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What Happened at Alameda Research

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Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have 220B AUM.

Canadian teachers and retired teachers have $220b, which they paid into the plan from their not particularly opulent pay packets. Nearly $100m was given to a company based in a regulatory haven, which does not know to within $5bn how much money it has, and which was able to steal from its customers without any oversight. Ontario Teachers were an anchor investor in a round which lots of less clueless people must have…

an enormous amount of our economy is based off gaslighting and manipulation

they can blur the line between honest mistake, gross negligence, nepotism, corruption, and thievery, enough that people who will applaud beating up a shoplifter for taking 20 dollars of junk will say "oh but they have nice suits and went to Stanford" about someone who gave 75 million dollars for magic beans.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#152
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NFT art was likely a bubble, not a Ponzi. Many investments are bubbles, but not Ponzis.

NFT art was a scam intended to create a bubble. The art market itself is a bubble. Famous art is primarily used for investment, tax avoidance, and sometimes money laundering. Occasionally someone will hang it on a wall and look at it, but it's more likely to end up in storage. NFTs were designed as a microcosm of the art investment market, sold on the promise of increasing resale value - like the real thing. Of cours…

No. Some NFTs are definitely art, like the ones by @beeple on Twitter. There are also NFTs that work as a membership card for a community, like BAYC. And of course there are scams too. You're oversimplifying.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#153

One thing that stuck out at me in the NYT puff-piece was: Alameda had accumulated a large “margin position” on FTX, essentially meaning it had borrowed funds from the exchange ... He said the size of the position was in the billions of dollars but declined to provide further details. Did FTX use their pool of customer deposits to extend leverage to margin traders?

The NYT is just lying. The people who controlled both FTX and Alameda stole funds from FTX (which FTX customers have claims against) and gave them to Alameda

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#155
Going through all their shenanigans, any legal activity on the exchange was rare. Extremely criminal behavior. SBF would buy tokens from his personal account, Alameda would then buy the same tokens, and then FTX would list those tokens after Alameda bought them.

Criminal beyond measure and it's absurd that all of these big name funds did not do even ten minutes of due diligence.

The Ontario Teacher's Pension Fund was "investing" in trash like this without even looking at their corporate governance. How do you treat a pension fund like that?

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#156
post #142

> Most news accounts seem to portray the scale of the bankruptcy as relatively small. This is a key point. They lost $16B in customer deposits. LTCM lost $4.6B in investor funds. Enron lost $11B in shareholder capital. Interestingly, while Madoff is widely quoted as having lost $65B, that was almost all fabricated paper wealth, actual losses were around $18B and $14.4B of that was recovered and returned. All of these…

>LTCM lost $4.6B in investor funds. [...] All of these situations are obviously somewhat different, [...] biggest financial frauds/scandals in history. LTCM shouldn't be in that list because that wasn't fraud. That hedge fund had a flawed math model of volatility of their holdings when a cascade of events got triggered by Russia defaulting on their bonds. LTCM losses were magnified by their over leveraged positions.…

Correct. Arrogance is not illegal (yet).

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have 220B AUM.

Canadian teachers and retired teachers have $220b, which they paid into the plan from their not particularly opulent pay packets. Nearly $100m was given to a company based in a regulatory haven, which does not know to within $5bn how much money it has, and which was able to steal from its customers without any oversight. Ontario Teachers were an anchor investor in a round which lots of less clueless people must have…

They accepted the risk of losing $100m because they thought there was a significant chance of getting a much bigger return. Obviously in this case the bet didn't pay off, but putting 0.05% of the AUM in a high risk investment is hardly a scandal.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who wrote this post is pretty well known in the crypto space. Not saying that what was written here is guaranteed to be accurate, but it's likely to be much closer to reality than what the New York Times put out. To be clear, I enjoyed Levine's commentary on the situation so it's not just because I dislike mainstream publications.

Never heard of them, I've been in the crypto space for many years. Their social media looks like it's run by a teenager and I'm not not being facetious, it literally reads like a 14 year old boy runs the account. The person also writes so many tweets they'd hardly have time for serious work. Over 90% are jokes, memes and rumors. https://nitter.cz/0xfbifemboy Not sure how this stuff makes it to the top on HN.

cmon man anonymous twitter > new york times

milkyeggs dot com is disupting journalism, by permissionless quote tweeting and decentralized fact checking.

and if you join now using my code "FNB" you can get 20 percent off your first milky coin.

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#159

> Most news accounts seem to portray the scale of the bankruptcy as relatively small. This is a key point. They lost $16B in customer deposits. LTCM lost $4.6B in investor funds. Enron lost $11B in shareholder capital. Interestingly, while Madoff is widely quoted as having lost $65B, that was almost all fabricated paper wealth, actual losses were around $18B and $14.4B of that was recovered and returned. All of these…

If they lost it through bad bets, who was on the winning side of those bets?

Re: What Happened at Alameda Research

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know how to torrent you can download an image of his iPhone or iPad taken from that same laptop.

Why would I need to torrent it? And how do I know it's legitimate? I had assumed that the big news about its contents would break any day now. All I've ever seen is people talking about what people told them that they totally saw on it.

Well you can see lots of photos of his penis and face in the same picture. I think that's fair verification.
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