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Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”

mollywhite.net

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Re: Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”

#121

Post by detrites »

crispyambulance wrote: post #89
detrites wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe because the fruits of those few well-intentioned founders labours aren't blasted on the news 24/7 like SBF was, doesn't mean they don't exist? I've seen people in parts of South America where the banking system can be completely unusable, using their phone to send and receive crypto payments cheaply and reliably, enabling them to safely transact with family. I've heard of this also happening in Africa. Others,…

> Others, workers from Mexico for example, working in the US, are able to remit their small incomes back home for pennies instead of a 15% western union bite out of it. ... and ALSO occasionally have the value of explode or implode drastically because it's so volatile and extremely dangerous to use as actual currency. And anyway, where are you getting that western union takes 15%? For fun, just looked up the fee on w…

What is "it"? There are thousands of cryptocurrencies, many pegged to fiat. There's no shortage of price-stable options, but this isn't so relevant for this kind of remittance anyway as typically the crypto will only be held briefly each end.

In these situations, someone gets a salary, they immediately send it to a hungry family, who then straightaway pays for essential items with it. Latency is important, sometimes more than cost, as having anything arrive is preferably to being completely without due to a lost transfer.

Unfortunately WU fees of 15% or sometimes more are common in poor regions. It's costly because payment corridors in those regions (which is not as simple as country A - country B) are so unreliable - money literally disappears on the way - that the only way it can be done for small value transfers is to hike up the fees to subsidise the losses.

You might get a reasonable seeming quote for major centres, but actually go through the process and fill in the details for more out of the way locations and you'll find very different prices.

WU and banks all also silently charge another 1-3% on FX rates, this is well-known and uncontroversial - visit wise.com for an accurate overview.

(Wise is actually a pretty good traditional-finance-backed solution to these problems for some regions. They did also trial transfers with a crypto back-end for a while, not sure if anything came of it.)

Re: Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”

#122

Post by detrites »

wpietri wrote: post #117
detrites wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First page of search results for "remittance" & "crypto" has numerous examples. At random, here's a referenced article covering Africa, South America & Asia: https://thenetworkstate.com/crypto-remittances I invite you to use the amazing powers we have at our fingertips to find them yourself, and understand why something valued at two pizzas 13 years ago just had its max institutional hold increased from 1% to 2% by t…

Thanks for telling me about this exciting new technology called "search", but it turns out that not only am I aware of it, I have been for quite a while. It is not my job to read random search results in hopes of finding some sort of data that demonstrates the value of crypto. I have already researched this a fair bit and have a provisional conclusion that suits me fine. If you would like your claims about it taken s…

There were two links provided in my post, one with it's own decent links and another from investing.com regarding action by the Bank for International Settlements (the Bank of Banks) - so I'm not sure what you're on about?

Re: Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”

#123

Post by notch656c »

wpietri wrote: post #118
notch656c wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presuming drawing arbitrary lines must improve a situation is probably the worst argument I've heard on HN and that's saying something. Also astonishing to call the difference between ~$1B in total wealth and ~$1M in wealth a "nit." I went out of my way to make sure the difference was far from a nit to show the absurdity so hey instead somebody just lied to make it sound practically the same, I love it. >You can do t…

> Presuming drawing arbitrary lines must improve a situation is probably the worst argument I've heard on HN and That is not a claim I made. If that's the best you can do, I'm tapping out here.

>"Regulations often draw arbitrary lines because that's a relatively easy way to improve a situation..."

--wpietri

I gotta frame that on my office, it's so bad. I would tap out too to save face after that one. And I absolutely fucking love the example was the literal think of the children meme. Have a good day and thanks for the great laughs.

Re: Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”

#124

Post by wpietri »

detrites wrote: post #122
wpietri wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for telling me about this exciting new technology called "search", but it turns out that not only am I aware of it, I have been for quite a while. It is not my job to read random search results in hopes of finding some sort of data that demonstrates the value of crypto. I have already researched this a fair bit and have a provisional conclusion that suits me fine. If you would like your claims about it taken s…

There were two links provided in my post, one with it's own decent links and another from investing.com regarding action by the Bank for International Settlements (the Bank of Banks) - so I'm not sure what you're on about?

Ok. You say you don't understand. I am happy to take you at your word, and don't see and benefit in going further. Thanks for participating.

Re: Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”

#125

Post by wpietri »

notch656c wrote: post #123
wpietri wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presuming drawing arbitrary lines must improve a situation is probably the worst argument I've heard on HN and That is not a claim I made. If that's the best you can do, I'm tapping out here.

>"Regulations often draw arbitrary lines because that's a relatively easy way to improve a situation..." --wpietri I gotta frame that on my office, it's so bad. I would tap out too to save face after that one. And I absolutely fucking love the example was the literal think of the children meme. Have a good day and thanks for the great laughs.

If you are that determined to misunderstand the point, I am happy to leave you to it. Godspeed, tendentious month-old account. Maybe I'll catch you on your next go-around.

Re: Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”

#126

Post by anonymoushn »

automatic6131 wrote: post #86
breck wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto is a 24/7 global, resilient payments network. It increases the velocity and transparency of money, which will have a huge impact on global economy. Also, if you think customers losing a $8B to FTX is bad, wait until you read about retail banks in the USA taking $30B a year from their customers: https://breckyunits.com/the-great-bank-robbery.html

>Crypto is a 24/7 global, resilient payments network. Man, your mind is gonna be blown when you realise that you can have that _right_ now! All you have to do is move to a first world country* *like the UK or any country in the EEA. US not included. I jest, but my point is serious. This is already a reality for anyone living in Europe. It's a political problem (is a 24/7 global payment network important to people in…

> All you have to do is move to a first world country*

If you move to the UK you will have 24/7 payments to all other countries?

Re: Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”

#127

Post by kees_ »

jtbayly wrote: post #4
bradgessler wrote: post #2

What annotations software is this? All news should be reported this way when source documents are available. Edit: scrolled to the bottom of the page and found https://github.com/molly/annotate

So it's just the front-end, relying on you to manually write all the HTML. I'd love some software to make generating these (or similar) annotated documents easily. Any ideas?

This is what my fork of her project does https://github.com/kees-/annotate :)

Well, all it does is generate her identical format from a spec. Like @bradgessler said a gui to coerce annotations to that format from highlighting would be awesome

Re: Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”

#128

Post by twelve40 »

wpietri wrote: post #57
lolinder wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard at this point for me to not blame crypto-the-technology and crypto-the-culture for the repeated and spectacular failures of crypto-the-industry. It's not like FTX was an isolated incident. It's becoming sort of a scapegoat for crypto enthusiasts because it was such a big deal, but practically everything that has come out of the crypto space since Bitcoin and Ethereum has been a grift to some degree or anoth…

Exactly. I think there was a tipping point. The only question for me is how many times you can shear the same sheep. There have been so many bubbles here and somehow people kept coming back for every shiny new idea. DAO, ICO, NFT, etc. But given the way NFTs never really took off plus the ongoing domino-fall of major crypto names, maybe the brand value of crypto has finally gone so far negative that the space is done…

> DAO, ICO, NFT

that's a great list to keep in mind, the same people who were foaming at the mouth when these acronyms first popped up would probably be embarrassed now or pretend like they've never heard of these. I'd say "crypto lending" at "8% apy guaranteed" is another one on that list that will be embarrassing to think back to.

Re: Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”

#129

Post by Haga »

detrites wrote: post #46
wpietri wrote: post #8

I am truly grateful for people like Molly White, David Gerard, and Amy Castor. As the crypto grift circus expanded and expanded, I just got worn out. There was so much to pay attention to as it metastasized. All those writers have been diligently following it for years with a critical eye, and all of them have taken a lot of heat for it. As the wheels come off, it's great to have their detailed insights.

There needs to be a differentiation between good and bad actors in this drama as opposed to the lazy and inaccurate idea of "the crypto grift". These recent billion-dollar grifts plaguing crypto have primarily been enabled by actors working steadfastly against all of crypto's core principles: decentralisation, secure your own money, no middle-man. These players are employing all of the same tactics enabled by the tra…

[dead]

Re: Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried's “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview”

#130

Post by UncleEntity »

breck wrote: post #102
naijaboiler wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be true that FTX customers would be better off with FTX still running with or without SBF. But that does not negate the fact that lending customer money to Almeda is capital F fraud.

> But that does not negate the fact that lending customer money to Almeda is capital F fraud. I think you are probably right here. If SBF does not have the ability to make customers whole, then I agree.

It’s only fraud if the money is lost?

Or is the fraud doing something that was contractually (legally?) prohibited?

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