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Anyone 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.
by oldstrangers 5y ago
Anyone 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