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Binance to acquire FTX

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531–540 of 790 posts

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#531

I am extremely bullish on crypto, and have been for the last decade. That said: the sooner we can get rid of these weird centralized exchanges and weird messiah figures the better. The next thing I thing will explode is Cardano, which appears to function approximately like a cult, with no actual product (as far as I can tell). Ethereum, LINK, and Bitcoin. Everything else is a distraction.

The time to have been bullish was a decade ago. Now it looks like the bubble finally burst. No bottom in sight. No adoption either. The government has made crypto obsolete or unusable. Everything is traced and tracked.

I'm cryptoignorant (but trend skeptical). re: traceability, how about Monero?

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#532
post #448
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rest assured that the regulations are coming because the crypto simply did a speed-run of unregulated securities market and repeated every fraud or scam that the traditional markets went through over the history. In the process, huge fortunes were created and libertarians were empowered(but not enough to be the main political power). Congrats to them but there's nothing anarchist left in crypto, they even end up cons…

Regulations are coming? On a fully public ledger? You understand that BTC, ETH, and every derivative non-privacy-coin is exactly what the regulators have been salivating for, right? Why regulate a non-repudiable chain-of-custody that mathematically proves your serfs'/slaves' assets that you can seize at will? > libertarians were empowered(but not enough to be the main political power). You should re-examine the GOP,…

Regulations aren't exclusive to the US.

Many parts of the world e.g. Australia are heavily regulated in the financial sector and will not be looking to water them down just because its 'crypto'.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#534
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also turns out that "decentralized" in practice means "centralized"

Centralization is more efficient than consensus building.

Only if the central entity can be trusted not to become a corrupt rent seeker.

(Looks meaningfully at TicketMaster)

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#535
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that Citadel may have short squeezed FTX's token and created this.

Please don't tell me you own GME stock and blame Ken Griffin for everything bad that has ever happened. Can't you people just stay in your subreddits?

Hello, your comment does not follow guidline "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Please be more constructive.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#536

Binance was threatening to dump a huge amount of FTT tokens on the market. FTX has a big+vulnerable position in FTT. FTX asked Binance to sell them the tokens for a fixed price, so as not to crash the FTT token price. Binance declined - this was yesterday/today. Of course the price of FTT crashed today. And now Binance buys FTX to help them out... smells like Binance played 4D chess all along. https://decrypt.co/1136…

This is my view as to what possibly happened in last 24 hours. Mind you I have no idea if its real but i am making an educated guess based on my 10+ yrs seeing such events play out several times.

1) Alameda used FTX money and balance sheet along with using $FTT to take out billions of loans and "investments" including possibly customer funds to "invest" "efficiently" into risky investments

2) He then also used a lot of it to prop the entire market up in the 1250-1350 range over months to decouple the market possibly and keep $FTT above the $22 mark which was possibly a margin level for his collateral.

3) Market rallied and everything was fine. He is up a lot but lost few between making potentially risky investments (maybe shorting?), maybe options market making as that was his original expertise... who knows. But he clearly lost some money in there.

4) Rumors spread of balance sheet shortfall. Now mind you .. Alameda is a separate entity than FTX. So using FTX resources for trading on Alameda is a big no no.

5) CZ finds out about this. Decides to market sell his billions of $FTT position. Caroline gives up her hands and says they will buy at $22 which on the chart you can see has been the support line time and time again so clearly that line has been supported constantly..

6) The market selling pushes price below $22. Entire market and large players smell blood.. the moment the price goes below $22 the lenders market sell coins ($FTT and $SOL) for margin. This results in a loop after it breaks below $22 and goes into freefall with no support anymore

7) With no options to get more money from lenders and having no other assets to get more loans from lenders as they are already selling his assets, SBF goes to CZ and asks to bail out FTX as there is a big hole that cannot be filled anymore. CZ probably decided to take over FTX and said to SBF you have to either stop gap some of the fills from selling your assets since you did things wit the balance sheet and customer money you weren't supposed to. He probably said he will bail out FTX but NOT Alameda. Sam then either market sold everything he had...OR the lenders... Sam went to the lenders and said I am defaulting on my loans...So the lenders just market sold all the collateral. I think its most likely Sam said he is going to default on the loans and they market sold.

IF the lenders recouped 70-80% then i think its fine.

IF the lenders WERE NOT able to recoup and will have to take a write off on the loans.. we have issues. That part I am unsure about. IF a large lender goes under... then there is further contagion. The market selling off coins so quickly triggered probably more liquidations.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? We have seen bigger black swan events like in crypto past. All new concepts have days weeks like this. Stocks had it, banks had it and crypto has had it few times. There will always be new smart people to push growth and take over.

When 3AC went bust, we got to $800 on $ETH. We rebounded to 2k in time. That was close to 17-18bn. This is smaller. in time... we will be back. Not sure when.. but eventually it all comes back. Market is cyclical end of the day.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTX/Alameda holds tons of illiquid FTT tokens that they cannot sell and which Binance was dumping. Thus, they might have not technically lied. But they were still wrong from the accounting perspective - they surely understood that FTT token cannot be used to cover gaps in large scale. It was the question that matters "how fast you can process user withdrawals and with what risk" Sam owns 8% of Robin Hood that is wort…

> Sam owns 8% of Robin Hood that is worth around ~$1B - he could sell that and cover some of the gap. Not knowing too much about this space have you ever seen anything like this happen? A CEO using their personal wealth to cover their customers funds seems unlikely.

This isn’t a thing, limited liability (which is the fundamental principle that distinguishes corporations from partnerships) prevents this. The only way would be if SBF was charged with defrauding FTX

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#539

I am extremely bullish on crypto, and have been for the last decade. That said: the sooner we can get rid of these weird centralized exchanges and weird messiah figures the better. The next thing I thing will explode is Cardano, which appears to function approximately like a cult, with no actual product (as far as I can tell). Ethereum, LINK, and Bitcoin. Everything else is a distraction.

The time to have been bullish was a decade ago. Now it looks like the bubble finally burst. No bottom in sight. No adoption either. The government has made crypto obsolete or unusable. Everything is traced and tracked.

> The government has made crypto obsolete or unusable.

i don’t think you can really say this until the DNMs meaningfully shrink in size.

US govt has had like one major success that i know of in shutting down DNMs — Silk Road — since then there’s always been a dozen or so in operation that serve most/all the big countries whose govt you would expect to track crypto.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#540

September's cover of Fortune was quite the jinx https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/COV.W...

In general, when I see someone on the cover of Fortune, I expect their business's half-life to be about a year. This has been very consistent because of the process of getting on the cover of Fortune and kind of people who push to get on it
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