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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?

#171

Post by LeafGuild »

saurik wrote: post #35
aniforprez wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I could say banks are equally guilty of doing shady stuff, the truth is banking is hundreds of years old and as such, has regulations and insurance behind it. Not regulating is how we get messes like the Housing Bubble in the 2000s in the US culminating in the crash in 2011. Crypto being a completely new space has no regulation and no checks and balances which leads to messes like this with companies playing ar…

Centralized financial exchange markets are at least somewhat regulated and notably FTX.US is supposedly A-OK. Just because some stuff in crypto doesn't have regulations doesn't mean it is a free-for-all.

>Just because some stuff in crypto doesn't have regulations doesn't mean it is a free-for-all.

It pretty much does. The free-for-all disregarding of laws (including laws against fraud) is the stated purpose of crypto. They've been pitching this as Fight Club For Finance since the very beginning. The exchanges with a legitimate appearance are just fronts to get you to the back room with all the unregulated tokens offering insane interest rates. If you didn't come for a scam-or-be-scammed fight to the death, there isn't any reason to use crypto. The crypto bros just missed the part where Fight Club falls apart if you tell everyone about it. Or maybe they got too excited and forgot about that rule.

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

#173

Post by tracerbulletx »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #146
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?

Why does fucking up mean you're not smart? You have to be smart by some metric to get a job at Jane street. Lots of smart people fuck up in finance, and "dumb" people even strike gold sometimes.

In these discussions there usually isn't a consistent definition of what being smart means to everyone. People with high IQs, academic success, and even strong histories of successfully applying their intelligence can make one off major mistakes, and also engage in long term systematic error patterns.

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

#175

Post by kurisufag »

lovehashbrowns wrote: post #94
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.

It’s all from that buy the dip meme. I saw something similar where people were asking if they should buy that LUNA coin thing during its meteoric collapse. I think that coin is still in the dumpster so..

$LUNA zeroed, hit a 10x bump, then zeroed again.

it's a common trend, and a lot of people ride that bump for significant profit.

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

#176

Post by qeternity »

diab0lic wrote: post #162
jrochkind1 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

What? Shorting call spreads is not how most people would protect a position.

Perhaps you're thinking of a collar? (short calls to fund puts?)

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

#177

Post by qeternity »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #154
jamesfmilne wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Binance has sponsored the Alpine Formula 1 team although the logo on the car is quite small.

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

#178

Post by yw3410 »

xyzwave wrote: post #161
ahepp wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's essentially Kant's argument as to why you should have universal morals (see the classic not lying to an axe murderer).

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

#179

Post by Bubble_Pop_22 »

zeroclip wrote: post #166
brk wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> centralized trust and human financial fraud. Uniswap and Aave withdrawals are working just fine.

Finance always follows commerce. It’s commerce which ultimately creates an organic price floor for assets.

Given that no commerce exists in the cryptospace there is no such floor.

You are describing a decentralized casino, but it’s taboo to say it and hence the word “asset” is being thrown around

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

#180

Post by leganthropane »

EGreg wrote: post #87

What happened was Binance squeezed a competitor, by dumping their token. Then announced stuff on Twitter that made people suddenly withdraw $6B out of it. This is an unregualated market — but even if it was regulated, what would the regular do after the fact to make it right for everyone inside an exchange or crypto that went to zero?

Regulated fractional reserve banks are usually insured by the regulators.

If the bank goes bust, the government covers the customers' losses up to a predetermined amount (FDIC covers $250k per account in the US).

This helps to prevent bank runs, because people know that they'll get their money even if the bank collapses.

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