The FTX scam, Sam Bankman-Fried, the Clintons and the Democrats

They haven't put out a proper law yet, but FTX Sam was essential in working on a new bill that may pass soon and would be to the detriment of many exchanges (and also not be a safeguard for customers, just more kyc requirements etc and forcing out decentralised entities or ones that don't want strict customer kyc).

Regulators stress the need to help customers, but do absolutely nothing about proper due diligence and transparent audits, or guaranteed separated customer deposits for exchanges.

All these proposed laws do it just take away the ability to choose what you want to do with your money and give law access to every customer's data.

 

Most of the info is in this twitter thread:

 

That's the problem.....

 

You have to search by democrat or directly Google his mother's name + Clinton.

 

and the back-pedaling begins,

in doing so, contradicting the title of the thread "The FTX scam, Sam Bankman-Fried, the Clintons and the Democrats"

 

Dude doesn't even reply when someone brings facts or asks something, incredibly useless. Put him on my ignore list now.

 

I've been following the FTX debacle closely but I fail to see how his parents are involved simply because they were college professors. They had nothing to do with this as well as the Clintons and the Democrats. SBF started this entire fiasco by when he realized that there were differences in the valuation of crypto currencies among different countries. He began to exploit those differences by trading between these currencies in order to generate a nice profit ($20M if memory serves). He then created Alameda and began exploiting weaknesses in the private exchange marketplace where relationships with other wealthy investors is more important that actual accounting and fiduciary operations.

This enabled him to "persuade" other wealthy investors (Binance and Crypto.com) to invest in his operations all while being totally ignorant of the true nature of Alameda's operations. He starts FTX in order to do spot crypto and derivatives "investing" but the entire operation was REALLY sketchy from the start particularly with how clients funds were managed. And because this was being carried out in the "private investment space", SBF felt that he was not subject to governmental banking and financial regulations. Thing was, SBF never had actual funds to invest with so he simply "made up" accounts to be used in trading or he used funds from client accounts (BILLIONS of $$$). This gave him the appearance of being a successful trader thereby attracting more amateur and professional investors.

However, once the crypto market for Bitcoin crashed last year, clients started withdrawing their investments at Alameda and FTX and SBF was caught up in a massive liquidity crisis so he took money from other Alameda client accounts to cover the shortfall. Which is how he got caught when it became obvious that Alameda and FTX did not have enough funds to satisfy their obligations. The trading firms who did business with Alameda and FTX are now writing off those investments. SBF tried to get other firms to bail him out (Binance) but when that falls through he has FTX file for bankruptcy. This is now a huge cluster****.There may be as many as 1M creditors with losses estimated to be as much as $10B. This may well prove to be bigger than Madoff.

There's also the matter of $1B that mysteriously "disappeared" from the crypto wallets at FTX that SBF has yet to explain.

 

No, by all accounts we know he used billions to bail out Alameda after they used their money to prop up generic firms after the Luna&3ac disaster, plus invested in over 400 obscure startups without due diligence.

This entire thing was self-inflicted by bailing out Alameda and not due to clients or investors withdrawing over the year. FTX itself was profitable with a healthy balance sheet and could have just let Alameda die.

 

Thanks, a really good article. The whole movement strikes me at first glance as part of the larger anti-government/libertarian approach to societal problems.

Interestingly that also we have the recent story of Brezos proclaiming he will giving away a lot of his money for philanthropy. Meanwhile crankly conservative billionaires heavily invest their money in voting suppression, false claims of voting fraud, gerrymandering and hacking the undemocratic flaws in the Constitution to keep their gang in political power.

 

This was brought up in the Ukraine thread. 'Peace for all of our country" means withdrawl of Russian forces from Ukraine.

 

Came out today that SBF's pollster in the election was betting on elections based on his polls. Only problem is that SBF's pollster was way off and missed on almost every race so he got killed on predictit.

I guess it isn't surprising that the people around him are just as scummy and delusional.

 

Actually it is similar to the hysteria around hot stocks that never make any money till they suddenly collapse, Theranos as well as the fall of Lehman etc.

It is darkly humorous as the same folks who idiotically hate all government regulation are the first to blame the SEC who they probably complain bitterly hires too many people.

 

Effective Altruism is a very compellign idea how it's being implemented isn't without controversy. This is the main website for it:


Like I said I know very little about Crypto and even less about this situation. Bankman-Fried though being one of the major figures in EA it will be interesting to see what happens to the movement.

 

The movement is pretty broad, and certainly isn't just made up of SBF types. Some commit to giving a sizeable fraction of their earnings away annually to measurably effective charities, and that seems entirely honorable and commendable to me. But choosing the path of trying to earn as much money as possible so that at some later point in the future you can give it all away gives people a built-in excuse to behave in an exploitive/harmful way while telling themselves it will all be for the greater good eventually. I can't help but be suspicious of people who choose that path.

 

It's basically a take on Ends justify the Means. From a pragmatic point of view though given where our civilization is at it makes sense. Unfortunately it's easier to make change and get your voice heard when you have a lot of money.