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What Happened at Alameda Research

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Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#51

Post by oldgradstudent »

blitzar wrote: post #34
nl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it's almost the opposite. This piece speculates very strongly about SBF's stimulant usage degradating his cognitive abilities. Eg: > If the above observations about SBF’s personality and competence are even half true, that would go a great deal toward explaining Alameda’s losses. The entire article goes into much further depth. But it doesn't even speculate about malice.

"their systems became unprofitable" - "Alameda & FTX jointly continued to lose large amounts of money" - "uncompetitive market-making strategies, risky lending practices" - "erratic behavior and unprofitable gambling". > losing all the money accidentally rather than malice (far more likely) They sound an awful lot like trading / accidental losses than malice to me.

Alameda was a hedge fund. It could lose all of its money and it would be totally fine.

The moment they touched customer funds it became fraud and theft.

This was not accidental. Losing it in trading might have been, but it was trading with stolen funds.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#52

Post by Semaphor »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #22
flanked-evergl wrote: post #9

Before or after they were bribing politicians for favourable regulation for FTX at the detriment of their competitors who were not fraudulent? https://prospect.org/power/sam-bankman-frieds-multimillion-d... > Crypto’s supporters in Congress are determined to ignore the massive gap in capacity between the two agencies; in fact, they likely understand that its incapacity is part of its appeal to FTX. A bill proposed by…

Well FTX's competitors are not necessarily not fraudulent, especially their primary competitor Binance.

What fraud does Binance do besides evading U.S. regulations?

note: This is an actual question.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#53

Post by wikfwikf »

lordnacho wrote: post #30

Makes some sense. When stuff is messy, you can do financially stupid things. I've sat on desks that lost money from not realizing some very simple things like having options with upcoming dividends. If SBF really was on drugs and playing League of Legends badly, perhaps he also didn't know what was happening in his shop. But... you have all this money. Hire an adult? Almost anyone who's had a trading desk job would t…

The Ontario Teachers' investment is outrageous. They are charging middle-class people (by definition) good money from their retirement savings to make reasonable investing decisions and do due diligence.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#54

Post by remoroid »

For even more context of how bad SBF was at League of Legends, a large part of their player-base is children and teens. You would not expect a normal functioning 30 year old man to lose to 12 year olds after years of playing with the frequency he did.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#55

Post by rxyz »

remoroid wrote: post #54

For even more context of how bad SBF was at League of Legends, a large part of their player-base is children and teens. You would not expect a normal functioning 30 year old man to lose to 12 year olds after years of playing with the frequency he did.

I don't think League is a popular game in that demographic. I see it as a old man/woman game now, like counter strike

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#56

Post by ZephyrBlu »

SilverBirch wrote: post #36
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had been following this whole saga at all you would know that Twitter anons have been a way better source of information than anyone else. The on-chain anaylsis, digging and commentary done by people on Twitter has been insanely insightful.

Twitter might provide more information than the NYT, but there's a reason NYT doesn't publish it - because the NYT wants to be reliable. They want their claims to actually stand up to scrutiny and be an accurate portrayal of the events we know happened. Whereas big chunks of this article are just pure speculation. The whole section about how Alameda might have had a rogue algo are just made up out of whole cloth. Is…

> This article is very little more than just a gossip rag version of the NYT article

This characterization is so far from the contents of the article I have to assume this comment is in bad faith or you're extremely biased towards the NYT.

The article is 90% discussing facts/quotes from various sources and 10% speculation on what actually happened by people who are very familiar with crypto markets.

The NYT piece on the other hand contains almost no facts (90% narrative) and throws a pity party for SBF. It's a complete joke.

NYT piece: https://archive.ph/413e0.

E: the author of this piece even states on Twitter that it's mostly a compilation of known information. Nowhere near gossip or speculation.

https://twitter.com/0xfbifemboy/status/1592387837126905857

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#57

Post by wweeeebb »

SkyMarshal wrote: post #22
flanked-evergl wrote: post #9

Before or after they were bribing politicians for favourable regulation for FTX at the detriment of their competitors who were not fraudulent? https://prospect.org/power/sam-bankman-frieds-multimillion-d... > Crypto’s supporters in Congress are determined to ignore the massive gap in capacity between the two agencies; in fact, they likely understand that its incapacity is part of its appeal to FTX. A bill proposed by…

Well FTX's competitors are not necessarily not fraudulent, especially their primary competitor Binance.

This is a false equivalence. FTX stole customer deposits and lied about it, to the tune of billions of dollars.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#58

Post by EdwardDiego »

TedShiller wrote: post #25
gillesjacobs wrote: post #3

I like how OP opens smugly by calling the NYT article a fluff piece, then proceeds to immediately cite anonymous Twitter anecdotes as better sources. He's right about the specific NYT article not including much pertinent information, but they're a serious journalistic publication and have verification standards for sources.

Quoted post unavailable.

Heard of it. Repeatedly. Never seen any, you know, proof.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#59

Post by SilverBirch »

This article spends quite a bit of time talking about SBF's risk appetite and how it might be drug related. I think that's missing a fairly obvious piece of logic.

In order to decide to go into crypto trading you need to have an extremely high tolerance for risk. The crypto industry is self-selected for risk in the first place, you don't need complex explanations of why they use lots of leverage on highly volatile assets, that's literally the reason why they're there. If SBF had a low appetite for risk he wouldn't have entered crypto or started a start up, he would have stayed in trad-fi getting paid massive sums of money for some fairly basic quant work. It's not that Sam has a high risk appetite, it's that in order to get into the position Sam was in you need a high risk appetite.

And that obviously poses a big problem for people who want to use a crypto exchange - because they can only find exchanges run by people with a massive risk appetite making it likely to blow up in your face.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#60

Post by systemicdanna »

choeger wrote: post #29

A $3M monthly AWS bill. that's a nugget here. What that means is that amazon, Microsoft, and google are essentially selling shovels during a gold rush. On a subscription basis. In a form that makes it tedious and costly to actually figure out how many shovels your business has, what they do and who uses them regularly. Essentially, when there's a digital market hype, the big cloud providers collect their share on the…

That doesn’t sound like a valid criticism of cloud service providers. Or shovel sellers.
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