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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?

#161

Post by xyzwave »

ahepp wrote: post #121
adamisom wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I always felt the problem with consequentialism is that outcomes are uncertain, whereas actions are not. Therefore you are not guaranteed that an immoral action (means) will result in a beneficial outcome (end).

For instance, you push someone in front of a trolley to save 5 lives, but the trolley isn’t stopped and you end up with 6 dead.

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

#162

Post by diab0lic »

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.

Nobody ever claimed they did, but it is an investment, with insurance.

If you want something more financial a short vertical spread [0] is a strategy in which you are purchasing insurance on the risk (investment) you just took (made). There are many such investments of this form.

[0] https://www.optionsplaybook.com/option-strategies/short-call...

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

#163

Post by smcin »

loeg wrote: post #50
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.

I don't understand why anyone takes Lewis seriously after Flash Boys. He seems to just make things up from thin air.

Because he was superb since before then, for four decades now. I read Liar's Poker and was hooked from the first sentence.

Look, Michael Lewis is like the Stephen Gaghan of (semi-fictionalized) socioeconomic zeitgeist: he chronicles concepts paradigmatic of an entire generation, people and personalities that affect or transform an entire decade or generation (usually in or about the US, and often Wall Street). And he nods towards the societal implications with a sense of urgency and inevitability but also dark theater. Sure he Hollywoodizes people and quotes, not dissimilar to how the screen adaptation of Mark Bowden's superb 'Black Hawk Down' merged characters and their story arcs, or how loosely 'War Dogs' (2016) was based on Guy Lawson's 2011 Rolling Stone article [0] and 2015 book [1]. [As to 'War Dogs' and Lawson's writings, there's an obvious similar moral fable to three potheads from Miami Beach becoming in 2007 one of the Pentagon’s largest weapons suppliers, by reselling Chinese bullets to US-occupied Afghanistan, and noone at the Pentagon actually wanted to know where private contractors were getting their supply, as the scale of the contracts became increasingly insane.] If you want to more accurately label Lewis' genre "semi-fictionalized socioeconomic zeitgeist", then do.

To be blunt, people have short attention spans, people in the US only read average 15.6 books/yr or median 4 books/yr [2], and moral ambiguity seems to sell worse than clean-cut tales casting characters as good guys and bad guys, certainly on the big screen. But these writers are still fulfilling an important service. Noone actually sits down and reads Inspector-General reports, CSPAN is occasionally great but usually dull to watch, and what now passes for US mainstream media is hopelessly coopted and long ago abandoned investigative reporting [3]. Writers like Lewis, Bowden, Lawson(, Crichton, Grisham [4]) fill a very real cultural void in interpreting what's going on.

[0]: https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-stoner-arms-dealers... [1]: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-comple... [2]: https://katiecouric.com/culture/book-guide/how-many-books-do... [3]: https://www.fastcompany.com/90646413/why-breaking-points-wit... [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33391995

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

#164

Post by hcks »

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?

This comment came a few times but it really doesn’t make sense to me.

How many people actively try to become billionaires like he did in a systematic way?

And contrary to many entrepreneurs, I don’t see where he got especially lucky.

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

#165

Post by bergenty »

codyb wrote: post #131
bergenty wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because getting rich is one of the hardest things to do in society. It’s getting power + stability in one fell swoop and is everything humans are biologically built to value.

Well... not really right? Cause lots of people are rich through inheriance. And lots through the lottery. SBY appears to have gotten very rich through a simple arbitrage trade. Props to him for exploring the space and making the moves... but it doesn't take a genius to see that if you can buy something for cheap in one place and sell it in another for more that you can make a bunch of money if you do it over and over…

So a handful of people. I think that pretty much aligns with what I was saying.

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

#166

Post by zeroclip »

brk wrote: post #160
zeroclip wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did the blockchain fail here? Blockchain and DeFi was created to solve these very problems of centralized trust and human financial fraud. Uniswap and Aave withdrawals are working just fine.

Leaving your coins on a centralized exchange kills the reason for a blockchain and DeFi. It’s crypto by name only.

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

#167

Post by iudqnolq »

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…

OTPP is surprisingly big and very successful overall. And they invested at a $25B valuation, which is very different from investing $25B

> Teachers first bought its FTX stake in October, 2021, as part of a US$420-million funding round. It was one of 69 investors, but FTX listed it first in its announcement of the financing. Teachers has never disclosed exactly how much it invested.

> The pension plan housed the investment ... a portion of the portfolio dedicated to high-growth, yet high-risk, investments. As of June 30, the $8.2-billion portfolio represented just 3 per cent of Teachers’ $242.5-billion in assets.

Teachers ... reported a 1.2-per-cent return for the six months ended June 30. By way of comparison, Royal Bank of Canada’s RBC I&TS All Plan Universe saw defined benefit pension plan assets ... shrink 14.7 per cent over that period.

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

#168

Post by iudqnolq »

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??

They have hundreds of billions, of which they set aside around 3% for risky bets. One of those risky bets failing isn't a big deal.

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

#169

Post by WJW »

wombatpm wrote: post #134
adamisom wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If curing cancer for the rest of humanity now and forever required knowingly experimenting on and absolutely killing a certain number of people now, how many people could you justify with an Effective-Altruism ethical framework?

Depends on your expected remaining lifetime of the human race? (since from that you might compute the expected cancer deaths over that time and then you can do a simple comparison)

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

#170

Post by SilverBirch »

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…

I think one thing to think about is that I'm sure someone with integrity is running a crypto exchange and they genuinely are just running a crypto exchange that works. But those guys aren't creating exponential valuations. We can ground this all in real expectations- the CME group is worth 62Bn market cap, Deutche Borse is worth ~30Bn.

Why, why, why would you think that a niche crypto exchange is worth more than the biggest European exchange? We know what the comparables are people!

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