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The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?

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Re: The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?

#121

Post by ahepp »

adamisom wrote: post #96
acjohnson55 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he lacks morals, but he seems to have a Lex Luthor "ends justify the means" way of thinking. If you're whole moral framework is effective altruism, then as long as the good you do with the money you accumulate is greater than the harm caused in its accumulation by a ratio that exceeds your alternatives, you're all good.

One remark I have on anti-"ends justify the means" is they always ignore the ends. The "ends" might literally be saving real people's lives, whose lives have value. I'm sure there are good arguments against the idea, but you must engage with the ends that you propose we forsake, or you're just not serious.

Isn't this a fundamental problem with consequentialism? If you can convince yourself of a serious enough consequence, you can do whatever you want. Steal, hurt, kill. As long as your actions lead to a .000001% chance of preventing Skynet from taking over in the year 50000 AD, any means justify those ends.

How is that something that can be seriously engaged with? Other than trying to talk some sense into these people about limiting their EA calculations to a reasonably observable time-space continuum?

Re: The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?

#122

Post by sooheon »

no_wizard wrote: post #65
fred_is_fred wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunaely the draw for many isn't that they want a libertarian dream society with no rules, but rather they think they can get rich quick. The "banks are bad" is part of the appeal also. I have a cousin who works in the food service industry (think something like managing a Chipotle) and has put all his liquid assets into crypto and still thinks they will "pay off so he can retire". As for banks - as soon as these…

My "hot take" if you will: SEC and FDIC aren't usually, to the general public, negatively seen due to their mission. Its the fact they don't prevent criminal / unethical behaviors beforehand, and banks get away with alot before anyone intervenes. I actually don't think the average US citizen is "anti regulation" with this. I think - and I include myself in this - that we see agencies like the SEC (more so than the FD…

Yeah, people like effective regulation, it's just regulatory capture is worse than no regulation.

Re: The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?

#123

Post by dilyevsky »

chubot wrote: post #37
siftrics wrote: post #6

Michael Lewis, author of The Big Short, was in the process of writing a book about the success of FTX and SBF. He personally went to the Super Bowl with them and visited them in the Bahamas multiple times. Someone on Twitter said, "he just got his perfect ending." It's gonna be a fantastic book.

Wow ... so I'm assuming Lewis could smell this a mile away, given his history? (Liar's Poker, etc.) It's funny that they seemingly weren't in on it -- "No it's not at all like the other things you wrote about".

ML wrote very favorably about IEX team in flash boys so maybe they thought it was like that

Re: The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?

#124

Post by dibt »

stickfigure wrote: post #120
stusmall wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crypto community is wild. Literally in a thread about how the wheels are coming off the cart, the project frozen withdraws and possibly mishandled user funds there is the question "Should I buy in?" Also I love that the question of "What value does this provide?" comes after the question about buying it. At least the question came at all.

Warren Buffet puts it this way: "be fearful when others are greedy and to be greedy only when others are fearful". So, honestly, it's a very reasonable question. I personally wouldn't touch it, but I'm at least curious to hear the heterodox argument. Somebody out there is still buying it at $3, I wonder why.

There's still an opportunity IF you know what you're doing. I wouldn't recommend it.

It's traded elsewhere, and there are derivatives that pay premium. There's also the chance that Binance, Tron, or someone else accept conversions of FTT at some rate that makes the trade profitable. Facts are still coming out. We can only say it's not yet worth $0.

Re: The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?

#125

Post by jamesfmilne »

ajkjk wrote: post #23

I still don't get who is actually trading crypto on these exchanges. I have trouble believing it is not 99% wash trades.

I was in the local Co-op supermarket in North London buying some bread & milk the other day. The staff in the shop were talking amongst themselves about how "they were into crypto". I doubt they were comparing their elliptic curve coefficients.

SBF, CZ and his ilk have taken money these people can ill afford to lose in this financial climate and spaffed it up the wall on sports stadiums and billboards of themselves all over the place.

Re: The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?

#126

Post by nickstinemates »

ARandumGuy wrote: post #11

I think this should be a warning to anyone still invested in other crypto companies or exchanges. Everything seems like it's going well, until the music stops and the exchange is insolvent. FTX is not unique. A lot of crypto exchanges are doing just as much shady stuff. When you put your money with these companies, you're betting that "no really, this one is above board!" That's an extremely risky game to play when t…

This is a common mantra - if it's not your keys it's not yours. Leaving your crypto in an exchange is a huge convenience but also a huge risk for exactly this reason.

It's completely the opposite thinking where cash is more dangerous than leaving your money in a checking account for normal people.

Re: The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?

#127

Post by kibwen »

mrguyorama wrote: post #89

I'm so tired of people who are lauded as geniuses because their lottery ticket bet paid off. Why are people so convinced that being rich means you're smart?

The just-world hypothesis/fallacy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

Re: The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?

#128

Post by diab0lic »

wmf wrote: post #59
labrador wrote: post #42

I'm having a hard time understanding why organizations like the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan has money in uninsured crypto funds. Somebody has some explaining to do. Sequoia Writes Off Entire $210MM FTX Investment; Here Are All The Other Funds That Are Losing Billions In FTX https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/here-are-all-funds-are-abo... Edit: 25 billion dollars up in smoke Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan faces a hi…

No good investments are insured and FTX isn't a fund.

Plenty of good investments are insured. There are whole classes of investment that simply would not be sane to do without insurance. Taking an example from every day life: People buy investment properties and most of the time they insure them.

Re: The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?

#129

Post by splitstud »

adamisom wrote: post #96
acjohnson55 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he lacks morals, but he seems to have a Lex Luthor "ends justify the means" way of thinking. If you're whole moral framework is effective altruism, then as long as the good you do with the money you accumulate is greater than the harm caused in its accumulation by a ratio that exceeds your alternatives, you're all good.

One remark I have on anti-"ends justify the means" is they always ignore the ends. The "ends" might literally be saving real people's lives, whose lives have value. I'm sure there are good arguments against the idea, but you must engage with the ends that you propose we forsake, or you're just not serious.

No post body was provided.

Re: The Sam Bankman-Fried empire crumbled. What happened?

#130

Post by zeroclip »

brk wrote: post #62
zeroclip wrote: post #53

Very informative and clearly written, kudos to Molly! The irony is that DeFi and blockchain protocols fixes this.

Blockchain may fix it, but couldn't we also argue that blockchain created these problems in the first place? I will fully admit I have only casually followed the whole blockchain/crypto scheme, so maybe I'm wildly off on something, and would definitely appreciate informed responses. Without blockchain, there is no "crypto", without crypto, there are no exchanges and related coins, and without those, none of this happ…

The birth of the stock market also created new avenues for fraud that did not exist prior. This is a new asset class, poorly understood and poorly regulated, and still ripe for abuse.

DeFi would solve some of these problems by shifting the counterparty risk from a man named Sam to an immutable protocol that we can all audit and verify. Look at aave, compound, Uniswap.

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