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Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

adityabaradwaj.com

11–20 of 197 posts

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#11
Celsius lost millions in dumb mistakes like that too.

Someone at Celsius manually approved a bogus transaction on a hacked website...

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/03/crypto-lender-ce...

Badger later reimbursed Celsius with inflation on their token that would be released slowly over several years. "restitution".

Someone at Celsius thought that they could sell that restitution token and ended up forfeiting it... which was another $22m loss...

https://www.thismorningonchain.com/articles/defi/celsius-mad...

Then they tried to get the DAO to vote to give them back their lost tokens, without even admitting who it was that lost the tokens... and everyone voted against it.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#12

Celsius lost millions in dumb mistakes like that too. Someone at Celsius manually approved a bogus transaction on a hacked website... https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/03/crypto-lender-ce... Badger later reimbursed Celsius with inflation on their token that would be released slowly over several years. "restitution". Someone at Celsius thought that they could sell that restitution token and ended up forfeiting…

yeah a lot of "dumb" mistakes. whoops accidentally sent to wrong address, which i happen to own the private key too...

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#13
A lot of the "genius" credit given to FTX, Alameda, Sam are all during a time when crypto was soaring, probably partially because people were home more and got free checks in the mail. The fact that a single person could absolutely tank the entire company with a single trade shows how reckless they all were. But it worked because the market was going up. That's it. The market slumped for like a week and their behavior dropped them to 0.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#15

"the utility we gained by moving fast outweighed the occasional costs we paid due to poor risk checks, hacks, and the like" I think this may have potentially been true when everything was going up volume-wise, but as competition improves there's less margin for error.

It was true from Sam's perspective, where all of those holes provided cover for fraud, embezzlement, and self-dealing (possibly up to and including the large “oops, unattributable hack” loss right as Sam was about to be shoved out the airlock.)

But that's because the holes were actually directed added utility from that perspective.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#17
Here is a good analysis of the flash crash from that day: https://twitter.com/austerity_sucks/status/14523324727258194...

- It lasted 12 seconds.

- Total BTC traded was 290.54

- Only 2% of that was at price of 10K or below.

- Most volume happened in $20-30K range, over 50% discount to mkt.

Here is a tweet from someone (rightly) speculating that it had been Alameda: https://twitter.com/TheoryBitcoin/status/1452345411759398923

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#18
post #7

This happens in “proper” firms too

Case in point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group

The number of things that had to go wrong at the same time in the Knight case was large as far as I remember.

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#19
post #6

It's wild to think that just one fat fingering mistake was responsible for the collapse of the whole FTX and Alameda ecosystem.

It's wild because it isn't true.

Millions, billions, it's just one letter difference, right?

Re: Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

#20

Celsius lost millions in dumb mistakes like that too. Someone at Celsius manually approved a bogus transaction on a hacked website... https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2021/12/03/crypto-lender-ce... Badger later reimbursed Celsius with inflation on their token that would be released slowly over several years. "restitution". Someone at Celsius thought that they could sell that restitution token and ended up forfeiting…

yeah a lot of "dumb" mistakes. whoops accidentally sent to wrong address, which i happen to own the private key too...

rookie mistake. have to send it to a family member’s address so you can claim it isn’t yours - truthfully.
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