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FTX balance sheet, revealed

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Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#101

Post by jsemrau »

usrusr wrote: post #98
mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

An interesting observation: first people get used to trusting e.g. Coinbase, in the slow, organic way of trust to grow, then they see a similar company, the brain does that category drawer game and suddenly the new company gets trust by similarity. Certainly not the full amount but a much better start than the first one had. I wonder if there's already a term for that? What's even the field where these observations w…

The innovator's dilemma

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#102

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#103

Post by AmericanOP »

b0b10101 wrote: post #44
AmericanOP wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

Well as michael burry said, its ludicrous to think asset bubbles cant be predicted. One of leading indicators is an increase in the frequency and complexity of fraud within the sector.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#104

Post by bjornsing »

lottin wrote: post #99
bjornsing wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my understanding is correct the Swedish central bank, Riksbanken (which happens to be the oldest in the world), has said that whey do not want to hold their QE assets to maturity and that they are essentially bankrupt. They will be bailed out by the tax payers of course.

You're probably understanding it wrong. Central banks have little or no debt, and they can "print" reserves at no cost. Reserves is the stuff they pay their debts off with. As a result it's virtually impossible for a central bank to go bankrupt.

I think your understanding is a bit off. Sure, central banks can “print” money by buying stuff. But they still have a balance sheet. If the stuff they buy falls in value and they sell it for less then they incur a loss. If they lose more money than the equity on their balance sheet then they will have negative equity. Theoretically a central bank can keep operating with negative equity, but it doesn’t look good. The Swedish central bank probably won’t. It will ask for a tax payer bailout instead.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#105

Post by irusensei »

The whole thing that is bugging me is that they made big political donations to both D and R. They use the money they conjured out of thin air and backed politicians with it. They probably backed the politicians who were most friendly to them. Those politicians might have won and that dirty money might have done a difference.

Does that sound moral to you? I think it’s absolutely terrifying. Every candidate that received that money should have their relation to Scam Bankman-Fraud investigated. It gets worse when you realize his mother and business partner are either related to certain political parties and the SEC chairman.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#106

Post by largepeepee »

lend000 wrote: post #60
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.

Binance was publishing fake volume numbers (basically a sine wave chart) up until ~2018. They faked it until they made it. The only reputable exchanges are KYC/western based Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and perhaps some of the smaller US based companies. Honorable mention to Bitmex, which was truly financially innovative (basically what FTX and other crypto futures exchanges tried to copy) and admitted exactly what it w…

And a week ago you would have included FTX in that KYC "western" list esp since they had so many big "western" investors and Washington's ears including the SEC.

Not to mention Bitcoin and crypto were created out of the failures of the trusted KYC "western" banking standards of 2008.

You are literally repeating blind trust mantra based on region bias that has just failed again this week.

Crypto is about avoiding the need to trust any of these entities, if it still hasn't enabled that maybe it isn't mature yet as an industry. CeFi or not.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#107

Post by oldgradstudent »

b0b10101 wrote: post #44
AmericanOP wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 con…

> it's still the theranos playbook, it's just a different image projected

You unfairly group all types of fraud together.

Fraud is a creative endeavor, diverse and fascinating.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#108

Post by jiggawatts »

bmitc wrote: post #90

Does he really expect anyone to believe his “poorly labeled internal ... account” story? How can you have $8 BILLION mislabeled? As in, if he transferred or loaned it to Alameda, literally no one was asking: wait, where did this sum of money, so large that it is a massive percentage of our value and could crash the company, come from? Despite all the idiocies that we’re learning about, it is still hard to believe. An…

> you have one person spearheading away through the bushes, while everyone else is getting slapped in the face with the branches snapping back and thorns.

You just described me about 15 years ago. I've learned my lesson and avoid "unsupportable solutions" these days like the plague, but I still get pulled aside occasionally and get told quietly that nobody understands why I'm talking about solutions to problems that haven't even come up yet.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#109

Post by grey-area »

bboygravity wrote: post #100
grey-area wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story is the same for all these other giants of crypto. Binance, Tether, Bitfinex are all basing their purported asset value on holdings of multiple worthless currencies, many of which they mint and price themselves.

Interesting to see that you and many others think that "the real financial world" works significantly differently. Countries, (central) banks, family funds and hedge funds are about to fail (or are already failing) in a very similar way but on a much much grander scale.

Everyone’s a con-artist is neither accurate nor useful. Some things are clearly a con (the operations listed above in my view), most things are not.

Re: FTX balance sheet, revealed

#110

Post by recuter »

irusensei wrote: post #105

The whole thing that is bugging me is that they made big political donations to both D and R. They use the money they conjured out of thin air and backed politicians with it. They probably backed the politicians who were most friendly to them. Those politicians might have won and that dirty money might have done a difference. Does that sound moral to you? I think it’s absolutely terrifying. Every candidate that recei…

Sounds like plain old moral hazard to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard

Why people think that such things are limited to any one political party or that progressive liberals are somehow immune from it is beyond me.

Used to be a time, about a decade ago, where these very same folks would lose their collective minds when Mitt Romney said stuff like "corporations are people my friend" and "money is speech".

I guess if you can't beat them, join them. Heck, SBF even donated to Mitt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried#Political_do...

Instead of fighting to get money out of politics they decided they can just play this game better and their ends justify the means with very predictable results.

The only surprising thing is they got caught. Although it remains to be seen whether anybody actually admits fault, goes to jail, or any actual changes are made.

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