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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

Based on an interview with SBF, he made a ton (billions?) early on in the crypto days by arbitraging BTC/USD exchanges (e.g. one exchange was selling BTC at $200 and another was selling BTC at $210, so he took the difference). It's easier to throw £16B at someone who had already built the algo that got them personally to, say, $1B (in a very short amount of time).

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Not sure why this is downvoted, it's accurate. Sam made a lot of money in crypto from 2017 to 2019 before founding FTX. He also went to MIT, not Stanford, and I think is a good example of someone who had privilege (via being born into an upper middle class family to intelligent faculty parents) but still went through meritocratic routes.

I think he made a couple hundred million on this trade and half a billion moe in alameda when things were going well then took investment funds denominated in either coins or USD and invested those into FTX expansion and more levered long crypto pump and dumps and then took those proceeds and did more pump and dumps and direct investments in things like robin hood and other shitcoins.

I think most of their "market making" was probably using connections to do pump and dumps of various coins.

activities like this made huge gains but since the BTC peak a lot of the same activities have been burning a lot of capital and then you end up needing recapitalization

> Based on an interview with SBF, he made a ton (billions?) early on in the crypto days by arbitraging BTC/USD exchanges (e.g. one exchange was selling BTC at $200 and another was selling BTC at $210, so he took the difference).

If you interview me, I can tell you I made a ton of money selling used condoms to developing countries. It won't make it true.

We now know he has, how shall I say it, a complicated relationship with the truth.

Hopefully, an enterprising investigative reporter or two will spend some time researching the topic.

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