6 ms·

I’d wager bankman-fried is going to disappear, or mysteriously die in India. Gerry Cotton had far less money on the table and he supposedly died abroad.

moralestapia 4y ago
He may go for it but I don't think he will succeed. Come on, this is a guy who had: * A company with a constant revenue stream in a business that could be pretty much 100% automated. * Backing from the largest investors and VC funds worldwide. * Valuable connections with people higher up in academia and the prevailing political party in the US (all the way up to the president). * All the money in the world and free reign over what to do with it. * Unparalleled info and insights about the crypto markets. * A massive group of followers that found his antics particularly alluring and who were trusting him with their money more and more everyday. * A team of geniuses who were absolutes alphas from quantitative trading, won math olympiads and were constantly on drugs to enhance their cognition 1,000% (ok, this one's sarcasm) And he still managed to f*ck it up. I don't think he's capable of pulling off a Hillblom, tbh.
- jongjong 4y ago
  They are either industry saboteurs planted by big banking interests or they are complete imbeciles. Same can be said about people who gave them money. It's just retarded. The whole business went completely against the core purpose of cryptocurrency. Anyone who invested in him or had their money sitting on his exchange (or any bankrupt exchange) deserved to lose it. It's scary to think what damage large amounts of capital could do in the hands of such idiots; society is better off now.
  - ftxbagholder123 4y ago
    I ended up losing a significant amount of money on the FTX debacle, and I want to demonstrate that even risk-aware people who tried to act relatively prudently can still end up losing money. I also want to argue that while most parties involved (myself included) made wrong decisions one way or the other throughout this -- and as a result are greatly suffering from the consequences -- that we should focus less on blaming the victims, and more on prosecuting the actual villains, while figuring out a clever way of preventing such large-scale fraud from happening again. Here is my story: - I put $50k into FTX last year. The reason for putting the money into FTX was because it was the only large-scale platform that allowed me to trade the specific token that I wanted to trade. - My investment proved to be more successful than I had anticipated, and I turned the initial investment into $600k by the end of last year. - By the spring of this year, I had sold my entire position and was now sitting with $400k USD on FTX (as I didn't sell everything at the top). - At that time, I attempted to withdraw the entire amount into my bank account, but immediately ran into issues with my bank. - For background, I'm a dual citizen, originally from South America but now living in the US. As you may be aware, US citizens were not allowed to use FTX.com; hence I used my South American citizenship to get verified by FTX, with the condition that I could only withdraw to a South American bank in my name. - I spent about 10-20 hours this spring attempting to make the withdrawal, which included dozens of phone calls and emails with my bank as well as the FTX support team, in order to execute the transaction. But the process turned out to be more complicated than I had expected. - Full details are not necessary here as I wish to somewhat protect my identity, but it became clear to me that this process would be very difficult to complete unless I was physically present at the bank in South America. - While I considered that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not risk-free, I deemed the risk relatively low. A part of that judgement was the fact that FTX was an exchange, and not a bank nor a prop-trading house, and thus I viewed the risk of a run on the bank scenario, or FTX speculating away my money in trading, as low. - What instead worried me was that FTX could get hacked, or that the founders could take my money and run, but given the high-profile nature of the company and its founders, I made the call that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not an overwhelming risk factor. - I also considered converting my money into BTC and transferring them to cold storage, but ended up not doing that as I worried about a crypto meltdown, and I reasoned that my money was safer sitting in USD at FTX (despite the aforementioned risks). I further reasoned, that given that the amount was already quite large, that it would be even harder to explain to a local bank where the money had come from once it had gone off an exchange and then come back on again. - For all of these reasons, I decided to wait, and was planning to do the transfer in less than 2 months from today, once back in South America. We obviously know what happened next, and we know that pretty much any other solution would have been better for me. But with the information available to me at the time, it wasn't obvious that what happened would happen. I believed I had reasoned appropriately about the risks and made the correct decisions at the time when I made them, with the information available at the time. My point is that we don't know the stories behind why so many people kept their money on FTX. Perhaps some were more reckless than others, and perhaps someone reading this thinks that I was reckless too. But even so, in my view, none of us "deserved" to have this happen to us. So instead of vilifying the victims, the focus should be on holding the perpetrators responsible, while thinking of a better way forward so that this doesn't happen again. Thanks for reading.
    - swalsh 4y ago
      Too late now, but another option might have been converting to USDC and self custody, and or moving to coinbase to withdraw.
      - ftxbagholder123 4y ago
        Thank you, I responded to a sibling comment that offered a similar suggestion -- I appreciate any input from you if you are able to opine.
        mattdesl 4y ago
        To expand on parent, you may wish to read a little more about USDC, Uniswap and non custodial wallets (also known as self custody). Uniswap would allow you to trade any token that follows the ERC20 interface (not all of them do, but many). USDC would allow you to mitigate day to day price volatility. Non custodial wallet would mean the burden lies on you to secure the funds, but a CEX getting hacked or investing away your deposits is not possible. Self custody also means you could move some to another CEX in US to attempt withdrawal. Also should note there are different and additional risks with this approach: you might lose your keys, get phished/hacked, or use the blockchain incorrectly, or USDC/Uniswap contracts could fail, etc. Very sorry to hear about your situation.
        swalsh 4y ago
        Every approach has risks, and the right approach depends on the person. I'd never reccomend self custody for my mother (actually I'd never reccomend crypto for my mother) but if you have the technical skills and are personally responsible self custody might be safer than a cex. It also let's you take advantage of defi, which has a whole other set of risks and benefits.
        ftxbagholder123 4y ago
        Thank you! I'm not very familiar with USDC, though I am familiar with Dai and the MakerDAO ecosystem, and it looks like USDC serves a similar purpose, even though the design between the two looks different (one is centralized, one is not). Perhaps those two assets offer similar order of magnitude tradeoffs in terms of tail risk. In retrospect, putting the money in USDC (or Dai) or similar would have been a good course of action. I realize this wasn't evident from my initial post, but I actually go back many years with crypto and have run both airgapped computers at home as well as used Trezors without mistake (including using Uniswap), so I'm less worried about losing my keys or committing other such user errors. Ironically, while I used to worry more about using CEX's (thinking they could hacked, or the founders could run away with the money), over time I gravitated towards worrying more about actually getting my crypto money back into the banking system, without running afoul of AML / KYC hurdles, and I thought CEX's would be the less risky option in this regard. And in this case specifically, once the money on FTX became sizable, I became even more paranoid about this, and I guess I got set in my own thinking of not wanting the money to leave the exchange for fear of not being able to transfer it back into the banking system. In retrospect, it's funny (and obviously sad at the same time) how I overly worried about one thing, while completely missing out on what the real risk was. You all have been extremely helpful, so I thank you very much (and not least for allowing me to put some of my thoughts in writing and reasoning with you about it). We live and learn -- now onto figuring out how to make up for the money lost!
- narrator 4y ago
  Ramesh ("sunny") at Theranos got $40 million bucks when he cashed out after a brief period of working at a dot com startup and he blew most of it on his divorce and Theranos. On the upside, he got to date 19 year old Holmes. People are alleging that SBF being romantic partners with Alameda's chief trader Elisson was also a bad idea for similar reasons. Btw, does anyone know where the heck Elisson went? I haven't seen any articles specifying her current whereabouts.
  - goolz 4y ago
    I have heard unsubstantiated rumor that she may be trying to make it to Dubai, take that with a dash of salt.
  - dibt 4y ago
    I heard she went to hong kong shortly after the collapse started. She then went to Dubai to avoid extradition. I don’t have a source. I heard it in an interview with someone following the case.
- oldgradstudent 4y ago
  > * Unparalleled info and insights about the crypto markets. Since both his hedge fund and exchange lost billions, I doubt it. Except for going long in a bull market, was he ever successful in anything? > * A team of geniuses who were absolutes alphas from quantitative trading, won math olympiads and were constantly on drugs to enhance their cognition 1,000% (Ok, this one's sarcasm) Again, they've lost massive amounts of money trading. If your strategy makes a lot of money for years, but then loses more than anything you've ever earned, it's a crappy strategy.
  - moralestapia 4y ago
    >ok, this one's sarcasm
    - oldgradstudent 4y ago
      Hmm, I thought only the part about the drugs was sarcasm.
  - JamesianP 4y ago
    > If your strategy makes a lot of money for years, but then loses more than anything you've ever earned, it's a crappy strategy. Depends who's money you're playing with. If you profit on the way up and only your customers lose on the way down. Then high-risk strategies are (unfortunately) always better. My trading strategy has never made me billions nor lost billions. Yet I kinda feel like there's a solid possibility many of these fools will end up waaay better off than me. Assuming they can stay out of jail.
    - tartoran 4y ago
      Some of these fools stash the wealth on the side for when they get out of jail. During their sentence they take classes, meditate and self actualize or possibly write a book about some life lesson they just learned in prison. White collar crime is quite lenient in punishments, jail may even be a good experience for some
- erosenbe0 4y ago
  MIT grads need to stay in their lane. This kind of incompetent deceit at the highest levels of power and influence is supposed to only be possible with a degree from or Harvard and Yale. edit: what I mean, trollishly, is that I expected more conscientiousness from a room of MIT quant types, even if business process and diligence was not in their wheelhouse.
- manholio 4y ago
  > And he still managed to f*ck it up. Plenty of people fuck up in similar or even better circumstances. What amazes here is the sheer magnitude and low intellect. They did no accounting. They bought property in their own names out of company (customer) assets. He was still "trying to raise money" as of yesterday, in full denail. This is not an excessively sophisticated criminal mind, he doesn't seem to understand why people would take issue with his actions.
ekianjo 4y ago
giving so much money to democrats surely deserves a presidential pardon
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  To paraphrase SBF paraphrasing someone else, don't throw (Roger) stones in a glass house.

moralestapia 4y ago

He may go for it but I don't think he will succeed. Come on, this is a guy who had: * A company with a constant revenue stream in a business that could be pretty much 100% automated. * Backing from the largest investors and VC funds worldwide. * Valuable connections with people higher up in academia and the prevailing political party in the US (all the way up to the president). * All the money in the world and free reign over what to do with it. * Unparalleled info and insights about the crypto markets. * A massive group of followers that found his antics particularly alluring and who were trusting him with their money more and more everyday. * A team of geniuses who were absolutes alphas from quantitative trading, won math olympiads and were constantly on drugs to enhance their cognition 1,000% (ok, this one's sarcasm) And he still managed to f*ck it up. I don't think he's capable of pulling off a Hillblom, tbh.

jongjong 4y ago
They are either industry saboteurs planted by big banking interests or they are complete imbeciles. Same can be said about people who gave them money. It's just retarded. The whole business went completely against the core purpose of cryptocurrency. Anyone who invested in him or had their money sitting on his exchange (or any bankrupt exchange) deserved to lose it. It's scary to think what damage large amounts of capital could do in the hands of such idiots; society is better off now.
- ftxbagholder123 4y ago
  I ended up losing a significant amount of money on the FTX debacle, and I want to demonstrate that even risk-aware people who tried to act relatively prudently can still end up losing money. I also want to argue that while most parties involved (myself included) made wrong decisions one way or the other throughout this -- and as a result are greatly suffering from the consequences -- that we should focus less on blaming the victims, and more on prosecuting the actual villains, while figuring out a clever way of preventing such large-scale fraud from happening again. Here is my story: - I put $50k into FTX last year. The reason for putting the money into FTX was because it was the only large-scale platform that allowed me to trade the specific token that I wanted to trade. - My investment proved to be more successful than I had anticipated, and I turned the initial investment into $600k by the end of last year. - By the spring of this year, I had sold my entire position and was now sitting with $400k USD on FTX (as I didn't sell everything at the top). - At that time, I attempted to withdraw the entire amount into my bank account, but immediately ran into issues with my bank. - For background, I'm a dual citizen, originally from South America but now living in the US. As you may be aware, US citizens were not allowed to use FTX.com; hence I used my South American citizenship to get verified by FTX, with the condition that I could only withdraw to a South American bank in my name. - I spent about 10-20 hours this spring attempting to make the withdrawal, which included dozens of phone calls and emails with my bank as well as the FTX support team, in order to execute the transaction. But the process turned out to be more complicated than I had expected. - Full details are not necessary here as I wish to somewhat protect my identity, but it became clear to me that this process would be very difficult to complete unless I was physically present at the bank in South America. - While I considered that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not risk-free, I deemed the risk relatively low. A part of that judgement was the fact that FTX was an exchange, and not a bank nor a prop-trading house, and thus I viewed the risk of a run on the bank scenario, or FTX speculating away my money in trading, as low. - What instead worried me was that FTX could get hacked, or that the founders could take my money and run, but given the high-profile nature of the company and its founders, I made the call that keeping the money on FTX for a few more months was not an overwhelming risk factor. - I also considered converting my money into BTC and transferring them to cold storage, but ended up not doing that as I worried about a crypto meltdown, and I reasoned that my money was safer sitting in USD at FTX (despite the aforementioned risks). I further reasoned, that given that the amount was already quite large, that it would be even harder to explain to a local bank where the money had come from once it had gone off an exchange and then come back on again. - For all of these reasons, I decided to wait, and was planning to do the transfer in less than 2 months from today, once back in South America. We obviously know what happened next, and we know that pretty much any other solution would have been better for me. But with the information available to me at the time, it wasn't obvious that what happened would happen. I believed I had reasoned appropriately about the risks and made the correct decisions at the time when I made them, with the information available at the time. My point is that we don't know the stories behind why so many people kept their money on FTX. Perhaps some were more reckless than others, and perhaps someone reading this thinks that I was reckless too. But even so, in my view, none of us "deserved" to have this happen to us. So instead of vilifying the victims, the focus should be on holding the perpetrators responsible, while thinking of a better way forward so that this doesn't happen again. Thanks for reading.
  - swalsh 4y ago
    Too late now, but another option might have been converting to USDC and self custody, and or moving to coinbase to withdraw.
    - ftxbagholder123 4y ago
      Thank you, I responded to a sibling comment that offered a similar suggestion -- I appreciate any input from you if you are able to opine.
      - mattdesl 4y ago
        To expand on parent, you may wish to read a little more about USDC, Uniswap and non custodial wallets (also known as self custody). Uniswap would allow you to trade any token that follows the ERC20 interface (not all of them do, but many). USDC would allow you to mitigate day to day price volatility. Non custodial wallet would mean the burden lies on you to secure the funds, but a CEX getting hacked or investing away your deposits is not possible. Self custody also means you could move some to another CEX in US to attempt withdrawal. Also should note there are different and additional risks with this approach: you might lose your keys, get phished/hacked, or use the blockchain incorrectly, or USDC/Uniswap contracts could fail, etc. Very sorry to hear about your situation.
        swalsh 4y ago
        Every approach has risks, and the right approach depends on the person. I'd never reccomend self custody for my mother (actually I'd never reccomend crypto for my mother) but if you have the technical skills and are personally responsible self custody might be safer than a cex. It also let's you take advantage of defi, which has a whole other set of risks and benefits.
        ftxbagholder123 4y ago
        Thank you! I'm not very familiar with USDC, though I am familiar with Dai and the MakerDAO ecosystem, and it looks like USDC serves a similar purpose, even though the design between the two looks different (one is centralized, one is not). Perhaps those two assets offer similar order of magnitude tradeoffs in terms of tail risk. In retrospect, putting the money in USDC (or Dai) or similar would have been a good course of action. I realize this wasn't evident from my initial post, but I actually go back many years with crypto and have run both airgapped computers at home as well as used Trezors without mistake (including using Uniswap), so I'm less worried about losing my keys or committing other such user errors. Ironically, while I used to worry more about using CEX's (thinking they could hacked, or the founders could run away with the money), over time I gravitated towards worrying more about actually getting my crypto money back into the banking system, without running afoul of AML / KYC hurdles, and I thought CEX's would be the less risky option in this regard. And in this case specifically, once the money on FTX became sizable, I became even more paranoid about this, and I guess I got set in my own thinking of not wanting the money to leave the exchange for fear of not being able to transfer it back into the banking system. In retrospect, it's funny (and obviously sad at the same time) how I overly worried about one thing, while completely missing out on what the real risk was. You all have been extremely helpful, so I thank you very much (and not least for allowing me to put some of my thoughts in writing and reasoning with you about it). We live and learn -- now onto figuring out how to make up for the money lost!
narrator 4y ago
Ramesh ("sunny") at Theranos got $40 million bucks when he cashed out after a brief period of working at a dot com startup and he blew most of it on his divorce and Theranos. On the upside, he got to date 19 year old Holmes. People are alleging that SBF being romantic partners with Alameda's chief trader Elisson was also a bad idea for similar reasons. Btw, does anyone know where the heck Elisson went? I haven't seen any articles specifying her current whereabouts.
- goolz 4y ago
  I have heard unsubstantiated rumor that she may be trying to make it to Dubai, take that with a dash of salt.
- dibt 4y ago
  I heard she went to hong kong shortly after the collapse started. She then went to Dubai to avoid extradition. I don’t have a source. I heard it in an interview with someone following the case.
oldgradstudent 4y ago
> * Unparalleled info and insights about the crypto markets. Since both his hedge fund and exchange lost billions, I doubt it. Except for going long in a bull market, was he ever successful in anything? > * A team of geniuses who were absolutes alphas from quantitative trading, won math olympiads and were constantly on drugs to enhance their cognition 1,000% (Ok, this one's sarcasm) Again, they've lost massive amounts of money trading. If your strategy makes a lot of money for years, but then loses more than anything you've ever earned, it's a crappy strategy.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  >ok, this one's sarcasm
  - oldgradstudent 4y ago
    Hmm, I thought only the part about the drugs was sarcasm.
- JamesianP 4y ago
  > If your strategy makes a lot of money for years, but then loses more than anything you've ever earned, it's a crappy strategy. Depends who's money you're playing with. If you profit on the way up and only your customers lose on the way down. Then high-risk strategies are (unfortunately) always better. My trading strategy has never made me billions nor lost billions. Yet I kinda feel like there's a solid possibility many of these fools will end up waaay better off than me. Assuming they can stay out of jail.
  - tartoran 4y ago
    Some of these fools stash the wealth on the side for when they get out of jail. During their sentence they take classes, meditate and self actualize or possibly write a book about some life lesson they just learned in prison. White collar crime is quite lenient in punishments, jail may even be a good experience for some
erosenbe0 4y ago
MIT grads need to stay in their lane. This kind of incompetent deceit at the highest levels of power and influence is supposed to only be possible with a degree from or Harvard and Yale. edit: what I mean, trollishly, is that I expected more conscientiousness from a room of MIT quant types, even if business process and diligence was not in their wheelhouse.
manholio 4y ago
> And he still managed to f*ck it up. Plenty of people fuck up in similar or even better circumstances. What amazes here is the sheer magnitude and low intellect. They did no accounting. They bought property in their own names out of company (customer) assets. He was still "trying to raise money" as of yesterday, in full denail. This is not an excessively sophisticated criminal mind, he doesn't seem to understand why people would take issue with his actions.

ekianjo 4y ago

giving so much money to democrats surely deserves a presidential pardon

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
To paraphrase SBF paraphrasing someone else, don't throw (Roger) stones in a glass house.