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I think this is... journalism.

You can't text a fraudster in the bahamas and say "Hey, why are you so shit". You have to text "Hey, you're a precious flower with a special story" and then they tell you why they're shit. There's very clearly a level where SBF feels safe to talk honestly, in a self-incriminating way to a friend, where that friend is actually a reporter working for Vox.

Oh absolutely, it's just weird when that tone leaks into the text of the article. A sort of winking style that expects the reader to read between the lines, which is fine as far as it goes! But imagine beginning an article about Bernie Madoff in the weeks after his Ponzi's collapse pretending that you just wanted to learn more about his ethical principles.

I think its more akin to asking a religious leader who turns out to be a con artist what his true beliefs are. SBF's beliefs were integral to his success and the only reason some like me had every heard of him. Madoff actually did raise a lot of money by appealing to Judaism (hence the large investment by Brandeis) and I'm sure Jewish publications covered that angle of it right after it happened.

A lot of people (including myself) had listened to him talk (on Sam Harris, on Odd Lots, on Conversations with Tyler) because of his interesting beliefs. I had no idea who CZ was until this week because I am not interested in the minutiae of crypto. But SBF leveraged his image for this.

Ultimately it seemed the amount of actual money of other people he lost was a few billion? Which is extremely awful but less interesting than the media landscape which lead to it, imo, especially if you are not a finance reporter.

> Madoff actually did raise a lot of money by appealing to Judaism

Affinity fraud, one of the oldest and truest tools in the conman's toolbox.

It’s an earnest attempt at staying as unbiased as possible. If you go into an interview believing one thing and structuring all of you questions with that supposition you are far more likely to get the answer you want as oppose to whatever the reality is.

I'm not complaining about the interview technique- which clearly worked great here!- just the framing. I guess it's a nitpick really considering the rest of the content of the piece.

> I imagine my question would be "hey, where'd all the deposits go?"

But we know where they went. To Alameda Research. Then Alameda Research sent them somewhere else. The money isn't coming back, and Alameda Research's collateral of FTT tokens is worthless. So that's that, its done.

Its actually quite a simple story here. FTX lent the money to someone else (even if Alameda Research is also owned by SBF), and that other group lost the money.

> FTX lent the money to someone else (even if Alameda Research is also owned by SBF), and that other group lost the money

One minor clarification: "lent" should be "stole". If I can't pay my mortgage, I'm not allowed to go break in to my neighbor's house to steal some cash that I'll "borrow" in the hopes of paying back later.

FTX's Ts&Cs we're very clear - customer deposits were not FTX's to lend.

This is a simple, straightforward case of fraud and theft. No additional "crypto-specific regulations" are needed to reach that conclusion.

Not to mention, he literally tweeted a week ago that "We don't invest client assets (even in Treasuries)." FTX is not bank. It's not supposed to be susceptible to a bank run.

This entire line of tweets makes no sense. SBF is a lying fraud that deserves prison.

> One minor clarification: "lent" should be "stole"

Not a lawyer, but I think the correct term is "embezzled".

> The crime of embezzlement is defined as the fraudulent appropriation of property of another by someone who has been entrusted with its possession. Unlike theft where the property is taken unlawfully, in embezzlement the property comes lawfully into the possession of the embezzler who then fraudulently or unlawfully appropriates it. The key aspect of embezzlement is the fiduciary relationship that exists between the embezzler and the victim of the embezzlement as embezzlement requires that the property be appropriated by a person who was entrusted with its possession. A senior executive who uses company funds to pay for his personal yacht is guilty of embezzlement even if he intended to return the funds or had the means to do so.

Source: https://www.bayarea-attorney.com/CM/Articles/Theft-Offenses-...

Agreed that this is embezzlement, but in all the definitions I've seen (including plain old Webster's), embezzlement is a form of theft, e.g. https://ryanbeasleylaw.com/2019/07/theft-embezzlement-and-fr...

True. That's fair

How do you think margin works ?

Margin doesn't include theft of other people's assets.

As I said yesterday, there's a guy (Irving Picard, AFAICR) who's clawed back most of the money that Bernie Madoff stole from his clients. In that case, Bernie took one person's deposits and gave the money to the previous sucker, so Irving unwound all that.

In this case, apparently some people's money was fraudulently given to charities, so do they have to give it back? And what if they can't?

There's a job almost no one would want to undertake.

> So that's that, its done.

Not at all.

If Alameda really lost billions or tens in billions in trades, who was on the other side to collect the money? To random people who sold BTC at $64K and then all the way down?

Or were the losing trades a way to syphon billions somewhere else?

Seen the amount involved, the policital donations, the articles in the media portraying the guy as an altruistic genius and seen that tether/USDT/Bitfinex/Deltec are also in the Bahamas, it looks like, maybe, fucking maybe, it's time for actual journalism, actual research, actual congress hearings (at least one is coming in december btw), etc. about what's going on.

Do you really believe it's just a few trades gone wrong?

> Its actually quite a simple story here. FTX lent the money to someone else (even if Alameda Research is also owned by SBF), and that other group lost the money.

For a start you're forgetting the part where FTX was also pumping and then dumping tokens on their customers. Some tokens they created themselves. They're also somehow tied to hundreds of million of USDs getting frozen by authorities, where FTX then quickly raised money. That's fraud, too.

It's much more than "simple". There's serious shit going on.

Your hypothesis is a small cabal of insiders at FTX/Alameda purposely blew up the hedge fund and exchange to siphon off billions (hiding it in the losses) to enrich themselves while simultaneously making themselves some of the most hated people in the world, and also rolling the dice on going to prison for decades.

Seems very thin to me....

It makes a lot of sense given the nature of SBF’s charitable donations and the purported rationale(s) behind them. Kelsey Piper is pretty deeply associated with the EA movement, which is heavily interested in picking the right ways to deploy money to solve the world’s problems, and much of SBF’s charitable giving was too.

> In 2018, Vox launched Future Perfect, with the goal of covering the most critical issues of the day through the lens of effective altruism. In this talk, Kelsey Piper discusses how the project worked out, her experience as a Vox staff writer, and her thoughts on the key challenges of EA-focused journalism.

I just commented in this thread about how this story magically keeps getting worse, and then it got worse...

Yeah when I saw it was Piper as the journalist, I was expecting to see a massive disclaimer/disclosure on the article. There still isn’t one.

My own disclosure: I have many mutual friends with Piper and participate in the local EA group and contribute to EA causes.

There's a disclosure that SBF actually gave Vox money as part of a journalism grant. This business of billionaires buying journalists outright by calling payments philanthropic grants is way out of control. It's bad enough when Gates does it.

A grant alone should not count as "buying journalists". They clearly aren't acting in his interests (as they shouldn't!).

Piper's journalistic duty was to disclose her ties to EA much more fully in that piece, or recuse herself from writing it. I'm curious about the ties that she and other prominent Bay Area EAs have to SBF as well. Everyone is in a rush to distance themselves from they guy who bankrolled them.

And to be clear, Piper and Ellison go way way back. I think there is a very good chance that SBF did not know that that chat was on the record. So Piper may have failed to disclose in two directions, to both her source and her audience.

It does seem like the (some now erstwhile) EA billionaires supposed that buying professional, high-tier take-havers/explanatory-journalists was going to be an effective way to mainline their ideology. SBF had his eye on Matt Yglesias, for example.

> what did he do?

FTX loaned money to Alameda, the crypto hedge-fund made a series of bets and probably put some cash in illiquid assets too, but mostly irresponsible bets. Crypto market collapsed, bets that were worth billions with a decent liquidity now became worth millions with not so much liquidity.

They turned to their most harsh competitor hoping for a bailout kinda like how Microsoft saved Apple in the 90s . All that didn't happen, it was the the straw that broke the camel's back.

That's about it, when you are leveraged adverse market events can literally put any company out of business, no matter how giant it is. Chapter 11 is not the end of the world for old companies making real stuff that people will always want (say General Motors or Hertz), but in crypto where everything is about reputation there is no way FTX will ever be heard of ever again.

In the case of the crypto market adverse events of massive proportions repeat themselves every 5 years or so. It happened this year , together with inflation. It was due, at some point the chickens had to come home to roost.....whatever the fuck that means lol.

> FTX loaned money to Alameda ... [it was a bad bet] ... That's about it

He took money from an exchange, client money, and without permission used their money ("t" "h" "e" "i" "r" " " "m" "o" "n" "e" "y" -- channeling the genius' tweets here) and put it in his own company, the "hedge fund" called Alameda.

So that is fraud and not a bad bet.

A 'good bet' is that an organization (which merely includes FSB) who due to circumstances was exposed red handed in fraud involving billions of dollars and famous people, which then benefits from "f" "r" "e" "e" PR by established media, starting with "The New York Times", is a protected outfit of some sort, and that the playful sociopaths in FTX/Almada know it full well.

We have a lot of info on where the money went: A stadium name deal, F1 sponsorship, penthouse in a Bahamas resort, political donations, several DeFi ponzis that fell apart, acquisitions of BS companies, and similarly, bailing out numerous failed crypto projects over several years.

With such a large sum gone, the tougher question is "where didn't he piss the money away?"

We haven't seen as much commentary from him post-incident to reconcile who he appeared to be before the collapse, with who he apparently is. I think that angle is actually pretty interesting, but ultimately he sounds like just another deranged sociopath. No surprise there. Still interesting.

Alameda got long on crypto, crypto crash, billions lost. Funds from FTX was covering Alameda's losses. My guess there, was never a distinct point in which money was moved from FTX to Almeda. I felt they always ran both as two hands belonging to the same body.

Technically he’s probably one of the poorest people in the world

yeah i find it hilarious how all these articles are trying to get to his inner philosophical self. But, at least based on this particular exchange, it seems that he was just trying to make a buck or two, and treated everything else as PR/BS.