CoffeeZilla covered this in a recent video. The effort to paint over such blatant fraud and negligence and pretend it was all a mistake from a well-meaning kiddo is disgusting.
Is it because SBF gave a bunch of money to politicians? Is it because FTX got investment dollars from prominent VCs? Is it because journalists do not understand crypto, like, at all? Is it because he bamboozled journalists by talking so much about Effective Altruism?
Nobody, literally nobody, said Bernie Madoff was "suffering from a solvency crisis." They said he lied and stole money. And yet SBF's alleged crimes are quite similar in nature, but he's portrayed as suffering from market conditions beyond his control. So was Madoff. If Madoff got lucky and his portfolio doubled in a year, then he too would have been able to make customers whole. But even if that happened, he still lied and stole, just like SBF.
From "Sam Bankman-Fried's mom once wrote an essay about fixing problems rather than assigning blame when 'something goes terribly wrong'" Nov 20, 2022 [0]
>> She has written pieces for the Boston Review, a quarterly political and literary magazine, arguing that attributing "personal blame" in times of crisis had "ruined criminal justice and economic policy," suggesting it was "time to move past blame."
>> "The fact that we have gotten so little in return for our blame mongering at least opens up the possibility that people would be receptive to a new approach," she wrote in 2013.
>> "The next time something goes terribly wrong, suppose that instead of immediately asking who is to blame, we were to ask: How can we fix this problem?"
Seems a bit of a convenient philosophy for a fraudster . . .
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-frieds-mom-wrote...
That doesn't mean the person at fault can't also be blamed and punished as a warning to others (i.e. one more mechanism to prevent recurrence).
It might help if you’re too hard on yourself.
But if you’re egotist (like many founders), it can be used to justify all sorts of wrongdoing.
“I’m getting away with it - that’s a problem with the system not me.”
The subtext is of course that he was perfectly willing to pay both sides.
I get its criminal what SBF did and this is as bad as negligence gets in business but everyone is treating this like some overt Madoff like scam that was obvious to everyone in-the-know. The details of how SBF himself was engaging in the scam is not even yet set in stone, besides some real estate deals and an obvious lack of corporate controls/conflict of interest, so accusing others of also being a part of it seeems pretty brash and far too early.
Although I get the emotional outrage angle of none of the power players calling it out sooner or asking tough questions. But that's slightly different than participating in a scam.
FUD doesn't help us stop this in the future. Actually accusing them of the things they did is how you get them to fix that mistake in the future. Accusing them of being overt scammers, before we have any actual evidence of that, is how you get completely ignored as being hysterical.
Yes.
The investors might not have committed any crimes, but they bear some moral culpability for this debacle.
And to be clear I am not defending SBF at all. But on the scale of crimes, what he did is less bad than literally any violent crime.
And their risk/management team signed off on it?
And how do they estimate how long no one will notice or care? Or do you think they have other bullshit companies lined up to acquire it or the IPO market wouldnt check either?
Why wouldn't they just buy FTX coins or similar tokens for such a blatant pump scheme? Why make a long term bet on the actually company cashing out before anyone checks their books?
I don't mean to paint with too broad a brush here. The majority of investment managers are ethical and responsible. But there are always some bad actors, which we now see all around FTX.
Maybe I'm confused but even "dumb money" doesn't typically buy billion dollar scams at IPO where their financials are arranged by Goldman Sachs et al. Unless I missed some obvious examples in recent history where a bullshit (let alone crypto tier bullshit) tech company IPOd with hundreds of millions invested by legit Sequia/OTPP style investors and then the whole charade got exposed after the fact.
You could maybe point to a tiny set of VC companies in history, like Groupon where the stock price was overvalued at IPO, but even they are still a real business with 4000 employees 11 years later.
If anything you could say the grand conspiracy was betting on an acquirer buying them before crypto went bust. But I highly doubt that was a key part of some calculated plan.
Why is it so hard to believe some VC (who looked for external validation over their own dilligence) thought there was real longterm value in the business? That it seemed on paper like they were making revenue from legit sources and successfully hid their relationships/high risk bets elsewhere? Or even exploded in risk after they got tons of $$ invested? There's more than enough potential doubt here to wait before pushing this FUDy angle.
It's just ridiculous that the whole fraud seems like it could have been revealed by just sending a (not even specialized in crypto !) accountant to either FTX or Alameda, and the """sophisticated""" investors (and worse : US banking """regulators""") failed to to so !
P.S.: And this is also where the defense of SBF comes in : he's pretty young, focused on "moving fast and breaking things", so of course he would have been emboldened by the above, and might not have realized just how criminal his doings were ??
Stealing and wasting billions is definitely worse than many violent crimes.
It's cryptocurrency. Of course it was obviously a scam to anyone who's bothering to pay attention.
I think a little talked about part of the crypto investment boom among "normies" is that a lot of those people felt completely left behind by capitalism, constantly underwater financially, with no way to catchup or reach financial security. Crypto then got sold to them by the grifters and media as a way out, an amazing, full proof chance to get free. Theres a reason they were paying people Matt Damon and Larry David to do their commercials. Yes, putting your life savings in crypto is obviously a hugely risky and bad idea but most people lack the financial education necessary to recognize that a project promising you 20% APY is unsustainable and even those that do may still go for it because they see it as their one chance to stop drowning.
These aren't ancap millionaires living in the Bahamas, rubbing elbows with politicians and flaunting their $150k NFTs on Twitter, its people like my friend whos a single dad trying to raise two kids with autism while dealing with chronic health issues from his military service who lost most of his (negligible) savings when Celsius blew up. Yes, I'd been telling him for years how he shouldn't be taking risks on stuff like this and how they are all obviously scams and yes he was really stupid for not listening to me and everyone else and he does deserve some blame for his decisions but he wasn't in it for evil or greedy reasons. Dude just wanted to be able to afford counseling services for his kids and got tricked into giving people like SBF his money in hopes of being able to do so and is completely fucked now as a result.
I'm possibly being too empathetic and willing to remove blame from people who made bad choices due to hard circumstances (maybe because I have such a close anecdote). I guess I just feel like theres a large number of the victims that were the suckers the grifters were siphoning money away from and the impact on those people isn't really being discussed.
Also, probably taking cues from the self-serving VC blow jobs: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequo...
It's even worse that that: they give SBF a free pass on referring to FTX's issues as being a liquidity problem, which implies his venture was solvent, but just needed more time to extract the value of its investments, even though that too is obviously false, and no amount of time would let him convert FTT etc to value he claimed in his books.
Edit: My earlier comment on abuse of the concept of "liquidity": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33539326
This is not a bald criticism or renunciation of journalism from big publications - I simply mean to provide some understanding and clarity around how journalism so often misses the mark. Even though it misses the mark, journalistic coverage is incredibly valuable and a far better approach than darkness. (People might think of journalism as turning the lights on - more accurately journalism is like shining a flashlight into a dark place.)
In this case, it is very odd that much of the coverage has not been centered on fraud. I genuinely don’t understand why.
Reminds me of Gell-Mann Amnesia.
https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” – Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
Think about all the places you've ever worked, all the organizations you've been part of, where you know how the sausage is actually made, and how that differs from the way the organization portrays itself.
Now think about all the other organizations in the world, whose internal workings you're not privy to.
On the other hand, when a journalist follows a story, they must have good high level understanding. Shockingly, youtubers have much better grip on the situation.
The traditional media seems to be losing the plot in this FTX and presenting SBF in strangely positive light, almost as if it is a human interest story.
The talk with him today was very strange.
I generally don't. A journalists job is to report the news, if they don't feel confident in a given domain then they can sit the story out.
To give you an analog, I work on infrastructure, but I don't work on things like AWS policies every day. It generally takes me longer to craft up the right way to restrict a given resource due to that. If I left an S3 bucket open to the public "on accident" I'd expect ramifications from my employer.
That's to say, the onus is on the doer of the work. Now, if news outlets are just telling journalists to give it the old college try on domains they don't know, that's another subject.
While such tangential citations were used, at most it basically discredited the article but not necessarily fully refute the topic.
A case of strong yellow journalism?
Concur.
It’s not an excuse for the low quality, just an expected outcome IMHO.
Nope. A journalist job is to make clicks. That’s how their job is evaluated: how many click did the story bring.
That’s all. That’s f**ing all.
Every news outlet office now has a giant screen with the list of the stories and the number of clicks. "Journalists" are expected to competed on that metric and that metric alone.
It blew my mind every time to realize that, even in tech, people are still naïve enough to not see that. Just change the word "journalist" by "click farmers" and, suddenly, everything makes sense. (Television has "audience" instead of "clicks" but the reasoning is similar)
That may have been the case in the past, but "journalism" has radically changed within the past decade. Today it's more about telling the story that the media conglomerates want the public to hear, than about honest reporting.
Public distrust of the media is at an all-time high, and growing.
So, to answer your question: it's both. It's bullshit I don't want to hear and what a grip of powerful people probably want me to hear.
In theory maybe, in practice, journalists are simply Instagram influencers with fancy degrees. They make content to draw eyeballs for an organization that sells ads.
The media coverage about FTX is extremely odd.
There are some amazing journalists out there and I’m sure they are just as disappointed in the mediocre content their peers produce.
Journalists are expected to source information from experts and from people who are in positions to know, and to attribute the information they publish to their sources.
I am not saying that every journalist or publication does a good job of seeking the truth. Only that the job of a reporter does not require being an expert at anything other than - hopefully - information gathering and reporting.
Look up how Rian van Rijbroek fooled a popular news show in The Netherlands. If they had invited one more random expert in the field, that person would've grilled her.
Its because news is for entertainment purpose not knowledge acquisition from the journalists perspective and secondly because powerful players are involved.
This guy donated 40 million dollars to the ruling political party and has parents with connections. Why would you write a truthful article outlining the grand fraud that took place when you only have something to loose by doing so?
Remember this was the guy who said "FTX is fine. Assets are fine" and "We don't invest client assets (even in treasuries)".
I don't doubt that he did donate some money to the non ruling party but to quote what he is saying as truth or try and attribute a donation by an associated party to him is disingenuous.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-team-amon...
BTW be careful with expecting the media to spoon feed the narratives you want rather than laying out facts and editorializing them to let you decide. That's how you avoid some bias.
Now go look at some other examples where the writer or org has an interest in attacking and you will find, not only no shortage of "alleged"s but also a good dose of extra eyebrow-wriggling, winking and nudging there to suggest whatever number of other crimes can possibly be invented.
Same thing happens early in crises, from the Russian massacres of civilians in Ukraine to Trump's Mar-a-Lago files we get some forms of facts but its the readers who have to draw some to all of the conclusion.
Don't you think it is an interesting question to ask yourself, "why they report it like that?".
"Avoiding libel" doesn't cut it, there's other ways of avoiding libel that don't look like a love letter.
Why? Why is it in the reporter's interest to protect this guy? That is the interesting question. I don't need to guess at why reporting on Ukraine or Trump is the way it is, it's pretty clear.
But with this guy? Why?
Are you looking for opinion or journalism? Ethical journalists aren’t going to say “this is a ponzi scheme and this guy stole money” because that’s not what any primary source is saying. It’s clear that’s what’s happened to anyone reading the articles written.
Like with Nick Sandman or Rittenhouse. runs off cackling
You hire a fcking plumber.
Why can't top publications be held to this standard?
The mainstream definitely doesn't understand crypto. (Hell, SBF himself paid for TV ads telling them they didn't have to!) Madoff had easier precedences to compare to and validate for themselves vs trying to figure out if the various crypto-sphere tweets and blog posts "proving" fraud are actually proof and such.
The FTX story, if half the stuff I've seen linked on HN is too believe, also has a believability hurdle to the uninformed of being UNBELIEVABLY STUPID. "They did almost literally no accounting at all and transparently bought houses with company funds" yet they also raised crazy $$$ from so-called reputable investors? Surely that can't be true!!
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/newyork/press-releases/200...
It is not the job of the media to accuse people of having committed crimes, and it is dangerous for most people to do so. Defamation is a real thing. Publicly accuse someone of a crime they did not commit, and they have a legitimate civil cause of action against you.
If you can get people to go on the record with their own accusations, great, but those people, too, would be exposing themselves to potential liability.
If SBF is charged, the media will be all over it, and the coverage will be based on official records and statements. That is how news coverage of crime works.
It is precisely because SBF has not been charged that the information needed to substantiate a news story tying him to criminal activity is unavailable.
The walls are closing in
Also there's this [1], which just boggles my mind. I can't make sense of this level of centralized message control and dissemination. It's straight out of 1984.
It's hard to believe "the media" (whoever "they" are) has an agenda... it's tinfoil hat stuff.. Usually I write it off as emergent behavior of collective groups of humans trying to make $$$ from clicks, standard selfish behavior + time, leading to a race towards the bottom that looks like this.
But watching those clip segments it's pretty clear there's a story/narrative being pitched by someone with the leverage to do so. Is this propaganda? What is propaganda? How can I recognize it? Is everything propaganda? Has "the media" been captured and become a tool of whatever "system" is controlling things? This is the kind of stuff Jean Baudrillard was writing about.
Sometimes we get journalism other times we get whatever that this stuff is. I don't have a problem with journalists sticking to the facts, SBF hasn't been charged, so lets not lynch him just yet. But hopefully he's being investigated (they usually don't announce when they are investigating someone, as it puts them on notice).
Overall I think this is a direct result the 1996 Telecommunications Act which eliminated the rules on the number of radio stations a company could own (which also was one of the most lobbied bills in history). In hindsight this was a big mistake, and set things up for the kind of centralized messaging we see. There was hope that internet "streams" would help reset things, but with FAANG we're back to a small group of companies controlling what you see and hear.
Distrust of the media is at an all time high because of this kind of stuff. It's hard to put your finger on, but your gut says something is very wrong. No wonder so many people go down the tinfoil hat rabbit hole. They're simply trying to make sense of the world they're now living in.
“Why is it so hard to believe the media has an agenda?”
Why wouldn’t it? See Agenda Setting Theory.
All mass media can be propaganda. It’s always a political tool.
Yeah, they were farming for clicks, but to get you to read, not to make money.
You’re not supposed to notice that it’s propaganda tho. Otherwise it loses its power. That’s why you’re getting that gut feeling.
So there is something to be said about a decline in the quality of American propaganda
I think the trick is that when ppl think “propaganda” they think external, to/from another country. But internal propaganda is taboo
The word has a bad connotation for historical reasons but it’s actually a neutral term.
It's indeed dangerous for "most people" to do so. However, in many jurisdictions, the media gets more protection against defamation claims than the average person because of their public duty to report alleged criminal behavior.
The press doesn't get to receive special treatment in defamation law and then claim they're not going to report facts because they fear legal consequences.
"It's a big club and you ain't in it"
1. SBF, Caroline, SBF Parents all know all the right people and run in the same circles as the editors/owners of the top publications
2. A lot of other people come down along with SBF, so they dont want to pull the thread. For example, if the FTX money was indeed stolen, then did Dems get stolen-cash-contributions? For example, who else has deeded ownership over the 300M of laundered cash homes in The Bahamas? I think a lot of people want this to go away and they are all friends with the same NYTimes exec circle
3. No one wants to be called anti-semitic, so people are treading very, very carefully around this, even at the expense of justice. No one wants to end up like Kyrie Irving https://www.nytimes.com/article/kyrie-irving-antisemitic.htm... having to donate 1/2M$ for even touching this
> Is it because journalists do not understand crypto, like, at all?
I think this is a part of it, even most cryptocurrency enthusiasts don't understand it (a statement that most enthusiasts would concede, just not about themselves), but I think a more influential component is that people just don't care. There have been so many scams like these over the years that everyone already understands cryptocurrency is mostly scams and people are somewhat resigned to the state of things; it's cryptocurrency outrage fatigue. From the media's perspective, the story is far more provocative if they entertain SBF's meandering chaos rather than file it away as just another cryptocurrency scam.
> Nobody, literally nobody, said Bernie Madoff was "suffering from a solvency crisis." They said he lied and stole money.
I think that's just a product of the era we live in, "suffering a solvency crisis" is the type of euphemism you see all the time in the cryptocurrency world.
They're incentivized to not look as if they're willing to backstab donors the moment they fall from grace. Otherwise nobody (or at least no unscrupulously rich person) will donate money to them for political support in the future.
No usually you see "rugged"
> Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, court chronicler of the neoliberal status quo, seemed to whitewash his own entanglements by crediting Bankman-Fried’s money with helping Democrats in the 2020 elections – sidestepping the likelihood that the money was effectively embezzled.
Here are some excerpts from Yglesias' article[1]:
> But the truth appears to be much worse than reckless, even as it’s still not fully clear exactly how much worse (did he and his circle lose the money? did they pocket it?), and for those of us who defended him against some of his critics, a reckoning is due. ** > By betraying his clients — I don’t know whether he “defrauded” or whatever else in a legal sense, but he certainly betrayed them — SBF is leaving many of his causes worse off than they would have been if he’d never invested in them. ** > I did warn that SBF supporting good causes didn’t mean that we should assume his crypto agenda is benign — sincere belief that your wealth benefits humanity can be dangerous...I did not, of course, seriously consider the possibility that he would just steal his clients’ money. And given what we now know, you have to be suspicious about the downstream spending as well. All the official and unofficial EA material emphasizes the importance of integrity and does not encourage people to run scams or break faith with others. But I do think the situation poses some questions that the community as a whole will need to reckon with.
Honestly, the effort to paint this as a failure of the mainstream media seems to cover the lionization of Sam Bankman-Fried by many in the crypto community. For instance, Coindesk itself wrote numerous articles painting Sam Bankman-Fried in a positive light. And these were directed at people trying to invest in crypto, unlike Yglesias' article.
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/some-thoughts-on-the-ftx-implos...
As someone who's been in the space since the early Bitcoin days, I don't know a single actual crypto person who was a fan of the likes of SBF, CZ etc even before FTX imploded. It's firms such as Sequoia Capital and Softbank (seriously, they're always in when cash can be burned) that lost millions in FTX, not actual crypto natives for the most part.
There is an interview with SBF out there where he quite literally calls the defi tokens he traded a "ponzi". Of course none of the expert investors did due diligence because they were blinded by the bull market hype, with fat dollar signs in their eyes. Now that their "investment" has disappeared the mainstream has made out the culprit as well. Not the scammer, not the gullible tradfi traders, not a system that relied entirely on trust without verification or regulation - no, it's crypto that was the problem of course.
If only there were a way that exchanges could be reliably audited. Maybe some kind of decentralized ledger that can't be controlled and falsified by a single dishonest party.
Make no mistake, real people chose to purchase cryptocurrency and send it to FTX based at least partly on some pretty sophisticated marketing and endorsement from establishment figures. They will almost certainly lose that money. It’s definitely not just VC funds being burned here.
Here's the first Vox article that pops up when I type "vox sam bankman fried" into Google[1]:
> A week ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was the boy-wonder face of crypto: A 30-year-old who founded one of the biggest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, a celebrated philanthropist worth an estimated $16 billion, and a major Democratic donor who quickly found favor in Washington. By Friday, he was at the center of an epic flameout that left his empire and his image as an uncannily sharp, altruistic billionaire in ruins.
> In the annals of crypto disasters, the tale of Bankman-Fried may go down as one of the most jaw-dropping. He resigned from his crypto exchange, FTX, as it collapsed from a domino effect of a surge in customers trying to withdraw their funds, and the company filed for bankruptcy. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Bankman-Fried may have illegally taken about $10 billion in FTX customers’ funds for his trading firm, Alameda Research, whose future is also in peril. And Bankman-Fried is now worth close to nothing.
> The downfall of FTX isn’t a typical story of crypto’s volatility or investor risk-taking; it didn’t crumble due to bad luck, but what now appears to be unsustainable layers of deception.
Again, people seem to be trying to purposefully spin the mainstream coverage into something it's not.
[1] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23458837/sam-bankman-fried-ftx...
> Several months ago, I found myself having a few mocktails and splitting vegan snacks with Sam Bankman-Fried at a restaurant near my house.1 We touched on, among other things, his proposal to create a new publication featuring writers he liked, including me.
> I declined, which obviously in retrospect was the right choice. I told him that I like my Substack just fine and make plenty of money, though he was happy to offer more. But I also told him that given the extent to which we agree on a lot of important issues, I thought it was a lot more valuable to these causes for me to maintain credibility by not accepting any of his money.
That’s because spinning the notion of “they” being more friendly to Sam implies a shadowy conspiracy, which is much more interesting than other explanations.
Cotton’s razor: The most boring explanation is the most likely explanation.
The same thing happened after Elizabeth Holmes' fraud was revealed. There were a lot of articles claiming that she was actually the victim, or that the industry was to blame, or that everyone was doing the same thing with their startups. None of those aged well, but they drove clicks at the time.
I've lost hope of Hanlon's Razor at this point. It's painfully transparent how purposeful this has been at the media level, and I've come to believe that there's a very large group of voices who are perfectly fine with what's going on because the fallout "hurt the right people" in their eyes.
If the perp had been a persona non-grata, you'd bet this would have been all over the place --pitchforks and torches in-hand.
This is Andrew Ross-Sorkin who is supposed to be a pretty respected journalist or at least I thought. This isn't a mistake, and I don't think they're stupid either. SBF seems to know how to appeal to journalists pretty well. What the motives of the journalists are is more complicated.
I don't this it's this one because EA has gotten 10x the negative coverage SBF has.
I think a lot of people haven’t decided when SBF became the crook and what his intentions were. As we don’t have all the information and he hasn’t gone to court, isn’t that healthy?
On the other hand I haven't seen any media downplaying, here in Germany it's all haughty "Americans being Americans again" ("let's not talk about Wirecard for a few minutes, can we?") and what I read through the hn filter isn't downplaying either. Perhaps what you are perceiving is a subset of media motivated by the crypto angle?
The argument "I'm sorry, I didn't know rape/murder was illegal" does not have _any_ value in a court of law.
My sense is that this cognitive bias is playing out here. "Obviously your money could just disappear, it's crypto, that's what happens. Why look into this?".
Once the brain is trained to know this is how it is, it stops asking why it's happening. That's just what happens.
Give this scandal some time to percolate. I think the scale of the failure/criminality here is still under appreciated by journalists.
Also helps that SBF is still in his 20s. He’s getting more benefit of the doubt than he would otherwise. Whether that offers any legal protection remains to be seen…
FTX’s Unraveling Is Latest Blow to Softening Ad Market : https://www.wsj.com/articles/ftxs-unraveling-is-latest-blow-... ( https://archive.ph/GogZu )
Where is this media that is trying to white-wash FTX?
Are there any news outlets outside of the US that wouldn’t be affected by these insidious US leftist institutions that should be reporting on it?
But if you notice, keep quiet, or you’ll get labeled a lunatic.
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/top-organizat...
No, I think it's because they understand it well enough to know that if they call what FTX was doing a scam (which it was) then the entire house of cards will collapse because all of the other big crypto exchanges/lenders/yield farms/funds are doing the exact same thing. SBF laid it all out to Matt Levine on Odd Lots back in April.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...
Yet the takeaway from Matt Levine is consistently that they're fucking idiots, not fraudsters. That nobody bothered to count the money. They didn't transfer customer funds to Alameda, but instead used Alameda bank account for customer deposits because FTX didn't have one. Then they didn't bother to do any accounting to notice the money was disappearing.
ML paints them as more likely to be morons than hucksters knowingly perpetrating a fraud? Or, I've misread all of his recent columns.
Maddoff didn’t have any portfolio since the late 80’s. So no trading, all fake records. Redemptions of principal and made up profits were paid with other customer funds.
Let's not forget that the folks using FTX were only doing so in an attempt to steal money from others. If the key innovation of crypto is that it's supposed to reduce the risk of lending by bringing realtime transparency to the assets and liabilities of borrowers, then why was FTX paying vastly higher interest rates than traditional banks? It's hard to feel sorry for those who lost their money because they thought they were in on the con or whatever.
You can hear the folks who lost money saying this themselves, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cATvKsZA0A
And to those who think I'm being uncharitable, I've been saying the same thing on HN since long before the FTX collapse, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28457273
But how would you respond to the argument: those that lost money in FTX weren’t consciously in on the con, but instead had (vastly) exaggerated expectations about the future of crypto?
I've said multiple times on HN that I consider blockchain to be the most economically important invention of the last 500 years, e.g.:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14633148
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18574399
But the reason it's exciting is, among other things, because it should radically drive down the cost of borrowing money. So yeah, I'm probably literally on the most bullish person on crypto on HN, but that's why it's so easy for me to see how the folks chasing those double digit interest rates on FTX aren't exactly the innocent victims they're being portrayed as.
I'm hardly an economist, but even the most financially illiterate people know that interest rates should be vaguely proportional to risk.
Not really. If we take nominal interest rate = real rates + inflation expectation + credit spread, then only the (counter party dependent) credit spread reflects riskiness. Real rates reflect an equilibrium of time preferences.
I estimate that approximately 80% of people would not even understand the claim you're making, let alone be able to evaluate how true it is.
It's just virtual tulip bulbs and South Sea Company shares. And that's all it's ever been.
The fraud is the point. It's not an unfortunate, isolated, and regrettable accident. Crypto literally raises the cost of borrowing by making it trivially easy for fraudsters to steal it, under the cover of running a "secure exchange" or a global high profile pump and dump, or worthless NFTs, or whatever the next scam du jour is.
After removing "banking as SaaS" from the value proposition, what was left was a bunch of hustlers running cleverly incentivized Ponzi schema. It's not even tulip bulbs. We're finding its black boxes, creative financing and yield farming as far as the eye can see.
None of these would have been possible without the invention of double entry accounting, because before double entry accounting you couldn't even really run anything larger than a family business because there was no way to know whether or not you were making or losing money. So it stands to reason that because blockchain is a breakthrough in accounting of a similar magnitude, in the sense that it will enable all sorts of new economic relationships that aren't possible today by radically driving down the transaction costs of doing business, that these new relationships will similarly enable all sorts of new technologies that we can't even imagine today.
To understand blockchain, you need to go back and read all the books on the history of double entry accounting in order to understand the changes that it enabled within society. But these changes aren't going to happen over night, they'll take a couple hundred years to play out, in the same way that it was a couple hundred years between the invention of double entry accounting and the height of the Dutch East India company or whatever.
What? I thought the benefit of double-entry was that it makes fraud and inconsistencies easier to catch, not detection of profit per se (which single-entry can surface).
One of the key principles of double entry accounting is denominating profit and loss in a fungible currency, rather than just recording the number of goats you own or whatever. Double entry is actually the codification of several different best practices, it’s more than just having two sides of the ledger. But even with just the fraud part, you are very limited on the number of employees you can have if you don’t have any way to know if they’re stealing from you. That’s why even though e.g. Ancient Rome had thousands of fast food restaurants, they didn’t have franchises like McDonalds.
There are many reasons that they didn’t have McDonalds-like franchises, and none of them have to do with accounting. Those kinds of franchises didn’t exist in the modern world until the 20th century; they are product of many elements of modern culture (and modern approaches to business). What the heck would a franchise even do for someone in Ancient Rome? It’s not like there are massive chicken suppliers or industrial-scale bakeries that produce standardized food products to sell. Every restaurant needs to source local suppliers directly anyways. Fast food chains make no sense without industrialization, among many other things (bookkeeping being the least of them).
Its not. Blockchain is an immutable ledger only, there's nothing in the original blockchain spec (not Satoshi's spec, Satoshi didn't make blockchain. he kinda stole it, like he didn't cite his sources very well) that mathematically enforces any sort of double entry accounting feature like ledger immutability is mathematically enforced. But blockchain is useful and interesting for other reasons. Lets set that aside since you're clearly talking about crypto, which is also not a replacement for double entry accounting for its own myriad of reasons including but not limited to excessive power consumption, reliance on a consensus of random computers (of which anyone could own 51%+ and effectively have full control over the chain), zero recourse for lost/stolen funds, unpredictable value, poor security features (true), no way to correct errors (without compromising the data structure), and the list does go on.
Even if it was a panacea for the burden of having to have an accounting department (the horror), it can't have the same economic impact as double entry accounting like you claim since double entry accounting literally didn't exist before double entry accounting. Crypto is just automated (until there's problems, and there's always problems) double entry accounting, its literally still double entry accounting and will still even need to be audited by real accountants (ugh, stupid laws, right?) LOL.
I got my mortgage for less than 2%. I can't see how crypto is going to enable negative rates.
(Historical factoid: the world's oldest bank in the modern form is up to 550 years old https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banca_Monte_dei_Paschi_di_Sien... )
Never heard this definition, where did you read this? Any time the word "asset" is linked to a crypto, people should know by now it's eventually going to zero.
I mean literally the reason why everyone refers to crypto as "triple entry accounting" is because entries on the ledger are cryptographically signed, which makes ledgers less expensive to audit and also prevents certain categories of fraud. So that alone should always make the costs of lending on the blockchain lower, and therefore also reduce interest rates.
But if you want a much more detailed explanation of why crypto should reduce the cost of borrowing money, especially in the developing world, here is an extremely detailed explanation on this topic:
I think it’ll come in two phases: first they’ll come around to the idea of debtor’s prisons and demand the governments of the world bring them back. Then when they’re all in the prisons, they’ll lead a movement to abolish them (again) completing the circle of “why bother?”
In the end we’ll be left with a saturated market of repo companies picking up the pieces for pennies on the dollar.
It's interesting you brought that up because crypto has a similar mechanism to get people to complete the whole transaction and resolve disputes without involving interest rates.
For example, imagine person B was buying a product from A. Should A send the product first or should B pay first.
When both sides don't want to take the initiative, they use an escrow contract on the blockchain where both sides have to lock up 150% to 200% of the value of the product in crypto inside the contract.
A then sends the product.
B receives the product.
If B accepts the state of the product, he can press a button to release the relevant amount of crypto in the contract to A and refund the extra 50% to 100% he had to put up.
If B sees the product is fraud, he presses another button and both sides lose all their crypto. This disincentives both A and B from committing fraud.
There are more nuanced conditions involved so I won't bore you with the details, but the main concept is there and it doesn't involve interest rates.
That can't possibly be right. It would mean that if person A defrauds person B, person B would lose 150-200% of the asking price, rather than just 100% if no "crypto escrow" were used at all.
You just described escrow with extra ~steps~ risk which has nothing to do with loans unless you’re suggesting borrowers put up 150-200% of the capital they want to borrow? (!?!?)
Of course, the fact that it makes it impractical to buy any kind of expensive product is merely a detail. As is the extreme cost of non-fraudulent delivery failures in this scheme.
Cryptocurrency is finance as imagined by people who have never bought anything more expensive than a car or house.
But if cryptocurrency is to be anything of actual value, it must tie into the physical world at some point, even if loans don't exist.
"Exchanges" try to bridge this gap and counterparty risk isn't properly priced in. If anything, the high interest payments aren't high enough to represent risk.
Reducing or eliminating that cost should not make the costs of lending change in any noticeable way, because you're reducing something that is insignificantly small anyway.
.. but this is obviously garbage. The question in lending is always about default risk, which crypto does nothing to address. Most crypto lending seems to be so-called "overcollateralised" loans, which are secured on other crypto "assets", which also tend to turn out to be garbage.
And we can see that everyone in the crypto space is offering higher interest rates for depositors. Even more than Madoff's 8%. 10%? Why not! How about 10% per month! Who's taking the other side of that trade? Well, it turns out to be bankrupt exchanges and fraudsters.
> Sweetbridge converts any Commercial relationship, Supply chain, or Value chain into an Ecosystem that increases the Net Worth of its Members.
Just the casing of that phrase makes me suspect them of some fraud :-)))
Ah, confirmed:
> By running all of the sales and purchases from an organization through an Ecosystem over a 5 year period, members will typically increase their net worth by:
https://sweetbridge.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/bottom-li...
For people that can't see the image, it basically promises that companies can increase their net worth by 25-200% and individuals by 50-200%.
Get outta here with that garbage, pardon my French.
Notably, FTX also offered the option of margin loans and options, though they were centralized. This turned out to be bad, not because it made things more difficult, but because they stole all the collateral.
Also note that the DeFi approach would likely have failed here, because the smart-contracts that determine the value of the collateral do a simple "units owned * current market price" computation. That doesn't account for price slippage. In practice the markets are quite illiquid, so selling some collateral will drop the price of that collateral quite quickly. DeFi currently has very little holistic risk management. When you have a lot of, say FTT, as collateral from counter-parties, that leaves you quite vulnerable. If FTT drops quickly, many people will get margin-calls. If they all default, then you get left with their FTT. If you try to sell that, it will crash the price even more.
It's not clear to me that increased liquidity would solve their problem. I'm not against DeFi, but the spectacular failures are proving that it's not nearly ready for prime time.
Nailed it!
What I hear from people who invest in crypto is hoping they will make money on it. Maybe that technology is part of it but I've only known people that want to invest in it for a greater return. It's thought of as a stock, but unlike a regular stock there is no company behind it that produces something of value. It's a made up digital collectible spawned from the mind of boy geniuses that is literally nothing.
My recommendation for investing in collectibles is comic books, trading cards, etc. They are finite, they exist, and they are not propped up by VC money.
Wow this got me thinking... like all collectibles the value is not intrinsic in the item itself, but subjective to the eye of the beholder.
What exactly is the subjective thing that's being collected here? I wonder if the appeal of crypto is that literally represents (well, as literal as a digital good can be) a piece of "the digital new", whatever that may be. It's a piece of the our perceived digital future, but one you can own and say is yours.
This must strongly resonate at a subconscious level to those weaned on social media who now live in a state of constant anxiety due to FOMO. The digital world is ephemeral, but bitcoin is something you can hold on to.
The average person doesn't understand the digital revolution and the world it's built and are discontent as they feel left out it's promise; namely a techno utopia that brings great wealth and power to those in the know (Gates/Jobs/Zuckerbergs/etc.).
Crypto therefore allows these people to believe they own a piece of the action. That may be it's only appeal. They can point to it and say it's theirs. "I don't understand it, but I'm not going to be left out of it."
It is the ultimate nexus of everything wrong with social media and the modern digital world. The future is coming, everyone else on my feed is having fun and smiling, and vast riches await you too if you only have Diamond Hands and HODL, which ensures you will never experience FOMO. A collectible that acts as a balm against all the anxieties of the modern world. Snake oil as a collectible.
I must think on this further.
Honestly I wonder how intentional this Boris Johnson tactic of engendering sympathy through unkempt hair is. It seems to work. Maybe it reminds parents of their helpless teenagers or something.
I agree and this thread is honestly plain disgusting too. Many here are happy and find it funny to see people's crypto being stolen by fraudsters.
From TFA:
"It is now clear that what happened at the FTX crypto exchange and the hedge fund Alameda Research involved a variety of conscious and intentional fraud intended to steal money from both users and investors."
And from the bankruptcy filings:
"On-chain analysis has found the bulk of movements from FTX to Alameda took place in late 2021, and bankruptcy filings have revealed that FTX and Alameda lost $3.7 billion in 2021. This is maybe the most befuddling part of the Bankman-Fried story: His companies lost massive amounts of money before the 2022 crypto bear market even started. They may have been stealing funds long before the blowups of Terra and Three Arrows Capital".
People may hate on Bitcoin, Ethereum, ape monkeys yacht club etc. (or whatever these NFTs are called) as much as they want, it's not reason to rejoice when thieves do scam people (including a canadian teachers pension funds' money).
There's also another angle: the very same who are cheering on people losing all their money to a scam were the first to say: "Pay your taxes on any crypto gain you made" (so that, in the end, they get their share of these winnings too through the state's spendings)...
If the state collects taxes on gain made on crypto, the state go after people stealing other people's crypto.
As simple as that.
P.S: and I hope people are happy that their politicians got greased by stolen funds and aren't giving these bribes (pardon, donations) back.
It was the exact same way on The Motley Fool boards after the dotcom crash. The crowd that was all "Well you may have your facts and figures, but my CMGI keeps going up and up and up, so PPPPPTTTTHHHHH!!!", instantly pivoted to "How can you kick me when I'm down like this? Do you enjoy suffering?"
Am I to believe that lumping people into groups of polite and impolite as human beings is a polite thing to do, or am I meant to believe that lumping people into binary groups of polite and impolite is an impolite thing to do?
Am I being downvoted by polite people or impolite people??
Is reductively judging people and putting them into antithetical groups based on offhand comments polite, or is it impolite? It’s a legitimate question.
> when you have nothing nice to say, the polite people say nothing, and the impolite people say the impolite thing.
I’m genuinely confused by this sentiment. Does this poster think they’re saying something nice? Or are they intentionally outing themselves as impolite by opting not to say nothing?
It seems genuinely funny to assume the role of the judge of who is or isn’t “polite” while violating their own rules about who is “polite”
To further rephrase that: That appears to be (without clarification) a very amusing moralizing statement that provides no value whatsoever other than to directly contradict its own premise.
Usually I classify comments as polite or rude, not people. I guess GP is the arbiter of personality though?
I'm referring to an old dictum of politeness: "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." People breaking that rule are being impolite.
I apologize that I wrote that in a confusing way by referring to them as "impolite people". It was intended as a more instrumental observation: in that instance, they are being impolite (at least by that particular rule, which is of course itself not universally accepted). It was not intended to make a categorical statement about them, but it clearly read that way.
That “canadian teachers pension fund,” however, is a $180 billion monstrosity that - in the process of losing a rounding error off their fund - legitimized a scam artist because they were too stupid to do a minimum of due diligence. They’ll make the money back in a fortnight off the safe investments they should have been putting money into in the first place while the little people who trusted FTX by proxy got fucked.
Crocodile tears for the speculators. That’s the story of finance.
That’s a small price to pay when interest rates are 3% to find out your fund managers need to be fired.
In October 2021, Ontario Teachers’ invested US$75 million in FTX International and its US entity (FTX.US). In January 2022, we made a follow-on investment of US$20 million in FTX.US. ... Our investment represented less than 0.05% of our total net assets...I don’t know why but that extra factor of two somehow makes it even worse. 0.05% of assets isn’t even enough for petty cash for most businesses and they couldn’t do some due diligence when it was $75 million?!
If we consider publicly listed companies that require annual audits by external professionals: Look how many people were taken surprise by Germany's largest start-up: Wirecard. It took years for highly skilled investigative journalists to expose the extent of fraud. Yes, you can be cynical about professional auditers, but they were also subject to an impressive level of deceit. When Dan Mccrum from FT was getting very close, I still thought it might be their Asian ops were a fraud, but EU ops OK. I was dead wrong -- the whole thing was a fraud.
I am strongly against using public resources to bail out folks who willfully sidestepped centuries of learned experience in financial regulation. Most financial fraud is privately pursued. SBF should go to jail. But beyond that, it's on the creditors to recover their assets.
I rejoice in that I would hope it deters future pension funds from investing in crypto. It’s a downright idiotic decision given the current sphere of hype-inflation that can balloon and burst on a whim.
Just look at the effect a single tweet from musk had on Doge.
The Ontario teacher’s pension fund had something like a $95M investment in FTX. It manages $241.6BN CDN in assets, making the FTX investment about 0.04% of the total assets. Pension funds normally put some percentage of their assets in risky investments, this is normal and good—and they will, therefore, invest in whatever new scam people come up with ten or twenty years from now. If not crypto, it will be something else.
Yes, they probably didn’t do the due diligence that they should have done. But that is a different kind of mistake than the mistake of investing in something risky when they thought they were investing in something safe. The pension fund likely knew it was risky, they just didn’t figure out that the inmates were running the asylum, so to speak.
Or in short, yes, this was a mistake, but pension funds invest, on purpose, in things that can balloon and burst on a whim anyway.
(I'm not implying any moral judgment here. Personally, I think it's actually a net positive given the amount of harmful regulation, both in national laws and in international sanctions. But that's precisely why it would be silly to expect it to not be driven underground by the governments in the long term.)
There’s very little solace in being able to say “I told you so” when disaster strikes. If there’s anything to rejoice about, it’s that the current crypto collapse seems to be more isolated from the rest of the economy than, for example, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.
After the damage has been done, we can go in and regulate the way that crypto should have been regulated from the beginning. You can’t escape politics, and large, public collapses like this provide the political willpower to create the oversight that we already knew was necessary, to protect future generations.
> There's also another angle: the very same who are cheering on people losing all their money to a scam were the first to say: "Pay your taxes on any crypto gain you made" (so that, in the end, they get their share of these winnings too through the state's spendings)...
I don’t understand the criticism here. If I think that it is right to pay taxes, and I think that crypto is a scam, are you saying that this is somehow hypocritical? I think there might be some steps here in the argument which I don’t see or understand.
I believe in due process and the prohibition on ex-post-facto laws. If you make money manufacturing widgets, but I think widgets are morally repugnant and pass laws to ban widget manufacturing, then I don’t get to go in and retroactively confiscate your widget profits from the past five years. You pay your taxes on crypto profits, and then if it turns out that you were breaking the law, you have to face the consequences for that too. Crypto tokens have blurred the lines between securities and other types of products and it makes no sense to pass new laws and backdate them to apply to old crypto transactions.
They are? I haven't noticed that.