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FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

reuters.com

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Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#631

Post by jdhzzz »

paxys wrote: post #447
shorthistory wrote: post #423

Can anyone speculate what Bankman-Fried's exit plan was? Was this a fraud that got out of control, or premeditated? If it was premeditated, what was the exit plan? Did he expect to be able to gamble with customer funds indefinitely? Were the Effective Altruism intimations genuine? Why, if Alameda was a market maker, and they therefore presumably have some form of insight into the markets, did they then decide to take…

Every serial gambler in the world thinks that they are just temporarily in the red and one big break away from winning big. They just need to invest a little bit more.

Gotta double up to catch up.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#632

Post by babyshake »

This where the investors including the big silicon valley investors that make billions of returns step in and make the little people whole. If BlockFi needs a line of credit to allow withdrawals, each of the investors needs to be in line to provide that credit at the expense of the partners and LPs. Officers eat last.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#633

Post by RobRivera »

twblalock wrote: post #528

This has been a wonderful social experiment, enabling people who didn’t live in the 19th century to see what happens when banking and investing is treated like the wild west. Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions. There aren’t very many other aspects of our society where we get to have that kind of experiment and find out…

maybe the real true value of crypto was the frens we made along the way

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#634

Post by HDThoreaun »

Mortiffer wrote: post #579
twblalock wrote: post #528

This has been a wonderful social experiment, enabling people who didn’t live in the 19th century to see what happens when banking and investing is treated like the wild west. Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions. There aren’t very many other aspects of our society where we get to have that kind of experiment and find out…

FTX was a centralized exchange. Those who believe in trying to build an alternative financial system did not use centralized exchanges except perhaps for on-ramp off-ramp. Uniswap among others has been stable with very audited open code that prevents anyone from doing what FTX did. Just want to remind ppl to not put them in the same bucket.

You're always going to need a centralized ramp to convert crypto to fiat though. If everyone thinks they're scams crypto has a big problem.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#635

Post by xxEightyxx »

twblalock wrote: post #528

This has been a wonderful social experiment, enabling people who didn’t live in the 19th century to see what happens when banking and investing is treated like the wild west. Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions. There aren’t very many other aspects of our society where we get to have that kind of experiment and find out…

No post body was provided.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#636

Post by qudat »

piva00 wrote: post #581
qudat wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I’m not sure about your conclusion. I would rather see people be more scrutinizing when giving their money to others. It doesn’t matter if there are rules and regulations, people are always going to be duped. When I read about FTX I just think that people need to be better educated. Maybe one could argue that the rules and regulations are specific to providing consumers with tools to make educated decisions abou…

> I would rather see people be more scrutinizing when giving their money to others. "I just wish everyone is better" is never a solution for anything that has mass appeal/is used by the general public. You can't ever depend that individual actions will solve a systemic issue, it's not realistic.

The same argument can be made for government intervention.

I don’t buy it, there are a ton of examples where not only does the gov get it wrong but also have the opposite effect of what they were trying to achieve. Good intentions is not realistic.

The systemic issue is education.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#637

Post by chx »

luckylion wrote: post #580
chx wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. I can not. It's been 13 years and there's still nothing. It was never anything else but a scam and can not be anything else but a scam for all crypto"currencies" with a transaction fee are negative sum games .

Fast, cheap money transfer (theoretically) not requiring trust in any middle man, cutting out bank's control, i.e. "digital cash". I don't know if it's revolutionary, but it has a lot of potential and is great when it works.

Here are the steps you need to take to move money with crypto"currency":

1. Establish a presence at an exchange (you need to do this only once)

2. The receiver needs to establish presence at their exchange (every receiver of yours need to do this)

3. Transfer money to the exchange

4. Buy coins and move them and the receiver exchanges back them to money

5. The receiver needs to move money from the exchange to their back account

Reminder: you want to transfer money and crypto"currency" is merely a vehicle to do this. And so turns out the hard part is #3 and #5 -- integrating into existing banking systems and #4 is completely superflous. For example, wise.com (nee transferwise) solves the same problem except without the receiver needing to do this nightmarish rigmarole.

Not trusting the middle man would require the entire world to switch to some crypto"currency" and this is completely unfeasible with the current ones.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#638

Post by JeremyNT »

Julesman wrote: post #463

I'm not a luddite (on hacker news lol) and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. But, for the love of God, can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth. Moderate investment can support development without the kind of hype that ruins lives and sullies public perception of the technology.

> I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain.

What do you feel is the "revolutionary potential" here? Bitcoin has been around for a while, and I surely haven't seen it.

I see this stuff only used for scams, speculation, and illicit transactions. None of this is "revolutionary" - scams, speculation, and illicit transactions have been around as long as money.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#639

Post by ArchD »

krrrh wrote: post #568
nannal wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't trust you, you don't trust me, neither of us trust the guy who owns the git server but I need to give you something without anyone being able to stop us.

You really shouldn't be doing a significant amount of your business with people who don't trust you and who you don't trust. Blockchain advocates really underestimate how much of functioning economies simply work because of trust (with lawyers and courts as a backup), and how small the potential "I don't trust you" market is.

Do you trust the bank, credit bureaus or some other establishment that you deal with to not leak your sensitive info? Maybe you do. But in case you don't, which is a rational response to the past performance of some establishments (e.g. Equifax), your life still has to go on.

Did you trust the POTUS when he said that Iraq had WMD before starting a war? I suppose he's a painter now so everything's peachy.

A lot of people have been giving reminders of the general untrustworthiness of establishments, including Snowden & Assange. Establishments that many people are forced to deal with.

It would be nice if everybody could be safely trusted. For those who readily trust, there is no problem to solve.

However, some other people see untrustworthiness everywhere, so they take opportunities to try to opt out of the system by engaging in a trustless system that does not require privileged middlemen. It's been baby steps so far.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#640

Post by afarrell »

thwayunion wrote: post #491
Julesman wrote: post #463

I'm not a luddite (on hacker news lol) and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. But, for the love of God, can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth. Moderate investment can support development without the kind of hype that ruins lives and sullies public perception of the technology.

> can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth I first played around with blockchain in 2011 or so and I still don't know what actual utility this technology is supposed to have. I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database. Around 2015 a lot of people I thought were smart enough…

I have found one: Sending the Jamaican Bobsled team to the olympics. I highly doubt that this could have been done based on Postgres. Postgres is too boring and stable to attract the necessary attention.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/01/22/265060754...

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