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FTX held less than $1B in liquid assets against $9B in liabilities

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Re: FTX held less than $1B in liquid assets against $9B in liabilities

#161

Post by nullc »

celestialcheese wrote: post #121
ttul wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My guess is that either FTX did not furnish them with accurate or truthful information, or the information was correct at the time, but the lack of good governance allowed FTX to pursue some rotten strategies without the knowledge of their investors. It would not be the first time that otherwise smart people have made a bad call.

The timing of the big investments back in Oct '21 for their Series B and Jan '22 for Series C makes your guess seem likely. Seems like most of the actual fraud started after the 3AC/TerraLuna blowup as SBF trying to trade out of the hole he was in.

> Seems like most of the actual fraud started after the 3AC/TerraLuna blowup

What makes you say that? I think it was fraud from day one-- starting with the claimed billions of dollars in arb gains.

If they were real-- wheres that money now?

Re: FTX held less than $1B in liquid assets against $9B in liabilities

#162

Post by Gwypaas »

brianvli wrote: post #78
partloyaldemon wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd recommend a PNC checking account. Solves a lot of issues related to storing value without counterparty risk.

What if you’re not a US citizen?

Pretty much all developed countries have similar mechanisms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deposit_insurance

Re: FTX held less than $1B in liquid assets against $9B in liabilities

#163

Post by epistasis »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #154
epistasis wrote: post #125

This was always a Ponzi scheme, and SBF was incredibly open about it being a Ponzi scheme, and yet people still tried to beat out the Ponzi scheme. Here's SBF back in April (just a small excerpt, the full section is far more damning): > SBF: So, you know, X tokens [are] being given out each day, all these like sophisticated firms are like, huh, that's interesting. Like if the total amount of money in the box is a hun…

Except in that comment he's talking about yield farming, and he's 100% right about a lot of what yield farming products did However he runs an exchange, not one of these magic boxes, and he was never saying or claiming that that was what ftx was doing

You are right, and I was wrong. I wish I could edit to put a big red flag at the top of my incorrect comment...

Re: FTX held less than $1B in liquid assets against $9B in liabilities

#164

Post by Fezzik »

FerociousTimes wrote: post #159
fullsend wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already the world of founders, funding, and venture capital is full of incestuous relationships and shady dealings. I can’t imagine what happens when you combine that kind of capital with the utter shamelessness and obtuse financial engineering of the cryptocurrency space.

By incestuous, do you mean full-blown incest literally or just plain cronyism and good old boys' club?

incestuous ĭn-sĕs′choo͞-əs adjective …

3. Improperly intimate or interconnected.

Re: FTX held less than $1B in liquid assets against $9B in liabilities

#165

Post by Bubble_Pop_22 »

People are looking at this thing too closely. When taking the 30000ft wide view then something like this is not extraordinary , and there I say it, not even bad.

Fedex was famously down to their last 5,000$ dollars and were facing bankruptcy, and the founder quite literally went to Vegas to play blackjack and won 27,000$ to save the company.

Companies and entrepreneurs are supposed to take on risk, that's why bankruptcy laws and LLCs exists in the first place. To give entrepreneurs some peace of mind that if the risk doesn't pay off they only lose what they put in.

The world and the US was growing much faster in the 1970s and 1980s when these sort of things happened daily. Not all donuts come out with a hole.

If for every Ponzis we get a Standard Oil then it's worth it.

If for every Enron we get a Microsoft then it's worth it.

If for every FTX we get a Moderna then it's for sure worth it.

And maybe all those positive examples were just inches away from being touted as negative examples, quite like Fedex was.

Re: FTX held less than $1B in liquid assets against $9B in liabilities

#166

Post by nullc »

wwarner wrote: post #85
stephc_int13 wrote: post #7

It was all for charity. People are mean. https://twitter.com/The_Prologuist/status/158967849854920704...

I think the consequentialist underpinnings of EA are part of the story. Consequentialism revisits our ideas of right and wrong by looking at outcomes. Any reasonable person can look at a law and conclude that there might be a reason to break it under certain circumstances. Certainly, one might argue, financial regulations are arbitrary and that the only way to succeed in your larger goal is to break the rules. EA spe…

> think the consequentialist underpinnings of EA are part of the story

I've thought before that EA is charity for sociopaths. Nothing recently has shaken that view. There are plenty of EA quotes that support the 're-framing' point you make, stuff ling Singer saying "take advantage of strategies other people are biased against using".

Fortunately, with FTX collapsed there is a little less risk that someone will actually fund them to move forward with the idea of genociding all the wild animals on earth (on the basis of it being the most efficient way to reduce total suffering because wild animals are suffering). So, I guess that's a little silver lining on the FTX implosion.

Re: FTX held less than $1B in liquid assets against $9B in liabilities

#167

Post by FerociousTimes »

Fezzik wrote: post #164
FerociousTimes wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By incestuous, do you mean full-blown incest literally or just plain cronyism and good old boys' club?

incestuous ĭn-sĕs′choo͞-əs adjective … 3. Improperly intimate or interconnected.

Thanks but I wouldn't use it though as it's an open invitation for misunderstanding and faux pas

Re: FTX held less than $1B in liquid assets against $9B in liabilities

#168

Post by conorcleary »

danans wrote: post #82
salawat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, the problem you're restricting to cryptocurrencies is actually something finance as a whole just deal with. Everyone could withdraw all their money at the same time. What happens then? The answer is bank run. There will literally not be enough cash to do it. The entire system is running on the fact that everyone has not done that yet. Personally, I want to have it happen, just to force the system to come…

> Personally, I want to have it happen, just to force the system to come to terms with the fact that it isn't all just about numbers, and so that people can actually materially witness the sheer magnitude of monetary centralization created by our system. The question is are you also willing to give up the easily ignored benefits of monetary centralization, which are significant and foundational to the trust that unde…

We can have both.

Re: FTX held less than $1B in liquid assets against $9B in liabilities

#169

Post by cyanydeez »

ourmandave wrote: post #114
celestialcheese wrote: post #110

How the fuck did all these high-profile investors miss this. NEA, IVP, Iconiq Capital, Third Point Ventures, Tiger Global, Altimeter Capital Management, Lux Capital, Mayfield, Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital, SoftBank, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ribbit Capital, Temasek Holdings, BlackRock and Thoma Bravo. These aren't schleps in this list. Blackrock, Sequoia, Tiger, Lightspeed, the fucking NEA. Jesus. Did no one…

Makes you wonder who else in the crypto space is lying through their freakin' teeth, don't it?

Unless it's code, all of them

Re: FTX held less than $1B in liquid assets against $9B in liabilities

#170

Post by SparkyMcUnicorn »

JonathanBeuys wrote: post #72
SparkyMcUnicorn wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's different ways to handle multi-sig, but https://gnosis-safe.io is probably the current gold standard, and it's pretty easy to set up and use. It's a smart contract that you can add any type of owner to (regular wallet, hardware wallet, anything that can sign for transactions), then you specify how many of the owners need to sign for transactions.

When you "set up and use" that Gnosis thing, how do you verify it is doing the right thing and has no backdoor built in?

It's open source and you can deploy everything yourself. You don't even need to use their hosted website if you don't trust it. What more could you ask for?

https://github.com/safe-global/

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