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Alameda lost tens of millions because of a fat fingering mistake

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

#161

Post by HWR_14 »

function_seven wrote: post #148
hinkley wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM is still worth money if their stock gets delisted. Real estate, buildings, equipment, patent portfolios. Bitcoins is worth $0.

Those buildings and equipment and patents may have value, but less than the bonds, loans, and other liabilities IBM also has. Not only could IBM be worth $0, it could be worth less than that. Things are worth whatever people are willing to pay. Bitcoin may be the original sin of crypto bros, but it still appears to be worth money, because it's impossible to make one for free, or obtain one for free. And it has utilit…

But IBM is a public company. These numbers are known. Its estimated liquidation value right now (selling off all the assets) is around $22 billion. That's pretty far from its market cap of just over $130 billion, but it's not nothing.

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

#162

Post by School-Cotton »

mherdeg wrote: post #132
Horffupolde wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the house, especially if players are usual customers.

So the house pays $10,000 to everyone who hasn't folded yet?

No, the person you’re replying to is just wrong. In a real casino the card would be burned and play would continue.

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

#163

Post by HWR_14 »

Scott_Sanderson wrote: post #111
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn’t that just mean the trading is done by a trusted third party? Fine until the third party goes belly up.

Yes, the exchanges are 3rd parties that could lose, and often do lose, the money

I thought the (noncrypto) financial exchanges made a very small amount of money on every trade.

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

#164

Post by andirk »

steveBK123 wrote: post #64
andirk wrote: post #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 behavio…

also don't discount sporting events being closed/reduced and sports betting dollars moving to crypto

Haha mild sports betting is my 2nd main use of bitcoin, other than store of value/wealth/whatever we call it when you buy something low and now it's worth a lot.

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

#165

Post by pclmulqdq »

charlieyu1 wrote: post #40
noduerme wrote: post #27

Honest question: How do you determine that something like this was an honest mistake? Once, when I was much younger, I had a side gig dealing poker at an underground club in NYC. One morning at the end of 10 hours dealing, I accidentally exposed a burn card which turned out to be something one of the players was representing (bluffing), with about $10k on the table. It was an honest mistake - literally a fat finger m…

I played poker at casino and these kinds of mistakes happen all the time.

Yeah, play just continues usually. High stakes dealers are usually more experienced and less likely to make these kinds of mistakes, but at 1/2 or 2/5 games (max buy-in around $500 at these stakes, so pots tend to stay under $1k), this sort of error isn't uncommon in my experience.

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

#166

Post by jaggederest »

viraptor wrote: post #122
FireBeyond wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once watched a new (I assume) dealer make two large mistakes at a blackjack table, in Vegas, of all places. One, I had put down $500 in twenties, and he was giving me chips, except he was going to give me $1,250 in chips, like he thought they were fifties. Pit Boss looked at him, looked at the chips, "What are you doing??", let him fix the error. A couple of hands in, dealer gets an Ace, so he checks the hole card.…

> after two mistakes like this in a matter of minutes, the dealer wasn't pulled off the table. Does anyone know what the dealer training looks like in practice? I assume people will make silly mistakes for a while. Are they expected to practice until perfection before they start working?

Especially when the pit boss catches it and it costs the casino nothing except perhaps annoying some gamblers and a few cents of expected earnings. A trained dealer must be worth much more than a few voided rounds of blackjack.

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

#167

Post by henry2023 »

mvdtnz wrote: post #60

> The story of how a misplaced decimal point at Alameda Research caused a market crash that echoed around the world Hang on a second. It caused a dip in the price of Bitcoin, that is not a "market crash". Bitcoin is a toy and not a real market, its price is set almost entirely by bullshit wash trades and other forms of fraud.

Then short it

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

#168

Post by thepasswordis »

dotnet00 wrote: post #99
johndhi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my sense too. What's kind of funny is we weirdly get caught up and excited by the hype... every single time

I always felt like SBF was a massive fraud. When someone is inflated as a genius and "the kindest billionaire" for superficial things like not driving an expensive car and not dressing appropriately, it sends alarm bells ringing to me. Acting like the exaggerated TV stereotype of a tech nerd screams "I'm covering something up", just like what happened with Theranos.

Just something relevant in another field: this is exactly how people feel about John Fetterman demanding to wear basketball shorts and a hoodie in the senate.

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

#169

Post by latchkey »

pests wrote: post #154
latchkey wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, it wasn't anything like that. Someone exploited a weakness in CloudFlare and was able to replace the Badger website. When someone clicked on the site to execute an approval transaction, it went to the attacker first, which gave the attacker full control over their wallet. It did take a manual step on the part of Celsius though... which should have been checked more closely. The UX around that checking i…

> It is also clear that the frontends really need to be hosted in a way that they can't be modified. Years ago the advice was IPFS and IPNS. I agree. This is not the Web3 dream everyone was promising us when frontends and nft media assets themselves are mutably stored on some server relying on serveral entities in the DNS chain to maintain security, behave, and stay available.

I wish there was a way we could almost hash a website or a piece of the critical path code running the site so that you know the content on the page was not modified and that the code that is executed is what the site intended.

We kind of have the 'secure lock' with https doing part of the work, but it is kind of irrelevant if DNS is pointing to some hackers site.

This isn't just crypto... it is your bank too.

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