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What Happened at Alameda Research

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Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#301

Post by kryogen1c »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #272
simiones wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTX took customer deposits (which were supposed to be held in custody and untouched, according to their TOS) and loaned them out to Alameda to gamble with. That is entirely different from being over-leveraged and having your debts default.

> FTX took customer deposits (which were supposed to be held in custody and untouched, according to their TOS) and loaned them out to Alameda to gamble with This is what I initially suspected. But we can see FTX's balance sheet [1]. There is no loan to Alameda. "FTX shot its customer money into some still-unexplained reaches of the astral plane" is the best explanation we have for billions of missing dollars [2]. [1]…

> we can see FTX's balance sheet [1]. There is no loan

The problem with this is that the customer funds are also not present on their balance sheet. Levine opined about this yesterday; Like 3 of the biggest assets are coins ftx didn't pay for - so where did the money go?

That's why the Alameda explanation is likely, in one way or another. Money had to go somewhere.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#302

Post by MangoCoffee »

manholio wrote: post #140
DebtDeflation wrote: post #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…

> 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. Most of that wealth was manufactured in the crypto bubble, not actual money people worked for and put into crypto, just early stage ponzi investors that kept rolling their investment. The wealth, while apparently substantial, was never actually there, I think most understand that the mirage…

> Most of that wealth was manufactured in the crypto bubble, not actual money people worked for and put into crypto

Its real money.

https://twitter.com/Travis_Kling/status/1592198107734876160?...

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/14/ikigai-asset-ma...

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#303

Post by drpgq »

wikfwikf wrote: post #99
andromeduck wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have 220B AUM.

Canadian teachers and retired teachers have $220b, which they paid into the plan from their not particularly opulent pay packets. Nearly $100m was given to a company based in a regulatory haven, which does not know to within $5bn how much money it has, and which was able to steal from its customers without any oversight. Ontario Teachers were an anchor investor in a round which lots of less clueless people must have…

Unlike in the US, Ontario teachers are paid well relative to the average Canadian, especially with their pensions taken into account.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#304

Post by danrocks »

jasode wrote: post #142
DebtDeflation wrote: post #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…

>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.…

The book about LTCM’s failure, “When Genius Failed”, is a fascinating account of what happened, and a quick read.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#305

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dwater wrote: post #300
DebtDeflation wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a hunch that: >negative $8bn entry described as “hidden, poorly internally labled ‘fiat@’ account” probably had something to do with the loan as that seems to be roughly the amount and the description literally makes no sense.

It's also possible that the one hastily thrown together excel spreadsheet the CEO himself chose to release doesn't include the full accounting. Maybe Sam decided to leave off an illegal off-book loan?

> doesn't include the full accounting

I think the running bet is there is no full accounting.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#306

Post by tommica »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #260
DebtDeflation wrote: post #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…

I wonder how much of those $16B in customer deposits were actually lightly-traded altcoins that could never have been liquidated at anything close to that value? There is no doubt they defrauded people of a lot of (real!) money, but my guess is a huge chunk of that $16B top-line figure is fantasyland dog-coin nonsense. Whereas the LTCM and Enron investors at least started with real cash.

But those coins were most likely purchased with real money?

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#307

Post by xdavidliu »

memish wrote: post #284
mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bunch of BS. It's obviously easy to say that in hindsight. There are a million reasons for why he did not take the investment, but in none of the published conversation was anything about him thinking SBF is lying. In fact, knowing Elon, if he had really said that at some point before FTX collapsed, he sure would have published it by now to prove how smart he is.

He was skeptical even though SBF wanted to give him money , not the other way around. And people Elon knew were pushing for SBF. Elon ended up ghosting him anyway. Look at the chat logs that were revealed in court. Michael Grimes [IBanker at Morgan Stanley]: Do you have 5 minutes to connect on possible meeting tomorrow I believe you will want to take? Elon: Will call in about half an hour Michael: Sam Bankman Fried i…

> Elon: Blockchain twitter isn't possible, as the bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer to peer network, unless those "peers" are absolutely gigantic, thus defeating the purpose of a decentralized network.

Anyone able to evaluate this comment? Is this another "poorly batched 1000 RPCs slowing down home timeline" remark?

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#308

Post by rr888 »

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…

I remember during the dotcom boom people thought the infrastructure providers like Sun Micro would be safer, but it got screwed along with the website companies.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#310

Post by PubliusMI »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #114
petchyindee wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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