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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

#931

Post by vgatherps »

kikokikokiko wrote: post #904
vgatherps wrote: post #869

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTX’s lending product was (theoretically) peer-to-peer, the rates were driven by actual borrow demand from other people. FTX was just a tremendously better derivatives exchange than everybody else when it was launched. To this day only Okex of the major exchanges has a competitive margin system imo. Continuous pnl realization and cleaner perpetual models are icing on the cake. Theft of user funds aside, SBF likely kn…

"... the rates were driven by actual borrow demand from other people..." Or, alternatively, the rates were artificially inflated by a ponzi operator interested in getting more and more people joining the pyramid. Just like Coinbase, FTX was, with 99% certainty, not profitable. Of course, the creators of the pyramid WILL profit and take resources for themselves to buy things like, let's say, a 10% stake on Robinhood,…

"FTX’s lending product was (theoretically) peer-to-peer"

that's the point of theoretically?

Their spot lending system didn't come out until well after they had cemented their spot as a top exchange, and if you look at the rates anytime in the last year they were well under market rate - like ~1-2% rates for most major products.

It might have been part of the scam, but this looks much more like pretty bog standard "let's go trade our users funds away".

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

#932

Post by tyree731 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #928
planetsprite wrote: post #917

For those who believe crypto and web3 is the future, has any comparable emerging technology been met with as many scandals and busts in so little time?

This has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. It's just an exchange that gambled away customer deposits and then was liquidated. They're banks. We've reinvented banks with all of the drawbacks and none of the benefits. This isn't the way cryptocurrency was meant to be used. We were meant to hold our money in our own wallets, not leave it in some centralized exchange so it can "efficiently" allocate the funds. People ke…

No true scotsman would gamble away customer deposits.

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

#933

Post by HideousKojima »

sharkweek wrote: post #856

Howdy HN, as some of you may know from previous comments of mine, I’m always on the hunt for swag from dead companies (Lehman Brothers letterhead, Theranos shirts, Clinkle phone case, Enron desk art, et al). The more fraudulent the collapse, the more interested I am. I’d love to get ahead of the ball on this one so if anyone here has any, and I mean any, FTX swag you somehow have picked up over the years, I’m a very…

Along those lines, if anyone has a Spanish Jeb! 2016 hoodie (i.e. with the upside down exclamation mark) let me know

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

#935

Post by hinkley »

killerstorm wrote: post #652
hinkley wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on code that used a Merkle Tree before any of us had heard of a Merkle tree or this blockchain bullshit came around, so I never got starry eyed about any of this stuff. That project was in an environment where chain of custody is an established mechanism for ensuring public safety. Layering a web of trust over the top of that was something the users could mostly digest. Consumers can only use software signed…

A Block header includes a root hash of a Merkle tree of transactions. So yes, it is a tree, if you also consider the useful payload, not just block headers. Then e.g. in Ethereum there's also a Merkle tree of the entire state as well. > there's no distributed consensus Distributed consensus is necessary if you want high availability and replication for your Merkle tree. If data in your tree is important, you want to…

> Distributed consensus is necessary if you want high availability and replication for your Merkle tree.

No, distributed consensus is necessary if you're willing to sacrifice correctness for availability.

>> public safety

> So this distributed consensus thing, Byzantine Fault Tolerance,

Show me a blockchain that actually implements BFT. Longest chain wins is not Byzantine Fault Tolerance.

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

#936

Post by AYBABTME »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #670
AYBABTME wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they thought they were honest and doing things properly, and didn't realize that their holding of FTT was making them as bad as the other frauds before. I think these ouroboros are complex enough that even main players don't necessarily understand the position they've put themselves in.

Let’s not treat senior management and owners of a company that has gambled away billions of dollars of customers (and investors) money as kids. They should get jail time from what I’ve read so far. They were either criminally stupid or did this on purpose. It really wasn’t that complex. This isn’t even close to 2008 complexity since this was all happening within one organization With the same owner SBF.

I don't really care whether they're kids of not. I do think it's possible that they step by step ended up in a situation they didn't realize they were getting into. Doesn't mean I think they shouldn't be punished if such a treatment is required.

But again and again, supposedly smart finance folks end up blindsided by retrospectively obvious stuff. There's just too many complicated fabrications on top of one another.

I'm not particularly sanctimonious, I think the average vilain of the day is most of the time just an average person making dumb mistake.

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

#937

Post by sfifs »

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…

For those of us living on the right side of a relatively stable rules based society where we have reasonable expectation of personal property rights, it is not useful.

For those either on the wrong side of the society (eg. Source of income is what the society defines as crime etc) or living in a society where your wealth (possibly acquired through corruption) can be seized without recourse, it is potentially a useful way to store and transfer wealth in a way that is difficult and expensive to interfere with or detect. This is a real use case though possibly not a morally defensible one to most of us.

The other theoriticical use case of having a form of liquidish currency that is not devaluable at whim by governments has not come to pass due to speculation and volatility.

The rest are either speculating OR selling shovels to the gold diggers.

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

#938

Post by sangnoir »

ineedasername wrote: post #918
ryanSrich wrote: post #829

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're in the Bahamas you can withdraw. People on Twitter with millions in FTX have been paying Bahaman citizens to KYC their accounts so they can withdraw. This is obviously highly illegal.

What makes it/why is it illegal?

Getting a mule to attest they own an account they do not obviously is illegal, and does an end run against KYC laws

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

#939

Post by PheonixPharts »

tartoran wrote: post #333
PheonixPharts wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most of the adults know that there is a window when you can get rich off a known con and get out before it blows up with quite a lot of cash. The best part of these being unqualified children is that they don't even realize that part of the deal they've signed up for is to take the fall when shit finally hits the fan. There's plenty of people who have made money from SBF behind the scenes, but you'll never he…

This couldn’t be further from the truth. SBF had enablers who knew what this was from the beginning but kept mum about it. They actually helped hype it up then exit with profits.

I'm confused because you say "this couldn't be further from the truth" and the state pretty much exactly what I was saying.

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

#940

Post by cuteboy19 »

pbreit wrote: post #467
sgt101 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The administrators / bankruptcy courts will try and do a deal with the stadium. Something like "we can auction the rights again and we will keep 90% of what we get for them, you can have 10%, so you are 10% up, for nothing"

Very unlikely the bankruptcy court will get to do much beyond terminating the deal.

They could probably even claw back some of the money
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