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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?

#151

Post by fred_is_fred »

codyb wrote: post #133
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…

Unfortunately for your cousin, he's the bag holder that the people getting rich quick are going to take for a ride. As far as I can tell.

yes - he absolutely is. I'm not sure he knows that though.

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

#152

Post by BLKNSLVR »

snowwrestler wrote: post #144
mewse-hn wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said the investment was part of Teachers’ strategy to learn about the crypto business and whether it gives the right balance of risks and returns. “I don’t think we have the answer to that question yet,” Mr. Taylor said. Holy shit.. they were openly investing in something they don't understand??

Nobody understands crypto from a financial perspective. That's why all the big crypto companies keep dying in new and interesting ways.

Recently they seem to be dying in the exact same way: reinvesting customer funds.

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

#153

Post by RC_ITR »

mewse-hn wrote: post #139
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…

He said the investment was part of Teachers’ strategy to learn about the crypto business and whether it gives the right balance of risks and returns. “I don’t think we have the answer to that question yet,” Mr. Taylor said. Holy shit.. they were openly investing in something they don't understand??

As others have said, those who understand crypto either chose to be conniving and make money off of the scam, or they avoid it.

Mr. Taylor wanted to test if he could be conniving enough to profit and he turned out not to be (very few will be in the long run).

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

#154

Post by BLKNSLVR »

jamesfmilne wrote: post #125
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 a…

The fan-spread-shit hasn't splattered onto CZ yet.

Do Kwon, 3AC guys, Celsius guys, Voyager guys, yes. Binance / CZ no(t yet).

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

#155

Post by snowwrestler »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #152
snowwrestler wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody understands crypto from a financial perspective. That's why all the big crypto companies keep dying in new and interesting ways.

Recently they seem to be dying in the exact same way: reinvesting customer funds.

Sure, but lots of other kinds of financial institutions reinvest customer funds and don't die.

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

#156

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

danaris wrote: post #115
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.

It doesn't even have to do that in an objective, measurable sense. It just has to do that from your perspective —meaning that any harms you can ignore don't count, and any potential good you can convince yourself you could do in the future because of it do.

Yeah, I'm glad to see someone saying this. Something that bugs me about EA is it pattern matches to a lot of the same performative behavior I grew up around with evangelical extremists. Your hypothetical good forgives your very real misbehavior in fact.

There's also just the fundamental stupidity of thinking you can reduce something as complex as human morals and ethics to a karmic checking account balance...

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

#159

Post by [deleted] »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #137
diab0lic wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Investment properties not generally insured against loss in market value, no matter how drastic.

[deleted]

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

#160

Post by brk »

zeroclip wrote: post #130
brk wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The birth of the stock market also created new avenues for fraud that did not exist prior.

Right, but I've never heard anyone say in response to stock market fraud, "You know what would fix this? A stock market!"

The logic path on fixing what is ultimately a blockchain-related problem with more blockchain just seemed a bit circular to me. The blockchain/crypto portion does not really seem to be solving any real-life problems, or if it has, anything it has solved is being outstripped by the problems/losses.

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