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Binance to acquire FTX

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491–500 of 790 posts

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#491
post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rest assured that the regulations are coming because the crypto simply did a speed-run of unregulated securities market and repeated every fraud or scam that the traditional markets went through over the history. In the process, huge fortunes were created and libertarians were empowered(but not enough to be the main political power). Congrats to them but there's nothing anarchist left in crypto, they even end up cons…

Exactly, it's bizarre to read about the wildcat banking era in the US and why the Fed was created while simultaneously looking around at the rate of mainstream crypto scams and institutional failures nowadays. The Fed sure isn't without its issues, but it was created to solve the exact problems that we're now seeing proliferate via the crypto space.

I don't think this is correct.

The FED was created in 1913 for a very specific reason - to counter the Panic of 1907 by creating a banker of last resort.

It did nothing to curb the banker speculation that led to the panic of 1907

Witness LTCM, Web bubble, Subprime crisis, all fueled by banks willing to lend and overextend themselves beyond margin. The 1913 ACT did not change that one bit except make the speculators never "lose"

The FED did nothing to resolve speculation, if anything, bubbles are worse and now they are worldwide thanks to them and their low rates.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#492
post #489
post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see the same thing with Middle East Leaders - MBS, MBZ, etc. When the names are even semi-complex and the reach is global, people default to acronyms.

Pedantic nit: Those are initialisms. An initialism is when the individual letters are individually pronounced, like "emm-bee-ess." An acronym is when the initial letters are pronounced as a word, e.g. SOAR ("Situation Options Act Review-and-Reassess")

The broader sense of acronym—the meaning of which includes terms pronounced as letters—is sometimes criticized, but it is the term's original meaning[1] and is in common use.Dictionary and style-guide editors are not in universal agreement on the naming for such abbreviations, and it is a matter of some dispute whether the term acronym can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced "as words", nor do these language authorities agree on the correct use of spacing, casing, and punctuation.

[1] https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/1844;jsessioni...).

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#493
post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats funny, sure going to Gtech for an American as an undergrad doesn't scream privilege but seeing that today the total cost of going to such school will run you around 400k as an international student, while millions of people graduate high school in Nigeria and have to go through the hunger games of Jamb for extremely limited spots due to the lack of investment in education lead by his dad and cohorts tells a dif…

Are you just assuming his dad paid for his school? Do you know if he received any scholarships? Do you know the finances of his mother/mother's side of the family?

A scholarship? People from Nigeria can't even get a visa into the US.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#494

Why is it apparently so difficult to run a solvent crypto exchange? On the face, it shouldn't be too hard, just take deposits, stick them in a wallet, and swap client balances in a database. Is the temptation to maintain a reserve ratio < 1 just too great? Do operators try to earn small, low-risk return on client funds only to find there are no low-risk, positive-return assets in crypto? Are the extending margin to c…

FTX offers leveraged products so they are borrowing assets from somewhere to fund these trades.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pretty uncommon for exchanges to do all their market making directly Point is, in real finance, it's pretty uncommon for exchanges to do any of their market making. Largely to ensure they can project confidence in crises. Market makers blow up. Exchanges shouldn't.

Do exchanges in real finance even have long term customer deposits?

> Do exchanges in real finance even have long term customer deposits?

Not really. They used to! (A hundred+ years ago.) But we learned that an exchange blowing up is a hell of a lot worse than a bank or broker. So most systems segregate the functions. (It's also not great to have an exchange making markets and thereby having a vested directional interest.)

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#496
post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They go by acronyms on social media, namely twitter, the main place people interact with them https://twitter.com/cz_binance https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX

CZ is Czechia though

It will get it's acronym back shortly.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#497

Binance was threatening to dump a huge amount of FTT tokens on the market. FTX has a big+vulnerable position in FTT. FTX asked Binance to sell them the tokens for a fixed price, so as not to crash the FTT token price. Binance declined - this was yesterday/today. Of course the price of FTT crashed today. And now Binance buys FTX to help them out... smells like Binance played 4D chess all along. https://decrypt.co/1136…

> Binance was threatening to dump a huge amount of FTT tokens on the market. FTX has a big+vulnerable position in FTT. FTX asked Binance to sell them the tokens for a fixed price, so as not to crash the FTT token price. Binance declined

This makes absolutely no sense and is not how markets work. If FTX was actually willing to buy unlimited FTT at a given price, Binance could not have "crashed the price" by selling below that price — somebody would simply have bought at the Binance price and sold to FTT at their price.

What seems more likely is that FTX extended that offer only to a small portion of the tokens that Binance wanted to sell (to maintain the fiction of their price).

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crypto is an anarchist experiment And, like every anarchist experiment before it, it failed. It continues to draw in new suckers every day, and that is a problem for society. It doesn't matter if you didn't cause the problem. Because you live in that society, you still have to pay the cost to fix it or continue to take the losses from the problem existing. It's the same with slavery, not educating blacks, and then…

To be fair to anarchists, it extremely often failed because of outside forces being violent towards them. Nothing in anarchy is inherently doomed to failure, and is a better demonstration of democracy than anything we have currently. (Because if there's anything an anarchist loves more than voting, it's one more voting round). Calling cryptocurrencies "anarchist" is walking on the corpse of actual anarchists and taki…

I guess people think Mad Max rather than "everything is run by tiny councils" when they think about anarchists.

Re: Binance to acquire FTX

#500

You know what this makes me kind of wonder... back earlier in the year SBF made a big show of coming in and investing in a bunch of the companies that were collapsing due to the LUNA/3AC/Celsius problems. He stepped in and to some extent halted the unwinding of some of these issues. It turns out now that it's likely FTX is underwater, and Binance is basically doing the same thing - coming in, picking them up cheap an…

Pure speculation - but I am going to go ahead and speculate that they lost most of the money when everything collapsed a few months ago in the defi blow up. They doubled down and bought up distressed assets for cents on the dollar, hoping to make it back. A few months on, these bets are worth $0 and there is a $5bn hold in the balance sheet. If binance havent been f'ing around on the side gambling on the price, and j…

Yup, I think this is what happened. And they claimed "it was for the good of the crypto ecosystem", which in part is true. But the reality if SBF aquired because he had to.
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