191–200 of 437 posts
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I can't think of any possible reason. https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-joe-bid...
Ryan Salame, the co-CEO, donated heavily to the GOP.
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The NYT article is headlined "How Sam Bankman-Friedʼs Crypto Empire Collapsed". The parts of the article which actually answer this question are, in their totality, as follows: > Alameda had accumulated a large “margin position” on FTX, essentially meaning it had borrowed funds from the exchange, Par 6. Common knowledge, finance-splained and followed by equivocation and hand-waving from SBF. > On Nov. 6, Mr. Zhao ann…
I think you're misunderstanding what the NYT article is, it's not a piece of deep investigative journalism, it's an interview with SBF with context attached.
I can't see the article because of the login, but what does the piece achieve? Does the interview ask Sam hard questions?
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The NYT article is a shockingly bad puff piece. It doesn't once mention fraud. Doesn't call out that Alameda borrowing funds from FTX deposits is insanely illegal Makes it sound like poor SBF got unlucky and it wasn't his fault he recklessly gambled $8+B of customer deposits
Given both SBF and Caroline's family connections, I'm not surprised that the MSM is going to treat them with kid gloves.
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I agree with that. I don't think this was malice though - just extreme stupidity (and hopefully criminal). I think they thought they could trade their way out of it. That's different to malice which goes to motivations.
Alameda just non-maliciously gave their own account special privileges on their own exchange, non-maliciously front-ran customer orders, non-maliciously traded on material nonpublic information (their own exchange listings), non-maliciously used their ownership of their exchange to strike trades that caused them $400mm of losses in one of their multiple KCG-style algorithmic meltdowns, non-maliciously stole billions…
For the greater good of humanity. The most effective altruism.
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A Merkle tree may show what crypto assets are held, but it doesn't stop the exchange from having a balance sheet with a negative $8bn entry described as “hidden, poorly internally labled ‘fiat@’ account”. Until these crypto companies are audited by actual recognized auditors I would just assume that everything they say is suspect.
The auditor that Kraken used claims to be "one of the top 25 largest accounting, consulting and technology firms in the U.S.". Is the idea that they aren't "auditors"?
Also, this wasn't an "audit" in the traditional sense of the word, it was an attestation as to proof of reserves based on the Merkle tree.
The press release about the "audit" is full of red flags:
"Administered by Armanino LLP, the Proof of Reserves audit is the second of its kind conducted on our exchange since 2014". Two audits in eight years, lol.
"Though the audit covers just two of the over 100 assets available for trading on our exchange". They only checked BTC and ETH reserves, nothing else, lol.
From the audit report itself:
"This report may not be suitable for any other purpose. The procedures performed may not address all the items of interest to a user of this report and may not meet the needs of all users of this report and, as such, users are responsible for determining whether the procedures performed are appropriate for their purposes."
"We were not engaged to and did not conduct an examination or review engagement, the objective of which would be the expression of an opinion or conclusion, respectively, related to the platform account liabilities and asset balances represented by Kraken. Accordingly, we do not express such an opinion or conclusion. Had we performed additional procedures, other matters might have come to our attention that would have been reported."
"The practitioner’s report is as of a specified point in time and we have no responsibility to update the report or findings therein for subsequent points in time."
All this "audit" tells you is that on December 31, 2021 Kraken had an amount of BTC and ETH that matched customer deposits. That's it. Nothing about other coins. Nothing about assets and liabilities overall (e.g., did they take out loans using customer BTC as collateral). Nothing about financial practices. Nothing about what they may or may not have had the day before or the day after.
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It's not about performance or risk management, it's about due diligence. They should not be giving any amount of money to an organization with such poor internal checks of their finances.
--if you made an investment based on audited books but the books were still cooked - what more can you do? - audit the auditer maybe - at some point you have to trust the books --
If the company turns out to be a fraud and the investment worthless, are you still entitled to say "nobody could have known" and "only 1 in 10 has to be a winner"?
Fucking nothing will happen.
Here is the turtle’s cut, for example. Out in the open.
Going through all their shenanigans, any legal activity on the exchange was rare. Extremely criminal behavior. SBF would buy tokens from his personal account, Alameda would then buy the same tokens, and then FTX would list those tokens after Alameda bought them. Criminal beyond measure and it's absurd that all of these big name funds did not do even ten minutes of due diligence. The Ontario Teacher's Pension Fund was…
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…
If the cup is half empty it's called bribing. Otherwise it's called lobbying. I don't know anything about the CFTC in particular but I'm familiar with the general idea of lobbying and the role it plays in a representative government. Elected officials have to interface with basically every industry in the country. How is any specific representative in a legislature going to have the knowledge required to vote on a ba…
What's actually needed is government agencies staffed with industry insiders who knows that they will never ever work in the industry again and have nothing to loose from putting the general public first, but this is kind of hard to do when government work is not seen as something of particularly high status, where people go for self realization after a success career in the private sector.
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The NYT article is headlined "How Sam Bankman-Friedʼs Crypto Empire Collapsed". The parts of the article which actually answer this question are, in their totality, as follows: > Alameda had accumulated a large “margin position” on FTX, essentially meaning it had borrowed funds from the exchange, Par 6. Common knowledge, finance-splained and followed by equivocation and hand-waving from SBF. > On Nov. 6, Mr. Zhao ann…
I think you're misunderstanding what the NYT article is, it's not a piece of deep investigative journalism, it's an interview with SBF with context attached.