[HN Gopher] Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's "FTX Pre-Mortem Overv...
___________________________________________________________________
Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's "FTX Pre-Mortem Overview"
Author : adrian_mrd
Score : 207 points
Date : 2023-01-25 16:38 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mollywhite.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mollywhite.net)
| linuxftw wrote:
| The way I see it, Alameda is the real criminal here. They clearly
| operated with the criminal intent to take the assets, and
| distribute who knows how.
|
| I think it's perfectly possible that SBF is just dumb, and
| Alameda exploited his stupidity.
|
| Once everything crashed, Alameda was all too happy to turn
| state's witness. SBF's best chance at this point is to secure his
| own plea deal with proof that Alameda is lying to the feds and
| scapegoating him. I don't see the feds going for this, they hate
| ever admitting they're wrong, but I suspect that's how it's going
| to play out.
| jacksnipe wrote:
| Except that Alameda was also run by SBF, as laid out in the
| article.
| rodgerd wrote:
| This is where I wish I could post the Scooby-Doo unmasking
| meme.
|
| "Turns out Sam was the ghost all along!"
| kencausey wrote:
| SBF was a founder and officer of Alameda.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Steal a handful of dollars: get thrown in a dungeon for years and
| be forgotten by history (or worse).
|
| Steal billions of dollars: get a free home vacation and the
| chance to explain yourself and sway the public opinion!
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Just a reminder RE:Making investors whole.
|
| If you defraud investors, but magically a trillion dollars
| appears in your bank account and you distribute it equally to all
| investors you defrauded and they somehow walk home with 2X what
| they invested, YOU HAVE STILL COMMITTED A CRIME. The crime is not
| owing money to investors, the crime is taking their money and
| using it as the company's money. It doesn't matter if your
| bonkers ideas of ownership allows to you make each and every
| investor a trillion dollars.
| grammers wrote:
| That's a great summary, putting everything in perspective.
| simple10 wrote:
| Molly published the front end tool (annotate) she used to create
| the writeup. This would be an amazing VS Code plugin!
|
| https://github.com/molly/annotate
| CydeWeys wrote:
| This is one of the best fiskings I've seen in a long time. Just
| absolutely brutal.
| bradgessler wrote:
| What annotations software is this? All news should be reported
| this way when source documents are available.
|
| Edit: scrolled to the bottom of the page and found
| https://github.com/molly/annotate
| chubot wrote:
| Agreed this is awesome! The author understands how to use the
| web: HTML, CSS, and JS (which is unfortunately rare in 2023)
| ibebrett86 wrote:
| https://kaimerra.com/kaimerra-graffiti
|
| I had worked on a tool for hosting collaborative editing of
| these kinds of things, but we are currently evaluating whether
| we should pursue it further.
| jtbayly wrote:
| So it's just the front-end, relying on you to manually write
| all the HTML. I'd love some software to make _generating_ these
| (or similar) annotated documents easily. Any ideas?
| bradgessler wrote:
| Yeah I was thinking the same thing. A GUI where the original
| text material is loaded, then you highlight it and write the
| annotations. Bonus of each annotation could be
| tweeted/tooted/whatevered and include open graph screenshots
| of the annotation.
|
| Also, I'm sure you didn't mean to trivialize the project, but
| it's more than "just a front end". The design is what's
| really great about it.
| cma wrote:
| Sounds similar to Ted Nelson's Xanadu project.
| sorokod wrote:
| Cool idea, why don't you have a go at it and share the
| outcome on HN.
| batmenace wrote:
| Fermat's Library offers something that comes relatively close
| https://fermatslibrary.com/margins
| bradgessler wrote:
| Slightly tangential: is there software that converts multi-
| LaTeX PDFs into responsive HTML in a reasonable way? I'd
| read more of these papers if they were more viewable on a
| phone-size viewport.
| linusha wrote:
| You might find https://web.hypothes.is/ helpful.
| Denzel wrote:
| Does Hypothesis require a cloud account that syncs your
| annotations? If so, these products are a non-starter for
| any corporate environment, which is unfortunate.
|
| Obsidian gets this right. Most software these days doesn't
| which is a shame.
| lofatdairy wrote:
| I assume there's probably a way to modify or configure MD-
| based SSGs to produce side notes instead of footnotes.
| Hilariously I think you could use RMD because that has built-
| in sidenote functionality but it would probably require some
| manual effort to produce those nice highlights. That said,
| Molly is also making use of footnotes inside her margin
| notes, so if that's the goal my suggestions might not work.
| jzelinskie wrote:
| My team recently built NextJS-based site with sets of
| annotations on the research paper our project is based on
| (Google Zanzibar):
|
| https://authzed.com/zanzibar
|
| https://github.com/authzed/zanzibar-annotated
|
| Could be easily forked and used for other purposes. Happy to
| facilitate if we get any requests in the GitHub issues.
| molly0x57 wrote:
| This is super cool!
| SergeAx wrote:
| I really love that format and wish there were more content like
| that!
| bmitc wrote:
| Sam Bankman-Fried is something else. He seems to be incapable of
| stopping talking, both before and after this saga. He also seems
| just purely delusional. He's co-conspirators have readily plead
| guilty. He has a tough hill to climb.
|
| Regarding Sam Trabucco, why do we not hear anything about him in
| these proceedings? How is it possible that he wasn't involved
| given he just up and left in just August 2022? Why hasn't he been
| charged? This seems very strange to me.
|
| https://protos.com/scoop-ex-alameda-exec-sam-trabucco-bought...
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| I've wondered the same thing, he leaves in August 2022 and
| there has been no update on his legal standing. Presumably he
| is a witness/cooperating?
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| > FTX International and Alameda were both legitimately and
| independently profitable businesses in 2021, each making
| billions.
|
| From the article. What are your thoughts given this?
|
| > Again, FTX's and Alameda's 2021 tax returns suggest they were
| massively unprofitable.7
|
| Ah. I missed this point right next to it.
| breck wrote:
| > FTX's and Alameda's 2021 tax returns suggest they were
| massively unprofitable
|
| The source for that line is this: https://archive.is/LZ2FM
|
| But it is more complicated than that. And unfortunately the
| "journalists" have done a bad job of documenting the actual
| sources.
| [deleted]
| whatshisface wrote:
| "At no point was my client aware that FTX was insolvent, and I
| have 100s of emails and public statements for you to read if
| you don't believe me." - what a lawyer would hypothetically
| say.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Apparently he told CZ it was insolvent in a phone call: https
| ://www.thenationalnews.com/business/2022/11/16/binance-...
| baby-yoda wrote:
| Is Trabucco the Lou Pai[0] of this scandal? How much did he
| walk away with?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Pai
| bmitc wrote:
| Reading into that guy is something else. Imagine literally
| owning a 14,000 foot mountain. Absurd.
| pavlov wrote:
| Maybe Trabucco is a voluntary witness for the prosecution and
| they don't want to dilute what he's going to say at the trial?
| bmitc wrote:
| But why isn't he charged as well? His timing on leaving is
| quite suspicious, and there seems to be no way in which he
| wasn't both aware and a participant of what was going on.
| Plus, his personal purchases seem quite suspect, if the
| claims in the article are true.
| breck wrote:
| Here's some constructive feedback to make this more trustworthy:
|
| - Include a "View source" link to the source code for this
| document. Everyone makes mistakes and new information comes to
| light. You should provide a link to the GitHub source file used
| to generate this page, so that your readers can see the version
| history and all changes for the lifetime of the article since
| publication.
|
| - Include the actual sources. A number of your sources, such as
| #7, are links to secondary sources, that have dead links to the
| primary sources. You should copy any primary sources and include
| them in the repo with your article.
|
| "But Breck, the WSJ, NYTimes, CNN, WaPo, et cetera, don't do
| anything of those things!"
|
| Yes. Exactly. You can't trust them either.
| molly0x57 wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestions! I've implemented both, and I also
| reached out to the Forbes writer to let him know his link was
| broken.
| breck wrote:
| Fantastic. The View source link points to: https://github.com
| /molly/website-v2/blob/master/src/pug/page...
|
| Very cool use of Pug.
|
| And thanks for following up with Forbes!
|
| I've really enjoyed your stuff, but wasn't sure if you really
| cared about the truth or not. Now I know. Thank you! The
| world needs more journalists like you!
| stusmall wrote:
| Can he just gift wrap these statements with a little tag that
| says "To the prosecutors with love. Merry Xmas, SBF"
| timmytokyo wrote:
| I'd love to know what his parents think of what he's doing.
| They're law professors at Stanford; they have to be aware of
| how utterly stupid this is, don't they?
| easytiger wrote:
| Have you spent much time with humanities academics? I would
| make no such assumptions.
| __derek__ wrote:
| They're lawyers and law professors, not humanities
| academics.
| easytiger wrote:
| at least in UK universities law is a humanities
| discipline. perhaps it is different there
| __derek__ wrote:
| For the most part, American law school professors are
| actual lawyers with hard experience in their area of
| expertise. That appears to be the case for Bankman-
| Fried's parents.
| grey-area wrote:
| His parents were signatories on a beach front house bought
| with 10m of FTX funds. That's all you need to know about his
| parents.
| yessirwhatever wrote:
| [dead]
| wmf wrote:
| His father is reportedly conflict-averse to the extreme and
| his mother wrote an article saying free will doesn't exist
| therefore people aren't responsible for their crimes.
| fidgewidge wrote:
| I wonder if those two facts are connected.
| notahacker wrote:
| I imagine his parents, in addition to giving him standard
| "don't do public speeches about the bad things you've done"
| lawyer advice, probably also wouldn't have recommended he
| drop out of Jane Street, make large arbitrage bets on crypto,
| set up a exchange without proper controls and take money out
| of that to bet on other cryptos. He may or may not be on very
| good terms with them, but I don't think he's been following
| their advice on big decisions for a while...
| jasonhansel wrote:
| SBF also wrote a later post about FTX US's balance sheet:
| https://sambf.substack.com/p/ftx-us-balance-update-2023-01-1...
|
| Is that post at all accurate or is it even more lies?
| Marazan wrote:
| It confuses customer funds with ftx.us assets so no, it is just
| more self serving lies.
| low_tech_love wrote:
| Balance sheet: ===== Money I got 100.000
| Money I owe 90.000 Total +10.000
|
| See? Totally solvent bruh!
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| Total lies: the current bankruptcy CEO says that balance sheet
| accounts for hundreds of millions in a company called LedgerX
| (IIRC, out of memory) which FTX.us acquired with... Money
| fraudulently siphoned from investors and customers.
|
| So the money used to buy LedgerX (and which LedgerX still
| partially has) should at some point be seized.
|
| FTX.us is insolvent too.
| inasio wrote:
| Hooray for diffs, Molly joked about formatting issues (triple
| space), SBF probably read it and fixed it
| JCM9 wrote:
| SBF's lawyers probably struggling to get him to keep quiet. What
| he keeps saying can and will very much be used against him.
| Symmetry wrote:
| > No one in their right mind would use the word "solvency" to
| describe this.
|
| No, you absolutely can. They were balance-sheet insolvent but
| cash-flow solvent from when they took the money until when people
| found out.
| breck wrote:
| > Judge Dorsey ultimately overruled objections to their retention
| by two individual FTX creditors.
|
| I think Molly White defaults to too much credibility in judges
| and lawyers.
|
| SBF's main argument is that Sullivan & Cromwell misled him into
| going the Chapter 11 route, which he later learned was more
| motivated by its ability to make hundreds of millions rather than
| helping his customers. He made a mistake in trusting them. All
| entrepreneurs make mistakes in trusting people they should not.
|
| He admits to serious mistakes with Alameda etc, but believes
| those were recoverable. I would agree--the crypto market is huge
| and so important--and think as long as all customers get their
| money back, that it was fixable.
|
| I think S&C has done a terrible job with FTX since taking over
| since the bankruptcy, so find SBF's argument to have merit.
|
| SBF's main message to entrepreneurs, which I think is a good one:
| be more transparent, and be careful who you trust.
|
| Source: I think I have $30,000 in my FTX.us account, so if
| anything I should be biased against SBF/FTX. But I am currently
| dealing with a dishonest lawyer and incompetent judge in the San
| Diego Family Law Cartel, so I am biased against the system at the
| moment.
| shkkmo wrote:
| SBF's main mistake wasn't trusting Sullivan & Cromwell. That is
| the lie that SBF is trying to tell. While that may have been a
| "mistake" to declare bankruptcy, it was because it reduced
| FTX's ability to try to hide the fraud it had been
| perpetuating.
|
| FTX was already incredibly insolvent at that point because FTX
| gave Alameda an unlimited line of credit and then used that
| credit to take loans from Alameda to line their own pockets
| with what was effectively FTX's customer deposits.
| naijaboiler wrote:
| >>then used that credit to take loans from Alameda to line
| their own pockets with what was effectively FTX's customer
| deposits.
|
| that's small fraction. most were spent and lost betting the
| crypto market
| rrdharan wrote:
| > the crypto market is ... so important
|
| Citation desperately needed.
| breck wrote:
| Crypto is a 24/7 global, resilient payments network. It
| increases the velocity and transparency of money, which will
| have a huge impact on global economy.
|
| Also, if you think customers losing a $8B to FTX is bad, wait
| until you read about retail banks in the USA taking $30B _a
| year_ from their customers: https://breckyunits.com/the-
| great-bank-robbery.html
| fckgw wrote:
| When? It's been 13 years.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| >Crypto is a 24/7 global, resilient payments network.
|
| Man, your mind is gonna be blown when you realise that you
| can have that _right_ now! All you have to do is move to a
| first world country*
|
| *like the UK or any country in the EEA. US not included.
|
| I jest, but my point is serious. This is already a reality
| for anyone living in Europe. It's a political problem (is a
| 24/7 global payment network important to people in
| democracies), and incidentally, crypto also faces the same
| political problem.
|
| "ohhh but it's permissionless" yeah nah no one is taking in
| magic beans for value
| breck wrote:
| > you have to do is move to a first world country*...US
| not included.
|
| I know. It's embarrassing. I remember in New Zealand in
| 2011 had better payments tech than USA in 2023.
| rodgerd wrote:
| > Crypto is a 24/7 global, resilient payments network.
|
| Which crypto?
| breck wrote:
| I pay almost all our team with NEAR coin. USA, Europe,
| Middle East, Africa, Pakistan, India, etc.
|
| No problems.
|
| All of my headaches come from a the very few I can't pay
| with crypto (Venmo, paypal, etc).
| rideontime wrote:
| How in the world would everybody get their money back except
| via another scam token like FTT?
| naijaboiler wrote:
| It might be true that FTX customers would be better off with
| FTX still running with or without SBF. But that does not negate
| the fact that lending customer money to Almeda is capital F
| fraud.
| breck wrote:
| > But that does not negate the fact that lending customer
| money to Almeda is capital F fraud.
|
| I think you are probably right here. If SBF does not have the
| ability to make customers whole, then I agree.
| Sebguer wrote:
| S&C basically invented modern white collar crime. It's hard to
| find outside of libraries, but: https://www.amazon.com/Law-
| Unto-Itself-Sullivan-Cromwell/dp/... is an exceptional read on
| their history.
|
| (I still think Crypto is worthless, but the concerns about S&C
| in this case are likely very legitimate!)
| wpietri wrote:
| I am truly grateful for people like Molly White, David Gerard,
| and Amy Castor. As the crypto grift circus expanded and expanded,
| I just got worn out. There was so much to pay attention to as it
| metastasized. All those writers have been diligently following it
| for years with a critical eye, and all of them have taken a lot
| of heat for it. As the wheels come off, it's great to have their
| detailed insights.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > As the crypto grift circus expanded
|
| crypto != FTX
| Fnoord wrote:
| Tether isn't FTX either. And yet, both are scams.
| lolinder wrote:
| The crypto grift isn't limited to FTX, it's nearly everywhere
| in crypto. My _great-uncle_ (who 's constantly trying to find
| the one big break that'll make him rich) was working on
| starting a crypto token before everything collapsed. He is in
| his seventies and knows nothing about tech or finance, but he
| knew crypto was the place for people who want to make quick
| cash.
|
| The whole industry has become a haven for grifters. That
| there are a few sincere projects doesn't change that.
| notch656c wrote:
| The government made this thing called "accredited investor"
| which is just code for not one of the poors.
|
| I wish it wasn't necessary for the poors to use crypto to
| moonshot on various grifts.
| [deleted]
| stouset wrote:
| Considered from an alternate perspective, the thing that
| has allowed crypto to become the massive grift that is
| has is the ability for anyone and everyone to speculate
| on it without any kind of oversight, regulation, insider
| trading protection, or guard rails of any kind.
|
| I won't speak specifically to the current reglatory
| definition of "accredited investor" which is certainly
| worthy of some criticism, but the "investments" that
| being one opens you up to are--on the whole--
| _significantly_ worse than just parking your money in a
| whole-market index fund. The few opportunities that are
| actually worth investing in are rare and generally
| require being on a first-name basis with the right
| people. Not to mention, of course, knowing a priori who
| those right people are.
|
| Merely having a bunch of dollars in the bank and wanting
| outsized returns puts you squarely in the realm of
| suckers who will be soon parted from their money by both
| hucksters and well-meaning idiots. Having almost no
| dollars in the bank puts you at an even worse
| disadvantage.
| notch656c wrote:
| Yes I believe the poors ought to be able to drop bands on
| a well meaning idiot just as easily as the truck stop
| stripper.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| What exactly is the upside of the scenario you're
| envisioning? Right now it just sounds like you wish the
| accredited investor rule didn't exist because it makes it
| harder to scam poor people.
| notch656c wrote:
| I would use "scam" in the sense of offering unregistered
| securities. Not in the sense of willful fraud. In that
| sense yes I think the poors should have as much right to
| buy into a scam as the accredited investor.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Again, what's the upside here? The end result of that
| scenario is that money gets redistributed from poor
| people to people offering unregistered securities. Why is
| society better off if we allow this to happen?
| notch656c wrote:
| Why is society better off when I'm allowed to drop bands
| on the truck stop stripper instead of buying toys for my
| kid?
|
| The individual should not be forced at all steps to
| selflessly act in the benefit of society. There are a
| non-zero number of scenarios where unregistered
| securities have paid off to investors. Individuals should
| not be forced at every step to prove their acts benefit
| collectively society.
| stouset wrote:
| Because society has a demonstrated track record of
| "actively letting people get scammed en masse" resulting
| in widespread misery and an enormously disproportionate
| number of resources needing to be committed to
| enforcement, and the current status quo--while inarguably
| suboptimal--is clearly an improvement?
|
| The libertarian ideal is akin to assuming that people are
| frictionless spheres operating in a vacuum instead of
| recognizing that a significant amount of laws and
| regulation are written in metaphorical blood, and simply
| striking them from the books just invites a return to the
| conditions that necessitated them in the first place.
| notch656c wrote:
| What are the conditions that "necessitated" that someone
| with a $1B value mansion as their primary residence and
| $999,000 in the bank isn't qualified to invest in these
| securities while someone with $1,000,001 in the bank is?
| wpietri wrote:
| Picking nits like this not only fails to advance the
| discussion, but in my opinion makes it worse.
|
| You can do the same thing with literally any rule. Why
| does one have to be 18 to buy cigarettes, an addictive
| product that will kill you if you use it long enough?
| Does something magically happen at age 17.9999 plus
| epsilon? Of course not.
|
| Regulations often draw arbitrary lines because that's a
| relatively easy way to improve a situation without
| getting bogged down in some sort of much more complicated
| test. E.g., we could mandate each person who wanted to
| buy cigarettes undergo a deep psychological evaluation
| looking at their personal history and testing their
| ability to make truly adult decisions. But that would
| immediately be seen as unduly burdensome (and nitpicked
| exactly as you're doing now).
|
| And in any case, you have missed or are ignoring that one
| can now pass a test to become an accredited investor, no
| capital requirements at all. So in addition to being
| tiresome, your point is also out of date.
| nradov wrote:
| In practice almost anyone can become an "accredited
| investor" by simply lying on the form. I know people who
| did this in order to invest in pre-IPO stock offerings.
| Many financial services companies don't bother to verify
| investor qualifications. (To be clear I am not
| recommending that anyone break the law.)
| wpietri wrote:
| Oh? You're saying that FTX was the only bad thing to happen
| in the crypto space?
|
| This sort of tedious, disingenuous quibbling is exactly why
| I'm grateful to the people I mentioned. Because instead of
| having to laboriously find all the failures, I can just tell
| you that all of this is documented in David's books, Amy's
| blog, and Molly's projects like https://web3isgoinggreat.com/
| rejectfinite wrote:
| The medium is the message. Crypto enabled this.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jjeaff wrote:
| Pedo Catholic Priests != Catholic Church
| detrites wrote:
| There needs to be a differentiation between good and bad actors
| in this drama as opposed to the lazy and inaccurate idea of
| "the crypto grift".
|
| These recent billion-dollar grifts plaguing crypto have
| primarily been enabled by actors working steadfastly against
| all of crypto's core principles: decentralisation, secure your
| own money, no middle-man.
|
| These players are employing all of the same tactics enabled by
| the traditional financial system to carry out these scams:
| centralisation, entrust someone else to secure your money,
| employ a middle-man.
|
| It's still legitimate to criticise crypto, there are many
| issues there: projects that fall short of the goal of the
| decentralisation, someone securing their own money can end just
| as badly as entrusting someone not worthy of it, etc.
|
| But lumping these recent events, of someone foreign to the
| crypto community coming in and actually setting out to defraud
| people outright, by lying to them about what they're doing, and
| twisting the ideals of crypto into nothingness, aided notably
| in the FTX case by continual mainstream media hype - this is a
| scam in an of itself plain and simple. Crypto was _used_ as a
| buzzword to sucker people in - in the very negative sense of
| being used. Crypto wasn 't the cause here.
|
| How many billions would have been lost of FTX's customers money
| had SBF and FTX not been endlessly paraded over the mainstream
| news, and cover-pages of major financial, news and culture
| publications since it began?
|
| It is those colossal failures of journalism, and/or conflicts
| of interest, that need to have a light shone on them,
| investigated and mitigated/regulated better.
|
| Labelling this "the crypto grift", is actually continuing the
| grift to an unfair even worse conclusion - blaming crypto not
| for something done _by_ it, but for something done _to_ it.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Just because people were unwittingly taking part in a larger
| grift does not make it a legitimate enterprise. Ever hear of
| racketeering and receiving stolen property?
| wpietri wrote:
| I think there are a very small number of people who were
| interested in crypto from the get-go for what I'd consider
| good, socially positive reasons. To the extent that those
| people didn't cash in and are mad about how it turned out, I
| respect their pain. It's always hard to watch the beautiful
| dream get corrupted. It would have been a very interesting
| alternate timeline if those few pure souls were left to
| innovate quietly on their own for a couple of decades.
|
| But as far as I can tell, the rest of it is at best, IGMFY
| [1], and at worst just scams. And that's the great, great
| bulk of it. I get why crypto adherents are going through a
| there-must-be-a-pony-in-there-somewhere [2] stage. But I
| would like to suggest that there is in fact no pony. That
| 99+% of the "crypto community" is composed of suckers, people
| in on the grift, and people who are simultaneously both.
|
| And I'd also like to suggest that things like FTX are not
| outliers. They are the absolutely predictable outcome of
| people saying, "What if we make an end-run around the
| financial regulatory apparatus and ignore all of the history
| that drove its creation?" I understand that the
| anarchocapitalist fantasy is that if we just end government
| we'll all live in Shangri-La. But the reality of is the sort
| of warlord despotism you seen in failed states. (Which, as an
| aside, has given us another meaning for "techincal". [3])
|
| Similarly, the real-world version of financial
| anarchocapitalism is bubbles, fraud, crime, and grift driving
| out actual development and investment. That's why every
| successful marketplace in the world above the size of a
| street market has significant regulation, be it internal or
| external. I used to write financial trading software. The
| people who I worked for were dispositionally cowboys. But
| every one of them knew that you did not fuck with the
| exchange and the clearing firm. And maybe the national
| regulator, but that was a distant concern compared with the
| people who were running the marketplace and would happily
| clip your wings if you looked at all like you were pulling
| something.
|
| [1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=IGMFY
|
| [2] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/12/13/pony-somewhere/
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle)
| detrites wrote:
| Maybe because the fruits of those few well-intentioned
| founders labours aren't blasted on the news 24/7 like SBF
| was, doesn't mean they don't exist?
|
| I've seen people in parts of South America where the
| banking system can be completely unusable, using their
| phone to send and receive crypto payments cheaply and
| reliably, enabling them to safely transact with family.
| I've heard of this also happening in Africa.
|
| Others, workers from Mexico for example, working in the US,
| are able to remit their small incomes back home for pennies
| instead of a 15% western union bite out of it.
|
| It does have functions and utility that does work, and they
| are the same functions envisioned by the OG's.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| > Others, workers from Mexico for example, working in the
| US, are able to remit their small incomes back home for
| pennies instead of a 15% western union bite out of it.
|
| ... and ALSO occasionally have the value of explode or
| implode drastically because it's so volatile and
| extremely dangerous to use as actual currency.
|
| And anyway, where are you getting that western union
| takes 15%? For fun, just looked up the fee on western
| union, to transfer $1000 cash from USA to Mexico as cash,
| is an $8 fee.
| wpietri wrote:
| One, I never said a good side didn't exist. In fact, I
| was careful to not say that. So easy on the straw men.
|
| Two, I have been hearing vague, anecdotal claims like
| this for years. It reminds me of how back in the day I
| would get vague, anecdotal claims for why open mail
| relays were useful to people. But if you want to claim a
| _meaningful fraction_ of crypto activity is valuable in
| ways for which there are no equivalent, you 'll have to
| provide data.
|
| Three, I'm very skeptical that there aren't other good
| non-crypto ways to solve the nominal problems. Good or
| better, really. As an example, take M-Pesa. [1] It
| started around the same time as Bitcoin, but has done
| vastly more to bank the unbanked in Africa. If you'd like
| to demonstrate actual superiority for significant use
| cases, I'm all ears. But I'm coming up on a decade of
| dealing with vague, handwavey replies about how crypto is
| akshually good, so I'm really going to insist on
| specifics here.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
| lolinder wrote:
| It's hard at this point for me to _not_ blame crypto-the-
| technology and crypto-the-culture for the repeated and
| spectacular failures of crypto-the-industry. It 's not like
| FTX was an isolated incident. It's becoming sort of a
| scapegoat for crypto enthusiasts because it was such a big
| deal, but practically everything that has come out of the
| crypto space since Bitcoin and Ethereum has been a grift to
| some degree or another.
|
| Something about crypto quickly and irreparably drew the get-
| rich-quick crowd, and I don't think there's any coming back
| from that. Where that kind of person gathers, scams abound.
| wpietri wrote:
| Exactly. I think there was a tipping point. The only
| question for me is how many times you can shear the same
| sheep. There have been so many bubbles here and somehow
| people kept coming back for every shiny new idea. DAO, ICO,
| NFT, etc. But given the way NFTs never really took off plus
| the ongoing domino-fall of major crypto names, maybe the
| brand value of crypto has finally gone so far negative that
| the space is done. Fingers crossed, anyhow.
| Yizahi wrote:
| The only problem that even "good" actors in the tokenbro
| space usually take these principles: decentralisation, secure
| your own money, no middle-man, and then assign to them
| positive values from the: centralisation, entrust someone
| else to secure your money, employ a middle-man.
|
| When confronted on the any viability of any of the "good"
| principles, they inevitably mix and match "good" and "bad"
| principles and values as they see fit, just to keep up their
| narrative. E.g. take a mostly decentralised network which is
| easily clogged to a standstill and then claim it's a great
| virtual currency medium. When asked why, they inevitably
| describe mostly or completely centralised "improvement" to
| the said network. Decentralised rent seeking, which is not so
| enticing even in the theoretical description inevitably gets
| to the point where centralised gatekeepers can can control
| and ban bad actors and anyone really when they see fit. And
| so on.
|
| tl;dr the so called "good" actors are mostly two types of
| people - first type are committed anachists and libertarians
| who sincerely want to use what they promote and sell. And
| another type are disingenious liars, who promote libertarian
| systems to the commoners all the while promising that nothing
| really would change when commoners would adopt said systems,
| and would get only incredible benefits. I consider this
| second type the same as "bad" actors really.
| detrites wrote:
| See, this is a fair criticism, and founded.
|
| Note also how similar it is to FTX - it's bad actors
| pretending to champion principles they are actually working
| against, whether unwittingly or otherwise.
|
| The part I would disagree on, is where you yourself seem to
| be uncertain, with a contradictory stance of labelling
| "bad" actors as "good".
| [deleted]
| doogerdog wrote:
| I also use Molly White's write-ups to loosely follow the
| everlasting crypto train wreck. This particular one is
| amazingly concise and easy to read. I hope she keeps it up.
| There is no way I would have the energy to look up all of this
| on my own.
| wpietri wrote:
| Agreed! And I should mention that Molly has a Substack:
| https://substack.com/profile/6775195-molly-white
|
| I pay her money because I am glad to have her pushing back
| against the tide of cash funding crypto promotion.
|
| The other two have Patreons that I also support:
|
| https://www.patreon.com/davidgerard/
|
| https://www.patreon.com/amycastor/
| SilasX wrote:
| Hold on there. If you're getting coverage like this, where
| someone comes and takes flattering photos of you, that's
| the kind of thing you get when you or your supports can
| fund a PR team to wrangle major journalists into covering
| you. I think she's fine on support.
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/29/molly-
| w...
|
| https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/07/11/business/meet-
| molly-w...
|
| https://www.protocol.com/fintech/molly-white-web3-crypto-
| ske...
|
| Doesn't mean the criticisms aren't necessary or good, just
| speaking to the issue of whether you've found a shoestring
| operation, barely able to survive.
| wpietri wrote:
| Excellent FUD. No actual claims, just casting vague
| aspersions based on nothing but some absolutely generic
| photos that are typical of what a newspaper photographer
| will produce.
|
| As long as we're making unsupported allegations, can you
| prove that you aren't funded by the crypto industry or
| otherwise benefiting financially from crypto? Because it
| seems suspicious that you're going to go out of your way
| to produce high-quality FUD for free.
| tasuki wrote:
| > takes flattering photos of you
|
| You know, some people just look good? From the photos you
| linked, the second one even has rather unflattering
| lighting.
| molly0x57 wrote:
| lol, I don't have a PR team. None of those articles were
| solicited by me.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| I don't like seeing Molly White and David Gerard in the same
| sentence. Molly White is a legit journalist with the mind of a
| scientist who cares about truth. David Gerard is a crank who
| will take any story and spin it to support his "crypto bad"
| narrative. They both like making fun of crypto, but that's
| about where the similarities end.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-25 23:01 UTC)