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FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

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Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a blockchain failure in that blockchains in general cannot actually support transactions like this. There's too much volume and there are fees. It is also a regulatory failure, there are reasons this kind of dipping into customer funds is quite illegal in the US. FTX should not have been reachable by US citizens (funding should have been impossible) _or_ FTX should have been sanctioned _by_ the US. There is no…

> FTX should not have been reachable by US citizens Ostensibly this has already been the case. You can't even properly access ftx.com in the US. It just redirects you to the US exchange. FTX US is a distinct company from the international FTX exchange, at least according to Axios. If you still manage to get to ftx.com it gives you a banner saying its read-only, you aren't allowed to use it, and they wont let you. FTX…

Well then this is a solid argument for “No regulation” being an undesirable feature of crypto and a win for Americans.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#522
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are the only person in the world with the private key to your coins, you are the only person who can move them. Period. Right up to the moment you lose your laptop in a fire, forget the password to your wallet, accidentally run malware on your personal computer, etc. Or if you die and haven't gone through the complication of setting up a way for your heirs to gain control of your accounts. Yes, you can take…

Pretty easy to download a wallet that’s stored in the Secure Enclave of your iPhone with an encrypted backup to your Apple ID account and all those problems go away.

Even this one? “ you die and haven't gone through the complication of setting up a way for your heirs to gain control of your accounts.”

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#523
post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the correct answer. When you move your tokens into a centralised exchange like FTX, your funds are pooled with everyones deposit. There are always deposits and wihdrawals, and of course maybe you traded your tokens for another before withdrawing. So its hard to parse how much customers deposited vs genuinely withdrew, and so you cant really tell if the exchange is short unless they declare their actual assets…

From the Sequoia puff-piece: > Something of the sort must happen eventually, as the current system, with its layers upon layers of intermediaries, is antiquated and prone to crashing—the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the latest in a long line of failures that occurred because banks didn’t actually know what was on their balance sheets. Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper need…

If a single individual controlled all customer assets then that is the issue. No institutional checks and balances.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#524
The Guardian:

"A person familiar with the dealings between FTX and Binance described the books as a “black hole” where it was impossible to differentiate between the assets and liabilities of FTX and those of Alameda Research. This person spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter. This person said Bankman-Fried had committed the “ultimate sin” by tapping into FTX’s custodial assets to fund Alameda Research."[1]

There are people trying to blame Binance for the collapse. That's bogus. If FTX was stealing customer funds, it's entirely FTX's fault.

Interesting info: Bankman-Fried owns part of Robinhood Financial.[2] Which will probably be audited real soon to see if he somehow took money out of there.

This is the kind of thing prosecutors refer to as an "ongoing criminal enterprise".

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/10/ftx-crypt...

[2] https://fortune.com/crypto/2022/11/09/the-winners-and-losers...

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#525
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it very ironic that Satoshi created Bitcoin with the objective to be more resilient than banks, with the famous genesis block containing "The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks". A decade later, the bitcoin creation generated an entire industry of "crypto banks" that are opaque, played with customers money and went bankrupt.

It's a beautiful lesson in human behavior and greed. You're given a perfect form of money (Bitcoin) that you can safely hold with minimal effort and your shortsighted greed ("yield farming") forces you to lose it all to a conman. The silver lining to all of this is that people might actually start listening to Bitcoin maxi's after this year.

Money must be backed by something. Bitcoin is backed by nothing. This makes it a ponzi, not money. It's very simple.

It can be used as a means of exchange, but due to being unbacked isn't and can't ever become a store of value, which in turns means it's completely useless as a unit of account due to eternal volatility.

The only way to get real wealth in exchange for bitcoin is to hope someone later decides to buy it. That's again a characteristic of something that isn't money. Americans are forced to sell wealth for us dollars, and without that force it would die. That's actual backing enforced by governmental force.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I'm not a politician or lawmaker and I have no problem blaming blockchain for this. I'm technically a "business person" because I have a job, but technically all crypto people who intend to use it to make money are also business people. The way bitcoin and all its friends are designed is intentionally done so in a way that allows centralized entities to run amok and cause havoc without any accountability until t…

Quoted post unavailable.

>Is someone paying you to say this? Did you lose a bunch of money?

No and no. Avoid asking these questions please, they're fallacious and kind of rude. I just see fraud and I call it out. I'm sick of seeing these crypto-Enrons keep happening. I hope the SEC finally cracks down and anyone still involved in crypto after any more of these tumbles goes straight to prison. The entire thing is a ponzi scheme and a fraud and the technology is useless beyond any kind of recovery. I'm dead serious. They should have cracked down on all of these crypto exchanges years ago when it became obvious they were a huge vehicle used to sell ICOs, aka illegal unregistered securities that were complete scams.

>It's an immutable public ledger. We know exactly what happened when someone commits fraud on it

No, you don't. You know almost nothing at all just from looking at one blockchain. If you see a bunch of blockchain transactions moving around, you have no idea what the transaction is actually for or whether that's a legitimate transfer or not. You don't know if a pizza was exchanged for those coins or if anything actually happened, or if the coins were actually stolen, or if some exchange was hacked, or if it was just a wash trade. It's extremely easy for people to commit fraud on blockchains this way so they just do. All you can know from this is that some tokens were transferred to some anonymous wallet address. Just from the blockchain you can never know what it's actually being spent on or who it's being sent to or if there's even any real assets anywhere in the system at all because that information only exists in the real world outside of the chain. There are places to get this information off chain and that's the only way to actually make any of this useful, it totally defeats the purpose of using that chain.

As an independent reporter the only way to figure any of this out is to take data from multiple chains, cross-reference it together, compare it to proprietary data coming from the exchanges, look at public data published by traders, and try to put it all together to paint a picture of where the real money and assets moved. You need a lot of other data sources besides that chain. And when you actually do that, you see things like how there's evidence that most bitcoin transactions are actually fake, fraudulent wash trades for the purpose of market manipulation, and nobody in bitcoin is doing anything about it because they either can't, or they're the ones profiting from it: https://www.forbes.com/sites/javierpaz/2022/08/26/more-than-...

The entire crypto market is awash with fraud. Nothing about blockchains can solve any of these problems. They're intentionally designed to create these problems. Blockchains can't prevent you from just taking that activity off chain and doing it outside of the view of everyone, and that's how you get another Alameda and FTX or Terra or Luna or 3AC or Celsius or Voyager or any of these. If you could force everyone to do all their transactions on one blockchain, then what you're saying would be true. But the technical design of blockchains intentionally makes it so you can't do that and anyone can just create another token out of thin air, or fork an existing token into a second chain, and then start trading it on some exchange and loaning it out with no regulations whatsoever. This is what the cryptobros wanted. It's a perfect recipe for fraud.

Now the only real way to force all these people to use a single blockchain and make them follow normal accounting procedures would be to pass a law making them do it. On that note I always found it funny that a certain segment of cryptobro was pushing for CBDCs. Most of them would probably cry foul if they were forced by law to use a single central bank chain, because then it wouldn't really be decentralized anymore and they couldn't get away with so much fraud.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTX is a centralised exchange, it is not routing all customer trades on chain. It’s not a blockchain failure, it’s just a lack of client asset segregation by a traditional centralised trading house.

It is absolutely a blockchain failure. Blockchains are intentionally designed to facilitate this. They have no possible way to stop this kind of fraud. Even if you built an elaborate set of smart contracts that could audit participants, they would still not stop anything. That activity can just be moved to another chain and avoid the audits. This kind of thing can just keep happening over and over again, as it alread…

Maybe the issue is that the creator of the blockchain is inherently trusted but they should not be.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#528
post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because it is all built on greed and a lot of lies. The only time you actually are part of the trustless system is when you are sole custodian of any private keys necessary to access the coins. The issue with this is that a whole lot of people have no idea what it is, how it works, how to be part of the system and how to keep keys secure and safe at the same time. And it is fine. People can't know everything.…

What about if you buy something you thought you understood, but that’s only because you were lied to?

Still on you. Who did you trust that lied to you? Then starting to ask oneseld: Why did you trust them in the first place. Understanding that part would make it possible not fall for it the second time.

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#529
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, when you take a loan out of a bank, the bank doesn't "create deposits" that it loans to you. The bank loans you existing deposits. The method by which banks end up creating money is less dramatic than you think. I wrote a long-form explainer here: https://www.attejuvonen.fi/money-out-of-thin-air/

Not at all. When you get a loan, the bank creates a liability and deposit out of thin air. The deposit is a "demand deposit", which is effectively equivalent and fungible to central-bank-backed currency (hence the term "money" usually applies to both, though they are different things). The bank needs no existing customer deposits to create a demand deposit and liability in your account. You should run through your ex…

Always good to find another MMTer out in the wild ;)

Re: FTX tapped into customer accounts to fund risky bets, setting up its downfall

#530

Isn't this what a bank is? The money sitting in your account is not really there, it's being invested by the bank. Bank accounts exist on the gamble that not everyone wants to withdraw money at once.

I was about to mention the reserve ratio but apparently it’s 0% right now in the US…
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