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FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

wsj.com

71–80 of 217 posts

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#71

> the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals. The most fascinating part of this whole story to me is just how few checks and balances there were in this company. Even without a board, did major investors not get his quarterly financials? If the leaked balance sheet was any indication of their level financial engineering cap…

I think the reason is that he was seen as a financial genius boy wonder who just understood crypto better than anyone from the "old guard". So he got away with wildly inappropriate things. More generally, we (as a society) seem to be worshiping those who make a fortune, and forget that they too are just as faulty as the rest of us. Initial innovative success gets projected to mythical proportions, and once the invest…

Elon and Zuck aren't comparable - other than earning billions from scalable enterprise.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#72
The amounts of money we’re talking about here are sort of staggering. I know they did a pretty good job of not keeping any records of depositors, but do we have any sense of depositor demographics, total number of depositors, or average account size? Any KYC at all? Like did retail “investors” really pump close to $16B into this? Could the scam here be crypto whales used this as an off ramp to turn their crypto into fiat, and then burn the ramp and all evidence of who used it behind them?

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#73

Just a general statement on people commenting on this saga: Sam wasn't doing effective altruism. He was lying about doing effective altruism. It's weird to me that people talk about this as an indictment of EA...but this rings similar to me as claiming that this is an indictment of DeFi or cryptocurrency generally. Sam/Caroline weren't doing DeFi, and neither were they really doing anything related to cryptocurrency.…

It's an indictment of EA because many prominent EA people were associated with FTX/Sam. That shows poor judgement and, on some level, EA is about smart people making judgements about long-term good. How can we trust them to make those judgements when they decide to hitch their wagon to FTX?

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#74
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, the investors were stupid and deserved what they got. Customers were owed better, but large scale investors who don't do due diligence and end up losing their shirts deserve every bit of it.

I have to agree with this. While I don't like to victim blame usually, the VCs are too much in a position of power to truly be victims here. They absolutely could have pushed for more transparency or a board and likely would have smelled smoke when there was none

> VCs are too much in a position of power to truly be victims here

Sam playing league of legends during his pitch meeting with squioa capital gets memed a lot but it truly is absolutely staggering that so little common sense was applied here.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason is that he was seen as a financial genius boy wonder who just understood crypto better than anyone from the "old guard". So he got away with wildly inappropriate things. More generally, we (as a society) seem to be worshiping those who make a fortune, and forget that they too are just as faulty as the rest of us. Initial innovative success gets projected to mythical proportions, and once the invest…

In other words, the investors were stupid and deserved what they got. Customers were owed better, but large scale investors who don't do due diligence and end up losing their shirts deserve every bit of it.

Are you familiar with the term "accredited investor"? It's a formal term that the SEC uses to differentiate Joe Upper-Middle who has put 200K in a retirement program, from Josefina Nouveau, who has either:

earned income exceeding $200,000, or $300,000 when combined with a spouse, during each of the previous two full calendar years, and a reasonable expectation of the same for the current year

or

a net worth greater than $1 million (either by yourself or combined with a spouse), excluding your primary residence.

and is therefore expected, rightly or wrongly, to be able to judge the riskiness of a potential investment and absorb the loss without being crippled.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#76

How common was it for founders to cash out on common shares in the Series C-E rounds the last decade?

The article: "Mr. Bankman-Fried’s cashout was large by startup-world standards, where such sales historically were taboo because they allow founders to reap profits before investors."

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#77
post #24

> the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals. The most fascinating part of this whole story to me is just how few checks and balances there were in this company. Even without a board, did major investors not get his quarterly financials? If the leaked balance sheet was any indication of their level financial engineering cap…

I thought that was the whole point: unregulated (or at least extremely minimally regulated, preferably in a jurisdiction that has a looooong history of looking the other way and in a perfect world with no extradition treaties), decentralized, anonymous financial systems. It doesn't surprise me in the least that these clowns were running across the high wire without a net using other peoples money. The fascinating par…

There's a weird split in the space in that regard. There's a lot of right-libertarian-esque "no gods or kings, only man" ethos in the cryptocurrency space but there's also been a lot of work trying to build the guard rails that are common to society into the systems.

People like to joke that cryptocurrency is just right-libertarians speedrunning financial legislation history but the reality is more that a lot of the tools that governments use to make finance "safe" don't have well established parallels that work on a decentralised platform. A lot of that "speedrunning" is the people who are actually building things trying to figure out how to still have reasonable safety and stability without relying on a single government or power to enforce policy.

Things like privacy preserving transactions/communication and decentralised consensus are useful and valuable features but it's taken years for game theorists and cryptographers to work out schemes that are even close to being sustainable at scale without compromising on priorities. Doubly so to build those tools for stability that are essential for a well functioning society such as the capacity for KYC, tax, and regulatory compliance without compromising on the above priorities.

So in a sense that argument that "this is good because it shakes out the bad actors before they can do too much more damage" is accurate but not in the sense that it allows the "good guys" to continue in their glorious libertarian fantasy. Rather it's a good thing because it minimizes the potential damage that can be done until researchers and engineers can develop the technology to a degree that the average person could actually use it.

It's a race against a regulatory clock and when it strikes midnight, unless there is a working example of a "good" and "safe" cryptocurrency, regulators will absolutely go for the throat. Unless the tech is sufficiently mature, they will divide the space into one that is illegal & only used by criminals and another which throws any semblance of decentralisation or privacy preservation out the window. This take is unfortunately fairly US- and Euro-centric but the reality is that those two sets of governments and regulatory bodies will be the ones to decide what form digital currency/digital assets take going forward.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not investing into companies that are obviously either frauds or extremely incompetent is the investor's job. We don't need a lot of new regulation to make it harder for you to buy bridges from people you meet on the subway.

The idea behind the lack of regulation is that the impact is contained to the investors. It's obvious that in sufficiently large cases, that's not true. If these actors are able to do damage to entire sectors, they should have to do some minimum stuff: keep track of their money, have board meetings, submit to audits, etc.

And they will ... it's just that they'll provide false numbers to audits, their board will be them and their friends, and they'll keep track of their money as it makes its way into their pockets.

I guess we need more blockchain! But what business will have 100% of their relationships, contracts and transactions publicly visible?

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#79

Just a general statement on people commenting on this saga: Sam wasn't doing effective altruism. He was lying about doing effective altruism. It's weird to me that people talk about this as an indictment of EA...but this rings similar to me as claiming that this is an indictment of DeFi or cryptocurrency generally. Sam/Caroline weren't doing DeFi, and neither were they really doing anything related to cryptocurrency.…

The justifications in EA's long-termism are very similar to SBF's 'expected-value-reasoning', and the idea of buying out politicians to promote your cause is straight out of the EA playbook, fully justified by the philosophy. Just saying 'don't break laws while getting rich' is a band-aid, the problems exposed here run deeper.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#80

Just a general statement on people commenting on this saga: Sam wasn't doing effective altruism. He was lying about doing effective altruism. It's weird to me that people talk about this as an indictment of EA...but this rings similar to me as claiming that this is an indictment of DeFi or cryptocurrency generally. Sam/Caroline weren't doing DeFi, and neither were they really doing anything related to cryptocurrency.…

Just the capitalized term EA to me reads like a scam. It’s a new term created to explain some behavior that is simply injurious to the broader population, claiming that its for their benefit. I’m just not sure I buy it.
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