91–100 of 251 posts
I'll just quote part of what I said a month ago :) > And given what's leaked from their balance sheet, I don't see how people avoid jail time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608691 I'll also add that SBF going on tour was the stupidest thing he could have done. Every time he spoke, he was giving the government more evidence. Hubris has often been the downfall of the rich and powerful throughout history. What'…
>like Musk and SBF I‘m sorry, but what ? Just to give some perspective that I don’t think HN really gets: most of my friends have increased their twitter usage. If you aren’t aware, whatever the team did there a few days ago really has appeared to cut bots down to almost 0. SBF is an [alleged] criminal who has [allegedly] defrauded people of billions of dollars, and will likely be spending a substantial amount of tim…
So your friends are using twitter more and you just assume everyone else does too? Have you considered that people who have other opinions exist and theirs is as valid as yours?
I'll just quote part of what I said a month ago :) > And given what's leaked from their balance sheet, I don't see how people avoid jail time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608691 I'll also add that SBF going on tour was the stupidest thing he could have done. Every time he spoke, he was giving the government more evidence. Hubris has often been the downfall of the rich and powerful throughout history. What'…
>like Musk and SBF I‘m sorry, but what ? Just to give some perspective that I don’t think HN really gets: most of my friends have increased their twitter usage. If you aren’t aware, whatever the team did there a few days ago really has appeared to cut bots down to almost 0. SBF is an [alleged] criminal who has [allegedly] defrauded people of billions of dollars, and will likely be spending a substantial amount of tim…
Ultimately stopped using it because it isn’t really for me. I also don’t care enough for anyone’s opinion that much that I’m willing to scroll through insanity, bots, and a holes to find a nugget. But I’m sure millions of others do enjoy that.
HN is my fav social media lol.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoa, are you trying to tell me all the big fish hyping up the Regulators Are Evil Economy get near-total legal protection of a regulated market, but all the little people who got taken in by it are going to get screwed? An incredible and unforeseeable development! Surely there will be more charges over time but the end result isn’t going to change much. The wealthy people who’ve been boosting all of this will take t…
None of the big fish are getting money back. No one is going get money back. It's gone. At the same time, I have trouble finding sympathy for anyone involved. SBF is a sociopath, thief and liar. Those big-name investors should have known better and I'm sure in many cases they did. They probably should start lawyering up too, because they've got investors of their own who have been harmed either through malfeasance of…
I'll just quote part of what I said a month ago :) > And given what's leaked from their balance sheet, I don't see how people avoid jail time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33608691 I'll also add that SBF going on tour was the stupidest thing he could have done. Every time he spoke, he was giving the government more evidence. Hubris has often been the downfall of the rich and powerful throughout history. What'…
If he wasn't the type to go on tour and shout, then he wouldn't have attracted enough investors in the first place to be rich. It takes a specific personality to market things so others will buy, and that personality doesn't like to shut up and so won't. Some things sell themselves, but most great ideas sit around unknown by people who need them just because they don't know about it. I'd love to buy a better mousetra…
Quoted post unavailable.
As the larger exchanges collapse, it's also clear that many of these prices were simply invented. For example, it's pretty clear that FTX + Alameda alone invented at least a few billion dollars that simply never existed, but that were priced into BTC and others. Tether is almost certainly doing something very similar, as may be Binance and others.
And these are just some of the make-believe dollars in crypto. You then have all of the minor coins where someone buys one for a dollar and sells it back for two dollars, and someone else who had bought a thousand for a thousand dollars gets shown by some exchange that their funds doubled in value! And now they can leverage that to buy even more worthless coins, causing someone else to think their funds are increasing in value and so on.
It's all a house of cards propped up by savvy unscrupulous marketers.
Will BTC or ETH or Monero fall to 0 if the exchanges died? Probably not, as people actually do use them in some small measure (international payments with countries with failed banking systems, money laundering, evading sanctions, etc). But they would be back closer to where they were 10 years ago, a few dollars or maybe hundreds of dollars for 1 BTC. And most of the others would just die out.
I hope that swiftness of these charges will slightly diminish all these voices that keep repeating everywhere that 'the man' is on it with him, that the media defend him etc.
It won’t, just like even in this thread you see the perennial “this is good, actually.” At rock bottom the crypto world is held up by unadulterated greed and it shows on both ends: I am willing to make too-good-to-be-true “investments” because greed; when that unfolds the obvious way it was going to then it’s someone else’s fault and they’re not moving fast enough — also greed. In short: “Why aren’t I rich yet, I’ll…
That's not quite what the grandparent poster was talking about.
One strain of thought on FTX/SBF has been conspiratorial. Allegedly, SBF was "a big Democratic donor" with connections in high places, so he would evade any serious US-based law enforcement action.
This view is likely related to FTX's (previous) attempts to present itself as the lawful-good crypto exchange, actively lobbying for US regulation. Such efforts necessarily come with a lot of political deal-making, making the idea of a corrupt bargain more superficially plausible.
It's sort of curious that this SEC action is to protect the venture capital investors like Sequoia who invested in FTX shares directly. If I were a retail investor who lost my savings in FTX, I might be feeling upset that the government is rushing to action in defense of billion-dollar funds whose own due diligence failed massively, while seemingly nothing is being done to help those who invested in crypto based on F…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whoa, are you trying to tell me all the big fish hyping up the Regulators Are Evil Economy get near-total legal protection of a regulated market, but all the little people who got taken in by it are going to get screwed? An incredible and unforeseeable development! Surely there will be more charges over time but the end result isn’t going to change much. The wealthy people who’ve been boosting all of this will take t…
None of the big fish are getting money back. No one is going get money back. It's gone. At the same time, I have trouble finding sympathy for anyone involved. SBF is a sociopath, thief and liar. Those big-name investors should have known better and I'm sure in many cases they did. They probably should start lawyering up too, because they've got investors of their own who have been harmed either through malfeasance of…
People rush to simplify here with 'there are no angels" arguments. It doesn't matter that it was crypto. Those funds were stolen.
The most interest aspect in the FTX saga, for me, is that SBF was treated very gently by major news outlets (and maybe by government regulators too)... until regular individuals in social media started asking: Why is SBF being treated so kindly? Why would journalists (and regulators) assume that SBF meant well? A possible answer that no one ever mentions is that SBF possesses many qualities that are valued and admire…
He wasnt
> until regular individuals in social media started asking
And there is the crux ... until blah blah. "twitter" didnt get them over the line to arrest him. Neither I nor "twitter" can prove a counter factual but it is just a fantasy of people who have read and written too much shitty fan fiction that SBF was never going to get investigated