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FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

reuters.com

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Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#541

Post by JSavageOne »

thwayunion wrote: post #491
Julesman wrote: post #463

I'm not a luddite (on hacker news lol) and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. But, for the love of God, can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth. Moderate investment can support development without the kind of hype that ruins lives and sullies public perception of the technology.

> can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth I first played around with blockchain in 2011 or so and I still don't know what actual utility this technology is supposed to have. I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database. Around 2015 a lot of people I thought were smart enough…

No post body was provided.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#542

Post by hinkley »

bananapub wrote: post #532
kasey_junk wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A “universal” api for moving money between financial institutions that don’t have existing relationships would be extremely valuable and could unlock innovation in everything from payments to mortgages. But the blockchain space has an extreme bias against the existing finance world. Frequently products in the space want to tear it down as they view it as predatory. This leaves us with the current situation, the crypt…

I swear to god, half of the problem with cryptocurrency is Americans not understanding what a functional personal banking system looks like. The big American banks just never bothered to move beyond the 1970s, and so otherwise fairly well-informed Americans in tech assume you need some sort of completely mad system like "consume the power of Spain making a distributed merkel tree full of partial hash collisions" to m…

Snake oil comes around every couple of generations once the people who lived it are too feeble or too few to get the message out to the latest crop of people with enough income to grab the attention of con artists.

These are in theory lessons that are meant to be passed along by the Public Education system but ours is pretty broken.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#543

Post by thwayunion »

kasey_junk wrote: post #516
thwayunion wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth I first played around with blockchain in 2011 or so and I still don't know what actual utility this technology is supposed to have. I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database. Around 2015 a lot of people I thought were smart enough…

A “universal” api for moving money between financial institutions that don’t have existing relationships would be extremely valuable and could unlock innovation in everything from payments to mortgages. But the blockchain space has an extreme bias against the existing finance world. Frequently products in the space want to tear it down as they view it as predatory. This leaves us with the current situation, the crypt…

> A “universal” api for moving money between financial institutions that don’t have existing relationships

KYC is a feature, not a bug, so there has to be at least some sort of relationship even if it's via mutual registration with a third party.

Also, modernization of banking systems, including inter-bank transfer, has been slowing happening in the background for the last decade. AFAIK no one is using pow, pos, or blockchains (except, maybe, just in the sense that traditional databases have many of the same desirable attributes as a blockchain).

> could unlock innovation in everything from payments to mortgages.

Innovation in mortgages didn't work out so well last time, and honestly the actual origination of a mortgage is one of the least painful and inefficient parts of real estate.

When bitcoin launched we really did need innovation in payments. Apple Pay and Google Pay solved a lot of the problem, and the recent rise of "bank/lender as an api" startups popping up now solve a significant part of the rest of the problem.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#544

Post by qudat »

twblalock wrote: post #528

This has been a wonderful social experiment, enabling people who didn’t live in the 19th century to see what happens when banking and investing is treated like the wild west. Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions. There aren’t very many other aspects of our society where we get to have that kind of experiment and find out…

Hmm, I’m not sure about your conclusion.

I would rather see people be more scrutinizing when giving their money to others. It doesn’t matter if there are rules and regulations, people are always going to be duped. When I read about FTX I just think that people need to be better educated.

Maybe one could argue that the rules and regulations are specific to providing consumers with tools to make educated decisions about financial investments.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#546

Post by RetpolineDrama »

thwayunion wrote: post #491
Julesman wrote: post #463

I'm not a luddite (on hacker news lol) and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. But, for the love of God, can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth. Moderate investment can support development without the kind of hype that ruins lives and sullies public perception of the technology.

> can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth I first played around with blockchain in 2011 or so and I still don't know what actual utility this technology is supposed to have. I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database. Around 2015 a lot of people I thought were smart enough…

>I have never -- never -- encountered a value-producing use case for cryptocurrency that can't be solved by either signed git commits or a SQL database.

I've heard a lot of people used it to buy drugs on the internet.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#547

Post by basch »

shaburn wrote: post #504
shorthistory wrote: post #423

Can anyone speculate what Bankman-Fried's exit plan was? Was this a fraud that got out of control, or premeditated? If it was premeditated, what was the exit plan? Did he expect to be able to gamble with customer funds indefinitely? Were the Effective Altruism intimations genuine? Why, if Alameda was a market maker, and they therefore presumably have some form of insight into the markets, did they then decide to take…

10 Billion dollar question: Who were the counter parties to these trades where customer funds were "lost".

They were the counterparty with themself?

They accept FTT as collateral, give out a leveraged loan to the other company. The company spends that money on things like stadium rights and bailing out other failed crypto companies. Collateral falls to a value of 0, and the money is spent.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#548

Post by randiantech »

twblalock wrote: post #528

This has been a wonderful social experiment, enabling people who didn’t live in the 19th century to see what happens when banking and investing is treated like the wild west. Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions. There aren’t very many other aspects of our society where we get to have that kind of experiment and find out…

19th century, or 2008. It’d be same.

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#549

Post by rurp »

Animats wrote: post #389

"Voluntary Chapter 11" in Delaware. Figures. That gets them out from bankruptcy in the Bahamas, which is much tougher than US law. The Bahamas still has classic tough bankruptcy laws, where there's no debtor-in-possession reorganization. It's straight to liquidation, with a court-appointed receiver in charge. This should be, and may be, converted to a straight liquidation. Chapter 11 can be useful for restarting comp…

> We strongly advise against depositing

Wait, withdrawls are completely frozen and the company is done for, but they are still accepting deposits?!

Re: FTX to file for U.S. bankruptcy, CEO resigns

#550

Post by bombcar »

caycep wrote: post #520
kasey_junk wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A “universal” api for moving money between financial institutions that don’t have existing relationships would be extremely valuable and could unlock innovation in everything from payments to mortgages. But the blockchain space has an extreme bias against the existing finance world. Frequently products in the space want to tear it down as they view it as predatory. This leaves us with the current situation, the crypt…

How is it currently run? From my layperson experience, every time I do a wire transfer, I feel like I'm inputting data into a mainframe or something...

You basically are.

https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/ach/ and https://www.swift.com handle much of the US, and it's a system developed in the 70s (or earlier) and it works.

It could be modernized and things like https://explore.fednow.org are trying to do that.

But the problems involved are not things a blockchain would secure because there's a trusted intermediary which can just run a database.

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