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

There are also other mushy things that I mentioned days ago and here is a good article (thx @Invisible Fan) that talks about potential "wire fraud" crimes of some of those things....

Will SBF Go to Prison? (nymag.com)

 

And SBF was a crypto darling too…. Obviously “Bitcoin Maxis” like yourself wanted to protect your own moat, but it’s hard to deny he became the face of crypto through a carefully crafted narrative.

He used the black box of finance/crypto to engineer a Ponzi scheme.

 

Agree: SBF was a scam artist disguised as a crypto darling.

Disagree: I am not a bitcoin maxi.

 

But you do want to protect your crypto moat? SBF hurts your position by proximity?

 

Good WSJ article detailing what we know about the donors so far. Again, SBF donated heavily to democrats but another single FTX executive donated ~$20 million to GOP candidates. I’m sure we will get more information from other executives within the company.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sam-ba...olitical-donors-before-bankruptcy-11668949205

 

Bitcoin is not 'crypto'. Bitcoin is Bitcoin, its own unique asset class that is largely undefined, despite everyone trying to define it. (as crypto, currency, money, medium of exchange, inflation hedge, blah blah blah). You can define Bitcoin as well as someone could define the future of the internet in the early 90's.

I dont know what you mean by my 'position hurt by proximity'. Billions of toxic debt got washed out.

 

People seem to have this misguided notion that Bitcoin was designed to make fraud impossible.

Fraud will exist as long as one human trusts another human to be the custodian of their assets.

 

Bitcoin is not crytpo? Did you read the original Bitcoin paper. It explains a currency based on cryptography . The ledger is a big file with all the transactions. None of this stuff works without cryptography. Do you understand any of the math behind this?

 

Correct. Bitcoin doesn't prevent fraud. What it does prevent is 'too big to fail', like the US banking system and $USD.

FTX was seriously getting out of control and exposing a lot of incredibly ignorant financial 'experts' (like @adoo). These big bitcoin block chain analyst companies like Biance, Coinbase, Gemini, Grayscale, Swan, Unchained capital knew something really bad was going down with these yield farming companies. Those who had exposure to FTX (Biance, Coinbase, Gemini) all remained quiet. The pure bitcoin companies have been screaming for months to get your funds off exchanges. They were laughed at and scored. Biance has been sitting over there watching the suspected FTX bitcoin wallets dwindle down to nothing. CZ tried to warn people on the down low but nobody cared so he rug pulled FTX's remaining reserves.

The bottom line is that once the Bitcoin asset becomes too heavy with debt/leverage/contagion, it eventually shakes it off. The scam artists are the first to realize its a lot easier to spot paper bitcoin than many realize (thanks to chain analytics) and have bad actors come shake them from their position. Its very difficult to hide billions of dollars in Bitcoin w/out one of these top end chain analytics companies figure out who you really are.

The bigger issue is the debt fallouts. Remember FTX bought BlockFi and Voyager. That was in attempts to reduce contagion and buy some important debt assets (hey mr billionaire/politician, ill make you whole from your bad mistake if you do me some favors). Im sure CZ/Biance could have bought some serious favor if they ended up with FTX.

 

Thanks for the lesson buddy. The whole internet is ran on cryptography, not just bitcoin. We dont call it 'cryptointernet', do we?

 

I’m pretty sure bitcoin is a cryptocurrency.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency

According to Jan Lansky, a cryptocurrency is a system that meets six conditions:[34]

1. The system does not require a central authority; its state is maintained through distributed consensus.
2. The system keeps an overview of cryptocurrency units and their ownership.
3. The system defines whether new cryptocurrency units can be created. If new cryptocurrency units can be created, the system defines the circumstances of their origin and how to determine the ownership of these new units.
4. Ownership of cryptocurrency units can be proved exclusively cryptographically.
5. The system allows transactions to be performed in which ownership of the cryptographic units is changed. A transaction statement can only be issued by an entity proving the current ownership of these units.
6. If two different instructions for changing the ownership of the same cryptographic units are simultaneously entered, the system performs at most one of them.

​

 

By this definition, the other 10,000 cryptocurrencies are not cryptocurrencies.

 

Does bitcoin use brockchain?

 

Of course not.... it was billed as a better system and we've seen that "better system" over the least few years and these are some of the results.....

 

How does it do that or how can you say that when it's scale is nothing like the US banking system?

 

Which definition do you use?

 

Bitcoin is pretty synonymous with cryptocurrency (just crypto for short).

A bunch of less well-known cryptos have collapsed almost completely this year. Add on fraud in crypto exchange and some ppl wonder if that is it for the industry? Nope, I don't think so. It's still in its infancy and there is much more upside than downside.

There has been this niche (nerdy) thing with crypto - a refusal, in some way, to understand the gaps between what mainstream customers/investors want vs what it provides.

Decentralized sounds awesome, but it's also, you are on your own. Better figure out how to secure that wallet, don't lose it, or hey, park it in this exchange and trust it (oops). And if someone somehow hack and stole your stack, sorry, it's gone.... forever. That's if the retail customers can even get over the "just trust technology" (they won't - they can't trust something that has no centralized authority that they are so used to or that they don't understand).

What you are left with is just mostly speculative investors (some who haven't a clue what they are getting themselves into).

So.... the opportunity. With this FTX fraud being highly visible, there is now a chance to solve those core problems rather quickly - either through state regulation or new industry self-regulation, or some combination of both. If that happens (and not overly burdensome), cryptos can become mainstream, opening up the industry to a much larger customer pool, and attracting new investors enabling some of these current and future cool projects to end up with something valuable.

 

Bitcoin is tiny. So tiny that it really doesn't have a market except as a novel speculative asset for the vast majority of use cases. Honestly at this time i can't think of a good use case that some shitcoin like ripple can't replace it.
That said, due to the immutable characteristics, rampant fraud can't run endlessly as I described before, thus grounding its speculative value. The 70k top was not driven by demand but by pure speculation perpetuated by the shitcoin casino mania participated by people all over the world.
There is a belief that Bitcoin will continue to be consumed by hard-core investors and believers. When true demand arrives, that will drive up the value very quickly.

 

I really don't use the term. I don't view any of them as a currency, including bitcoin.

It reminds me of the late 90s term 'information superhighway'.