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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

Well, the Protos Papers established that FTX/Alameda were Tether's largest customer. And they acquired 36 billion Tethers.

Now Alameda is proven to be a fraud. So, this basically eliminates the possiblity that they paid cash for those Tethers.

Also, Tether admitted to lying in its settlement with the New York Attorney General

https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-inve...

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Alameda was proven to be a fraud? By whom? Is there a chance they broke fiduciary duties and let themselves get wildly over leveraged, even criminally so, but that they had legitimate aspects of their business? How would anyone know that at this point?

Most of the commentary seems to be more conspiratorial (and certainly more fun) than anything.

I mean, Enron was pretty cut and dry. Dog and pony show, cook the books and team up with one of the big public auditors.

This story, within just a few days, had people making all sorts of complex interconnections amongst a whole fleet of co-conspirators.

Alameda traded using insider advanced knowledge of what coins FTX would list and delist. "The scale at which Alameda has been frontrunning FTX listings is "much, much greater" than what we've seen before in crypto"

https://decrypt.co/114708/alameda-research-18-tokens-insider...

You literally created an account just to respond to my questions?

Anyways. The article you linked to is titled “Alameda Allegedly Traded These 18 Tokens on Insider Info Through FTX”. The operative word being “allegedly”. Also this is just another thread and has nothing to do with any of the previously mentioned co-conspirators.

They represented themselves as a crypto exchange where you traded cryptos with other users. In actuality they took all the cryptos away and lost them. So all of the "trades" happening for at the least many months were not real trades, as there were no actual assets trading hands.

That's a bucket shop, a version of financial fraud. This....is not that complicated.

So, the question then is: do you trust a bucket shop to have been recklessly dishonest about whether the trades happening were actual trades, but scrupulously honest about sending $36 billion real dollars to Tether?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bucket_shop_(stock_market)

Ok, so first off, that first link that you posted was to a website called Protos. Oh, I did this by hand, so I might have miscounted, but I'll write up some software and start documenting the graph of all of these allegations on the plane tomorrow... The article contained 23 links. 13 of those links were to other articles on Protos. Of the remaining 10, the only primary sources I could find were:

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/alameda-research

https://markets.ft.com/data/funds/tearsheet/summary?s=MT7000...

https://offshoreleaks.icij.org/nodes/55087847

And then a broken link to something on https://eservices.mas.gov.sg

I can't seem to piece together the same narrative as you have from these primary sources.

Maybe there are more primary sources in those links. As soon as I enlist a computer to do this work for me I'll know.

I was not aware that FTX was a bucket shop, ie, never delivered any of the traded assets and was just pure gambling. Do you have a primary source on this?

The allegations that FTX were engaging in fraudulent accounting practices seems pretty strong at this point. The allegations that FTX were misusing customer's commodities seems pretty strong at this point.

The allegations that involve a complex web of many different characters acting as co-conspirators all seem pretty weak at this point.

The better question is: do you trust a complex web of secondary source material?

Protos is a news agency. The primary source of their report is the blockchain. You're free to replicate their work or try to falsify it by pulling the same transactions they did and verifying their work. To date, no one has disputed what they published, including Tether and Alamedia/FTX.

A bucket shop is a place that says it is executing trades but is not, in fact, executing trades and is instead trading in phony assets. FTX did not have the assets on hand, as it had given them to Alameda. This is the definition of a bucket shop.

The source is FTX, they said they had given away their customer funds and didn't have them. What more do you want?

Do they have a link to their methods used in their report or a link to all of the transactions or other data used to generate their charts? Am I wrong to expect the same rigor that a court or an academic publication would apply?

What FTX has said is basically "we used customer's commodities like a bank would. we lent them out to a trading firm that we also operate and we really hoped that we'd cover these trades". This is fundamentally no different than how banks operate but with a key difference: They didn't seem to make this known to any parties and they seemed to be massively over-leveraged. I have no problem with these activities being illegal. This is not the same thing as a bucket shop.

And I still don't know what any of this has to do with $36 billion worth of Tether, Deltec, Chalopin, Bitfinex, Geniome, Moonstone... and that's just the threads mentioned in this brief discourse we've been having! Every time I ask questions the plot thickens!

So what more do I want? I want sobriety. I want people to ask themselves why they are interested in this story. I want to people to ask themselves why they are writing articles, tweeting, making YouTube videos and posting comments about this story. I want to see primary source material and I want intellectual rigor. I want to see justice served and that is founded on notions of individuals being innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. I want to see no gossip, no speculation, no mentions of how things are convenient, no things appearing a certain way.

They detailed their methods in greater detail here: https://protos.com/faq-tether-usdt-investigation/

This isn't a criminal proceeding. But no one has rebutted Protos despite ample opportunity. And Tether specifically cited FTX as a major customer on multiple occasions. It's hardly a radical claim.

> ""we used customer's commodities like a bank would. we lent them out to a trading firm that we also operate and we really hoped that we'd cover these trades".

FTX wasn't a bank, it was a brokerage. Brokerages do not lend out customer funds in this manner! In a regulated brokerage, the customer owns the securities traded. If the brokerage goes bust, they have the claim to them.

I know that FTX wasn't a bank. I was just loosely summarizing their remarks. I also know that this is not a good thing to be doing. What I don't know is what else they were doing. And neither do you. I'm sure that when this goes to trial that this will all be sorted out.

I know it isn't a criminal proceeding but to me that isn't an excuse for a lack of rigor in any discussion. Why not the Kardashians if we want to have a little fun trash talking strangers online?

I'm actually not very interested in the "Protos Papers" because I still have no idea what that has to do with FTX misusing customer commodities! If it is being used to speculate that they were pumping and dumping other coins or some other fraudulent behavior I am still not interested. Why? Because it is speculation! The courts will figure it out! Why are there so many people "doing research" like it's QAnon or something?

I'll get to the meat of it: I see the current media ecosystem as being a conspiracy theory generating machine and as every day goes by more people that I interact with are finding some kind of rabbit hole to get lost in, speaking of things as objective facts when they have never left their living rooms and their only source of information is an array of pixels sitting on their lap or held in the palm of their hands.

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