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What Happened at Alameda Research

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241–250 of 437 posts

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#241

A side issue, but I found it distracting that the text consistently refers to Caroline Ellison by her first name alone, rather than last name or both names or initials like all other people discussed (and like is generally done for public figures covered in news articles etc). But I'm not in the "community", I don't read a lot of this inside baseball stuff. Is this the way she is usually referred to? It looks like he…

she went by other names like "Fake Charity Girl"

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#242

A side issue, but I found it distracting that the text consistently refers to Caroline Ellison by her first name alone, rather than last name or both names or initials like all other people discussed (and like is generally done for public figures covered in news articles etc). But I'm not in the "community", I don't read a lot of this inside baseball stuff. Is this the way she is usually referred to? It looks like he…

It opens by using their full names, but goes on to refer to them as sbf, caroline and trabucco in the rest of the piece. I guess it's like "zuck" and "pg" etc, I don't think it was meant in a bad way.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do an investment group which is successful in making large, traditional, real money investments think they know better than the numerous seasoned venture funds and experienced crypto investors who did not give $95m to FTX? What was it about FTX's lack of internal controls or experienced decision-makers which only TVG was able to identify as a source of value?

Lol. FTX’s investors were a whose who of “seasoned venture funds and experienced crypto investors”. Sequoia, Third Point Iconiq etc. Coinbase Ventures gave them money. Blackrock was an investor. If you want to see FTX as an indictment of the entire venture industry I think there is an argument to be had there. But picking on OTP is just a lazy rhetorical device. They made a similar investment to other funds in the in…

Coinbase Ventures (a fund whose wheelhouse is, uh, investing in crypto ventures) did not invest anything like $95m.

Your fourth example, Blackrock, is tellingly neither a seasoned venture fund nor an experienced crypto investor.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#244

> When loans were recalled in early 2022, an emergency decision was made to use FTX users’ deposits to repay creditors. Just so you know, this is a clear and obvious prison sentence in normal finance. Also FTX itself was trading with customer deposits instead of just keeping them like an exchange is supposed to do, which is also prison in normal finance. Matt Levine wrote a good piece on this debacle, and will probab…

FTX supposedly collected 0.1% commission on $100B+ volume per day. Why couldn't they just get a loan to cover their losses?

Neither of these numbers are correct, they imply 100M of profit a day.

Volume is heavily weighted towards the highest tiers which on ftx were paying 0.015% to take and receiving 0.01% to make (given, alameda would receive no rebate).

They've also never claimed to do 100B+ a day. They published stats about their volume as well as some other exchanges here: https://ftx.com/volume-monitor.

It's stale since the collapse but they're claiming 16bn, and usually were claiming 5-10bn a day in the last month. Give some fudge factor for various traders at various tiers and this backs out to 1m a day order of magnitude.

Not covering a multi billion dollar hole with that anytime soon.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#245
This is really low quality 'reporting'. Those tangents about how bad SBF blog is compared to Carroline's. Wtf? He calls out NYT research, but he bases his "research" on random anonymous forum msgs... The world really is dumbing down...

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTPP has quite a solid reputation and this particular investment was a miniscule speculative bet. You can see the performance over time here [1]. [1] https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/investments/our-advantage/our-per...

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.

I'm sorry but thats not how it works. This investment was made out of their venture fund which deliberately makes risky bets, but is a small amount of the overall pie. OTPP is fine and is going to produce returns which are favorable, let's stop with the hyperbole.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#247
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty cool [0] is the Kraken page, at [1] someone collected both background information, links, and PoR entities, and finally a 2014 post of Kraken’s first PoR audit [2]. [0] https://www.kraken.com/proof-of-reserves [1] https://niccarter.info/proof-of-reserves/ [2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=528432.0 Edit: And here is CZ of Binance claiming they’ll do it soon as well: https://nitter.kavin.rocks/…

Have you read Kraken's own page about that? Here is a quote: "The results of our most recent audit were once again verified by top-25 global accounting firm, Armanino LLP. " (1) So from this I read that Kraken has done audit themselves and then some other firm has verified it. This (if true) is called attestation, and not audit. Attestations are an empty claim with no proof in the tokenbro industry. And second issue…

Unless I’m misunderstanding things (as a non-finance person that is very possible), this is not a normal audit, but instead proof, that they actually have the customer tokens they claim to have.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#248
post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Isn't this essentially what a PAC is?

My understanding is that a PAC can pay for advertising and campaign costs but I'm suggesting literally just giving it to them, straight to their bank account.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#249

> 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…

I'm wondering if the numbers are believable. That's because I think they are doing "paper valuation," like when a drug bust happens, and the value of the kilo is broken into "street-level" packets; quadrupling the value.

I am not a crypto expert, but from the bit I do know, it seems as if it's fairly difficult to correlate fiat with crypto.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#250
post #201
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>LTCM lost $4.6B in investor funds. [...] All of these situations are obviously somewhat different, [...] biggest financial frauds/scandals in history. LTCM shouldn't be in that list because that wasn't fraud. That hedge fund had a flawed math model of volatility of their holdings when a cascade of events got triggered by Russia defaulting on their bonds. LTCM losses were magnified by their over leveraged positions.…

Not just PhD. World famous economists with Nobel prizes.

I can't find which Nobel prize were in, do you have any names?

Robert C. Merton got the nobel prize, but it seems 3 years later (ironic)

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