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FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

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41–50 of 217 posts

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#41

> the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals. The most fascinating part of this whole story to me is just how few checks and balances there were in this company. Even without a board, did major investors not get his quarterly financials? If the leaked balance sheet was any indication of their level financial engineering cap…

How would that help? Anyone can lie on a spreadsheet or deck.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#42
Just a general statement on people commenting on this saga: Sam wasn't doing effective altruism. He was lying about doing effective altruism.

It's weird to me that people talk about this as an indictment of EA...but this rings similar to me as claiming that this is an indictment of DeFi or cryptocurrency generally. Sam/Caroline weren't doing DeFi, and neither were they really doing anything related to cryptocurrency. This was just a pretty staightforward scam.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#43

Just a general statement on people commenting on this saga: Sam wasn't doing effective altruism. He was lying about doing effective altruism. It's weird to me that people talk about this as an indictment of EA...but this rings similar to me as claiming that this is an indictment of DeFi or cryptocurrency generally. Sam/Caroline weren't doing DeFi, and neither were they really doing anything related to cryptocurrency.…

How was he not doing EA? He was lying AND donating to causes. I'm very pro-EA but that's a weird claim.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the total lack of corporate governance that contributed to it is totally legal, and could have possibly prevented the fraud and theft.

Not investing into companies that are obviously either frauds or extremely incompetent is the investor's job. We don't need a lot of new regulation to make it harder for you to buy bridges from people you meet on the subway.

The idea behind the lack of regulation is that the impact is contained to the investors. It's obvious that in sufficiently large cases, that's not true. If these actors are able to do damage to entire sectors, they should have to do some minimum stuff: keep track of their money, have board meetings, submit to audits, etc.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#45
> The amount raised contained numerical references to marijuana and oral sex: $420.69 million raised from 69 investors. An article published by one of FTX’s investors, Sequoia, called that fundraising a “meme round,” referring to the embedded jokes.

Is Sequoia going to need to rebrand itself after this? Sure does raise some questions about their judgement and professionalism. Hey Investors, we're raising a round of almost half a billion dollars and the theme is...

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#46
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean that Sam was the one who sold Binance the FTT which Binance subsequently used to cause FTT to collapse? Yes exactly. Binance triggered FTX's downfall by dumping FTT I don't know if they actually dumped; they just announced it. It doesn't matter now.

It matters! Because that'd be hilarious. Is that really true that an announcement of a pending large sale (but no actual sale) was enough delta to topple the house of cards? Fascinating.

CZ announced that he was going to sell a certain amount of FTT and people could see that there wasn't that much liquidity on all the markets combined which implied that the price was going to near zero eventually, so other people completely rationally started selling FTT before CZ.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are likely other charges that they could face. I don't think this rises to the level of embezzlement (although IANAL), but the missing customer deposits, lack of strict segregation between Alameda and FTX, and the use of company assets for personal loans and purchases will probably lead to indictments.

that I agree on, just commenting on this specific article

It goes much deeper. They clearly stole a lot of customer money and SBF is supposed to have had a "backdoor" he could use to move funds between the exchange and Alameda to avoid detection by auditors. It doesn't get much more criminal than that in finance.

https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/exclusive-least-1...

Of course, with the way he and his family are connected, it wouldn't surprise me if he eventually walks free.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#48

Just a general statement on people commenting on this saga: Sam wasn't doing effective altruism. He was lying about doing effective altruism. It's weird to me that people talk about this as an indictment of EA...but this rings similar to me as claiming that this is an indictment of DeFi or cryptocurrency generally. Sam/Caroline weren't doing DeFi, and neither were they really doing anything related to cryptocurrency.…

be careful about portraying any time an EA practitioner shows up negatively as "well they weren't actually doing EA" / adopting that line of defense from the EA community. obviously that community now wants to distance themselves from bad press

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#49
post #43

Just a general statement on people commenting on this saga: Sam wasn't doing effective altruism. He was lying about doing effective altruism. It's weird to me that people talk about this as an indictment of EA...but this rings similar to me as claiming that this is an indictment of DeFi or cryptocurrency generally. Sam/Caroline weren't doing DeFi, and neither were they really doing anything related to cryptocurrency.…

How was he not doing EA? He was lying AND donating to causes. I'm very pro-EA but that's a weird claim.

Prominent EAers like McAskill have said (before this scandal) that EA is only valid if the money is earned honestly. They say that they never intended EA to be "steal to give".

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#50

Just a general statement on people commenting on this saga: Sam wasn't doing effective altruism. He was lying about doing effective altruism. It's weird to me that people talk about this as an indictment of EA...but this rings similar to me as claiming that this is an indictment of DeFi or cryptocurrency generally. Sam/Caroline weren't doing DeFi, and neither were they really doing anything related to cryptocurrency.…

It wouldn't be an indictment of DeFi/cryptocurrencies if it weren't for... you know... this being basically the main pattern used in all of DeFi/cryptocurrencies.

https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

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