21–30 of 101 posts
The code snippet where they generated the FTX backstop fund's "current balance" displayed on the website by multiplying the exchange's daily trading volume by a random normal number is NUTS! This was the supposed crypto wonder-platform!
It is insane how there wasn't a single shred of accountability. I just wonder who was giving them tens and hundreds of millions of dollars without any auditing or due diligence. It seems even the most superficial audit would have revealed it to be a sham.
Wild to see some actual code from the FTX repo. Laughed at the takeaway of making sure you at least hide your fraud behind some messy code.
The code snippet where they generated the FTX backstop fund's "current balance" displayed on the website by multiplying the exchange's daily trading volume by a random normal number is NUTS! This was the supposed crypto wonder-platform!
As someone relatively involved in the crypto space the past few years, no one saw FTX as anything to be proud of. It was a centralized exchange, basically a web2 company that handled crypto. Only the TradFi VCs (the Mr. Wonderfuls of the world) spouted rhetoric like that. The engineers building out the chain ecosystems & protocols on top of it never thought much of it other than another place to trade with orderbooks…
Also known as a company.
Pretty insane that Sam Bankman-Fried decided to plead not-guilty. And it's interesting that their defense is an implication that a witness is committing perjury for a lighter sentence without any evidence backing it up. And just what in the world were any of these people thinking? Sam Bankman-Fried isn't remotely charismatic, so I just don't understand why people would follow his demands and actively participate in s…
It seems like if you were committing massive fraud, you'd want to avoid leaving permanent records of it on someone else's systems.
But I think this is generational thing. If you grew up when web browsers were already prevalent, a "text file on your hard drive" probably means almost nothing. It's just not the way you use computers.
I also like this bit from the article:
Note to self: if you’re going to write code to do fraud, make it messy and unreadable to reduce the chances it’s later put in front of a jury as evidence.
Pretty insane that Sam Bankman-Fried decided to plead not-guilty. And it's interesting that their defense is an implication that a witness is committing perjury for a lighter sentence without any evidence backing it up. And just what in the world were any of these people thinking? Sam Bankman-Fried isn't remotely charismatic, so I just don't understand why people would follow his demands and actively participate in s…
Would easily bet that was his decision. He's obviously made insanely stupid choices already, like leaking Caroline Ellison's journal and getting his bail revoked.
I'm sure he was counseled against it, but his lawyers were probably like "well, he wants to swing the bat, and we get paid more if it goes to trial anyway."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sequoia led their one of their rounds, everyone assumed sequoia did enough due diligence, everyone goes in and fills the round; it's assumed its a trustworthy platform for retail
I honestly feel Sequoia should be held partially responsible for funding and marketing such a blatant criminal enterprise. I'm a little tired of these venture capitalists claiming all innonence when they should have a burden of responsibility. They want all the upsides and none of the downsides to throwing millions at people.
Pretty insane that Sam Bankman-Fried decided to plead not-guilty. And it's interesting that their defense is an implication that a witness is committing perjury for a lighter sentence without any evidence backing it up. And just what in the world were any of these people thinking? Sam Bankman-Fried isn't remotely charismatic, so I just don't understand why people would follow his demands and actively participate in s…
It's also funny to me that they just use Github and Google docs. It seems like if you were committing massive fraud, you'd want to avoid leaving permanent records of it on someone else's systems. But I think this is generational thing. If you grew up when web browsers were already prevalent, a "text file on your hard drive" probably means almost nothing. It's just not the way you use computers. I also like this bit f…
Of course, the other possibility is that at least having this amount of visible paper trail was intentional - the CTO probably had a little voice in the back of his head going "Umm, maybe committing multi-billion dollar fraud is a bad idea...", but the GitHub history probably helps him more than it hurts now, at the expense of SBF.
Pretty insane that Sam Bankman-Fried decided to plead not-guilty. And it's interesting that their defense is an implication that a witness is committing perjury for a lighter sentence without any evidence backing it up. And just what in the world were any of these people thinking? Sam Bankman-Fried isn't remotely charismatic, so I just don't understand why people would follow his demands and actively participate in s…
It's also funny to me that they just use Github and Google docs. It seems like if you were committing massive fraud, you'd want to avoid leaving permanent records of it on someone else's systems. But I think this is generational thing. If you grew up when web browsers were already prevalent, a "text file on your hard drive" probably means almost nothing. It's just not the way you use computers. I also like this bit f…
Yes, I had to give my professional opinion on why some healthcare software here was breached so I asked the company to deliver the source: this software is written from begin 2022. They don’t use any normal (git, cvs, sourcesafe etc) versioning system; just zip files with dates in them. So they sent the ‘latest version’ and we found it’s not the same version as the breached version on the server. So they are saying they don’t know who or what ‘changed the deployed version’.