AFAIK, BTC and ETH have been classified as commodities - would FTX have to adhere to Commodity Exchange Act?
What Happened at Alameda Research
111–120 of 437 posts
Re: What Happened at Alameda Research
#112Before 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…
Nobody will be voted out. You cannot get elected without cash, but if you do then you can't remain in office without it. You also won't influence legislation without money in your campaign or PAC wallets. If HN users want to impact policy and legislation, its not happening without donating a lot of money (or to a limited extent time) en masse to lobbyists and institutes that believe in whatever it is you believe in.…
I've wondered a lot about a hypothetical scenario where people organize and crowdfund a pool of money with the intent of disbursing it to anyone who votes for the legislation they want. For example, vote to codify Roe and you can get a slice of the pie. It's almost surely explicitly illegal though, but the absurdly wealthy are already playing this game, why can't we do it too?
Re: What Happened at Alameda Research
#113No post body was provided.
Re: What Happened at Alameda Research
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heard of it. Repeatedly. Never seen any, you know, proof.
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post have by now admitted the legitimacy of the Hunter Biden laptop story (of course they waited for the election to be over before doing so). If you haven't seen any proof, it's because you haven't looked.
The legitimacy of _which_ story about his laptop? Was it really filled with child porn? There were so many stories.
Please feel free to share links to the NYT or WaPo acknowledging all this truth. I feel very remiss in having missed it.
Re: What Happened at Alameda Research
#115A $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.
It sounds more like an admiring compliment. Although for cloud providers, the costs of things like hackers stealing credentials and using them to mine shitcoins are also considerable.
Re: What Happened at Alameda Research
#116Re: What Happened at Alameda Research
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m no expert in the space but was under the impression FTX was still considered a low volume exchange. If Alameda mm was still providing substantial volume they may have felt the price they were paying being bad at trading was worth it from a marketing point of view. This was the same crew buying stadium naming rights and over paying for eSports teams. As for hiring an adult, have you seen some of the things they’ve…
OTP put in something like that in the fund I was at. Yes it's small for them but it's still serious, the guy in charge wants to move on to bigger things. Oh and I totally forgot to comment on the math. Kelly criterion, I don't get how the guy could have studied physics at MIT and not understood it. It's simply a result that tells you how much to bet of your stash if you are presented with some repeated betting opport…
Kelly criterion is not the best strategy for one. It’s the best strategy for an ensemble of ones in many universes but you can only live in one universe. It’s a nerd trap because it seems so elegant and reasonable.
Re: What Happened at Alameda Research
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m no expert in the space but was under the impression FTX was still considered a low volume exchange. If Alameda mm was still providing substantial volume they may have felt the price they were paying being bad at trading was worth it from a marketing point of view. This was the same crew buying stadium naming rights and over paying for eSports teams. As for hiring an adult, have you seen some of the things they’ve…
> FTX was still considered a low volume exchange According to a random source, they moved volume on the order of 500 billion. Transaction fees of 0.1% for 500 billion is a lot of million to keep the lights on.
For a maker and taker with best fees, the exchange only made 0.5bps, not 10bps. We happen to know that top rebates were pretty hard to achieve though, so most volume probably paid at least a couple more tenths of a basis point.
Re: What Happened at Alameda Research
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Heard of it. Repeatedly. Never seen any, you know, proof.
If you know how to torrent you can download an image of his iPhone or iPad taken from that same laptop.
Why would I need to torrent it? And how do I know it's legitimate?
I had assumed that the big news about its contents would break any day now. All I've ever seen is people talking about what people told them that they totally saw on it.
Re: What Happened at Alameda Research
#120> Most news accounts seem to portray the scale of the bankruptcy as relatively small.
This is a key point.
They lost $16B in customer deposits.
LTCM lost $4.6B in investor funds.
Enron lost $11B in shareholder capital.
Interestingly, while Madoff is widely quoted as having lost $65B, that was almost all fabricated paper wealth, actual losses were around $18B and $14.4B of that was recovered and returned.
All of these situations are obviously somewhat different, but if what we're starting to hear is correct, FTX may be one of, if not the, biggest financial frauds/scandals in history. The media doesn't seem to be treating it as such.