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FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

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Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#121

Post by xorcist »

themgt wrote: post #48

It's incredible that SBF was being touted by Sequoia, WEF, Fortune, chumming it up with Clinton and Blair in the Bahamas, getting meetings and kid glove treatment with the SEC, relatively glowing profile as a "do-gooder" by the NYT. All while FTX had a Chief Regulatory Officer who was basically a career white-collar criminal. It beggars belief that anyone who dug half an inch into this story wouldn't have seen 90,000…

VCs buys anything they think they can unload on PE, funds, or even retail later down the line.

It's not specific to crypto. Theranos was a similar fraud, and so was WeWork.

They can make a public spiel about how they were deceived as long as they want, but to anyone following them at the time it was obvious they were going in with their eyes open. Whether the product works or not is simply not their top priority when making an investment.

edit: I'd like to point out to the people who clearly disagree with the above that the dude running this scheme from Bahamas was openly taking drugs and playing videogames in meetings with investors. It's even mentioned in the VC material. Yet they did shower him with money. Please do tell what kind of due diligence could possibly miss the warning flags that maybe this company wasn't completely honest?

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#122

Post by nuclx »

once_inc wrote: post #66
bedhead wrote: post #31

As if crypto wasn’t useless enough, it’s always at the center of endless scams. What’s it gonna take for people to walk away from this poison?

"Crypto" is useless. Bitcoin isn't. Maximalists have been warning against this stuff happening for nearly a year now. Ever since Luna collapsed, those voices grew louder, but the yield-farming degenerates chose not to listen.

Privacy coins aren't. The problem with Bitcoin is, that it CAN be regulated to death.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#123

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #82
themgt wrote: post #48

It's incredible that SBF was being touted by Sequoia, WEF, Fortune, chumming it up with Clinton and Blair in the Bahamas, getting meetings and kid glove treatment with the SEC, relatively glowing profile as a "do-gooder" by the NYT. All while FTX had a Chief Regulatory Officer who was basically a career white-collar criminal. It beggars belief that anyone who dug half an inch into this story wouldn't have seen 90,000…

With every crypto collapse there seems to be an associated failure by the media to do any real digging. The same thing happened with Theranos where, with a few exceptions, the media fawned over Elizabeth Holmes. It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their jobs or they've always been this bad and I'm just getting older. There are plenty of earlier scams and bubbles (Enron, dot-com bubble) that slipped und…

I think this is an odd take, given that it was the WSJ that broke the Theranos story and CoinDesk that broke the FTX story.

Yes, true investigative reporting is rare (and expensive), but good work is still being done.

For the media at large, given the volume of stuff you can read, much of it is plain "story-telling" or "narratives", and I do think the media is more likely to go with things that fit the narrative of the day than look at things with a critical eye.

With Theranos, the media absolutely wanted to highlight a "female Steve Jobs", and Holmes used that to her advantage. Similarly, with SBF, given all the smarmy characters in crypto, he fit the narrative of "the good guy", "the next JP Morgan" coming to save the financial system for good.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#124

Post by rideontime »

zozbot234 wrote: post #52
themgt wrote: post #48

It's incredible that SBF was being touted by Sequoia, WEF, Fortune, chumming it up with Clinton and Blair in the Bahamas, getting meetings and kid glove treatment with the SEC, relatively glowing profile as a "do-gooder" by the NYT. All while FTX had a Chief Regulatory Officer who was basically a career white-collar criminal. It beggars belief that anyone who dug half an inch into this story wouldn't have seen 90,000…

Wait, wasn't the NYT supposed to take a very critical look at everything in "tech", as a matter of editorial policy? Why were they giving such a glowing (no pun intended!) endorsement of crypto, of all things? Something doesn't add up here.

Yeah, a lot of us have questions that Kevin Roose won't answer.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#125

Post by rideontime »

arisAlexis wrote: post #101
JustLurking2022 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tether has similarly been caught in the past using the funds behind their supposedly "fully backed" tokens for highly speculative investment. So far it's just such a big scam that no one has been able to create a large enough run to topple it... so far.

Not really but it’s a long discussion. In any case in this sense the author coul also throw other kinds of conspiracies unrelated. True journalism ! Add your sauce

Yes, really.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#126

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

toss1 wrote: post #110
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly. We don't have written accounts of the tulip craze but I would imagine there were a lot of nefarious activities underway then. This is more global and the movement of money is transparent but anonymous in some ways. I think a hard part for a criminal enterprise like a drug cartel…

And many if not most celebrities happily and frequently turn down jobs to protect their reputations. And that is not only turning down reputable jobs, but jobs for perfectly respectable businesses, because they don't want to sell out. I was literally reading of one yesterday, where George Clooney turned down $35 million for a day’s work on an airline advertisement. Sure, they can almost always find someone willing to…

You're comparing murder to an actor speaking lines in a 30 second commercial. Its an advertisement and you are questioning people's morals.

If any of the actors did any research they likely were convinced it was a solid thing to do at the time. It could have even been a "oh so-and-so is doing an ad, then I'm in" type of thing. Its pretty obvious whoever was involved at FTX was pretty convincing and doing wrong/illegal things behind the scenes so that's why I said they should get a pass.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#127

Post by factsarelolz »

mberning wrote: post #76
herendin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is honestly no price I could buy it at where I would be willing to hold. Really no price? Even given the opportunity to buy at $10, you still wouldn't hold?

Are you confident it won’t go to $5? I’m not.

I would be very confident I could sell before it hits $5.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#128

Post by hotpotamus »

ok123456 wrote: post #112
brookst wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families. Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time. So IMO, “they’ve always been this bad” is the answer, but it’s not entirely fair. Kind of like saying the cooks at McDonald’s ha…

It wasn't just 'The Morning Call.' It came from the top from the elite, international, consensus making publications like The New York Times and the Washington Post. These are the papers of record that have the resources to still do real journalism. We're harangued by them how 'democracy dies in darkness' every time we click one of their links, and yet they chose to give all these guileless grifters flattering covera…

Doesn't Fox News make tons of money? Do you think they could capitalize on this failure of what you describe as the papers of record and start doing investigative journalism into financial and tech businesses?

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#129

Post by once_inc »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #99
once_inc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Crypto" is useless. Bitcoin isn't. Maximalists have been warning against this stuff happening for nearly a year now. Ever since Luna collapsed, those voices grew louder, but the yield-farming degenerates chose not to listen.

> "Crypto" is useless. Bitcoin isn't. What unique properties does Bitcoin have that makes it useful that other cryptocurrencies don't, beside first mover advantage?

Bitcoin is provably the only decentralized system that has permissionless, borderless, digital scarcity. Other cryptocurrencies are less secure (the many direct forks, such as Bitcoin Cash and the like), less decentralized (Solana, BNB), less permissionless (any system that can be halted by its operators) or less scarce (Ethereum's emission schedule can be changed by a single organisation).

Bitcoin's value (not in terms of money, but in terms of usefullness) is an emergent property of the combination of proof of work, the difficulty adjustment, and its peer-to-peer nature. Other cryptocurrencies suffer because their founders have changed one or more of those properties in an attempt to "fix bitcoin" (bigger blocks! faster blocks! more blocks!), but that cripples the resulting emergent value.

If Bitcoin is directly cloned as Coinbit, and miners flock to it, and it achieves a greater total hash rate than Bitcoin, then its value supersedes Bitcoin's. Bitcoin's first mover advantage makes this unlikely (though non-zero).

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#130

Post by once_inc »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #120
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Crypto" is useless. Bitcoin isn't. What unique properties does Bitcoin have that makes it useful that other cryptocurrencies don't, beside first mover advantage?

I'm guessing the logic is something along the lines of "all crypto is crap... except for the crypto I have of course."

You guessed wrong.
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