FTX hacker identity discovered by Kraken Exchange team?
cryptoslate.com
cryptoslate.com
And I mean, at this point he's so legally fucked it doesn't really matter if he gets caught doing this, so there's no need to be subtle about it. For him, sloppy is fine if it's quick.
[0] https://twitter.com/Loopifyyy/status/1591489987459297282
Honestly, if he manages to sneak to Laos or the Maldives, even with a mere $100m or so? Yeah he'd most likely be fine, especially if he lays low. A similar example at smaller scale is Sam Jain[0] who ran eFront in the early 00s; he defrauded businesses of tens of millions and ran off somewhere. He's been a fugitive for over a decade but still has multiple millions of dollars to life off of.
Biggest difference is Jain was mainly defrauding businesses, whereas SBF defrauded billionaires... wherever he goes, I'm sure 24/7 armed security is going to be on his shopping list.
on top of all of that, im sure there are a large number of people that want him dead at this point?
I’m struggling to phrase this in a high brow way, but being the son of powerful parents might be a factor too. It’s possible that this is the first time in his life that anyone is telling him not to do X for an X he really wanted to do.
Him being the second largest donor to the Democratic Party will really test the rule of law. Does it apply to the powerful? We’ll see.
Bernie Madoff was a large donor to the Democrats and it didn't help him one bit. I see no reason to believe that the situation will be any different regarding SBF, if he is indeed culpable.
Past money only gives you leverage as long as people believe there are potentially plenty more in the future to get.
No, he SAID he did.
I don't know if you know this, but people can... lie!!!! u_u
Epstein and Maxwell are the only human traffickers ever to be convicted without anyone in the DoJ even questioning who they trafficked children to.
SBF and Madoff just took some of their money.
Well, in the very least, we have flight logs. I think that's better than nothing.
BTW, where can someone learn about the Epstein story? In the surface it seems a very rare character, for me, at least, it is difficult to connect the pederastian and procurer with someone who made a lot of money from other unknown activities. It seems these two, are separate things and it is not clear why he don't just pursued one of these activities and why he and Maxwell were abusing people at the same time instead of separating their business with their personal sexual choices. Top drug dealers see drugs as a business because having an addiction will ruin it.
People who think this guy won't come out still a millionaire out of this are delusional. As I said enough money to have a mansion in West Palm Beach or San Mateo, he'd only have to party at home for a while.
People like this end up dead before any law enforcement gets to them.
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/1591348369271971841...
It’s a curiosity to me about how these things all go down in a broader sense. Because clearly something went way wrong at FTX. But are authorities swooping in, as in literally and physically, at this point? It seems all sorts of shenanigans could be happening in the offices, which to my understanding is also where they live or close to it (at least some of the offices).
It’s like authorities know a figurative bloodbath is going on, but for these financial crimes, the response is a bit slower than a literal bloodbath.
Going by the twitter accounts of some (ex)FTX employees, they have not yet realized what might be coming their way. I.e it doesn't matter if authorities are busting down your door right now, whatever you say or do now can have implications.
Certainly anyone in their situation should have personally lawyered up days ago, no matter what level of employee. Even if I was a low-level employee with absolutely no proper knowledge of this stuff, I would lawyer up because the people at the top will look for any scapegoat.
There’s a nagging curiosity, that likely everyone shares, about having a play by play of what actually happened during this week (after the downfall) and what should have happened.
Doing so via unauthorized withdrawals almost certainly adds a layer of actual crime?
The reasoning would probably have influence on how hard you were punished though.
The relevant fact is the company’s insolvency.
If you’re in an executive position at a company, and you know the company is insolvent, and you’re appropriating company funds for yourself, you’re breaking the law. It doesn’t matter if the company owes you that money.
There’s a little subtlety here of course but this wouldn’t be an example of that.
In any case, when you ruin people's lives, any prison term is insignificant.
Belfort got 2 years, another exec at his company got 3 years. That doesn't seem significant. On the other hand, they got a deal because they cooperated, leading to 24 people at another fraud company being charged, one of whom got 22 years.
(The fellow who got 22 years is now out. He's on Twitter at @TheReal_Wolf_, and is involved in NFTs. Hmm.)
I don't think SBF would qualify for Shkreli's treatment, because people were significantly harmed. Would he get Belfort's treatment? Maybe, if he has the goods to bring down a bunch of other people.
SBF operated in MANY jurisdictions worldwide, and had a (now embarrassing) association with government officials. It's likely more governments will go after him than the other two. It's possible his situation results in more prison time than even Do Kwon, founder of Luna/Terra.
Edit: Roommates who are in a mutually intertwined amorous relationship. No offense intended.
Imagine how it would sound if one were to s/polyamorous/gay for example.
(Trying hard to keep my comment substantive. I’ll stop doing this if it leads to a poor discussion though.)
The poly movement is pretty interesting in general: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRxcxftQ/ There’s an ongoing TikTok series that’s witty and fun. I’ve found myself drawn in by it.
Unfair comparison, if gay was used that would be highlighting their sexual orientation, not the nature of the relationship between each other which is relevant in context.
You can say “well, stop doing that.” But the comparison with being gay is all the more valid here. It’s like saying just don’t be gay.
In other words, being poly isn’t merely an agreement between three or more partners. That’s a necessary component (otherwise it would just be cheating), but it’s not sufficient. Some of the people in those three can’t help but feel that way, regardless if they used to be exclusive.
It’s doubly hard in the current social climate, because since it’s so new, there isn’t really a way to meet likeminded people yet. The app Open is the closest I’ve seen. So societal normalization is a necessary step before the movement can start flourishing.
The topic is incredibly nuanced, and thus quite hard to have a substantive conversation about. But I’m hoping one day to see the phenomenon pop up on HN so that we can have an open discussion about the merits and downsides. (There are plenty of both.)
For many it is (to such an extent that there is such a thing as "choice" all). In either case, that's beside the point.
The whole story would ring a few bells if it wasn't that being seen as a "conspiracy theory" person is worse than being a murderer today: how Arthur Hayes was prosecuted and forced to resign and sued for refusing to share US custommer data, but really they sold it as him controlling the crypto leverage trading market which was dangerous for people, then right aftee the election campaign started (13 days after Biden announced he's running) SBF appeared out of nowhere (well his mom had just cofounded a couple campaign fundraising organizations), with an exchange that somehow was ok to use in the US while offering absurd amounts of leverage to trade anything, even stocks and commodities. Then they supposedly lost some huge amount of bitcoin in a hack, which no one mentions now, backed Solana which is just a centralized db they turned off whenever they wanted, etc.
Add to this the fact he legit met with the SEC to discuss regulating self custody of crypto assets (SEC file S7-25-20) while his own exchange just gave away people's money and lied about it.
His father wrote papers on how the cash economy is bad for tax collection and testified in front of congress on this.
His mom wrote papers on taxes too, oh and the organization she co founded "Mind the Gap" was involved in a scandal in 2020 where she funneled 20 million $ to a political party.
His aunt is a member of the wef and she created the first college program about climate and health.
Oh and his mom taught Caroline Ellison from Alameda, and her parents are friends with the Bankman-Fried's. Her father is head of the dept of economy at MIT so he worked with Gensler before he was appointed to the SEC, so these people are very well connected, although only a crazy person would believe it's because of their connections that they did what they did while Arthur Hayes was stopped.
Oh and he got to meet Bill Clinton and Tony Blair in a crypto conference in the bahamas and sit with them and talk, as you do of course...
Personally I didn't even need to research the guy, just a look at him and how dishonnest he looks when he talks made me delete Blockfolio right after it was bought up by FTX let alone trust this guy enough to send money to his exchange.
But let's say I was a crazy person, then as a crazy person I can't stop but notice how certain logos they use for both alameda research and ftx resemble (a little too much) some logos you can see on an FBI report on Epstein.
And as a crazy person who saw this I couldn't help but dig deeper on his family, and lo and behold the connections in banking they have are too similar to those Epstein had, and of course right after this whole ftx problem the website gets hacked and all the money that was still there was stolen and he hops on a plane and flies to Israel.
Then you get the co founder of Maker DAO tweeting about FTX insolvency and how Alameda's logo is a direct copy of a pedo ring, then a day later his body washes up on shore dead.
I wouldn't be surprised if they use this to pass severe regulations on crypto, before making owning gold illegal like they did in 1933, even J Powell said it the other day, they don't know if raising interest rates will curb inflation or not, and if it starts going haywire then people jumping ship to other commodities will only make it worse.
But hey soon enough I'll have to go the deepweb and transmit over radio to write a crazy comment like this.
I'm not a crazy person, I said if I was crazy I would make the connection, good thing you're not crazy either.
It’s good to see them making so many mistakes. It’ll really test the theory that if you commit a huge crime and get a 15 year prison sentence, will it be worth it if you lock your millions away where no one can find them but you?
I don’t think so. Even a brain wallet would be hard to siphon from afterwards without anyone noticing.
Everyone cares about privacy until a crime is committed, and then we all want to know. And we leave it up to folks at companies like Kraken to tell us what they find.
This seems like a strawman to me. Are there any privacy advocates out there who don't believe investigations should happen after a crime has been committed, because investigations are anti-privacy?
I use encrypted messaging, but if I decide to commit a crime I'm under no delusion that encryption will save me. Why can't the same be true for money?
Typically the markets can afford to compensate people on a day-to-day basis for small crime, but the entire reason bizarre concepts like clearing houses exist is that, from time to time, once every 10-30 years, an entire market can be destroyed overnight because of liquidity or counter-party risk or a combination, or some other situation like fraud. These things happen, and will continue to happen, which is why we should always look to the past when designing markets, and not fall for the folks telling about the wonders of their utopian future.
2. You talk about markets "can afford to compensate people [...] for small crime", but I see no reason why that would be applicable to exchanges. Given that both sides of a trade has to put up money before they can make the trade, the risk that either side can commit any sort of fraud/crime is virtually zero. You can still get hacked/scammed by the exchange itself, I'm not aware of any crypto privacy advocates who think that centralized exchanges should have the right to be anonymous.
3. You talk as if the "utopian future" is vaporware or something, but it does exist in the form of decentralized exchanges. Sure, they're not as good as centralized exchanges when it comes to fees/spreads/execution time, but they do exist and allow you to transact anonymously.
You're describing fraud in a market.
>I see no reason why that would be applicable to exchanges
Anomalous and/or suspicious trades are regularly undone by exchanges.
That's addressed my be later in the comment:
>You can still get hacked/scammed by the exchange itself, I'm not aware of any crypto privacy advocates who think that centralized exchanges should have the right to be anonymous.
what planet do you come from? you ask questions that seem like you have an interest in finance but cant accept the emergent capital markets structures that follow from the practice of finance?
islamic banking may seem weird to you if you are even aware of it, but its a timeless archetype of a certain pattern of relationships and rules that arose in response to a certain envrionment at the time ( which persists into modern day ). this system has probably more in common superficially with crypto than some other ways of organizing economic activity.
using words like archaic shows ignorance of the subject and of humanity. maybe when AI is doing everything and new underlying dynamics exists for the way machines relate, we can have this discussion but even then scarcity and physics exist and some methods of resource allocation have to be negotiated or emerge organically.
Much of the crypto bros want "law is code" which basically means nothing is illegal.
As other commenters have mentioned, this isn't some DiFi smart contract hack, it's just a regular centralized exchange hack. "law is code" doesn't apply here, unless there's some other group of "crypto bros" that I'm not aware of who think that laws should only be enforced via the blockchain. The version of "law is code" that I'm aware of only applies insofar as smart contracts are concerned (eg. anything that a smart contract allows for is fair game).
It's a dower subject. When everyone was making money nobody will listen. When everyone is losing money it's uncouth to told-you-so to people in serious pain. You can't get through to most people, full stop.
I was lucky enough to come of age during the dot-com bust, with family that clearly broke down the concepts of accounting and the history of market crashes. Nobody wants to hear it no matter what part of the mania you're in. Focus on your friends (many of which I was able to influence), and focus on fundamentals. Any public discussion of a mania during a mania will fail, and is literally the archetype/moral of the Cassandra myth.
Can we please not No True Scotsman this? Crypto “the future of money” is completely unregulated and nothing but full of scams hitherto unseen since the days before banking regulations.
You’d be hard pressed find a bank that can execute a rug pull like this. While I’m no fan of Bank of America, I’ll keep my “dirty fiat” there and sleep soundly, just like I slept soundly in though the Great Recession.
Crypto isn't about privacy, it's actually the opposite. All transactions on the blockchain are transparent as it's literally a distributed ledger. There is absolutely no secrecy or privacy when it comes to how Bitcoin works for instance. And it's by design. Bitcoin inventor(s) goal was for people not to have to trust the secrecy of banks but essentially be their own bank. Whether that goal was achieved or not is anybody's guess...
So I'm not sure what pro-privacy stance you are talking about.
To pretend that this isn’t a feature — nay, THE feature — of crypto is absurd. There’s a reason why Tornado cash exists, and why bitcoin is the choice of online criminals everywhere.
Darknet markets use monero, not bitcoin. Monero is one of the few currencies that does offer privacy, but it makes up a very small part of the ecosystem, less than 1% by market cap.
Tell it to Satoshi Nakamoto
You are using words without understanding what they mean.
Who is Satoishi?
Or if that’s too hard to answer. Why do you call yourself after vomit instead of use your real name? (If you really are named after vomit, I apologize.)
Or are you trying to claim that because you have not verified my real-world identity, these are actually private messages?
Could it be, you desire gasp privacy?
These messages are not private. They are public, which is why you're able to read them.
I hope this has helped you understand the difference between pseudonymity and privacy. But if it hasn't, there's nothing more I can do to help you.
I’d like to think, you’d grow out of this, but we both know you won’t.
You must be new at this.
Privacy conscious people are against mass surveillance, where everybody privacy is invaded by default, even if they've done nothing wrong and aren't suspicious.
Privacy as we had before technology that allowed such things is what such group desire. Is there someone suspected of a crime? Sure, tailgate them, follow them, etc. This manual surveillance has a cost and max throughput that makes it you cant mass surveil.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what pro-privacy stance? Crypto is far easier to trace than cash. And US companies like Kraken follow KYC laws.
So can I assume that if you get mugged on the street you won't give police details for fear of identifying the criminal?
I can't think of any legitate reason to move hundreds of millions of $ anonymously.
https://www.businessinsider.com/ftx-investor-sequoia-removes...
2. NAS Daily on FTX
https://twitter.com/nasdaily/status/1590027230281093120?s=20...
3. The World Economic forum: FTX
https://www.weforum.org/organizations/ftx
4. White House Monitoring FTX Collapse, Calls for Crypto Regulation
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-12/white-hou...
what a whirlwind. there are more FTX chaos on Twitter.
edit:
5. Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire ‘was run by a gang of kids in the Bahamas’ who all dated each other
/r/wallstreetbets : https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/ysujgu/sam_...
source: https://fortune.com/2022/11/11/sam-bankman-fried-crypto-empi...
Officials were precisely busy receiving gigantic bribes (well, "donations", the biggest ever made from any sector after those made by George Soros) from SBF/FTX to draft legislation giving the CFTC jurisdiction over crypto exchanges. And who was the chief lobbyist of FTX? An ex-CFTC commissioner.
Let that sink in: the main FTX lobbyist was an ex-CFTC commissioner lobbying for a legislation giving... Full control of crypto exchanges (including the decentralized ones) to the CFTC.
You cannot make that shit up.
So crooks running scams have drafted a legislation that'd give them complete control over crypto exchanges.
The ongoing legislation, if it passes, is the one drafted by the very villains who were planning to execute the biggest scam ever (he was obviously after pension funds and sovereign wealth funds: there was no limit to his megalomania).
As Erik Vorhees just blogged:
“The complex derivatives and custody issues which froze financial flows in 2008, back when safe, regulated financial institutions had no idea who owned what and markets collapsed under the layers of counterparty risk... these would not (can not!) happen in DeFi."
"Have they even learned how to use it? How many of those drafting crypto laws have ever actually executed a DeFi loan?”
“Yes, DeFi removes some of your power as regulators... but it solves the problems you’ve been trying to regulate. Isn’t that more important?”
I do honestly think that the villains just got caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
The master evil plan was much bigger than that what actually happened but, thankfully, everything crashed, creating a run to safety and immense selling pressures everywhere and put a stop to the FTX/Alameda shitshow.
Crypto haters are going to hate, but here's Erik Vorhees' messages to the (both totally clueless and corrupted IMO) officials.
It would be nice if the crypto haters were to read the following with an open mind:
It now redirects to the FTX page. They want to memory hole this one.
Or someone who just doesn’t care at this point and is going for broke on their way to a non-extradition country.
It may take a long time to recover these funds. Remember seeing that slippage was as much as 50% on some of the transactions, a permanent loss.
No one still in crypto wanted to see the liquidation happen.
>Any client can independently verify that their balance was included in the Proof of Reserves audit by comparing select pieces of data with the Merkle root.
Among crypto exchanges Kraken is definitely on the legitimate side of the spectrum.
Somebody should create a kind of credit rating for exchanges to rate their risk and legitimacy.
Kraken has been a bastion of sanity amidst the chaos for a decade now. No prop trading, no dizzying corporate structure, no "liquidity" issues, no stadium sponsorships. They're just chugging along in the background, keeping their site online, publishing regular audits, and running the business like adults. I intend on holding BTC indefinitely, but if anything happened to Kraken it would likely change my mind.