341–350 of 440 posts
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> AGI Safety research labs If they are not part of a university, it is probably pretty sketchy anyhow.
They fund a huge number of serious initiatives in the space via EA funds - 9, maybe 10 figures.
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There’s a Bloomberg article that goes over why this is a bit more nuanced than “gambling with customers funds”. In short, it’s either one or both of poor risk management ( margin traders can’t post collateral and the collateral they had was FTT which went to zero ) and black swan bank runs ( Binance CEO tweets about risky FTT causing bank run causing further drops ). In fact “gambling with customer funds” was by desi…
>In fact “gambling with customer funds” was by design. This is not accurate. The ToS for FTX explicitly said that customer funds would not be used for investment purposes. While it didn't explicitly say it wouldn't be used for lending, it was a broad assumption in the industry that the exchange was solvent and could back user assets on a 1:1 basis. It is widely believed now that Alameda went deep underwater during th…
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> Banks inherently gamble with customers deposits, every loan is a gamble While there's a ton of nuance here, in the general case it doesn't work how you've implied. When you take out a mortgage, the bank doesn't take a bunch of money other people have deposited. It's literally created out of thin air and marked as a liability on their balance sheet. This is how the majority of money is created in a fractional reserv…
No, banks loan customer funds out as mortgages. It is not literally created out of thin air. You deposit money, the bank gives it to joe to buy a house, he sends it to the seller. Now the seller has your physical money, and joe owes the bank what the bank owes you.
The silly thing is that FTX was a money printing machine. There was no reason to start gambling with user funds, aside from greed, hubris, and stupidity. Similarly, Sam's fund Alameda was delta-neutral until some time in 2021, which is something that also could have profitably continued in perpetuity, but they got greedy and started making directional bets with leverage.
> FTX was a money printing machine Turns out, they were a Monopoly money printing machine.
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definitely know one guy hired by FTX intl in the past 6 months so "If they wanted you, they got in touch." seems true to me
"If they wanted you, they got in touch." you make it sound like a prestigious elite club. it was a scam, and it should be called out as such. also again i personally know two people that received stingy offers from them
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I would read the rest of what I said. Is NYSE a scam? Is Euronext a scam? The exchange was a legit business that was profitable...outside of fixed costs, it isn't possible to lose money with an exchange. But they were doing other stuff (broking) that did lose them money. These are two completely distinct operations though (in real finance, they are largely distinct).
As Matt Levine mentioned in his article today, no responsible bank would allow you to borrow money and give them shares of their own stock as collateral. In some cases it's illegal to do so, but even when it's legal, banks would not want the risk. FTX, on the other hand, pretty much did just that. Does that make FTX a scam? No. But when they told their customers they don't gamble with customer deposits, that was at l…
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
I called it and saw many others call it too. Cause a run on FTX, get due diligence and say it’s F**ed, and get their user-base for free. My concern is how much funding FTX and SBF in particular were giving to EA/AGI Safety research labs and charities. There’s going to be some significant knock on effects there when the money is no longer available.
Did a malicious AI orchestrate this downfall?
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That banks extended bad loans under pressure from the government suggests they did so at a loss; otherwise, they would have done it anyway in search of profit. Moreover, Sowell makes bold claims and offers little evidence beyond references to redlining, while the evidence that banks were engaged in unethical and fraudulent practices are backed up by cold-hard data and an abundance of testimony from people within the…
You understand the borrowers weren’t the victims of the fraud —- in fact they were engaged in it. The banks settled on charges of selling securities backed by loans that they had not sufficiently vetted, of which many turned out bad.
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If something doesn't make sense after a detailed review - my instinct is that there is hidden knowledge that I don't have.
That instinct will mislead you. It denies stupidity and irrational choices and leads to conspiracy theories