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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

#271

Post by umeshunni »

Stranger43 wrote: post #75
threeseed wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crypto has attracted almost every type of criminal under the sun This is actually quite a profound statement. Is there actually anything in human history that can come close to rivalling this ? We have everyone from teens promoting shitcoins on TikTok, to household celebrities like Matt Damon, to white collar criminals, to arguably VCs, all the way to nation states like Iran and North Korea.

Doing the wild west days America had a bunch of what was called wildcat currencies issued by private banks with dubious backing in either non existing gold reserves or over inflated property holdings. look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking it's kind of an interesting period in finance that got kind of forgotten as it did not exactly end well.

I read a comment somewhere along the lines of

"Crypto is a great experiment where people who didn't live in the 19th century get to relive at 10x speed all the bank runs and regulatory changes that happened then"

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

#272

Post by Balgair »

themgt wrote: post #48

It's incredible that SBF was being touted by Sequoia, WEF, Fortune, chumming it up with Clinton and Blair in the Bahamas, getting meetings and kid glove treatment with the SEC, relatively glowing profile as a "do-gooder" by the NYT. All while FTX had a Chief Regulatory Officer who was basically a career white-collar criminal. It beggars belief that anyone who dug half an inch into this story wouldn't have seen 90,000…

Looking on the bright side:

This whole crypto failure is going to act as a bit of an 'innoculant' for any relaxation of financial laws. If anything, it should lightly strengthen support for further financial regulation of Wall Street and the like. All responses to any loosening up of the banks can reasonably be countered with 'Yeah, but look at what happened with Crypto.' So I guess that's at least something.

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

#273

Post by ChainOfFools »

pjc50 wrote: post #142
brookst wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The media” is mostly just a bunch of 20-40 year olds with liberal arts bachelors degrees, trying to make ends meet and feed their families. Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time. So IMO, “they’ve always been this bad” is the answer, but it’s not entirely fair. Kind of like saying the cooks at McDonald’s ha…

> Serious investigative reporters with the smarts and experience to dive deep were always the exception, maybe a handful in the world at any given time. Correct answer. People dramatically underestimate the extent to which reporters are stenographers: they go to relevant people, get quotes, write some background around the quotes (which itself is derived from previous statements), and hit publish. Almost every busine…

I wonder if there's a viable market for a news outlet which has as its distinguishing core principle the guarantee that it will never use any material from press releases (or equivalently unsolicited, self-interested messaging) as unqualified sources, except for narrow cases when no other source was available. And in such cases it is accompanied by an unambiguous indication (really unambiguous, like a different color font for any portions of the article text directly and solely derived from such sources) that the information presented therein should be trusted on the same level as motivated hearsay from a single source, because that's what it is.

But of course this would be expensive to operate, difficult to insulate from corruption and compromise, and unlikely to be popular with advertisers, whose objectives constitute the epitome of conflicted interest with such an outlet's stated core principle.

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

#274

Post by r00fus »

eternalban wrote: post #195
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…

> slipped under the radar No, sorry, that is their job description. But since we're using radar as analogy, let me introduce to your new friend, IFF (Identify, Friend or Foe).

I think the radar analogy is flawed at best w/r/t the press.

Part of the problem is that the press is owned/regulated by the people in the very institutions that fund the scammers.

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

#275

Post by Mistletoe »

bmitc wrote: post #244
Mistletoe wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is Michael Lewis (Moneyball, Flash Boys, The Big Short) has been following Sam around for the last six months. He just got an incredible ending to his book.

Is there more to this? As in, he was actually in the Bahamas documenting things and Sam? This was not a red flag to anyone at FTX or involved with FTX?

No he was writing a book about SBF before all this went down. Probably about how awesome he was. Although you could be right and I’m sure he had some hunches it was all a mess after digging deeper. Then he got an incredible M. Night Shyamalan twist at the end.

SBF and crew were probably basking in their own genius too much to realize how most Michael Lewis books end up. They probably thought they were more Moneyball than The Big Short.

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

#276

Post by AustinDev »

2sk21 wrote: post #95
tootie wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is everyone fleeing exchanges and just buying classic BTC and Eth?

How does one buy Bitcoin or Ethereum outside of exchanges?

https://localbitcoins.net/ There are other options as well.

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

#277

Post by loceng »

mikeyouse wrote: post #182
yonaguska wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I'm reading, Ukraine used FTX to facilitate donations to Ukraine. I'm waiting for more details on the claim that Ukraine actually directly funded FTX. In other funding news- FTX did fund one of the studies that "debunked" Ivermectin as an effective covid treatment. There's definitely a strong political slant to this scandal.

I love that proving that a bunch of frauds who were promoting a drug that didn't work at all shows a "political slant". Funding studies to show which drugs treat (and don't treat) covid is unambiguously good and it's insane that it's considered political. Edit: Great timing - DailyBeast literally just published a story exposing how the leader of one of those idiotic COVID misinformation groups spent her millions in i…

There are plenty of studies and cohort analysis of Ivermectin studies that show it is highly effective with the right protocol; most of the Ivermectin studies showing it doesn't work aren't using proper doses, nor at the right time, nor for long enough period of time.

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

#278

Post by mikeyouse »

loceng wrote: post #277
mikeyouse wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love that proving that a bunch of frauds who were promoting a drug that didn't work at all shows a "political slant". Funding studies to show which drugs treat (and don't treat) covid is unambiguously good and it's insane that it's considered political. Edit: Great timing - DailyBeast literally just published a story exposing how the leader of one of those idiotic COVID misinformation groups spent her millions in i…

There are plenty of studies and cohort analysis of Ivermectin studies that show it is highly effective with the right protocol; most of the Ivermectin studies showing it doesn't work aren't using proper doses, nor at the right time, nor for long enough period of time.

No there aren't. It doesn't work and most of the studies showing any effect were fraudulent. I can't believe there are still ivermectin dead-enders out there.

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

#279

Post by nullc »

gruez wrote: post #248
bitcharmer wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you are: https://youtube.com/shorts/BVjZsLafkz8?feature=share

I don't get it. What's supposed to be outrageous/"Un fucking believable" about that video? I watched the video once, and checking the transcript, the things she said were: 1. "yeah absolutely could pull it off without my math degree I use very little math" - given that her position is a CEO (ie. leadership), it seems plausible that she doesn't use her math degree in the day to day. Also, the clip has zero context as…

> It's true that they can stop losses, but it could also lead you to sell at the bottom and at the worst price.

Worse, in relatively illquid (and circuit breakerless) markets like the fringe cryptocurrencies they were investing in, stop losses can easily result in selling at absurd prices and can even be manipulated to do so. There was even a lawsuit against FTX for exploiting them.

E.g. say something is trading at $105 after falling a bit and you believe there are significant stop loss orders at $100 (perhaps aided by exchange insider knoweldege), you see that there is very little volume on the order book below $100. You then put in a huge buy wall at $10... sell down to $100 to trigger the stop losses, then laugh as idiotic stop losses dump coins into your $10 wall.

Moments later the asset is trading at $101 again.

In large liquid markets they're less risky because someone will usually hop up and take the deal at $99 so even though you get burned a little it usually won't be too bad. But cryptocurrency markets, particularly for the fringe scamcoins FTX was investing in are just not very liquid.

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

#280

Post by HelloMcFly »

yamtaddle wrote: post #252
brookst wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> They've added more MSG over the last couple decades

You say this as if it's an inherently bad thing. There's nothing wrong with some MSG as a flavor enhancer.

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