this is why the crypto journos like Molly trashed Lewis’s book. everything about FTX was a scam. it’s easy to have a very successful exchange and outcompete the completion if the client are betting against their own money.
Could you explain this? I don’t understand it. It reads like you’re saying something other than it was a Ponzi scheme.
Sure - the part Lewis has wrong is that Lewis thinks SBF was running a great exchange, and if only he hadn't stolen the clients money and stuck to his knitting everything would have been fine and great. That is incorrect because it ignores how FTX became so successful. Hint. Running an exchange is very competitive and margins by that time were not huge. Here is an example. Someone wants to place a leveraged trade on a token by effectively borrowing the token. That means FTX had to go out in the market and find someone who wants to be on the other side of that bet. At the end of the trade, someone wins, someone loses, margin calls are made, FTX makes a % everyone is happy. But what if FTX did not find the counterparty, and instead Alamada was on the other side of the trade? Then Alameda loses on the trade and FTX does not make a margin call on Alameda, but rather simply credits the trader with the profits, and allows Alameda to trade with an increasingly negative? At this point, the clients are effectively trading against their own money because there is no counterparty to the trades to make the margin calls. In effect a type of ponzi scheme. As industry insiders told Molly White, it is obviously easy to run an outwardly successful exchange if it is a giant fraud.
Some modern day bucket shops do this with stock daytraders - and it works because most daytraders lose money. Binance does this too, but they are big enough to manipulate the market to screw longs and shorts in turn and always end up on top.
yeah. according to the anoraks i read this is why FTX was so popular. you could make profitable trades on there.
Because as a person who aids in the support of people with autism,I refuse to excuse thieving sociopathic criminal behavior by saying "BuT hEeZ GoTz Da AwEtIzM!!"" Autism does not define SBF.Privilege,avarice,and lack of a moral compass does.Any autistic tendencies are merely an ancillary factor.
No,no,no,no. Children with autism have a variety of intellectual capacities.SBF was capable of attaining a college degree,so was capable of learning. His moral failing is far more impacted by the utter failure of his parents,both well educated,to instruct him in the ethics they taught.
This should really end the notion that FTX was led by intelligent and savvy traders. From the largest level trades to the smallest players, FTX got their clocks cleaned by everyone.
But the question is about emotion. Yes. But, again, this is about emotion. No disagreement that his parents had an effect, probably a major effect. But depending on how severe his autism is, his inability to understand emotion, specifically empathy, would effect how severely his moral compass failed.
Which makes it an ancillary effect,as I mentioned. Even if he has difficulty understanding other people's emotional states or doesn't pick up on social skills,its clear he could have been trained to respond in a socially normative manner (and also that society can be more more inclusive and adaptable with accommodations ).We have an entire program based on this for children with autism and ID. Also,the whole "don't run a Ponzi scheme" lesson that Mom and Dad could have worked on.
In the ongoing FTX bankruptcy they finally sold their Solana tokens. Solana is an advanced blockchain designed for all sorts of financial uses and was heavily supported and promoted by FTX. In actuality Solana is buggy and is rarely used, pretty much making the dividing line between "mainstream" tokens (Bitcoin, Etherium, Tether, USDC (Circle)) and memecoins. FTC sold what they had to a pair of market makers at over a 60% discount for what it is trading at. Solana users are mad, but if this was dumped on the open market it would have completely crashed the price.
Do Kwon and Terraform Labs were found liable for fraud in the collapse of their not-so-stable coin, Terra / Luna, two years ago. https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=do-kwon-and-terraform-labs-found-liable-for-40-billion-fraud
And today the Department of Justice said the law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, can't be the watchdog because of their involvement in FTX. This is horrible. A company caught being a major player in all sorts of world crime has now gone 5 months without any internal oversight. What the heck is the DOJ doing?
Usually when a crypto exchange suddenly stars implementing Know Your Customer policies, it means they got word the Federales are investigating them. Notoriously free-wheeling exchange MEXC just started three days ago. Why did they get in the US Government's crosshairs? Probably because they do the largest volume with Iran's main exchange, Nobitex. An exchange has to have some connection to American finance for the Feds to have jurisdiction. It's easy in this case, as lots of Americans use MEXC to trade crypto futures and other derivatives. That isn't allowed, which is why the main exchanges (like FTX and Binance) had US-only trading places that didn't allow derivative trading. We will have to see if the US's new stance on Iran is going to shut some of these places down.
There's a new fad in crypto, and it's called "Runes". Basically it's a way to create unique tokens on the Bitcoin blockchain, using the technology that allowed Ordinals. So obviously there's nothing to it except a new space to do pump-and-dumps. A space that has a reputation, but one utterly not designed to do this. Because there is limited bandwidth on Bitcoin, all this demand to create Runes has drove up transaction fees to insane levels. It costs up to a couple hundred dollars to do anything on-blockchain with Bitcoin now. We just saw the long-awaited halving in Bitcoin (where rewards for winning the massive electrical waste lottery is now half of what it was before the 20th), but fees generated from Runes is making miners rich. It won't last, of course. But there always has to be some new hope created for crypto investors as every old hope turns out to be nothing.
It lasted shorter than I thought. Since Saturday the revenue per petahash has dropped below $60 and now its around $50. That is below profitability for most public miners in the US. Doesn't look like it will get better anytime soon. Private companies can shut down computers and wait to get better prices. Public ones have a responsibility to shareholders, so paradoxically they have to waste even more money keeping hashrate at maximum level. They have to sell Bitcoins they are holding to keep operating.
CZ, founder and CEO of Binance, got a only a 4 month sentence for a multi-billion dollar crime of theft, securities violations, banking violations, sanction violations, and helping fund terrorists. As long as you don't make rich people poorer, I guess it doesn't really matter what you do. https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/new...ng-violations/ar-AA1nWE8W?ocid=BingNewsSearch
He was autistic. I don't care. He's also a criminal. If his autism was such an issue perhaps his lawyers should've gone with the autism defense. Twinkies worked for Dan White. Why not autism?
The reporting now is that CZ got a light sentence because he ratted out some big players. I think if this isn't destruction-of-Tether level, it isn't worth it. There's Justin Sun and his TRON universe, but he's just hanging on at this point and Tether is what's keeping him afloat. No one else is worth anything. I mean, sure, he can point to the people sourcing and receiving the money transfers to Hamas and Russia and drug cartels, but crypto is the reason those people could do what they did and the federales can't be telling the other thousand exchanges out there that they are few months in Club Fed away from retiring with their profits from dealing with those kinds of people.