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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?

#201

Post by SilasX »

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.

Speaking of the Super Bowl, their ad aged really poorly. Someone posted a clip from it[1] that has Larry David being pitched on FTX as being a safe way to get into crypto, and he turns it down, saying he's never wrong about these things.

The joke is supposed to be that he's being comically clueless to do so, because it follows a series of shorts[2] of him not "getting" the point of advancements like the wheel, the fork, the toilet, the Walkman, etc. But now he just looks wise!

[1] https://twitter.com/DegenNFTs/status/1590451000523227136

[2] Full ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-FQqo46CJQ

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

#202

Post by ajkjk »

jamesfmilne wrote: post #125
ajkjk wrote: post #23

I still don't get who is actually trading crypto on these exchanges. I have trouble believing it is not 99% wash trades.

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…

yeah but even if you're into crypto, you're not selling and buying stuff all day, trading between different coins. So what are all those transactions about?

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

#203

Post by imtringued »

WJW wrote: post #169
wombatpm wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Longtermists simply assume we will harvest Hawking radiation for hundreds of billions of years after the heat death of the universe.

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

#204

Post by imtringued »

pjc50 wrote: post #57
duvenaud wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, banking was already hundreds of years old in the 2000s. So recent bubbles and crashes in traditional markets seem like evidence that regulation, at least the kind that ends up being implemented, isn't doing much to prevent very bad outcomes.

There are two kinds of risk that are fundamentally unavoidable in being a "bank" - that is, any institution that borrows short and lends long. One is liquidity as a result of that duration mismatch: you have enough money owed to you that you've lent out, but it's not due yet. The other is loan writeoffs: you've lent money that you cannot get back, often because it's secured against an asset whose value has fallen sig…

The problem is that once rates hit zero people will just hoard cash like Keynes suggested with his liquidity trap. The only "funds" available are short term deposits. Nobody is buying certificates of deposits. When the bank issues a loan without a CD it has to create new liquid money, that is the only way.

The answer is quite simple, just keep going down with interest rates even if they are negative. That is fully consistent with the loanable funds model.

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

#205

Post by wombatpm »

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.

In light of recent events this appears to be an inaccurate statement

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

#206

Post by rideontime »

stusmall wrote: post #54
rideontime wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I buy some? What can I do with FTT?

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.

I thought this was obvious bait but go off

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

#207

Post by rideontime »

dibt wrote: post #112
rideontime wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should I buy some? What can I do with FTT?

No, you should not. It's an exchange token. It's meant to be used as collateral for your trading, instead of USD, BTC, etc. It incentivizes this by giving you reduced exchange fees based on how much FTT you own.

Huh. Why would the exchange want to encourage me to hold their token instead of non-associated crypto?

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

#208

Post by dibt »

rideontime wrote: post #207
dibt wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you should not. It's an exchange token. It's meant to be used as collateral for your trading, instead of USD, BTC, etc. It incentivizes this by giving you reduced exchange fees based on how much FTT you own.

Huh. Why would the exchange want to encourage me to hold their token instead of non-associated crypto?

I honestly can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic…

In the case of FTX: fraud. They were giving people a useless token for tokens that had value elsewhere.

With Binance, you could make the case you own equity in the exchange, but that could have the same outcome as FTX.

It’s worth noting these types of tokens aren’t permitted on US-based exchanges. Likely because they are the most obvious unregulated securities (more so than other tokens).

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

#209

Post by cscurmudgeon »

adamisom wrote: post #96
acjohnson55 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he lacks morals, but he seems to have a Lex Luthor "ends justify the means" way of thinking. If you're whole moral framework is effective altruism, then as long as the good you do with the money you accumulate is greater than the harm caused in its accumulation by a ratio that exceeds your alternatives, you're all good.

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.

You can take 10 healthy organs from one person without any social connections and use the organs to save 10 terminal patients.

See the problem with utilitarianism?

Unlike other hypothetical examples given here (Skynet, cancer cure), this scenario is possible today.

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