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Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

Is there truth to the U.S. sending money to Ukraine -> Ukraine funding FTX -> FTX being 2nd largest donor to Democratic party in the U.S.?

Timeline:

- April 25, 2019: Biden announces his presidential campaign.

- 13 days later, Sam Bankman-Fried, son of Barbara Fried (co-founder of political fundraising organizations), launched FTX crypto exchange.

- The exchange is an overnight success. Sam Bankman-Fried (SBM) becomes biggest donor to Biden.

- Most of the FTX team is reported to have flown to Hong Kong now, so China, the CCP is their safe haven?

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Here is an actual source: https://cointelegraph.com/news/ukrainian-government-launches...

Quote: “Aid For Ukraine shows how the global crypto community and the traditional financial system can work together,” said Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. “Crypto donations to the DAO are stored and governed on-chain, then transferred to FTX, a centralized exchange, to be sold for fiat USD sent via SWIFT to the Ukrainian government.”

So basically people in the US (not the US government) sent money to Ukraine using FTX as an exchange to fiat (lol). Seems the whole thing is more like a PR thing than anything else.

How can we know who sent it though? You can't state the truth as one way or another, at least not yet.

We certainly don't have any evidence for the extraordinary claim that the divided government is embezzling funds into cryptocurrency, and then convincing the entire government of a sovereign nation to embezzle them back to one political party.

You could say we don't have proof that Rishi Sunak isn't an alien from Alpha Centauri sent to Earth to eliminate donuts without holes, but you don't just make up extraordinary claims for no reason. It is logical to assume the simplest, boring thing is the truth unless you have evidence otherwise, a la Occam's razor.

U.S. sending money to Ukraine: True

Ukraine funding FTX: Mostly false. This appears to be a confusion related to the fact that Ukraine launched a website accepting cryptocurrency donations that were processed via FTX [1]. However, as far as I can tell, there was no funding of FTX by Ukraine other than possibly FTX earning transaction fees for processing the donations.

FTX being 2nd largest donor to Democratic party in the U.S.: Semi-true. SBF was the 2nd largest donor, not FTX the company. [2]

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/03/14/ukraine-partners-...

[2] https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-joe-bid...

Also quite a lot sent to republicans from the CO-CEO: https://www.ft.com/content/428c7800-c72d-4c59-9940-4376fea6e... https://sherman.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/congre....

> SBF was the 2nd largest donor, not FTX the company.

It doesn't really seem like much of a distinction, since Bankman Fried viewed FTX as his personal piggy bank. Regardless, the DNC will be fine. They're still popular with voters, regardless of what donors are doing. Donor money doesn't actually win elections, voters do.

Ukraine purchased Javelin missiles and other US military equipment with its military aid: https://www.defensenews.com/congress/2019/09/25/what-you-nee...

Ukraine didn't contribute to FTX at all.

From what I'm reading, Ukraine used FTX to facilitate donations to Ukraine. I'm waiting for more details on the claim that Ukraine actually directly funded FTX. In other funding news- FTX did fund one of the studies that "debunked" Ivermectin as an effective covid treatment. There's definitely a strong political slant to this scandal.

And quite interesting that most of the FTX team/founders are reported to now be in Hong Kong - arguably knowing they have the protection of China?

Source?

Sorry, I looked through a lot of articles and I don't recall which one it was; they're reported to be both in the Bahamas and Hong Kong, the Bahamas authorities also having said a claim that SBF made about them directing him to do certain actions weren't true.

Certainly there will be a lot of noise to shuffle through over the next few days, weeks.

I love that proving that a bunch of frauds who were promoting a drug that didn't work at all shows a "political slant". Funding studies to show which drugs treat (and don't treat) covid is unambiguously good and it's insane that it's considered political.

Edit: Great timing - DailyBeast literally just published a story exposing how the leader of one of those idiotic COVID misinformation groups spent her millions in ill-gotten gains: https://www.thedailybeast.com/covid-misinformation-group-ame...

It is insane that it's political. But that's what you get when pharmaceutical companies both test their products on behalf of the regulatory agencies and spend money on politicians. And there are incentives to either not study repurposing existing drugs or even spending money on proving they shouldn't compete with your patented drugs.

Let's talk about Andrew Hill and how a grant from Bill Gates resulted in him changing course on his Ivermectin findings.

I've been seeing articles here on hn for years disparaging corruption within academic journals, but suddenly with COVID, every journal maintained impeccable ethics right?

There are plenty of studies and cohort analysis of Ivermectin studies that show it is highly effective with the right protocol; most of the Ivermectin studies showing it doesn't work aren't using proper doses, nor at the right time, nor for long enough period of time.

No there aren't. It doesn't work and most of the studies showing any effect were fraudulent. I can't believe there are still ivermectin dead-enders out there.

https://c19ivm.org/ - 83% average prophylaxis.

Which of the 93 studies do you have trouble with, what specifically in each of those studies, and how much does that change the numbers/conclusions such as 83% average prophylasxis rate?

That is a load of lying horseshit.

I bet you believed that Pfizer studied for transmission of COVID-19 up until a week ago too, or maybe you haven't heard that news yet?

P.S. https://c19ivm.org/ - 83% average prophylaxis.

And where is it “effective”? Why, countries where internal parasites are a huge issue. Funny, that. It’s almost as if it isn’t a Covid treatment, but a parasitic infection treatment!

You bought into that narrative too eh?

You're correct that in Africa, in places where Ivermectin is regularly deployed due to parasites had much lower rates of COVID and death from COVID - but no, you're wrong - that's not where those 93 studies were conducted.

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