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Comment by andirk | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the "genius" credit given to FTX, Alameda, Sam are all during a time when crypto was soaring, probably partially because people were home more and got free checks in the mail. The fact that a single person could absolutely tank the entire company with a single trade shows how reckless they all were. But it worked because the market was going up. That's it. The market slumped for like a week and their behavior dropped them to 0.

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> The fact that a single person could absolutely tank the entire company with a single trade shows how reckless they all were.

Sadly, this sort of thing happens in traditional trading firms as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_futures_drunk-trading_inci... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group#2012_stoc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Leeson#Barings_Bank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_trader https://www.foxnews.com/story/typing-error-causes-225m-loss-...

also don't discount sporting events being closed/reduced and sports betting dollars moving to crypto

Haha mild sports betting is my 2nd main use of bitcoin, other than store of value/wealth/whatever we call it when you buy something low and now it's worth a lot.

It also helped that they couldn't be margin called because of a secret system setup at FTX (which is why FTX imploded).

Just leverage long 50x forever until they're all billionaires or FTX is bankrupt.

This can't be the whole story because Alameda started a few months before the big 2018 BTC crash and made it through just fine.

> the "genius" credit given to FTX, Alameda

The hype cycle marketing was targeted by geography and social class.

This is my sense too. What's kind of funny is we weirdly get caught up and excited by the hype... every single time

“We” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I am proud that I have never gotten burned by this sort of thing because I understand that if there’s a lot of hype it’s probably too good to be true.

Fair enough. I guess media cycles get caught up.

And for me personally, I will say every time the economy booms for a few years I start to ask: gosh is this ever going to stop?

For example with real estate, I haven't bought any because the prices always seem insane to me. But I'd be far wealthier (on paper at least) if I'd bitten the bullet and bought into the real estate market a few years ago.

I always felt like SBF was a massive fraud. When someone is inflated as a genius and "the kindest billionaire" for superficial things like not driving an expensive car and not dressing appropriately, it sends alarm bells ringing to me. Acting like the exaggerated TV stereotype of a tech nerd screams "I'm covering something up", just like what happened with Theranos.

Just something relevant in another field: this is exactly how people feel about John Fetterman demanding to wear basketball shorts and a hoodie in the senate.

Hmm my reaction to that is "good marketing." People who have some kind of shtick tend to get more media coverage.

Like, was Steve Jobs (turtleneck) covering something up? Zuck (t shirts)? Newsom with his Bruce Wayne hair?

Maybe it's just because I'm too young to have seen much of Steve Jobs prior to his death, but my impression of coverage surrounding him was that while he did have certain behaviors he insisted on and were often talked about like his turtlenecks, it didn't really fit the stereotype of a tech nerd of the time.

Back then "nerd" seemed to have a much more negative connotation and seemed to describe people who were closer to "gross" than "quirky", like the trope of them constantly having a runny nose or sneezing everywhere due to allergies. Steve on the other hand came off as very clean and insistent on dressing nicely, even if in his own style.

I feel like Zuck was/is similarly seen as a sham for his entire robotic persona. Perhaps not as a scam, but he certainly never seemed to be all that liked by people.

I don't know anything about Newsom to comment on that one. But one other example where I was telling people it was probably a scam beforehand was Nikola. I don't recall what about his behavior did it for me, but something was just off about him in the way SBF was that just screamed deception.

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