It’s only a Ponzi scheme if it comes from the Ponzi region of Italy, otherwise it’s just sparkling fraud.
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Holy shit what luck for Michael Lewis to be at ground zero for this.
It’s like Posnanski and Paterno, if Pos has been willing to sabotage his sports writing career and write the real story.
Somehow I doubt Lewis will have any such compunctions about laying this one bare.
Practically the only police that were actually defunded were the SEC and IRS.
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#notyourkeys
I feel like if your assets are made up of wholly fictional assets you invented yourself, but you also have a HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT entry on the liabilities side, that account might be doing the balancing part of the balance sheet regardless what numbers are on the spreadsheet.
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Nah don’t think this is right at all. I think the question of what happened to the money is going to be complicated.
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i wish i could read it without the paywall, this entire incident is fascinating, sad, and weird
All that basically adds up to they stole the money to gamble/backstop other bad decisions right?
I think most folks are signed up to the newsletter which hits your inbox without a paywall. You can signup at the link below, click +Follow and add your email in the modal. At least I think that’s how I subscribed.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine
Yeah that doesn’t sound anything like a ponzi scheme. Lol me!
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No Ponzi. You’re the Ponzi!
I posted about this upthread but my guess is that FTX couldn’t function without Alameda because Alameda was their backstop liquidity provider. Admitting Alameda was insolvent would therefore have involved grinding FTX to a halt, which would have been the end of them.
https://mobile.twitter.com/alex_bcg/status/1590674860891525121
https://mobile.twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1156696100729806849
Liquidations caused by the collapse of Luna blew a hole in Alameda, allowing Alameda to collapse would have led to FTX ceasing to function properly, which would have caused a run on the exchange. So they propped it up with FTX user funds. This story makes sense to me because it contains a powerful incentive to dip into user funds. Like even if you think SBF is a complete psychopath, he still had to know it was dangerous to do that. I don’t think he did it just for funsies, or out of simple greed. It makes sense that FTX user funds were used to remedy something which already represented an existential threat to FTX.
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Crypto bros are only a few years away from re-inventing Glass-Steagall.
https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1592260150806843393
So this is just nonsense retweeted by the guy who invented Javascript, who has been mildly red-pilled for a while.
https://twitter.com/0xConYe/status/1592265842167017473
And of course this is the top comment, which is weird because it only has one like.
https://twitter.com/jchervinsky/status/1592173682687938560
JFC
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In which crypto bros learn about bank runs
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to be clear tho, the “crypto” part doesn’t have anything to do with the fraud part. it’s harder to convince someone you have 15 billion in assets when everything is public and you don’t really have 15 billion. if you run a centralized exchange or a bank (can bank of america survive a bank run today?) someone can make a claim on the internet from the bahamas and there’s no sure way to disprove his 15 billion claim.
it’s more a banking problem than a crypto problem. i wouldn’t call the people with balances on ftx crypto bros, they’re offshore investment banking bros.
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No, that’s actually not a ponzi either.
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