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We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

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Re: We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

#231

Post by cinquemb »

churchill wrote: post #159
zomglings wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By getting greedy and treating FTX user funds as capital to deploy in the prop trading firm.

I know, right? Soon the defi community will be calling for the own version of Glass-Steagall. What is old is new again, I guess. Knowing when to stop is genius.

Some how a bunch of cex's behind the doors lending ops now is defi?

Meanwhile, some how magic internet money (abracadabra.money), with people bitching about their bad debt on chain for months is still solvent, while ftx is dumpsterfire...

Re: We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

#232

Post by tim333 »

rippercushions wrote: post #187
twblalock wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did anyone trust FTX either? The trust was really based on the credibility of the person running it, and the fact they had bailed out some other failing exchanges. But there were no hard facts. In fact it seemed like all it took was a public quarrel with the founder of another exchange to start the ball rolling toward total collapse -- again, because it was all based on personal credibility.

It's almost as if crypto tokens are intrinsically worthless!

Though that's not really the issue here. Obviously they were worth something to the people buying and selling them.

Re: We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

#233

Post by chromatin »

sytelus wrote: post #44
scottiebarnes wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bitcoin protocol and network continues to operate exactly as expected. Here, people trusted a "bank" (an exchange acting like a bank), and got burned when the bank gambled and lost.

Without exchanges like FTX or Coinbase, how should general public acquire crypto?

Crypto? Who knows (or cares), but Bitcoin on the other hand has a robust P2P marketplace:

Bisq https://bisq.network/

Hodl Hodl https://hodlhodl.com/

Robosats https://learn.robosats.com/

Re: We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

#234

Post by throw474374383 »

PathOfEclipse wrote: post #207
pseudosavant wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTX going under due to magic beans reminds me so much of Lehman Brothers going under in 2008. That time the magic beans were "mortgage backed securities" that somehow took low-quality debt, mixed it up with some magic, and out came high-quality debt, only it didn't.

"Certainly more study is needed on this issue. But the degree to which the Community Reinvestment Act (renewed and strengthened in 1995; see attached chart), the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the many other planks of the raft of federal regulation which have built up over the past couple of decades has pushed the banking industry into making the loans for which they are now being criticized is far and away the mos…

Right so it's the government's fault for encouraging the corporations to do something they didn't really want to do, which inevitably led to the corporations naked inhuman amoral greed running amock.

Re: We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

#235

Post by markisus »

nullc wrote: post #166
mumbisChungo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what you mean by this exactly. Many of the things they said to the public are not true, but these currencies use permanent, public ledgers, so you can see where the money goes if you look carefully.

How is that particularly relevant? Data isn't knowledge. Just because some assets have public records doesn't really tell you anything about liabilities or underlying ownership. Exchanges could practice provable solvency ( https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1008.pdf ), but they aggressively do not-- in part because they don't want to bring customers attention to the potential issue (and they rightfully reason that once cus…

How can the provable solvency scheme possible prove solvency for fiat holdings? For example, I deposit $100 into the exchange. How can the exchange prove to me that it hasn't gone and gambled that $100? I think this could only be handled with human auditors going in and checking the actual amounts held in the exchange's bank accounts.

Re: We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

#236

Post by tim333 »

rr808 wrote: post #66
shmatt wrote: post #32

CZ knew about the bad leverage to begin with, which is why he tweeted about selling all of the FTT What are the chances he never intended to buy FTX, just to destroy it after their public back and forth? It's almost like a reverse Musk - he sent a purchase offer with an option to back out no matter what CZ knew from day 1 all he needed to do was crash FTT just enough, and the rest would happen organically

CZ seems like a genius, but I'm sure he's panicking now, he doesn't benefit from killing the whole alt-coin world - which increasingly looks like happening.

CZ says it wasn't planned by him and hurts binance by shaking confidence in the whole system: https://mobile.twitter.com/cz_binance/status/159035118251372...

Re: We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

#237

Post by panarky »

d3nj4l wrote: post #230
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #13

In the thick of it, illiquidity and insolvency blur. But not after the fact. As usual, Levine put it best: “the problem is not a timing mismatch, in which FTX’s customers asked for their cash back but FTX did not have enough ready cash because it had long-term but money-good loans out. The problem is that FTX took its customers’ money and traded it for a pile of magic beans, and now the beans are worthless and there’…

Levine on SBF back in April: > I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person. And that was so much more cynical than how I would've described farming. You're just like, well, I'm in the Ponzi business and it's pretty good. I suppose he was right ;) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...

Gambling with customers' funds works great for you when you win, and bad for your customers when you lose.

Re: We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

#238

Post by Nathanba »

nu11ptr wrote: post #222
potatototoo99 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, FTX was barely in the top 10 for spot, though better in futures. Plus there are DEX and AMM.

FTX was #2 globally. Binance is #1. I'm not sure exactly what ranking mechanism is used to determine that, but that seems to be consensus from a variety of sources.

I've never even heard of FTX and I've been in the crypto space for many years. Binance however was always near the top since it came out. There was one american exchange that used to be nr.1 but became irrelevant after they weren't allowed to serve non-americans anymore. I can't remember the name and it isn't in the top 300 anymore, maybe they had to shut down.

EDIT: I just checked and FTX was only founded 3 years ago

Re: We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

#239

Post by joshxyz »

fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #106
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't. They just ran with significantly less staff (iirc, less than 30). If they wanted you, they got in touch. FTX wasn't a scam either. Their business was a licence to print money but, as so often happens in finance, managed to spin shit from gold.

That's not what I have heard. Specifically know people who have gotten offers, mostly in the 150k range with zero stock. Alameda research is also just random devs that went to MIT with a few years experience. Impressive to go to that school, but clearly not experienced enough to run a real finance operation. Zero real finance people. If they were serious they would have hired portfolio managers with decades of experi…

I've worked with a crypto trading firm before, one of FTX's otc clients. In that industry we hire based on referrals and rarely on credentials. A trustworthy person who earns the company $0 is worth more than an unvetted one that could stab the company in the back anytime in the future.

Re: We will not pursue the potential acquisition of FTX

#240

Post by uMeanPpl »

PathOfEclipse wrote: post #207
pseudosavant wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTX going under due to magic beans reminds me so much of Lehman Brothers going under in 2008. That time the magic beans were "mortgage backed securities" that somehow took low-quality debt, mixed it up with some magic, and out came high-quality debt, only it didn't.

"Certainly more study is needed on this issue. But the degree to which the Community Reinvestment Act (renewed and strengthened in 1995; see attached chart), the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the many other planks of the raft of federal regulation which have built up over the past couple of decades has pushed the banking industry into making the loans for which they are now being criticized is far and away the mos…

By government you mean a handful of legislators.

The public has been treating their Senators and Representatives like celebrities.

Electoral turnovers flush corruption; we really need to stop being ruled by pudding brains with no skin in the future game who LARP concern while doing nothing but living easy: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766

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