Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

821–830 of 1001 posts

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

#821

Post by digianarchist »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #269
throwaway0asd wrote: post #121

Where were the adults in any of this and why would people throw billions of dollars at unqualified children?

Because most of the adults know that there is a window when you can get rich off a known con and get out before it blows up with quite a lot of cash. The best part of these being unqualified children is that they don't even realize that part of the deal they've signed up for is to take the fall when shit finally hits the fan. There's plenty of people who have made money from SBF behind the scenes, but you'll never he…

Really? I'm only reading about VCs [0] and big institutional investors [1] losing money.

[0] - https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/10/daily-crunch-sequoia-capit...

[1] - https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/about-us/news-and-insights/2022/o...

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

#822

Post by thunky »

afarrell wrote: post #640
thwayunion wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

Yes because we all know the only way to raise money is via shitcoins.

I learned that by watching Cool Runnings.

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

#823

Post by digianarchist »

monkeydust wrote: post #245

He should have just stuck to running an exchange and trying to innovate that game (note - earlier in the year lots of talk around their automated margin plan for wider industry beyond crypto). Theres a decent business there.

That's not profitable though. Look at Coinbase.

That's why these companies have to mint their own shitcoins and come up with derivative Ponzi products to make money.

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

#824

Post by louwrentius »

nu11ptr wrote: post #488
louwrentius wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guess I’m a Luddite as I only see blockchain tech as a solution in search of a problem. I think it’s worse than useless and crime isn’t a valid use case.

Separation of money and state is definitely a worthwhile goal in my opinion. Everything else is more questionable.

You mean tax evasion. I said legal use cases. Please pay your dues to society.

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

#825

Post by digianarchist »

sgt101 wrote: post #276
new2this wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His company is already based in the Bahamas, how much further could he fly?

Venezuela might be a good pick? Or just disappear in Europe?

They just handed back a bunch of oil executives so I doubt they'd be up for harbouring a fugitive.

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

#826

Post by hnews_account_1 »

mrguyorama wrote: post #737
hnews_account_1 wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The super stupidity of using math to dazzle people around you is my greatest lesson from this. In my highly technical field, I can use math without treating it like some precious scripture. But it’s good to know it is so unfamiliar to a normal person in the VC world, I can use it to justify even a startup doing genocide as a platform or something.

It's almost like people who don't actually know anything about math, statistics, or probability shouldn't be believed when they make poor arguments using the same. Maybe there's a reason it takes 4 years of extremely tough classes to understand the basics of "hard" math.

It’s not just that. But like if I made up bullshit like “the emerging market populations are growing hard and will strain earth’s resources. Our startup needs to kill them to save the planet, here’s a log Utility function to explain it”, some VC out there is an idiot enough to give me money. Maybe if I’m playing league of legends while saying it, I’ll get more cash than I even want to raise.

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

#827

Post by afarrell »

thunky wrote: post #822
afarrell wrote: post #640

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes because we all know the only way to raise money is via shitcoins. I learned that by watching Cool Runnings.

As noted elsewhere, most of the money wasn't transferred via dogecoin. But reasonable financial transaction systems don't attract the advertising attention that this was able to.

Does that make it a good financial system? To the degree that a clown car is a good public transport system.

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

#828

Post by sdiacom »

zeroclip wrote: post #811
sdiacom wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a similar-ish position to yours, I think by the time someone figures out how to build something useful with this technology, the terminology of cryptocurrencies (blockchain, "defi", NFTs and whatever a "web3" is) will be so tightly associated with scams, that this new useful thing will use completely different terms to describe itself.

These things already exist. Uniswap, Aave. Both pretty easy to use and can not just go insolvent on you.

The only currently existing purpose of those things is to trade scam tokens for other scam tokens, which makes them effectively meta-scams. What I mean is that, like Ethereum, they're not scams in itself, but their only real-world use-case is to provide a decentralised platform on which to run scams.

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

#829

Post by ryanSrich »

imdsm wrote: post #698
Animats wrote: post #389

"Voluntary Chapter 11" in Delaware. Figures. That gets them out from bankruptcy in the Bahamas, which is much tougher than US law. The Bahamas still has classic tough bankruptcy laws, where there's no debtor-in-possession reorganization. It's straight to liquidation, with a court-appointed receiver in charge. This should be, and may be, converted to a straight liquidation. Chapter 11 can be useful for restarting comp…

Withdrawals halted yet one of the FTX hot wallets had hundreds of thousands of BUSD and USDC going out earlier today.

If you're in the Bahamas you can withdraw. People on Twitter with millions in FTX have been paying Bahaman citizens to KYC their accounts so they can withdraw. This is obviously highly illegal.

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

#830

Post by lazide »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #812
lazide wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto is incompatible with regulation and institutions because it was designed to be, and is consistently a part of the ethos espoused by pretty much all crypto players? Literally, the first sentence in the Bitcoin whitepaper (which arguably kicked off 'crypto' as a thing) is "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going thro…

I can pay you in cash without going through a financial institution. That doesn’t make the Euro unregulated.

It makes spending Euros defacto unregulated, no?

Or do you have to fill out a slip and get audited for every transaction?

Post reply on HN