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Binance to acquire FTX

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Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#721
post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe they offered to buy it later (when?) at a price fixed today - discounted or not. If they don’t have liquidity (why?) they cannot buy it on the market.

Illiquid means you can't sell your position without lowering the price significantly. It could be that you need time to sell, or it could be that no one is stupid enough to buy it. The former can be fixed with a temporary loan, the latter in bankruptcy court.

As discussed extensively elsewhere an “exchange” shouldn’t be in the business of having illiquid positions in the first place.

But here we are, and I’m not sure if FTX was offering to buy with some favorable terms regarding the time of settlement in addition to a discount. They could have bought on the open market at the discounted price but they apparently didn’t…

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#722

This is probably going to have ripple effects in unrelated industries - FTX Foundation, presumably funded by FTX/Alameda/SBF’s personal wealth, has been been the biggest funder of AGI projects and labs this year. They were the biggest funder (in a $500M fundraise) for Anthropic, which is (atm) a non-profit AI alignment lab. They also funded a bunch of esoteric EA projects which likely rely on them for continued fundi…

> AGI projects

> AI alignment lab

> EA projects

So what you're saying is that nothing of value was lost?

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#723
post #656

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market manipulation is not exactly business 101.

I'm not sure this is market manipulation?

Depends on the intention I guess. They might have been genuinely worried that the token was going to crash and also didn't trust the counterparty to be able to pay for it. In this case it would have been a genuinely legitimate transaction.

But if dumping the whole stock was done with the intention, even partial, to crash the price, then it seems to me that it would be manipulation. Of course crypto is unregulated, so it wouldn't be illegal.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#725
post #104

Anyone here remember when SBF was offering Elon Musk a billion dollars to help him buy Twitter? What the hell was he thinking?

Yup.. The transcripts say he wanted to partner yup. Binance did finance, so maybe it's a way to get involved in Elon's inner circle.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#726
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was a lie the whole time. how many of these y'all need before you learn: all crypto is a scam . It never was anything else, it never will be anything else because it can not be anything else. There's an awful lot of fancy piled on the simple fact that all crypto"currencies" are negative sum games . The only disagreement is whether this is an entirely new type of scam , a "Nakamoto Scheme" or the difference betwe…

Ok, why is this statement not true then: > There's an awful lot of fancy piled on the simple fact that all "currencies" are negative sum games. ?

Because it is currency itself that you measure everything else against. What my sentence meant is that without transaction fees it would be a zero sum game -- ie if you undid all crypto-money transactions then nothing is left -- but with transaction fees their sum is a negative number. But you need to measure this in something.

Note how stocks are decidedly not like this because if you undid all stock-money transactions the sum would be positive because of buybacks and dividends.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

12:38 PM · Nov 7, 2022 2) FTX has enough to cover all client holdings. [0] 4:03 PM · Nov 8, 2022 2) Our teams are working on clearing out the withdrawal backlog as is. This will clear out liquidity crunches; all assets will be covered 1:1. This is one of the main reasons we’ve asked Binance to come in. [1] has enough to cover all client holdings ---> not enough to cover all client holding in 24 hours. Either they los…

You forgot 8 hours ago: Hacker News commenters are in total denial: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33518961

This is yet another episode in the continuing saga “HN consensus is bad at predicting tech”.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#729
post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as noone is being lied to That is exactly what is happening. There is lots of lies being told, with no transparency, and then people's money disappears. Instead of that, if people money disappears, we should arrest the people who made it disappear.

No argument from me there. I was just narrowly addressing the point in stale2002's comment. Though to be honest, it is well known that the long term fate of any crypto exchange is to go bust. So no one could really claim that they didn't know it was coming. Crypto is glorified gambling. (At least so far. In principle, crypto can mature over time into something more serious.)

I don't think it can, because all those serious things already exist and require the kinds of governance that the crypto promise rails against.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#730
post #682

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the "bank" in this "shadow bank"? You're describing a casino with a money printer.

"Shadow banks" aren't necessarily "banks". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banking_system > The shadow banking system is a term for the collection of non-bank financial intermediaries (NBFIs) that provide services similar to traditional commercial banks but outside normal banking regulations.[1] Examples of NBFIs include insurance firms, pawn shops, cashier's check issuers, check cashing locations, payday le…

You're moving the goalposts a bit there
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