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FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

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Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#251

Post by HWR_14 »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #239
HWR_14 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least with Theranos, the was the media excuse of "new technologist isn't sharing the secrets of her device yet, but she showed enough to get big-names as investors and #37 on the Fortune list with as much revenue as MSFT is signed on to the tech to make it seem believable". With Enron, they were very very good at obfuscating their scam. But it was the WSJ affiliate that was the first mover on Enron being fishy. A…

Enron was unlike Theranos, in that Enron was originally a legitimate company while Theranos was a scam from the beginning. Enron was a company that sold natural gas, a real product, that became a scam as they used increasingly dodgy accounting practices to push their stock ever higher. Theranos on the other hand never had a real product, and before Theranos even started Holmes was informed by experts (particularly Ph…

All these are true. But I don't get how that relates to what I said.

Although, in the early days, a journalist wouldn't have found the gas trading. While Enron traded oil early on, they pretty much built the gas trading industry at the same time they were becoming more scammy.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#252

Post by yamtaddle »

brookst wrote: post #212
zmgsabst wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dominos would be my counterpoint: their pizza was just bad and they could do better. And they did. I think it’s entirely possible that an industry with low competition and high nepotism could just be doing their jobs poorly. Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?

Dominos is still terrible from a gourmet food perspective. They went from abysmal to merely bad. Which is fine at that price point and value prop.

Yeah, when did they get better? They've added more MSG over the last couple decades, I'm pretty sure, and kicked it up a lot when they publicized that they were re-formulating their sauce a decade or so ago—and, to be fair, they're far from alone in that, if you want a Pizza Hut pie that's about the same quality as a 1995 Pizza Hut pie, you're going to be paying more like $25 than $10 and you won't be getting it from Pizza Hut, all those chains been cutting quality and adding MSG for years to try to avoid raising prices—but haven't gotten better, except at making you regret eating it.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#253

Post by HWR_14 »

doorman2 wrote: post #224
HWR_14 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The NYT is in the advertising business. Google, Facebook, et al are direct competitors. The NYT is in the "providing content to lure people to advertisers" business. They don't sell ads to third parties. They could be very symbiotic with Google, for example. If Google was searching their content, bringing readers in, and supplying ads. But, instead, Google scrapes their content and helps people never visit their si…

> The NYT is in the "providing content to lure people to advertisers" business. What does that mean? The NYT sells ads, i.e. you can pay the NYT to have your advertisement shown in the NYT. Google sells ads, i.e. you can pay Google to have your advertisement shown in Google results. The NYT and Google sell the same thing. They are competitors.

The NYT's business model is to sell their customer's eyeballs to advertisers. While Google does that with search results, they have a big arm that sells random third party eyeballs to advertisers, and then splits the money with the site supplying the eyes. I would characterize the first of Google's businesses and the NYT business as "providing content" and the second as "advertising".

In fact, the NYT outsources their ads to Amazon's advertising business.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#254

Post by mring33621 »

mrleinad wrote: post #172
simongray wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real one is promoting crypto by playing a "foolish" version of himself on camera in exchange for money.

I don't see anything wrong there. He got paid to make an ad, and it's clear that's what it is. If he was promoting FTX on his own personal account like so many "influencers" do, then I would be ok criticizing him.

I loved these commercials but they failed to convince me to put any money in FTX, or crypto altogether.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#256

Post by [deleted] »

mrleinad wrote: post #172
simongray wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real one is promoting crypto by playing a "foolish" version of himself on camera in exchange for money.

I don't see anything wrong there. He got paid to make an ad, and it's clear that's what it is. If he was promoting FTX on his own personal account like so many "influencers" do, then I would be ok criticizing him.

[deleted]

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#257

Post by gruez »

once_inc wrote: post #63
d3nj4l wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen a lot of people say this (and I'm sure you're all correct!) but I never understod the link between BTC and Tether. Multiple attempts to explain it have gone over my head. Am I just stupid?

Consider it such: there is a company that wants bitcoin to stay above 15k. Every time the order books show a significant decline below 15k, that company issues new tokens that are treated as dollars by exchanges in order to buy bitcoin. This stays very much viable. Right up to the point that it isn't. Then, people will wonder what is backing those tokens, and if they want to risk the event that they aren't worth thei…

>Every time the order books show a significant decline below 15k, that company issues new tokens that are treated as dollars by exchanges in order to buy bitcoin.

source? Sources like these[1] don't any mention recent issuances by tether.

[1] https://twitter.com/usdcoinprinter

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#258

Post by bmelton »

boplicity wrote: post #164
AlexandrB wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With every crypto collapse there seems to be an associated failure by the media to do any real digging. The same thing happened with Theranos where, with a few exceptions, the media fawned over Elizabeth Holmes. It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their jobs or they've always been this bad and I'm just getting older. There are plenty of earlier scams and bubbles (Enron, dot-com bubble) that slipped und…

> It's hard to tell if the media has gotten worse at their jobs It's not that "the media" has gotten worse at their jobs. Rather, there simply a lot less funding for reporters. The hit in funding has become much worse in local reporting -- especially local newspapers. However, if this is viewed as a training ground for the few large national/international news organizations, it's easy to see how this has a profound i…

I don't know if this is right or wrong, but if I were running a news agency, I would think that glowing puff pieces would be one of the first things I'd eliminate in the event of a financial crunch.

Is there a reason we think they persist?

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#259

Post by ok123456 »

darkerside wrote: post #235
ok123456 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fox News is primarily a cable news network that republishes some of their work as articles. Television isn't really a medium that lends itself to long form investigative journalism. Why would they bother with it when what they're doing is way more profitable? They also have a reputation for being the partisan press. They'd have to completely rebrand to get into a less lucrative area.

60 minutes and PBS NewsHour beg to differ

Those don't make money.

Re: FTX collapse, Tether operations have links to online-poker cheating scandals

#260

Post by TacticalCoder »

once_inc wrote: post #129
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Crypto" is useless. Bitcoin isn't. What unique properties does Bitcoin have that makes it useful that other cryptocurrencies don't, beside first mover advantage?

Bitcoin is provably the only decentralized system that has permissionless, borderless, digital scarcity. Other cryptocurrencies are less secure (the many direct forks, such as Bitcoin Cash and the like), less decentralized (Solana, BNB), less permissionless (any system that can be halted by its operators) or less scarce (Ethereum's emission schedule can be changed by a single organisation). Bitcoin's value (not in te…

> less decentralized (Solana...

SBF is deeply tied to Solana. It's reported SBF/FTX/Alameda were sitting on close to $1bn worth of Solana up to a few days ago. Some are apparently locked. This makes him the biggest holder of Solana. Centralized indeed. Now of course these "$1bn" are in that worthless Solana scamcoin which already fell from $32 to $13 since the news. So I take that that $1bn is now more like $400m or something, and shrinking fast.

It's possible that, like with Serum, SBF was involved in the creation of Solana from the very start (I take it more independent journalist are going to dig on that: I don't expect mainstream media to do much research that said).

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