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Some more background: the companies were engaged in fighting over regulations, and on a personal basis between the 2 CEOs. It went down to really childish level
by TravelTechGuy 4y ago
Some more background: the companies were engaged in fighting over regulations, and on a personal basis between the 2 CEOs. It went down to really childish levels at some point.
But one thing is undeniable: SBF (FTX CEO) was trying to weaponize US regulation against his biggest rival CZ (Binance CEO). CZ retaliated by selling the FTT token, exposed the fact FTX was over-leveraged, and took over.
This is, as the kids on Twitter say, the embodiment of the old "F#$k around, find out".
Along the way every FTX client who couldn't withdraw, and every crypto user losing value got screwed - but why should these 2 characters care? The space just became more centralized, and whatever smidge of trust was left after the Celsius debacle has evaporated.
- jonas21 4y agoFor those not up to date on crypto people, SBF is Sam Bankman-Fried [1] and CZ is Changpeng Zhao [2]. I don't know why they insist on being called by their initials like they're some sort of ticker symbol. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Bankman-Fried [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changpeng_Zhao https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Changpeng_Zhao
- sneak 4y agoIt’s common in many internet circles to refer to prominent people by their initials. Hackerdom has a long tradition of this: rms gls esr jwz et al. It also tends to happen in US federal politics for some reason (jfk rfk gwb fdr et al) but not to everyone.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- woodruffw 4y agoThere's a little bit of cargo-culting with the practice: I thought CZ was short for the Czech Republic. The only reason I know "SBF" is because the New Yorker obliged him in that William MacAskill piece.
- bombcar 4y agoAt least the political ones (some) came about for clarification (JFK and RFK are both Kennedies, GWB is to distinguish from "Bush"). Others come from their names being long or hard to remember/pronounce/spell (I suspect this is what happened with AOC).
- pitt1980 4y agoThe Robert Caro books about Lyndon B Johnson detail his effort to force meme “LBJ” as a reference to him. (Mostly in terms of insisting various communications employees use it in press releases and what not). It seems he liked the iconography of it, especially in putting himself in similar company to FDR. Both his daughters have the LBJ initials, his wife is mostly known as Lady Bird Johnson (a nickname that predates their relationship, but is not her given name)
- cossatot 4y agoOT: Are those books worth reading? I loved the Power Broker but the LBJ books are a whole lot to get through.
- pitt1980 4y agoShort answer, yes. Longer answer - from my prospective - I enjoyed the first book Path to Power the most, which revolves around LBJs early life up to becoming a US Representative. I thought it was very on par with the Power Broker. That an the Power Broker would probably be my first recommendation to an ambitious college kid who wants to know the real Politik of how the world works. The next book Means of Assent was my least favorite of Caro’s books, but still highly enjoyable. Master of the Senate and Passage of Power are both great. But sort of specific to LBJs spot in life. Great, but I’m not sure they sparked my thinking quite the way the Power Broker and Path to Power did.
- sbierwagen 4y agoMaybe. The books are designed to be standalone-ish, so later volumes spend a fair bit of time repeating things from earlier books. Caro goes deep, deep into various shady acts and new scandals which were probably shocking and relevant in 1982 but less so four decades later. Caro also touches on a lot of the same topics as The Power Broker, and the picture he paints of LBJ ends up sounding quite a lot like Robert Moses. Is it because all powerful men inevitably end up as bullying psychopaths, or does Caro have something of an axe to grind? 50/50, maybe.
- Taek 4y agoCan't forget pg and sama
- wbl 4y agoFun crossover: IKE, internet key exchange had a proposed successor JFK
- rswail 4y agoWho are "et" and "al"? /s
- throwaway81523 4y agoFDR went by FDR because those were his initials and ehh, people do that sometimes. Have enough presidents and sooner or later you'll get a president who does it. JFK and LBJ did it as conscious homages to FDR. There is a book "In The Shadow of FDR" about post-WW2 US politics that mentions this.
- conductr 4y agoDPR fans?
- Analemma_ 4y agoBecause they think the people they're most similar to are respected old-school hackers (rms, jwz, etc.) instead of carnival hucksters like P. T. Barnum.
- alliao 4y agoi can just imagine jwz squirming at the idea of this and it is way too funny...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jefftk 4y agoIf they were imitating the older style they would use lowercase
- eru 4y agoP. T. Barnum doesn't deserve the bad reputation. See eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310056
- SilasX 4y agoBecause Bankman-Fried is a mouthful/typeful to say every time, and Changpeng is a big, non-western name, and Zhao too common by itself. Source: me referring to one of them in conversation a lot with no incentive to kowtow to his preferred branding.
- dpflan 4y agoMaybe: Crypto is full of acronyms, token tickers are a great example and apropos here --> their names have been "tokenized"...?
- rich_sasha 4y agoOwnership of personhood as documented by holding an NFT.
- dboreham 4y agoYou've been reading the DID spec.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoWhich is basically an energy-wasting form of the Blue Checkmark?
- RileyJames 4y agoWith the proof of stake release for Eth, is this point still valid? Bitcoin is still energy intensive, but that has nothing to do with NFTs.
- dboreham 4y agoNot even that, because that'd be a web of trust, like PGP or Keybase.
- RC_ITR 4y agoYou see the same thing with Middle East Leaders - MBS, MBZ, etc. When the names are even semi-complex and the reach is global, people default to acronyms.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- a4isms 4y agoPedantic nit: Those are initialisms. An initialism is when the individual letters are individually pronounced, like "emm-bee-ess." An acronym is when the initial letters are pronounced as a word, e.g. SOAR ("Situation Options Act Review-and-Reassess")
- RC_ITR 4y agoThe broader sense of acronym—the meaning of which includes terms pronounced as letters—is sometimes criticized, but it is the term's original meaning[1] and is in common use.Dictionary and style-guide editors are not in universal agreement on the naming for such abbreviations, and it is a matter of some dispute whether the term acronym can be legitimately applied to abbreviations which are not pronounced "as words", nor do these language authorities agree on the correct use of spacing, casing, and punctuation. [1] https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/1844;jsessionid=07476BC0B0471DBA1FC2FBCC34E34514#:~:text=1.,such%20as%20ATM%2C%20TLS https://www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/1844;jsessioni...).
- Jasper_ 4y agoIf there's one thing I really dislike about HN culture, it's the consistent derailing of a thread to "um, actually" someone on a semantics distinction that literally nobody has ever been confused by, or to shoehorn in new terminology that doesn't improve communication in any way.
- user_named 4y agoAgreed
- CamelCaseName 4y agoThey go by acronyms on social media, namely twitter, the main place people interact with them https://twitter.com/cz_binance https://twitter.com/cz_binance https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX
- HashBasher 4y agoThe acronyms are very twitter friendly.
- appleflaxen 4y agoAnd over-leveraged, for a brokerage, is a major problem. A brokerage is not a bank, and account-holders are not earning interest. Therefore if you are taking their funds and doing something else with them (a pre-requisite for insolvency, unless you are hacked) is a major red flag for illegality.
- walrus01 4y ago> It went down to really childish levels at some point. Childish bullshit in the cryptocurrency market?!??! I am absolutely shocked and surprised, such a thing is completely unprecedented...
- dang 4y agoNo flamewar please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mekster 4y agoWhy are people trying to make up their own stories without the reason of how CZ was trying to sell FTT? Alameda's balance sheet was already looking wrong in the first place. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/02/divisions-in-sam-bankman-frieds-crypto-empire-blur-on-his-trading-titan-alamedas-balance-sheet/ https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/02/divisions-in-sa...