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FTX Future Fund
- wmf 5y agoYou want to reduce risk? Stop letting people gamble with 20x leverage.
- oldstrangers 5y agoAnyone else oddly skeptical of FTX? They seemingly came out of no where with ungodly amounts of money, and began slapping their name on anything and everything.
- fezzez 5y agoThe story is that their founder made billions of a crypto trade a couple years ago so I think they might have the funding to do stuff like this.
- robbiep 5y agoTo extend on that, he’s done a couple ho hour interview with Sam Harris on ‘earning to do good’
- dkasper 5y agoThere’s incredible amounts of capital going into the crypto industry and FTX is one of the biggest players. There may be some froth but they seem like one of the least shady players in the space to me.
- wmf 5y agoThe question is how and why FTX became big given that BitMEX already existed.
- dkersten 5y agoBitMEX was engulfed in controversy (lawsuits and investigation) around the time FTX launched.
- solean 5y agoBitmex is very much a niche exchange, it only offers a handful of perps. FTX will let you trade pretty much any thing you can think of (crypto perps/spot, stocks, political elections, etc.)
- swader999 5y agoBitmex and its liquidation engine is why.
- arcticbull 5y agoWell that is a low bar. I am curious why their US destination wires arrive from "West Realm Shires Services Inc" instead of, like FTX.
- exdsq 5y agoNo. I have some mutual acquaintances with the owner through effective altruism and I've heard good things. It's pretty insane that he left Jane Street to try make more money to give to effective charities and now at 29 is worth $22.5 Billion! So they have the money to spend on these things and the fact he's running a future fund makes total sense based on what his original goals were.
- wmf 5y agoWhere did that money come from, though? People getting margin called on their life savings? Update: I assume the majority of SBF's net worth is from FTX not Alameda, so my question is where does FTX's money come from. I assume it's from wrecking retail traders.
- exdsq 5y agoCrypto trading with his own money and then his own fund. I believe it was Alameda Research which is still going. Basically a bunch of young Jane Street/MIT/Stanford mathematicians who've made a killing. You can read a little more about it here: https://80000hours.org/stories/sam-bankman-fried/ https://80000hours.org/stories/sam-bankman-fried/
- metacritic12 5y agoIs the assumption that just because SBF made money, it must have been through "some evil"? What's the basis for that assumption (versus anything else, like ICOing a new token).
- arcticbull 5y agoNah the assumption that they made money in crypto which is just a cesspool of fraud, grift and crime - is what gives some folks the assumption that it could have been through fraud, grift or crime. You hang out in the muck, folks are going to assume you have some on you. I'm not saying they do necessarily, just that that's where the assumption more than likely comes from.
- putlake 5y ago
- bena 5y agoI first heard about them when they began to sponsor a Magic: the Gathering related podcast and about a month(?) later, they're everywhere. But I'm wary of the crypto space in general. A lot of bad faith actors.
- space_rock 5y agoTheir growth was reasonably organic if you were following the popularity of exchanges
- oldstrangers 5y agoI've "followed exchanges" since Mt Gox, got screwed by Mintpal, saw the fall of cryptsy, the rise and eventual irrelevance of Bittrex, the rise and eventual irrelevance of Poloniex... Even with all of that, I still don't immediately know where FTX came from.
- lavezzi 5y agoTether
- babyshake 5y agoThe "Project Ideas" section has next to nothing regarding energy. Surprising given the focus on "humanity's long-term prospects".
- exdsq 5y agoEnergy is a very important problem but also one that is heavily funded and researched. It makes more sense to focus on underfunded issues that offer a high reward. I argue that energy should be more funded for what it's worth, but climate change and renewable energy sources aren't that popular in effective altruism circles.
- coldpie 5y ago> but climate change and renewable energy sources aren't that popular in effective altruism circles What.
- exdsq 5y agoCheck out some of the fund breakdowns and look at how much is spent on climate change and renewable energy https://funds.effectivealtruism.org https://funds.effectivealtruism.org https://www.givewell.org/maximum-impact-fund https://www.givewell.org/maximum-impact-fund The common argument is that the best way to try and make an impact on climate change is to fund lobbyists to make change at governmental levels https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2021/12/most-effective-nonprofits-fight-climate-change/621013/ https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2021/12/most...
- gault8121 5y agoHi there exdsq, I run a nonprofit, Quill.org, that serves five million students in the United States, and I am building an educational tool that is very similar to the "cognitive aid" goal listed as a project idea. I'm hoping to get some feedback from someone who is familiar with this space, and I was wondering if you had a moment to scan over our application before we send it? If you're interested in taking a look, it'd be a huge help if you could reach out to me at peter (at) quill (dot) org! I'd be really grateful for your input. -- The learning tool we are building now maps to this project idea from the FTX Fund: "AI-based cognitive aids - One of the great hopes for advanced AI systems is that they might enhance human reason—allowing people to explore lines of argument more carefully and efficiently, and to detect important errors in their reasoning. We’d like to kickstart this work, so that it keeps up with AI progress as much as possible. For example, could a fine-tuned version of GPT-3 be trained to identify misleading statements, and provide the best arguments and counterarguments for different views? We’d love to see products with this sort of technology that people will actually want to use."
- exdsq 5y agoIf people are interested in where these ideas come from, please look at these links: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org https://www.givingwhatwecan.org https://80000hours.org https://80000hours.org https://www.effectivealtruism.org https://www.effectivealtruism.org If you're thinking about how you can contribute more than you currently are but don't want to leave a comfy FAANG job, I highly recommend reading a little about giving what we can. Disclaimer: I pledged with GWWC and am involved in some EA groups.
- JumpCrisscross 5y agoIf you're in the New York City, this is the philosophy the Robinhood Foundation [1] pursues. [1] https://www.robinhood.org https://www.robinhood.org
- Shindi 5y agoI'm actually curious what makes you say the philosophies are similar? I see that the robinhood foundation site says "Last year, we invested $172 million in over 900 of the most impactful nonprofits across New York City, including over $80 million for COVID-19 relief." One idea I see expressed in Effective Altruism circles a lot is that a life overseas in some poor country is worth as much as a life here (in NYC where I live). Wondering how giving in NYC is more impactful than giving to unsexy causes like malaria nets abroad, given how expensive everything is in NYC. I'm always skeptical of company's philanthropic arms because it's so easy to give to causes that make the company looks good instead of giving to causes based the most good you can do. Although, I thank my direct parent for sharing that link, don't mean to come across as argumentative.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> a life overseas in some poor country is worth as much as a life here (in NYC where I live) Similar methodology, perhaps, not philosophy. Both seek to objectively measure impact across multiple causes e.g. healthcare, education and other disparate philanthropic domains. The scoping is, however, as you note, different. Robinhood holds that a life nearby is more valuable to the people near it than one faraway. (There is also an institutional component to this argument. A life elevated in New York has a higher chance of producing multi-generational change than one in an intermittent war zone. Though the war zone is in part a product of that depression.) So helping one person in the Bronx at the cost of five in Sub-Saharan Africa is okay, but helping one person in Manhattan over two in Queens is not. (Drastically oversimplifying, but you get the point.) > company's philanthropic arms The Foundation has nothing to do with Robinhood, the company.
- y0ssar1an 5y agotextbook greenwashing. if they want to make the world a better place, shut down FTX and stop enabling the insane, planet incinerating, fraud enabling, money laundering, rogue regime financing, fake tech breakthrough called "crypto". crypto companies like FTX should be viewed with the same disdain as Big Oil and Big Tobacco. this is like investing with ExxonMobil to stop climate change. don't fall for it. https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/Sustainability/Environmental-protection/Climate-change https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/Sustainability/Environmenta... https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60281129 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60281129
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- seibelj 5y ago
- rattlesnakedave 5y agoVery little on the site has to do with environmentalism.
- htlion 5y agoI would add the fact that the company is based in Antigua. So the overall picture is a very profitable company, in a domain which, as of now, mostly enables fraud at an insane energy cost, based in a tax haven. But somehow, this is for the greater good. With the challenges ahead, we, all of us, will have to decrease our consumption of most if not all resources. This can not be achieved by just pouring money from the penthouse of a skyscraper of a capital city.
- SparkyMcUnicorn 5y agoIt's hard to look at this founder and say he isn't extremely well intentioned. For a very young guy in this scene you'd expect expensive watches and cars, but instead he drives a budget car, is giving away a great majority of his wealth, and seems to truly care. The reason he's keeping FTX open is to earn more money to give away to environmental, socioeconomic, and health organizations and research. His track record speaks for itself.
- beefman 5y agoWe'd love to see thoughtful plans for how to spend $1-100B to make humanity's future as good as possible. We might learn a great deal from these plans, even when we don't put them into action—and in some cases, we might do that too! ... We'd be excited and grateful to see rigorous criticisms of our priorities and concerns. Ok, how do we contact you about this? None of the forms here seem appropriate https://ftxfuturefund.org/apply/ https://ftxfuturefund.org/apply/
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoTwitter.
- aaaaaaaaata 5y agoWould a PWA targeting a large niche of underserved users who are accustomed to awful software in their niche be sufficiently altruist to contact them? I've been procrastinating investment talks due to exhaustion by the state of ethics in the space; Sam's one of the few people I think I'd want to be involved in seeding my business.
- joshxyz 5y agoGod, so much hate on this thread. Damned if he do, damned if he don't. Always amazes me how HN crowd loves to project their ideals on how people with money should spend their money.
- skinnymuch 5y agoYes because no billionaire has ever actually been as amazingly ethical as they have claimed. It’s not really damned on either side for the guys who got rich off this.