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FTX balance sheet, revealed

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Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#41

Post by aaronbrethorst »

blue_light_man wrote: post #36

The only lesson I learend from this whole debacle is never trust people and organisations you know from the Internet no matter how famous or humble or good they are. Trust the tech. But never the people. Especially for financial advices. Be it Sequoia. Or Yc. PG, Chamath, Mark Cuban ,Balaji or the Collision brothers. Tom Brady or SBF or CZ. Never fucking trust people or organisations. They are all here for their fina…

you definitely shouldn't trust NFL quarterbacks. https://people.com/sports/former-packers-quarterback-brett-f...

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#42

Post by astrange »

TotoHorner wrote: post #3

So... is this guy just a complete sociopath or something? Telling everyone what regulations should be (and buying politicans) to ensure consumer protection while simultaneously sifting away 90% of consumer funds ? How does a person lie that much?

He just wants to impress his girlfriend, who seems to have turned herself into a monster by doing enough amphetamines to replace the contents of her brain with Slate Star Codex.

https://twitter.com/0xhonky/status/1591630071915483136

https://twitter.com/autismcapital/status/1591601671943393280

(From the first tweet, it doesn’t seem like anyone in the conversation has read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_(probability_theory...)

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#43

Post by throwaway0asd »

blue_light_man wrote: post #36

The only lesson I learend from this whole debacle is never trust people and organisations you know from the Internet no matter how famous or humble or good they are. Trust the tech. But never the people. Especially for financial advices. Be it Sequoia. Or Yc. PG, Chamath, Mark Cuban ,Balaji or the Collision brothers. Tom Brady or SBF or CZ. Never fucking trust people or organisations. They are all here for their fina…

What I learned from this mess: nothing new. If anything this just reinforces what should already be painfully obvious: invest in real world value that you understand. I have not seen the real world value of crypto or understand how that makes makes outside of itself. Even before crypto currency markets were a thing and were like setting money on fire.

I apply that reasoning to all investments. Sure, I miss out on all the easy money hype trains, but the investment decisions are almost always safe and still better than market average.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#44

Post by b0b10101 »

AmericanOP wrote: post #21
TotoHorner wrote: post #3

So... is this guy just a complete sociopath or something? Telling everyone what regulations should be (and buying politicans) to ensure consumer protection while simultaneously sifting away 90% of consumer funds ? How does a person lie that much?

He ran the inverse Theranos playbook. Instead of a supremely polished persona, he hard-committed to the sweaty geek. Confidence, man.

it's still the theranos playbook, it's just a different image projected. and it still serves the same role - tapping into SV narratives and preconceptions to create an image that is super appealing to investors, the media and employees in order to spin up the hype flywheel, and excuse inconsistencies and misbehaviour. fundamentally both still took advantage of contrasting their traditionally inscrutable fields to contrast their highly visible images and paper over any skepticism.

either way the failing is the same - investors failed to preform adequate due diligence and lent their credibility to things they didn't fully understand because they were distracted by the charisma of the founder and were worried that they would miss potentially outsized gains. as long as large amounts of capital keep flowing to private markets (especially VCs) this will continue happening

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#45

Post by Marazan »

clarkeni wrote: post #28
Marazan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I think FT story made a mistake, it isn't 2.2 billion dollars of SRM, it is 2.2 billion tokens. Biiiiiiiiig difference.

It’s 2.2 billion dollars - but it’s using fully diluted value rather than circulating supply market cap.

Yeah, you are right. That is still bonkers crazy nuts.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#46

Post by mudrockbestgirl »

jjallen wrote: post #40

The thing that I always wondered about with FTX (and Binance frankly) is how did they get so big so quickly. What did they have that caused so many people to use _their_ exchange. This is still unexplained and was a major red flag. Usually to grow that big takes many years. Just look at Coinbase.

I don't know about FTX, but Binance has been shady from the very beginning. They got large quickly because they listed all kinds of **coins, had negative trading fee promotions, and in general did lots of shady growth hacking marketing tactics and partnerships. If you wanted to gamble altcoins, those would be on Binance, but not listed on Coinbase. That was many years ago when they started out of course. I'm curious where they are today. In my mind, the shady image of Binance hasn't changed, but maybe they got lucky with their investments and are actually fully backed and profitable now. Who knows...

Coinbase used to be US-only, and is still very US-centric. Binance and FTX are international. They only opened US exchanges later, but they are separate, and tiny compared to their international footprint.

I'm also curious how FTX got so big. When they started, the market seemed saturated with exchanges already, and they didn't really have differentation.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#47

Post by wolpoli »

Shank wrote: post #17

The "before this week" column seems to be attempting to draw sympathy by saying "but everything was fine before, seriously!" when in reality it just proved that, even in the best of worlds, they had an extremely optimistic view of the entire crypto ecosystem, including its liquidity. I can't believe they seriously held that much of their total value in their own issued token. That's just preposterous. Imagine if JP M…

> Imagine if JP Morgan Chase's entire value was in JP Morgan Chase stock, and they just reported that as their value in cash. It's like recursive valuation.

While I think real world finance is on much more stable ground than crypto, I thought it'll be funny to point out that many of the world's central banks back their liabilities (the currency they issue) with own government's bonds. Luckily, the bonds are denominated in the same currency. There is no chance of the central bank going broke, as long as they hold the bonds to maturity.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#48

Post by theCrowing »

jjallen wrote: post #40

The thing that I always wondered about with FTX (and Binance frankly) is how did they get so big so quickly. What did they have that caused so many people to use _their_ exchange. This is still unexplained and was a major red flag. Usually to grow that big takes many years. Just look at Coinbase.

Marketing with enough money you can make every fraud legitamite for some time especially now in the world of influencers.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#49

Post by password4321 »

password4321 wrote: post #24

The stories so far (HN items with >100 comments): Tuesday 11/08 129 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33518961 FTX Appears to Have Stopped Processing Withdrawals, On-Chain Data Show (theblock.co) 747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33520585 Binance to acquire FTX (bloomberg.com) 110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33523274 FTX Token, FTT down by more than 80% in less than 24 hours (ftx.com) Wednesday 11/…

And if you had an "FTX" alert on HN/Twitter, you'd have seen:

Sunday 11/06

1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33494404 Due to “recent revelation” Binance is liquidating their FTX Token holdings (twitter.com/cz_binance)

> Context:

Friday 11/04

254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33464494 Crypto trading firm Alameda Research might be insolvent (dirtybubblemedia.substack.com)

--

All in time for:

Tuesday 11/07 -> Monday 11/06 ("yesterday")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33518961#33520094

> I admit I did panic and tried to withdraw my funds yesterday. They just processed it today. A bit delayed but still processing.

--

"Get Out" vibes for sure.

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