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FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

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231–240 of 350 posts

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#231
post #4

It’s amazing to me that enough people still believe in the crypto scam to keep pumping BTC above $15k. I guess they are still managing to mint fools at a fast enough pace to keep the price up.

Wouldn't we expect to see BTC hold or even gain when everyone is trying to exit their "crypto" positions? After all, BTC is the reserve currency of all these crypto scams, as you call them.

No, because the USD market price is psychological, just like the stock market [1].

And no, BTC is not the reserve currency; Ethereum is. Nearly all of these "crypto tokens" are just ERC-20 contracts that run as contracts on the Ethereum network. They're not even cryptocurrencies, just contracts with sets of rules that mimic the properties of a currency.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mr-market.asp

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this seems like a rather interesting defense of crypto. To use the metaphor, did the trough create the pigs? Or did it only draw a horde of pre-existing pigs to one place? Perhaps the amount of quasi-criminals that we are seeing in the crypto sector right now is just a sign that crypto was highly successful and not a condemnation of crypto in and of itself.

You are half right. It obviously did not create the pigs, but the "trough" is the place for easy pickings: Crypto. Of course Crypto did not create scammers, scammers simply have an easy time scamming people there.

Agreed 100%, but troughs are good for other things besides feeding pigs. I hope the actually innovative, non-scam projects don't have their name tarnished too much by all the pigs.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you're asleep when it falls?

Uhhh you set a stop loss number. If it hits x sell. So if I was given a coin currently "worth" $15,000 for $5. I could set a stop loss of $6 and always make a profit since my initial investment was $5. Asleep, awake, doesn't matter.

Stop losses can fail when prices are falling quickly enough.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://i.imgur.com/fsCmqVh.png I just don't understand all of the "BTC will never fall below " thinking.

You say you can't understand, but the chart you yourself posted (to illustrate price volatilility) also shows a 12,000% increase in price in less than 8 years, up to today. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but maybe that , the improbable 12000%, is the thinking that you're trying to understand?

That's my point - given the extreme volatility (and the fact that it was trading below $1K less than 6 years ago) why would anyone think there's some floor below which the price of BTC will never fall? Please don't bring up mining costs, which are completely irrelevant here.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't Fox News make tons of money? Do you think they could capitalize on this failure of what you describe as the papers of record and start doing investigative journalism into financial and tech businesses?

Fox News is primarily a cable news network that republishes some of their work as articles. Television isn't really a medium that lends itself to long form investigative journalism. Why would they bother with it when what they're doing is way more profitable? They also have a reputation for being the partisan press. They'd have to completely rebrand to get into a less lucrative area.

60 minutes and PBS NewsHour beg to differ

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#236
post #48

It's incredible that SBF was being touted by Sequoia, WEF, Fortune, chumming it up with Clinton and Blair in the Bahamas, getting meetings and kid glove treatment with the SEC, relatively glowing profile as a "do-gooder" by the NYT. All while FTX had a Chief Regulatory Officer who was basically a career white-collar criminal. It beggars belief that anyone who dug half an inch into this story wouldn't have seen 90,000…

With every crypto collapse there seems to be an associated failure by the media to do any real digging. The same thing happened with Theranos where, with a few exceptions, the media fawned over Elizabeth Holmes. It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their jobs or they've always been this bad and I'm just getting older. There are plenty of earlier scams and bubbles (Enron, dot-com bubble) that slipped und…

People on this site routinely post links to evade paywalls. They celebrate ad blockers. But now many of the same people are wondering why "the media" didn't stop a tech fraud? You get what you pay for.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh absolutely. Had I known the absurdity of crypto would still have been going on this long, I would have set up a bunch of rug pulls and run away with the money. Interrst rate hikes kill zombie companies. Scams put dumb people under the lash of their betters.

It's all scams and frauds and you are upset... because you weren't in on it?

If laws do not matter, I am not willing to follow laws.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh absolutely. Had I known the absurdity of crypto would still have been going on this long, I would have set up a bunch of rug pulls and run away with the money. Interrst rate hikes kill zombie companies. Scams put dumb people under the lash of their betters.

> Scams put dumb people under the lash of their betters Continuing this line of thought, isn't the next level of "betters" the people who would readily employ violence to get retribution on those who scammed them? Or even those who would just employ violence to take what they want in general? I can understand the law of the jungle as-it-currently-is point that boils down to "lol normie rubes fell for advertising", bu…

If there is no legal action taken against people who use violence, then yes.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#239
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With every crypto collapse there seems to be an associated failure by the media to do any real digging. The same thing happened with Theranos where, with a few exceptions, the media fawned over Elizabeth Holmes. It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their jobs or they've always been this bad and I'm just getting older. There are plenty of earlier scams and bubbles (Enron, dot-com bubble) that slipped und…

At least with Theranos, the was the media excuse of "new technologist isn't sharing the secrets of her device yet, but she showed enough to get big-names as investors and #37 on the Fortune list with as much revenue as MSFT is signed on to the tech to make it seem believable". With Enron, they were very very good at obfuscating their scam. But it was the WSJ affiliate that was the first mover on Enron being fishy. A…

Enron was unlike Theranos, in that Enron was originally a legitimate company while Theranos was a scam from the beginning. Enron was a company that sold natural gas, a real product, that became a scam as they used increasingly dodgy accounting practices to push their stock ever higher. Theranos on the other hand never had a real product, and before Theranos even started Holmes was informed by experts (particularly Phyllis Gardner) that it would never work.

In the early days of Enron, an investigative journalist would have found a real gas trading company. But at no point in the history of Theranos would an investigative journalist worth their salt have found a real company.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#240
post #48

It's incredible that SBF was being touted by Sequoia, WEF, Fortune, chumming it up with Clinton and Blair in the Bahamas, getting meetings and kid glove treatment with the SEC, relatively glowing profile as a "do-gooder" by the NYT. All while FTX had a Chief Regulatory Officer who was basically a career white-collar criminal. It beggars belief that anyone who dug half an inch into this story wouldn't have seen 90,000…

With every crypto collapse there seems to be an associated failure by the media to do any real digging. The same thing happened with Theranos where, with a few exceptions, the media fawned over Elizabeth Holmes. It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their jobs or they've always been this bad and I'm just getting older. There are plenty of earlier scams and bubbles (Enron, dot-com bubble) that slipped und…

It’s not just the media. The investors are the primary ones to blame here, in my opinion. They literally gave hundreds of millions a of dollars to a company with a compliance officer with a history of financial fraud and scams and then touted the CEO as a boy wonder. The fact that they invested lended a lot of credence, for better or worse, to FTX.
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