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Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

theguardian.com

221–230 of 255 posts

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#221
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like they were ordered to give the plaintiffs the documents, but they weren’t ordered to publicly release them. NYAG also looked into them last year. They were fined but it doesn’t seem like anything else came of it. > The New York Attorney General’s probe into Tether’s reserves concluded in February 2021 with an $18.5 million settlement. I don’t hold any tether, and I wouldn’t recommend it to others. But th…

> I don’t hold any tether, and I wouldn’t recommend it to others. But the common opinion that Tether is insolvent might be wrong. Tether, as a stable business, is a money printing machine. I’m not sure it’d be worth risking the business and jail time to pump shitcoins I encourage you to watch Coffeezilla's video about Tether. There's lots of shady stuff going on behind the scenes, like them borrowing $383M from Bitfi…

Just watched the videos, a few thoughts:

Coffeezilla says that Tether doesn't need to honor your redemption by point to the TOS. The TOS that he shows in the video says that Tether reserves the right to delay the redemption and pay it in-kind securities held by Tether. So if Tether is holding a bond, they reserve the right to give you that bond instead of selling the bond and giving you the proceeds. That's very different than his claim that Tether doesn't need to honor the redemption.

His discussion about whether or not it was transparent that Bitfinex and Tether were owned by the same people. He plays sound clips that sound a little misleading: Phil Potter is prompted with "Tether is Bitfinex, right?" To which Phil Potter responds: "No, it's not." Is that really misleading. If someone asked Elon Musk, Twitter is SpaceX, right? Wouldn't the answer be no, even though they're owned by the same people? All the sound clips are less than 10 seconds longs, so it's really hard to understand everything in context.

The leadership team of Tether does seem a little sketch.

The part about Tether lending Bitfinex money to stay solvent while Bitfinex's money was held by the state pending investigation of their bank was sketchy, but technically the currency would still be backed by the loan, assuming Bitfinex can get their money back, which seems likely given that they weren't a party in the investigation holding up the money.

I think the bottom line is that you have to trust the Tether team to handle the money wisely. Usually, you can't trust people to do that so using Tether is extremely risky. As for the video, I won't say it's wrong, but it certainly picked the least charitable interpretation of events and also cherry-picked sound-bites, which is kind of a misleading tactic to use that helps suit a narrative.

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the thing to consider as well is that any management level trust position in a white collar setting is off limits to her for many years after that as well. On account of people being slow to entrust ex-cons with responsibility.

She'll make way, way, way more money selling her tv/movie rights to Apple or whoever makes the definitive documentary-drama on the matter. Like 'F you, never work again' money.

[dead]

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#223
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Tether put all its money into low-yield short term US treasuries, the founders could pay every employee $10MM USD a year and still be paying themselves $1 billion USD a year. That is a phenomenal amount of risk free income. That's putting the founders somewhere high, probably first 50 names high, on the Forbes 400 list. That seems foolish to risk to commit crimes.

Tether wasn’t always that big though.

That's even better. Let's say it was a scam for the first 5 years. Total scam, they spent all the money on drugs. It would only take a year for the short-term low-yield US treasury interest on the rest of the assets to completely pay Tether back. That's only possible because Tether has been growing. It would take more than a decade of interest if it had merely doubled in size.

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree and I'm actually amazed at how FTX was doing crazy shit instead of just making exchange money the legal way, but... isn't it super-expensive to truly back up tether with cash? I mean, it's kind of an extraordinary claim that they have a few bil of cash stashed in a mattress just sitting there backing things up 1:1 ready to get withdrawn any second.

It wouldn’t need to be cash per say, just cash or very liquid and low risk assets like USTs. The yield on treasuries isn’t high, but given the volumes at play it’d generate a lot of cashflow.

so you think they really have it?

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes it is quite funny when people get surprised that a get rich scheme isn’t real.

Even those who aren't informed enough to know better than to be taken advantage of?

Crypto is difficult to use, so if you used it to lose all that money, it's not that you didn't have the ability to know better, it's that you didn't want to know better (because of your greed.)

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#226
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's an enormous first offense, though does that matter?

Did Madoff have a criminal record before he got hit with 150 years?

I don’t believe so, but the judge sentenced him so harshly because the amount involved was astronomical, exceeding the maximum amount specified by federal sentencing guidelines for fraud ($400 million at the time)[0]. Also, many people lost their life savings and the fraud lasted for nearly 30 years and the judge didn’t feel that Madoff did everything he could to mitigate the harm caused by his actions.

[0](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/0...)

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#227
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and a helmet and bulletproof vest with trauma plates doesn’t stop you from getting killed by shot in the face. But the lack of complete protection is a pretty bad argument against using the available protection. (There's some things a stop-limit is better for than a regular stop loss, but I'm not convinced that they are generally superior except in the technical sense that any stop loss can be issued as a stop-…

Minor nit pick: some products, such as exchange-traded calendar spreads, have prices that can go negative and in fact don't have a lower limit on price. When I was writing trading systems, it was a big headache to modify a system original designed only for equities to handle other asset types, especially those that could have negative prices.

Side note: if you're using IEEE-754 doubles (not a great choice for decimalized prices), use NaN to indicate no price, missing price, etc. instead of using an "impossible" value like -1.0. It's always possible the system will be expanded to some domain where -1.0 is valid, requiring lots of on-the-fly rewriting of live systems literally handling multiple billions of dollars per day.

Better yet, use proper algebraic data types.

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you go investing in new unregulated chaotic markets without doing due diligence to at least research what your investing in you are at least somewhat culpable for your own losses. Don't invest in thing you don't understand.

I don't disagree, but to laugh at ignorance?

play stupid games get a stupid prize.

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#229
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood how stop losses are supposed to help. Traders read heaps of news, do God knows what technical analysis yet simple "moves bit too much in wrong direction" is supposed to be an acceptable exit strategy.

You're missing the bit that "moves bit too much in wrong direction" is a strong signal that your analysis is fundamentally flawed. Maybe catastrophic news came out since you bought in.

Those are 2 additional reasons to exit - realization that analysis is bad and catastrophic news. And they ain't automated.

Re: Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, pleads guilty to seven offences

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think she'll probably do 36 months or so. Not nothing but also not life-destroying.

Also the thing to consider as well is that any management level trust position in a white collar setting is off limits to her for many years after that as well. On account of people being slow to entrust ex-cons with responsibility.

I wouldn't trust her even if she wasn't convicted.
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