Shippou-Sensei
4:1:2.5
Yes but at this point you can't see the wood for the trees. You just have to let your eyes come to rest on one point of craziness and let that stand out against the cacophony.The entire crypto story is fucking insane
Bitcoin discussion and news
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beesonthewhatnow
going deaf for a living
What amazes me are the believers still saying things that are basically “oh sure, that bit was obviously a scam, but the bit I’ve chucked all my money into is absolutely legit, look, line goes up”
I’m genuinely hope every single person that’s involved loses every damn penny.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
That won't happen, though. The nature of the thing is that those left at the end when it collapses are the ones who lose out. Those in it from the beginning, in particular those who had a tiny bit of awareness and have cashed out along the way, are already winners and will remain so. It is they who take the money that others lose.
I only hope that it ends quickly, at least at the planet-burning scale. We're not there yet. For all the talk of collapses, bitcoin is still worth more today than it was worth two years ago. It still has a long way to fall.
Not for mining it isn’t
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
True. Oddly, the hash rate has doubled over the last year as bitcoin's value has steadily fallen.
Bitcoin Network Hash Rate
I would love to think that lots of bitcoin miners will be left bankrupt, but sadly I think the smart ones won't. They only lose if they have kept their profits in the form of bitcoin, which maybe some of them have. Hopefully.
Monkeygrinder's Organ
Dodgy geezer swilling vapid lager
It's absolutely insane that something as fundamentally pointless as a Bitcoin is worth fourteen thousand pounds isn't it. Fucking nuts. The fact that it was even madder doesn't really change that.
gosub
~#
Bit jet lagged and still a lot going 9n, thought this was last week....interesting though
www.whitehouse.gov
FACT SHEET: White House Releases First-Ever Comprehensive Framework for Responsible Development of Digital Assets | The White House
Following the President’s Executive Order, New Reports Outline Recommendations to Protect Consumers, Investors, Businesses, Financial Stability, National Security, and the Environment The digital assets market has grown significantly in recent years. Millions of people globally, including 16% of...
q_w_e_r_t_y
You see an investment scam and I see divinity
There were lots of eyes, there were at least 350,000 of us watching it in real time on a twitter space.
Two white hat hackers managed to rescue some of the funds but yeah, the vast majority of the funds disappeared as we were watching.
And I bet you havent heard the half of them.
I've been in crypto for a long time, and nothing, absolutely nothing prepared me for this week, not Gox, not Bitconnect, this is a whole other level.
This is some of the highlights, totally not comprehensive,.
- The source of SB's first few billions is highly obscured. The lore is that it was the "Kimshi trade" - a Japan/west arbitrage strategy, only it turns out that this wasnt nearly as profitable as implied and only lasted a couple of month. The original seed funding of SBF is a mystery.
- All of the front people involved were very young - 20s. Many were highly inexperienced, and there was no board of directors.
- FTX was rehypothecating funds through Alameda, highly highly illegal.
- Alamada was trading with no stop loss. Essentially playing the St Petersburg game, which always guarentees you a win, IF you have infinite funds.
- When LUNA collapsed their losses were infinite (so even with infinite funds they were still fucked and there are more shenanigans around this I'm sure that have yet to come out incl. the LUNA 2.0 recovery plan)
- They "rescued" an insolvant crypto company called BlockFi, purely to gain access to the existing assets. The losses went into the general black hole.
- SBF was keeping the show on the road by persuading companies, DAOs, pension funds, hedge funds and employees of the company(!), to put all their assets into FTX, knowing it was fucked.
- Many crypto protocols paid their own staff their wages directly into FTX from the treasury fund that was held on FTX.
- One of the CEOs of Alameda,, Sam, is currently in a boat somewhere, after quitting early in the week realising the writing was on the wall.
- The other CEO of Alameda has the most astonishing tumblr blog that its evil in its banality. She was gambling with tens of billions of other people's money and had no clue what she was doing.
- They were all shagging each other, and using amphetimines, with an onsite prescriber, who would recommend to new hires that they took uppers and downers.
- The democrat party in the US, were laundering money through Ukraine via FTX.
- SBF's parents are well connected Law professors, his morther fundraises for the democratic party
- The World Economic Forum promoted FTX on its website.
- SBF had written draft regulations for crypto. They were pretty terrible, no one was happy about them
- The chair of the SEC was a professor under the guidence of CEO of Alameda's father.
Watching this all unfold in real time has been an astonishing experience. This is mass corruption, serious money laundering and fraud and there are enormous links to the current US administration. So big that some in crypto are consider this (FTX itself, not the collapse) as a state level attack on crypto.
While I have minimal sympathy for SBF, and other senior figures at FTX and Alameda, these were college kids, how the fuck did they come to be managing billions of other people's money?
As for the rest, hundred of thousands of people have been robbed, many of them of their entire life savings.
No one who really understood crypto would have gone near FTX, it was always scammy and very cozy with regulators, but none of us had any clue about how bad things actually were. What has been shocking to me is that people who really should have known better trusted them, giving them further credibility.
There has been an upgrade to ASICs which mine more efficiently, so lots of cheap 2nd hand rigs coming on the market and newer rigs hashing faster for same energy input
I suspect many of them will go bankrupt.
The bitcoin mining industry has its own troubles. Lots of big players took out btc collateralised loans to buy the new Asics, they too might be in trouble very soon.
SBF and FTX were major influencers in the development of this framework.Bit jet lagged and still a lot going 9n, thought this was last week....interesting though
FACT SHEET: White House Releases First-Ever Comprehensive Framework for Responsible Development of Digital Assets | The White House
Following the President’s Executive Order, New Reports Outline Recommendations to Protect Consumers, Investors, Businesses, Financial Stability, National Security, and the Environment The digital assets market has grown significantly in recent years. Millions of people globally, including 16% of...
*************
Next thing we need to take down is Tether.
beesonthewhatnow
going deaf for a living
Yet still you believe. It’s laughable.
FTX’s Balance Sheet Was Bad
Serum, customer money, etc.; plus Elon Musk’s Twitter debt and anti-ESG antitrust.
www.bloomberg.com
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
View attachment 351556FTX’s Balance Sheet Was Bad
Serum, customer money, etc.; plus Elon Musk’s Twitter debt and anti-ESG antitrust.
It's kind of terrifying that shit like peoples' pension funds get spaffed on this nonsense.
Supine
Newt Member
It’s almost enough to put you off crypto isn’t it
David Clapson
Well-Known Member
Has crypto nudged the doomsday clock forward? It seems that if North Korea drops a nuke, the crypto bros will have paid for it. archive.ph Subscribe to read | Financial Times How North Korea became a mastermind of crypto cyber crime. Cryptocurrency theft has become one of the regime’s main sources of revenue
q_w_e_r_t_y
You see an investment scam and I see divinity
No, but its made me very very glad that I am bitcoin first.
Way too many people get into crypto without understanding the basic principles of bitcoin.
NoXion
Craicy the Squirrel
"Crypto" includes all the bitcoin shit too.
q_w_e_r_t_y
You see an investment scam and I see divinity
Maybe they did, but SBF was Biden's largest donor. His mother was the Head of Fundraising, the democrats were laundering money through FTX via Ukraine, his family were best mates with the head of the SEC and the CTCF.
There are strong links between FTX and the Democratic Party, which there arent with the Republicans or Trump. They have other friends.
beesonthewhatnow
going deaf for a living
“All the others are scams but this one is definitely legit”
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
There's some resonance with psychic mediums in this regard.
Dogsauce
I’ve got Skol but I’m not a Scholar
Guess what else is raising its ugly head as part of this conspiracy nonsense? Sometimes they say the quiet bit out loud.
Storm Fox
Trying the find the next noun to verb
No true Bitcoiner fallacy
newbie
undisambiguated
Could you unpick this a bit please. 'us', the ones who really understand, were in the dark on detail but always knew it was a scam, despite not explicitly warning anyone else. Is that fair?
Somehow 'us' have been relying on observing other people who really should have known better, and using their behaviour to impute increased credibility.
Now I'm a simple soul on the internet, looking to you personally as one who has the insight and knowledge to help me form my opinions and strategy. I haven't picked you at random, I've been reading your insights for years now, and reckon you have a better understanding than any other coiner I regularly read. So I listen to you, and invest your posts with credibility- I'll avoid the words 'trust' or 'faith' but that's where the tangle of social media posts leads, to realworld actions based on gut feeling about the credibility of a screen name. That seems to be what you apparently do to those who (somehow) really should have known better.
So in an unregulated space quite obviously corrupt and full of scammers and incompetents, the most credible poster I read reveals, after the fact, that they knew this particular very big player was in fact college kids who were always scammy, very cozy with regulators and very politically embedded.
If I've read correctly that was known by 'us' before the collapse, although a lot of the details at the top of your post were new to 'us'.
Despite its size and prominence FTX had not been mentioned on this thread before last friday.
So how should I proceed when it turns out that (as with all the previous collapses) the sources I turn to, because they are part of a narrow, credible 'us', are themselves simply
ps. In reality I have no crypto investment strategy except to carry on avoiding it. I've never bought any, but every time I've considered it it's been based much more on your posts- and their credibilty as one of 'us'- than those of, eg, our new friend or adverts on buses. But yes, I do listen, I would have it in a wallet only I have the key for because I recognise that you've been saying that for a long time and it's clearly very good advice. Putting everything except the cash for the leccy bill in BC not so much
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littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
This is where a bit of old-fashioned Marxism is handy, particularly the concept of fictitious capital. Bad news for FTX's creditors but actually quite good news for the rest of us. The creation and then destruction of fictitious capital of this kind doesn't have to affect the rest of the world all that much. Normally fictitious capital is a bit more hidden than this, though. It at least pretends to have real value.View attachment 351556FTX’s Balance Sheet Was Bad
Serum, customer money, etc.; plus Elon Musk’s Twitter debt and anti-ESG antitrust.
Monkeygrinder's Organ
Dodgy geezer swilling vapid lager
It's built in isn't it. It's bizarre watching the true believers try to justify it. 'Well obviously THOSE people aren't using this system which was explicitly created to avoid any sort of oversight or checks and balances in the right way. Things will be fine just as soon as they all stop though.'
q_w_e_r_t_y
You see an investment scam and I see divinity
I feel somewhat flattered by your trust/faith, but this is part of the problem. Bitcoin is a trustless system that requires no trust or faith, however you need a trusted on-ramp to get bitcoin in the first place.
This is something that everyone that I know in crypto is coming to terms with. Its like a Jimmy Saville moment. Everyone is thinking how the fuck didnt we figure this out? Like Jimmy Saville, some pretty astonishing stuff is coming out with hindsight, that on its own was laughed off, but in context of what has happened its jaw dropping in the nievity.
You dont need to trust once you are in bitcoin, but you need to trust something to get bitcoin in the first place (ie a fiat on-ramp) FTX was an easy on-ramp that drew you into high frequency sophisticated trading. We all figured that was the scam...basically taking the money of noobs with dollar signs in their eyes who lost their money to highly trained quant traders but kept coming back for more.
The truth is that most people didnt look all that deep into him/FTX/Alameda. At first, he was a bit of a celebrity trader, most of these are either scammy con-artists or gamblers who got lucky, but wrestle with pigs and all that so usually they fail from their own shittiness and we just quietly laugh from the sidelines.
By the time FTX/SBF became know in crypto (rather than just by traders) it was different, he was legit, nice articles in the financial press, had all the legal paperwork, there were lots of people who rated him (often later discovered to have taken money/loans from FTX). Above all he had the ear of regulators, he appeared to be doing a shitty job of defending defi/crypto, but at least he was trying...right? So there was common cause. He might be exploiting problem gamblers, but we didnt see that as really our concern, or even anything that we could really do about it.
However we had no clue that FTX was basically a bunch of methed up kids having orgies in the Bahamas while gambling with other peoples money - a lot of their subcompanies were based in Delaware, they had international licences, they had fancy commercials with famous people. They looked legit and no-one ever cared enough to go deeper.
By "us" I'm talking about the kind of reddit discord and telegram groups that I frequent, which tend to be bitcoin first, decentralisation maxi, solarpunky and heavy on the eng side. "We" generally dont value dollars very highly and people arent flash. Scammers within our community are largely hackers, who exploit code errors to steal. There is a kind of grudging acknowledgement that these hackers are an essential part of the infrastructure as they expose poor coding and sophisticated loopholes which are then patched in the future. So while individuals may lose, it is usually from honest errors on the part of protocols and makes the industry overall stronger, even if it is painful.
There is a whole other side to crypto tho, which values the dollar exchange rate of crypto above everything else - one of high leverage trading, technical analysis, ETFs, regulators etc, this side has much more in common with traditional financial markets and tends to be where scammers hang out. These scammers are more your nigerian prince type. "trust me, bro buy this $hitcoin, its going to 100x in a week, trust me" etc. We tend to be a bit snooty towards this group and much less sympathetic to the victims on a "fool and their money basis".
FTX managed to cross this divide by providing services, loans and startup funding to the protocols of the first group, who got their lawyers to do the due diligence and got the thumbs up, cos on paper, everything looked good...but it was just all fiction.
I think Urban doesnt tend to attract grifters and financial types, who are the kind that would engage with FTX. But they were big...huge infact. They just werent really mentioned in crypto circles unless people were getting antsy about regulators.
Dont trust, verify.
You can read the white paper here at its official home. You;ll need to use TOR tho because the UK government has banned it.
A mirror is available on ipfs https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRA3NWM82ZGynMbYzAgYTSXCVM14Wx1RZ8fKP42G6gjgj
IPFS is a cryptographically secured protocol that cannot be tampered with,
You can trust me that its the same document, or you can download TOR and verify the truth of what I am saying yourself.
Dont trust me.
Yeah!!! I have done some good in the world.ps. In reality I have no crypto investment strategy except to carry on avoiding it. I've never bought any, but every time I've considered it it's been based much more on your posts- and their credibilty as one of 'us'- than those of, eg, our new friend or adverts on buses. But yes, I do listen, I would have it in a wallet only I have the key for because I recognise that you've been saying that for a long time and it's clearly very good advice. Putting everything except the cash for the leccy bill in BC not so much
Please PLEASE tell anyone that you know who gets into crypto about the importance of securing their private key.
In this whole thing, I've lost the equivalent of approx £2 in Blockfi, bought out by FTX, now insolvant (cos I signed up for a free $100 bonus, as a favour to a mate who also got $100, then once I was in decided it looked decidedly dodgy got the deposit and bonus out immediately but left the interest there).
I do know others that should have known better who have lost a fair bit in this mess. They have (re)learnt some very expensive lessons.
Regarding your suggestion that:
Many people knew about Jimmy Saville. Some famously called him out on it, but many, many, people kept quiet. He was accepted and protected by the BBC and numerous other organisations who should have known better. None called him out on it.
I suggest that the crypto world works in a similar way. Plenty of people would have known that SBP was dodgy as fuck. If only because everyone else sitting at the top of their own crypto-to-the-moon food chain is also dodgy as fuck.
More crypto businesses will tumble soon and all the believers will repeat the mantra 'we had no idea'. But they knew all along. They just kept quiet while the cash rolled in.
I remember when Mt Gox crashed and there were pictures in the news of young hipsters protesting outside Karpeles office in Hong Kong. Now the stakes are higher and it's not just the hipsters who got burned.
Many people knew about Jimmy Saville. Some famously called him out on it, but many, many, people kept quiet. He was accepted and protected by the BBC and numerous other organisations who should have known better. None called him out on it.
I suggest that the crypto world works in a similar way. Plenty of people would have known that SBP was dodgy as fuck. If only because everyone else sitting at the top of their own crypto-to-the-moon food chain is also dodgy as fuck.
More crypto businesses will tumble soon and all the believers will repeat the mantra 'we had no idea'. But they knew all along. They just kept quiet while the cash rolled in.
I remember when Mt Gox crashed and there were pictures in the news of young hipsters protesting outside Karpeles office in Hong Kong. Now the stakes are higher and it's not just the hipsters who got burned.
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