line of thought, isn't the next level of
| "betters" the people who would readily employ violence to
| get retribution on those who scammed them? Or even those
| who would just employ violence to take what they want in
| general?
|
| I can understand the law of the jungle as-it-currently-is
| point that boils down to "lol normie rubes fell for
| advertising", but extrapolating that out into an
| overarching moral judgement makes no sense unless you're
| also repudiating the specialization of labor that has led
| to most of our current prosperity.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| If there is no legal action taken against people who use
| violence, then yes.
| LastTrain wrote:
| It's all scams and frauds and you are upset... because you
| weren't in on it?
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| If laws do not matter, I am not willing to follow laws.
| LastTrain wrote:
| Right. When we talk about laws not getting enforced
| leading to people doing bad things, we're talking about
| you. You seem alright with that, which I've already
| noted.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Yes. This is the attitude that open lawlessness breeds.
| Laws (enforced laws!) keep good people good.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Tether keeps BTC above 15k IMO. They keep printing more anytime
| it starts to dive. Will tether survive the bank runs?
| d3nj4l wrote:
| I've seen a lot of people say this (and I'm sure you're all
| correct!) but I never understod the link between BTC and
| Tether. Multiple attempts to explain it have gone over my
| head. Am I just stupid?
| aliqot wrote:
| bitfinex.
| once_inc wrote:
| Consider it such: there is a company that wants bitcoin to
| stay above 15k. Every time the order books show a
| significant decline below 15k, that company issues new
| tokens that are treated as dollars by exchanges in order to
| buy bitcoin.
|
| This stays very much viable. Right up to the point that it
| isn't. Then, people will wonder what is backing those
| tokens, and if they want to risk the event that they aren't
| worth their advertised value. Then, a liquidation crunch
| happens and the company collapses in onto itself.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| Ok, so roughly speaking, 1 BTC != USD 15k, 1 BTC = USDT
| 15k, and people broadly agree 1 USDT = 1USD (for now)?
| candiddevmike wrote:
| IMO, the entire crypto market cap broadly hangs on folks
| believing that last part.
| xorcist wrote:
| That's not really an explanation as Tether does not make
| cooking the books any easier. You could just as easily
| lie about how much USD or BTC you have. It would also be
| a whole lot less visible, having huge unexplained
| stablecoin holdings is a giant red flag visible to
| everyone. It does not make sense.
|
| That said, the Tether situation is clearly fraudulent in
| some way, just not the one people usually put forward. So
| stay away, if you aren't already.
| gruez wrote:
| >Every time the order books show a significant decline
| below 15k, that company issues new tokens that are
| treated as dollars by exchanges in order to buy bitcoin.
|
| source? Sources like these[1] don't any mention recent
| issuances by tether.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/usdcoinprinter
| paulpauper wrote:
| people said this about 20k too. nothing can prop this up.
| same pattern of dropping 2-4k in a week.
| xorcist wrote:
| Wouldn't we expect to see BTC hold or even gain when everyone
| is trying to exit their "crypto" positions?
|
| After all, BTC is the reserve currency of all these crypto
| scams, as you call them.
| rglover wrote:
| No, because the USD market price is psychological, just like
| the stock market [1].
|
| And no, BTC is not the reserve currency; Ethereum is. Nearly
| all of these "crypto tokens" are just ERC-20 contracts that
| run as contracts on the Ethereum network. They're not even
| cryptocurrencies, just contracts with sets of rules that
| mimic the properties of a currency.
|
| [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mr-market.asp
| candiodari wrote:
| Because there are too many people that are in the situation
| that state actors steal from them more than these scams do.
|
| Anyone doing international money transfers. Hell, that included
| intra-EU money transfers not 5 years ago.
|
| Anyone in a bunch of countries. Lebanon being the most recent
| addition. Venezuela, Columbia, Turkey, Russia, Greece (sort-of-
| not-quite-anymore) ...
|
| Anyone in legal but unfairly treated business/professions.
| Situations vary from country to country. From sex work, even
| website admins, to "the unbanked", who can expect the
| authorities to impound their money at the drop of a hat.
|
| Anyone who wants to do large cash transactions safely without
| using a bank. And that DOES NOT mean drugs. Reality: you do
| this because you're afraid bank transactions can be reversed,
| which is possible in a bunch of places. Large, in the EU, has
| now become smaller than the cost of a used car.
|
| Recently, if your transaction involves anyone on social
| security, your or their bank transactions may be monitored very
| closely by non-judicial institutions. If this is unwanted (and
| I guarantee it'll be unwanted) that will means you either use
| cash or crypto, depending on the amount. Although a lot of
| people in this segment haven't really discovered crypto yet.
| loceng wrote:
| Is there truth to the U.S. sending money to Ukraine -> Ukraine
| funding FTX -> FTX being 2nd largest donor to Democratic party in
| the U.S.?
|
| Timeline:
|
| - April 25, 2019: Biden announces his presidential campaign.
|
| - 13 days later, Sam Bankman-Fried, son of Barbara Fried (co-
| founder of political fundraising organizations), launched FTX
| crypto exchange.
|
| - The exchange is an overnight success. Sam Bankman-Fried (SBM)
| becomes biggest donor to Biden.
|
| - Most of the FTX team is reported to have flown to Hong Kong
| now, so China, the CCP is their safe haven?
| yonaguska wrote:
| From what I'm reading, Ukraine used FTX to facilitate donations
| to Ukraine. I'm waiting for more details on the claim that
| Ukraine actually directly funded FTX. In other funding news-
| FTX did fund one of the studies that "debunked" Ivermectin as
| an effective covid treatment. There's definitely a strong
| political slant to this scandal.
| loceng wrote:
| And quite interesting that most of the FTX team/founders are
| reported to now be in Hong Kong - arguably knowing they have
| the protection of China?
| rideontime wrote:
| Source?
| loceng wrote:
| Sorry, I looked through a lot of articles and I don't
| recall which one it was; they're reported to be both in
| the Bahamas and Hong Kong, the Bahamas authorities also
| having said a claim that SBF made about them directing
| him to do certain actions weren't true.
|
| Certainly there will be a lot of noise to shuffle through
| over the next few days, weeks.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| I love that proving that a bunch of frauds who were promoting
| a drug that didn't work at all shows a "political slant".
| Funding studies to show which drugs treat (and don't treat)
| covid is unambiguously good and it's insane that it's
| considered political.
|
| Edit: Great timing - DailyBeast literally just published a
| story exposing how the leader of one of those idiotic COVID
| misinformation groups spent her millions in ill-gotten gains:
| https://www.thedailybeast.com/covid-misinformation-group-
| ame...
| loceng wrote:
| There are plenty of studies and cohort analysis of
| Ivermectin studies that show it is highly effective with
| the right protocol; most of the Ivermectin studies showing
| it doesn't work aren't using proper doses, nor at the right
| time, nor for long enough period of time.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| No there aren't. It doesn't work and most of the studies
| showing any effect were fraudulent. I can't believe there
| are still ivermectin dead-enders out there.
| yonaguska wrote:
| It is insane that it's political. But that's what you get
| when pharmaceutical companies both test their products on
| behalf of the regulatory agencies and spend money on
| politicians. And there are incentives to either not study
| repurposing existing drugs or even spending money on
| proving they shouldn't compete with your patented drugs.
|
| Let's talk about Andrew Hill and how a grant from Bill
| Gates resulted in him changing course on his Ivermectin
| findings.
|
| I've been seeing articles here on hn for years disparaging
| corruption within academic journals, but suddenly with
| COVID, every journal maintained impeccable ethics right?
| boole1854 wrote:
| U.S. sending money to Ukraine: True
|
| Ukraine funding FTX: Mostly false. This appears to be a
| confusion related to the fact that Ukraine launched a website
| accepting cryptocurrency donations that were processed via FTX
| [1]. However, as far as I can tell, there was no funding of FTX
| by Ukraine other than possibly FTX earning transaction fees for
| processing the donations.
|
| FTX being 2nd largest donor to Democratic party in the U.S.:
| Semi-true. SBF was the 2nd largest donor, not FTX the company.
| [2]
|
| [1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/14/ukraine-
| partners-...
|
| [2] https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-joe-
| bid...
| teh64 wrote:
| Also quite a lot sent to republicans from the CO-CEO: https:/
| /www.ft.com/content/428c7800-c72d-4c59-9940-4376fea6e...
| https://sherman.house.gov/media-center/press-
| releases/congre....
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _SBF was the 2nd largest donor, not FTX the company._
|
| It doesn't really seem like much of a distinction, since
| Bankman Fried viewed FTX as his personal piggy bank.
| Regardless, the DNC will be fine. They're still popular with
| voters, regardless of what donors are doing. Donor money
| doesn't actually win elections, voters do.
| teh64 wrote:
| Here is an actual source:
| https://cointelegraph.com/news/ukrainian-government-launches...
|
| Quote: "Aid For Ukraine shows how the global crypto community
| and the traditional financial system can work together," said
| Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. "Crypto donations to
| the DAO are stored and governed on-chain, then transferred to
| FTX, a centralized exchange, to be sold for fiat USD sent via
| SWIFT to the Ukrainian government."
|
| So basically people in the US (not the US government) sent
| money to Ukraine using FTX as an exchange to fiat (lol). Seems
| the whole thing is more like a PR thing than anything else.
| loceng wrote:
| How can we know who sent it though? You can't state the truth
| as one way or another, at least not yet.
| mminer237 wrote:
| We certainly don't have any evidence for the extraordinary
| claim that the divided government is embezzling funds into
| cryptocurrency, and then convincing the entire government
| of a sovereign nation to embezzle them back to one
| political party.
|
| You could say we don't have proof that Rishi Sunak isn't an
| alien from Alpha Centauri sent to Earth to eliminate donuts
| without holes, but you don't just make up extraordinary
| claims for no reason. It is logical to assume the simplest,
| boring thing is the truth unless you have evidence
| otherwise, _a la_ Occam 's razor.
| jimcavel888 wrote:
| mminer237 wrote:
| Ukraine purchased Javelin missiles and other US military
| equipment with its military aid:
| https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2019/09/25/what-you-nee...
|
| Ukraine didn't contribute to FTX at all.
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