15 ms·

While crypto bro scammed clients, reporters scammed readers

330 points by thm 4y ago

throw_m239339 4y ago
And when FTX folded, the same press was still writing puff pieces about SBF trying to make excuses for his behavior, painting that "genius" as just an incompetent but well intentioned man when he was always a crook running a Ponzi scheme and selling securities illegally, because that press could not admit their own responsibility in building a false profile of SBF thus their own utter corruption and lack of critical thinking or just doing their job, investigate and search for the truth...
rini17 4y ago
The question is, who is going to pay for critical business reporting? The readers - wannabe CEOs - won't, and the businesses in question won't buy advertising either.
- lupire 4y ago
  WSJ and FT readers will, because good information is profitable.
  - eduction 4y ago
    The WSJ wrote one of the listed puff pieces. In fact, it was written by their global tech editor (a Q&A without much pushback on the optimistic claims SBF was making). Perhaps the most egregious examples was from NYT, which also charges for its content and is highly profitable.
  - gruez 4y ago
    Ironically the initial story was broken by coindesk, not WSJ, FT, or Bloomberg.
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
      Coindesk owned by DCG which also owns Genesis. Adversarial reporting more like
  - amusedcyclist 4y ago
    WSJ is an absolute rag. FT is very good and worth the money
    - throwaway5874 4y ago
      Never read anything paper which publishes opinion pieces. They are taken as normal news by some people and quoted by some as real news.
  - 323 4y ago
    If you are into profitable information you buy a Bloomberg Terminal and also subscribe to Reuters news. Finance types don't read WSJ/FT/Economist, this is the "popular" financial press.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      Bloomberg will happily spread lies when it suits them. They haven't retracted the fake Supermicro story yet.
      - kaashif 4y ago
        What was the deal with that, anyway? Like what actually happened there? The whole thing seems bizarre.
        kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        Basically a hypothetical scenario was pitched to a clueless reporter who embroidered it into a phony story.
zetazzed 4y ago
These are all critiques of reporting on a quirky celebrity CEO. Serious question - was there a lot of coverage that said something like “FTX is safe” or “FTX is a good place to park your money”? I agree that there is a long tradition of uncritical puff pieces in CEOs. But this seems like a different position from “<insert your hated publication here> misled sheep to the crypto slaughter.”
- cma 4y ago
  The journalist/author Sequoia hired wrote: > Something of the sort must happen eventually, as the current system, with its layers upon layers of intermediaries, is antiquated and prone to crashing—the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the latest in a long line of failures that occurred because banks didn’t actually know what was on their balance sheets. Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.
  - eduction 4y ago
    Has anyone archived a copy of this somewhere online? And who wrote this?
    - notahacker 4y ago
      The internet never forgets https://archive.ph/GQkCp https://archive.ph/GQkCp (It's very long, but it's one of the funniest things you'll read all year)
      - thombat 4y ago
nailer 4y ago
- anonymousab 4y ago
  > He was committed to a virtual signalling movement He more or less admitted that that was all bullshitting for PR purposes.
  - voldacar 4y ago
    Where did he admit this
    - dahdum 4y ago
      In the Vox interview. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-frie... The polycule/testosterone stuff is just speculation. It’s known a number of stimulants were used by him and his top people, unknown if they were abusing them.
      - uxp100 4y ago
        I think this take is a misunderstanding of the conversation. What they were discussing was the “Phillip Morris” question that he was asked earlier this year. Like if it’s so cheap to save peoples lives in poor areas with endemic malaria (which has some issues but I think most likely is close to true, donating to the AMF is probably one of the least weird and most likely to hold up EA ideas, better than all x-risk stuff) then why not kill 100 westerners (with tobacco, or whatever) to save 10,000 people elsewhere? And in interviews he was like, well you can’t do that heh heh heh, but uh, if he was raised a utilitarian, uh, well, why not? You’ve got some additional framework? And later interview was him saying, no, not actually, kill the westerners. Which is a take you could hear from utilitarians, an-prims, and the tiny but not non-existent eco-fascists. It’s definitely one of those I am enlightened/logically superior takes that often reveals more about the person saying it than they think.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> he received little scrutiny in the media. On the contrary, he was celebrated. It's not just this issue that the media plays follow the narrative. Not only that, they're all in on the ruse. That is, none are willing to call out the others for constantly half-assing it. It might not be a corporate monopoly, but it's a monopoly of the mind.
nathias 4y ago
the CEO of FTX stole his customers funds, nothing to do with crypto, nothing to do with reporters
- code_runner 4y ago
  The most reputable spokesman the crypto space has managed to cough up was a fraud and a thief. Maybe has something to say about crypto.
  - nathias 4y ago
    how is he most reputable? because he paid a lot for ads?
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      I would say because of the dozens of articles with "journalists" waxing poetically about his reputation as a big-thinking successfully-entrepreneurial self-made financial-wizard philanthropist. A regular Jeffrey Epstein.
    - code_runner 4y ago
      Is there someone else you think fits better? Anyone else in Washington talking about regulation with politicians?
- throw_m239339 4y ago
  Reporters helped SBF build a credible profile in order for him to steal money, everything to do with reporters writing glowing reviews of SBF and his fraudulent business in exchange for kickbacks of all sorts, including direct grands to several news outlets, which makes reporters corrupt.
derbOac 4y ago
This makes a critical point, one that needs to be taken to heart societally at large, but I feels like it undercuts itself by burying its main arguments. The problem isn't just crypto, or business, but rather something about modern society at large -- academics, politics, the workplace, and so forth and so on, celebrity or not. There's a sort of naive head in the sand acceptance or embracing of hype that pervades everything, without enough critical caution or skepticism. SBF/FTX is a good example but by framing the article so strongly around it the broader message is diminished somewhat.
- jl6 4y ago
  Same vibe in medicine. Doctors and medical researchers carry a great weight of authority. Some medical treatments can be mainstream for years, before research finally self-corrects. Lobotomy, opioids, and more. “It’s a perfectly safe and normal procedure”.
  - itronitron 4y ago
    Regarding opioids, I recall that in the mid `90's when I listened to about 4 hours of NPR during work every day the host (Dianne Ream?) had reps from Purdue Pharma (or one of the other opioid purveyors) in which the pharma reps were basically saying that doctors weren't prescribing enough pain medication for their patients. I recall the host really challenging them on each of the points they were trying to make, which was out of character for her and stuck in my mind. Point being, I expect that at least some of the guests are arranged without much input from the hosts. There must be heavy politicking involved to get bandwidth in mass media, and the people actually doing the work (running interviews or writing articles) can only push back to the degree that they have some degree of control over the network or channel.
    - hotpotamus 4y ago
      If you want a striking example of this, look at the interview Ben Shapiro gave to the BBC a few years back. Whatever you think of Shapiro, he has a masterful understanding of how American media works (I believe his Daily Wire is among the top shared sites on Facebook for instance), but he is clearly off-balance in a British interview. The interviewer repeatedly asks questions and doesn't allow Shapiro to dodge them which eventually results in Shapiro becoming too agitated to finish. It was really illuminating on a few levels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E
ChadNauseam 4y ago
This is a bit of a tangent (and a response to only the title, which I admit is bad form) but what’s with the prevalence of adding “bro” at the end of random words? Can a woman be a crypto bro or a tech bro? It reminds me of when everyone was talking about “brogrammers” a while ago, and it had a pretty clear connotation of “programmer who loves keg stands, hitting the gym, and making misogynistic comments”. I think “crypto bro” and “tech bro” don’t have that connotation at all, or at least that’s never how I perceived SBF.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  I hope that one day we will live in a world where half of all crypto scammers are female. But today most of them are young men
  - LexGray 4y ago
    Spend some time on dating apps. I would estimate in a call center environment there is a high number of female employees running the those scams off a script. All sorts touting their investment opportunities to anybody desperate enough to listen.
- wmf 4y ago
  The "crypto bro" stereotype came from real people who combined a love of crypto with bro behaviors like aggressive rhetoric, shameless self-promotion, and flaunting their wealth (e.g. talking about lambos all the time).
  - onetimeusename 4y ago
    Women do that stuff too. I have seen women promote crypto scams as well. It is subtly misandrist to use these terms I think. But no one will stop using it because that is part of the society wide perception of men being viewed as less moral than women.
    - zztop44 4y ago
      So maybe women can be bros too? Just like men can be karens and huns. But just as complaining in an of itself doesn’t make you a Karen, shilling a scam coin in and of itself doesn’t make you a crypto bro.
onetimeusename 4y ago
I am just surprised no one questioned the partnership between Alameda and FTX. The equivalent would be something like if a large HFT firm like Citadel, Virtu, or one of the others had the same ownership with a brokerage like Robinhood or Charles Schwab or even formed a partnership. I think the financial media would be questioning the incentives. I read in the WSJ today that Alameda had indeed done price arbitrage trades on the FTX exchange. The closeness of these two firms should have raised questions I think. I really don't know a lot about it because I was never involved in either FTX or Binance. But I think most financial journalists are trained to spot disincentives and corruption that come with marrying trading firms and exchanges. So I am surprised that did not happen leaving aside other questionable items.
- itronitron 4y ago
  >> The equivalent would be something like if a large HFT firm like Citadel, Virtu, or one of the others had the same ownership with a brokerage like Robinhood... Yeah.
- lumb63 4y ago
  Doesn’t Robinhood sell order flow to Citadel?
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    Not just Robinhood selling order flow. Robinhood was just the first to say "we can make enough money with order flow, so let's cancel trading commissions". Other brokers really hated that.
  - onetimeusename 4y ago
    yes. It was widely reported on and criticized though and I believe the SEC decided not to ban it. This article[1] has some details but it seems like the SEC may not be able to. However, none other than Gary Gensler criticized the practice. That's my point is how different the reporting was on RH versus FTX over a similar practice. edit: FWIW this is not even the biggest issue. Alameda making bets with FTX customer money seems to be the biggest problem. I am bringing this up because closeness between a trading firm and an exchange might have been an early clue to financial journalists that the relationship should be scrutinized. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/22/robinhood-jumps-after-report-that-sec-will-not-ban-payment-for-order-flow.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/22/robinhood-jumps-after-report...
autotune 4y ago
It's easy to look back and say "it should have been obvious," but besides those who had general disdain for crypto like Buffett aside, were there any MSM outlets that actually saw through SBF for what he was at the onset and wrote an actual article about it before this all occurred? Because I can't seem to find any, and this just makes me want to avoid reading the news altogether at this point.
- JeremyNT 4y ago
  I read this article and I think this is the entire point. You can't trust corporate media's coverage of would-be wunderkind "entrepreneurs." Between access journalism, hero worship, a narrative formula that's known to sell, and laziness, journalists are all too glad to not only look the other way, but actively curate a reality distortion field on behalf of bad actors. It's not just that they didn't see through SBF, it's that it never would occur to them to even look. That's simply not what they are optimised to do when they cover this class of person.
  - autotune 4y ago
    Yeah, the best any of them can say at this point is "we ignored publishing anything on him," and that was more likely due to sheer luck than responsible journalism.
  - koofdoof 4y ago
    The book "Trust me I'm lying" goes into detail about this phenomenon. It is the interest of the media to be tricked, the authors get big stories and clicks and can then turn around and play dumb if things blow up. No one remembers the individual journalist who wrote the puff pieces, so the negative effects of eroding trust fall to a tragedy of the commons situation.
- Lerc 4y ago
  It's not clear to me that there was anything to 'see though'. This makes him seem like a Machiavellian genius putting up a front. It seems entirely possible that he is exactly what he seems. Sincere but lacking the skill and wisdom to run a large financial organization. While ignorance of the law cannot be used as a defense for breaking it, an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues. You can easily imagine naive hands breaking multiple laws in their ignorance. It is also possible that they did things knowingly illegal only after their lack of experience had put them into a situation where they were trying to stabilize a teetering house of cards. Some things are hard, very hard. In some domains, being clever without being an expert doesn't work. It is also worth mentioning that the media sources that said how great things were going are also the same ones that are telling us how badly it ended up. I say 'possible' and 'imagine' above because we can't really get a good picture of what happened from reading a few articles. There will be a few good well researched summaries in a few years time. Hardly anyone will be interested by then; besides, the truth will be boringly complicated and nuanced.
Barrin92 4y ago
I'm less surprised by the media coverage of the entire fiasco because when on earth have they ever not written sympathetically about your average millenial do-gooder cause driven entrepreneur, what I ask myself is, how have the investors not seen this coming, who are after all the people who open their own wallets for this and are professionals. And not just this case but any of the recent crypto-company explosions that lost customer funds to the tunes of hundreds of millions. There are experienced funders behind this who tout themselves on being able to differentiate BS from reality. People love to drag the NYT but I don't really expect them to have really deep insight into these firms, on the other hand people are way too uncritical of the whole Sequoia/al6z/etc alternate media machinery around this.
- notahacker 4y ago
  And let's be honest, the media are mainly writing the articles because the top tier investment professionals have spent millions of dollars giving the Bahamas crypto guy their seal of approval. They're not giving the same amount of positive spin to any old crypto guy who says he wants to save the world.
1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago
"Doug Henwood, host of KPFA's Behind the News and the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom, told FAIR: The business press is rarely skeptical about the speculative heroes of the moment. There are exceptions; if you read carefully, you can get a good critique. But the general culture is boosterish. Just a few months ago, SBF was a genius. Elon Musk, too, though his antics at Twitter are making that cult harder to sustain. Before that it was Elizabeth Holmes and her magical blood-testing machine. Go back a couple of decades and it was Ken Lay and Enron (celebrated by none other than [New York Times columnist] Paul Krugman, who'd also been paid a consulting fee by the company). There are a lot of reasons for this. Many business journalists identify with the titans they cover-some even aspire to join them, as did former New York Times reporter Steven Rattner, who became an investment banker." Another example from the so-called "dot-com boom" who went to work at Prudential and later Merrill Lynch.1 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/business/yourmoney/18shelf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/business/yourmoney/18shel... After he was banned from working on Wall Street for life he returned to journalism and co-founded "businessinsider.com".
friend_and_foe 4y ago
This is just excuse making for journalists. They promoted him because they're as unscrupulous and devoid of ethics as he is, by and large. He didn't win them over with some con man charm, he won them over with money, or the allure of money, or even probably some politicking.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
> How could no one have seen this coming? I always hear this, after one of these Jurassic-scale meltdowns. The hard truth is, is that lots of people saw it coming, but everyone was making money, and they were all hoping that they'd "get theirs," before things went pear-shaped. Greed does strange things to the human mind... "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair "There’s no free lunch in this world unless you’re willing to run around to different dumpsters to get it." -Stay SaaSy
- pixl97 4y ago
  I've been one saying this to the coin people for years.... "You think crypto is a new design that somehow overcomes scammers while completely ignoring that every market that has ever existed has had scammers and has had to develop either impromptu or formal regulations to prevent said scammers from destroying the market. Your leaders are frauds. Your day of reckoning is coming." That day is finally here.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  Bears make money, bulls make money, pigs get slaughtered.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  Yep, this has been my observation too with friends investing in crypto (fortunately they at least understand the golden rule of not investing more than they can afford to lose). They ask me about some new coin that offers some absurd gains and after looking through it, it becomes obvious that it's super sketchy and potentially a Ponzi scheme, I explain that to them and they proceed to go for it anyway because they think they'll be able to pull out before it goes bust. It was the same about SBF. I'm generally a fan of crypto (specifically with projects that have genuine utility though), but it was always obvious to me that he was probably doing something like this simply from all the hero worship surrounding him. Part of it is probably that successful CEOs of billion dollar companies don't tend to have such a goody-two-shoes type of reputation. Every big tech leader has had a pretty bad reputation while they've been in that position.
crazygringo 4y ago
No, reporters didn't "scam" readers. I'm sick of people trying to twist words to mean things they don't. Scamming someone requires obtaining something like money in the process (fraudulently). SBF ran a scam because he took people's money and used it fraudulently. Reporters just ran puff pieces. But they didn't defraud anybody. The reporters weren't investors in Alameda. They didn't obtain anything except the normal salary they get for any story. So no, reporters did NOT "scam" readers. They just engaged in run-of-the-mill journalism. You can critique that all you want, but it still falls under the category of "journalism", NOT the category of "scam".
- conanbatt 4y ago
  Newspapers sell legitimacy and scammers can buy it. SBX is a pretty significant example of the eroding value and public perception of media
- rightrightnot 4y ago
  Except we don't know how many of them got any kickbacks, and we probably never will. We don't live in moral utopia.
  - dymk 4y ago
    What’s your evidence that any of them received kickbacks? Why’s your default assumption guilty until proven innocent?
    - wfme 4y ago
      This is not a default assumption. He made significant grants to Vox [0], Intercept [1], ProPublica [2], and others. [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/how-sbf-sweet-talked-the-media.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/how-sbf-sweet-talked... [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1594386958314344454 https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/159438695831434... [2] https://www.propublica.org/atpropublica/bankman-fried-family-donates-5-million-to-propublica https://www.propublica.org/atpropublica/bankman-fried-family...
Jerry2 4y ago
New York Times is _still_ providing SBF cover by allowing him to speak at DealBook Summit later this month [1]. He's joined by such luminaries as Zuckerberg, Affleck, Fink, Zelensky etc. They invited him to speak long before the FTX imploded and now call SBF "Founder, FTX" instead of "CEO, FTX". The conference is by invite-only and costs $2,499 per person. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#sessions https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#sessions
- UberFly 4y ago
  New York Times / David Yaffe-Bellany are looking pretty bad in this. Bordering on straight-up propagandists. Yaffe-Bellany should have his kick-back accounts looked over a bit.
  - matdehaast 4y ago
    You need to read The Gray Lady Winked. This isn’t something new for the NYT. This is par the course for the last hundred years
    - Jerry2 4y ago
      >The Gray Lady Winked Thank you. I've added it to my reading list.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  > New York Times is _still_ providing SBF cover by allowing him to speak at DealBook Summit later this month [1] NYT is providing the US government with an oportunity to arrest SBF. If the guy is dumb enough to turn up, he wont get more than a few feet from his gulfstream before he is in irons.
  - Jerry2 4y ago
    The talk will be virtual... he'll ZOOM/Skype it in.
nitwit005 4y ago
Go find some long article from a major newspaper on a current CEO. It's likely to be positive, glowingly positive. The industry doesn't matter. The CEOs won't provide an interview unless they feel the coverage will be positive, and people tend to want to read about rising successes, so negative articles face an uphill battle.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  This, but there are more factors at play. Successful CEOs are often well spoken, have had plenty of press training, and usually have all the power in the conversation. Getting answers questioned is a privilege, not a right, unless you work in certain areas of law enforcement. When bad things are on the horizon, CEOs have a little story ready to go, together with the surprise questions that may come up during the interview, or they don't come to interviews at all. At a certain point, people collect enough money that press coverage is no longer much of a concern for them. Jobs, Musk, and other super rich don't need the validation and even manage to build a cult centered around their personality. As long as they say the right things to their key shareholders and don't start spouting unacceptable language that their core fan base disagrees with, it doesn't really matter if they come to interviews or not. Private interviews are not a level playing field. Press conferences come closer, because more reporters means having to deal with more and less obvious questions. It's not hard to be impressed by a young crypto billionaire if you have little to no knowledge about the platform and if their company keeps all the business details behind closed doors; for years, these people were actually running a moderately stable cryptocurrency business. Reporters couldn't know about how deep the company had sunk when the debts started to come in and a bunch of young people in bean bags managing billions of dollars for millions of people are doing something right; all they need to do is make the reporters comfortable and lie about or avoid the upcoming collapse and journalists are bound to write something positive about you.
Balgair 4y ago
Everytime I read about the antics here I'm just reminded of Mark Twain's Roughin It. His adventures as a 'journalist' in Virginia City, NV during the silver rush are just too similar to everything going on right now that it beggars belief. He's not an unknown or unpopular author, though the work is a bit dusty. If you're interested in the relevant parts, read from about here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3177/3177-h/3177-h.htm#linkch44 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3177/3177-h/3177-h.htm#linkc...
- pschuegr 4y ago
  Great reference, thanks for the specific link!
PaywallBuster 4y ago
Regarding FTX: How come VC and the Canada Teachers Pension are doing a series B that raised 420M without any due diligence? Why didn't we hear about this before?
Animats 4y ago
The crypto crowd has been able to promote a culture in which there is no supporting data for financial hype, and that's considered OK. Crypto is different, you see. If crypto exchanges had to file an S-1 and quarterly reports with the SEC, people would be looking at the financials and saying "WTF?". With no audited numbers, there's not much for serious reporters to look at. But they have to write something. Hence the softball articles. Now, there are the old-line balance sheet types who say publicly that crypto is bullshit across the board. Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, that crowd. People who read Graham and Dodd, and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The crypto community argues that's outdated thinking. Go watch "Don't be like Larry" [1] again. That was an FTX commercial run at the Super Bowl. The reason the hype worked is the run-up of Bitcoin from sub-penny values to $60,000. World's best performing asset for a few years. It is hard to argue against success. Everything else rides on the coattails of Bitcoin. FTX has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies, really. It's a bucket shop out of the 1920s, a fake broker that pretends to do trades but is just updating their own fake database and issuing fake stocks for fake companies. The same stunts could have been, and have been, pulled with gold mining stocks. FTX benefited from the "we don't need regulation because this is innovation" mindset. That's how they did it. Big questions for journalists today: - Where is Binance, the company, anyway, what assets do they really have, and who controls them? - What assets are really behind USDT?
- edanm 4y ago
  You never linked to it, so here is the video (your [1]): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH5-rSxilxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH5-rSxilxo And I have to say, I'd never watched it before, and it is hilarious and awesome. Especially since I'm a big Larry David fan. So thanks for that! It's definitely funnier seeing it with the last few weeks' context.
  - pnt12 4y ago
    There was an interesting discussion about this clip when the ad landed. The persona that Larry David presents in his show is someone who is selfish and doesn't care about fads and what others think. More often than not, this let's him see past the bullshit, although his selfishness and stubbornness end up being his downfall. In the ad, he is presented as a dumb dumb who is missing out on the cool crypto stuff - with a kind of uncanny valley persona who shares some traits but misses other. Well, in good irony, it turns out that FTX was good thing to miss, so I guess the original Larry's persona wins!
shapefrog 4y ago
So the "real problem" here is that the WSJ wrote "FTX is was today valued at 32bn after raising money from Sequoia Capital, NEA, IVP, Iconiq Capital, Third Point Ventures, Tiger Global, Altimeter ..." Filthy scamming reporters
m000 4y ago
Aren't reporters scamming us most of the time? "Reporting" for anything that involves a monetary transaction has turned into an advertorial, or at best a superficial enumeration of promised features. Why are we adding "site:reddit.com" to our search queries?
JaDogg 4y ago
It is scams all the way down. At this point I'm convinced everything is a scam.
SilverBirch 4y ago
This is just a stupid and absurd article. Yes, if you want to you can go around and cherry pick articles and opinion pieces that are flattering to crypto and point out they turned out to be wrong in retrospect, but that's what a free press is. You are going to have people with different opinions saying different things, and sooner of later some of them will be wrong, and some will be right and we'll all be better off for having heard the arguments. But to try and pretend there hasn't been media critical of crypto is just deliberately ignoring the facts. How could we have seen this coming? Maybe listen to the Bloomberg podcast where SBF genuinely just outright states they're creating ponzi schemes back in April. But what did you want? Bloomberg to storm the offices of FTX and drag SBF off in cuffs? The core of what happened at FTX was that SBF ran an unregulated exchange- that's a matter for the government and regulators. Not the press. Ocassionally talented investigative reporters uncover a fraud- and often it'll be the most impressive story of their lifetimes. But it's not a reasonable standard to blame them for every one that blows up before they catch it.
- tim333 4y ago
  It touches on a general phenomena in asset booms though, whether housing, crypto, stocks or whatever. The general pattern is: Asset goes up in a normal manner Agents, exchanges etc make money They then buy ads in media and journalists write "Asset is hot now" articles Public reads them piles in, everything shoots up And then eventually once they've run out of new buyers it all crashes It's worth bearing in mind as an investor. After the crash you'll get "It's all over for <asset>" articles followed by no articles when everyone is fed up which is probably the time to buy.
- isitmadeofglass 4y ago
  > You are going to have people with different opinions saying different things, and sooner of later some of them will be wrong That’s a rather dismissive attitude towards the craft of journalism. Imagine the same applies to medicine. Someone pays a doctor to let your mother die and you’d be saying “well sometimes patients die, we can’t go cherry-picking those cases and pretend it matters” The major problem around crypto reporting wasn’t that some reporters got it wrong. It’s that some reporters got major funding from crypto bros and then happened to write extremely naive and flattering articles about crypto bringing in gullible masses who now lost their money when the FTX Ponzi went bust. It’s not an attack on the free press to point out that writing sugarcoated lies about financial investments because you stand to earn is a scam.

330 points by thm 4y ago

And when FTX folded, the same press was still writing puff pieces about SBF trying to make excuses for his behavior, painting that "genius" as just an incompetent but well intentioned man when he was always a crook running a Ponzi scheme and selling securities illegally, because that press could not admit their own responsibility in building a false profile of SBF thus their own utter corruption and lack of critical thinking or just doing their job, investigate and search for the truth...

rini17 4y ago

The question is, who is going to pay for critical business reporting? The readers - wannabe CEOs - won't, and the businesses in question won't buy advertising either.

lupire 4y ago
WSJ and FT readers will, because good information is profitable.
- eduction 4y ago
  The WSJ wrote one of the listed puff pieces. In fact, it was written by their global tech editor (a Q&A without much pushback on the optimistic claims SBF was making). Perhaps the most egregious examples was from NYT, which also charges for its content and is highly profitable.
- gruez 4y ago
  Ironically the initial story was broken by coindesk, not WSJ, FT, or Bloomberg.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    Coindesk owned by DCG which also owns Genesis. Adversarial reporting more like
- amusedcyclist 4y ago
  WSJ is an absolute rag. FT is very good and worth the money
  - throwaway5874 4y ago
    Never read anything paper which publishes opinion pieces. They are taken as normal news by some people and quoted by some as real news.
- 323 4y ago
  If you are into profitable information you buy a Bloomberg Terminal and also subscribe to Reuters news. Finance types don't read WSJ/FT/Economist, this is the "popular" financial press.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Bloomberg will happily spread lies when it suits them. They haven't retracted the fake Supermicro story yet.
    - kaashif 4y ago
      What was the deal with that, anyway? Like what actually happened there? The whole thing seems bizarre.
      - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
        Basically a hypothetical scenario was pitched to a clueless reporter who embroidered it into a phony story.

zetazzed 4y ago

These are all critiques of reporting on a quirky celebrity CEO. Serious question - was there a lot of coverage that said something like “FTX is safe” or “FTX is a good place to park your money”? I agree that there is a long tradition of uncritical puff pieces in CEOs. But this seems like a different position from “<insert your hated publication here> misled sheep to the crypto slaughter.”

cma 4y ago
The journalist/author Sequoia hired wrote: > Something of the sort must happen eventually, as the current system, with its layers upon layers of intermediaries, is antiquated and prone to crashing—the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the latest in a long line of failures that occurred because banks didn’t actually know what was on their balance sheets. Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.
- eduction 4y ago
  Has anyone archived a copy of this somewhere online? And who wrote this?
  - notahacker 4y ago
    The internet never forgets https://archive.ph/GQkCp https://archive.ph/GQkCp (It's very long, but it's one of the funniest things you'll read all year)
    - thombat 4y ago

nailer 4y ago

anonymousab 4y ago
> He was committed to a virtual signalling movement He more or less admitted that that was all bullshitting for PR purposes.
- voldacar 4y ago
  Where did he admit this
  - dahdum 4y ago
    In the Vox interview. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-frie... The polycule/testosterone stuff is just speculation. It’s known a number of stimulants were used by him and his top people, unknown if they were abusing them.
    - uxp100 4y ago
      I think this take is a misunderstanding of the conversation. What they were discussing was the “Phillip Morris” question that he was asked earlier this year. Like if it’s so cheap to save peoples lives in poor areas with endemic malaria (which has some issues but I think most likely is close to true, donating to the AMF is probably one of the least weird and most likely to hold up EA ideas, better than all x-risk stuff) then why not kill 100 westerners (with tobacco, or whatever) to save 10,000 people elsewhere? And in interviews he was like, well you can’t do that heh heh heh, but uh, if he was raised a utilitarian, uh, well, why not? You’ve got some additional framework? And later interview was him saying, no, not actually, kill the westerners. Which is a take you could hear from utilitarians, an-prims, and the tiny but not non-existent eco-fascists. It’s definitely one of those I am enlightened/logically superior takes that often reveals more about the person saying it than they think.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> he received little scrutiny in the media. On the contrary, he was celebrated. It's not just this issue that the media plays follow the narrative. Not only that, they're all in on the ruse. That is, none are willing to call out the others for constantly half-assing it. It might not be a corporate monopoly, but it's a monopoly of the mind.

nathias 4y ago

the CEO of FTX stole his customers funds, nothing to do with crypto, nothing to do with reporters

code_runner 4y ago
The most reputable spokesman the crypto space has managed to cough up was a fraud and a thief. Maybe has something to say about crypto.
- nathias 4y ago
  how is he most reputable? because he paid a lot for ads?
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    I would say because of the dozens of articles with "journalists" waxing poetically about his reputation as a big-thinking successfully-entrepreneurial self-made financial-wizard philanthropist. A regular Jeffrey Epstein.
  - code_runner 4y ago
    Is there someone else you think fits better? Anyone else in Washington talking about regulation with politicians?
throw_m239339 4y ago
Reporters helped SBF build a credible profile in order for him to steal money, everything to do with reporters writing glowing reviews of SBF and his fraudulent business in exchange for kickbacks of all sorts, including direct grands to several news outlets, which makes reporters corrupt.

derbOac 4y ago

This makes a critical point, one that needs to be taken to heart societally at large, but I feels like it undercuts itself by burying its main arguments. The problem isn't just crypto, or business, but rather something about modern society at large -- academics, politics, the workplace, and so forth and so on, celebrity or not. There's a sort of naive head in the sand acceptance or embracing of hype that pervades everything, without enough critical caution or skepticism. SBF/FTX is a good example but by framing the article so strongly around it the broader message is diminished somewhat.

jl6 4y ago
Same vibe in medicine. Doctors and medical researchers carry a great weight of authority. Some medical treatments can be mainstream for years, before research finally self-corrects. Lobotomy, opioids, and more. “It’s a perfectly safe and normal procedure”.
- itronitron 4y ago
  Regarding opioids, I recall that in the mid `90's when I listened to about 4 hours of NPR during work every day the host (Dianne Ream?) had reps from Purdue Pharma (or one of the other opioid purveyors) in which the pharma reps were basically saying that doctors weren't prescribing enough pain medication for their patients. I recall the host really challenging them on each of the points they were trying to make, which was out of character for her and stuck in my mind. Point being, I expect that at least some of the guests are arranged without much input from the hosts. There must be heavy politicking involved to get bandwidth in mass media, and the people actually doing the work (running interviews or writing articles) can only push back to the degree that they have some degree of control over the network or channel.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    If you want a striking example of this, look at the interview Ben Shapiro gave to the BBC a few years back. Whatever you think of Shapiro, he has a masterful understanding of how American media works (I believe his Daily Wire is among the top shared sites on Facebook for instance), but he is clearly off-balance in a British interview. The interviewer repeatedly asks questions and doesn't allow Shapiro to dodge them which eventually results in Shapiro becoming too agitated to finish. It was really illuminating on a few levels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VixqvOcK8E

ChadNauseam 4y ago

This is a bit of a tangent (and a response to only the title, which I admit is bad form) but what’s with the prevalence of adding “bro” at the end of random words? Can a woman be a crypto bro or a tech bro? It reminds me of when everyone was talking about “brogrammers” a while ago, and it had a pretty clear connotation of “programmer who loves keg stands, hitting the gym, and making misogynistic comments”. I think “crypto bro” and “tech bro” don’t have that connotation at all, or at least that’s never how I perceived SBF.

cuteboy19 4y ago
I hope that one day we will live in a world where half of all crypto scammers are female. But today most of them are young men
- LexGray 4y ago
  Spend some time on dating apps. I would estimate in a call center environment there is a high number of female employees running the those scams off a script. All sorts touting their investment opportunities to anybody desperate enough to listen.
wmf 4y ago
The "crypto bro" stereotype came from real people who combined a love of crypto with bro behaviors like aggressive rhetoric, shameless self-promotion, and flaunting their wealth (e.g. talking about lambos all the time).
- onetimeusename 4y ago
  Women do that stuff too. I have seen women promote crypto scams as well. It is subtly misandrist to use these terms I think. But no one will stop using it because that is part of the society wide perception of men being viewed as less moral than women.
  - zztop44 4y ago
    So maybe women can be bros too? Just like men can be karens and huns. But just as complaining in an of itself doesn’t make you a Karen, shilling a scam coin in and of itself doesn’t make you a crypto bro.

onetimeusename 4y ago

I am just surprised no one questioned the partnership between Alameda and FTX. The equivalent would be something like if a large HFT firm like Citadel, Virtu, or one of the others had the same ownership with a brokerage like Robinhood or Charles Schwab or even formed a partnership. I think the financial media would be questioning the incentives. I read in the WSJ today that Alameda had indeed done price arbitrage trades on the FTX exchange. The closeness of these two firms should have raised questions I think. I really don't know a lot about it because I was never involved in either FTX or Binance. But I think most financial journalists are trained to spot disincentives and corruption that come with marrying trading firms and exchanges. So I am surprised that did not happen leaving aside other questionable items.

itronitron 4y ago
>> The equivalent would be something like if a large HFT firm like Citadel, Virtu, or one of the others had the same ownership with a brokerage like Robinhood... Yeah.
lumb63 4y ago
Doesn’t Robinhood sell order flow to Citadel?
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  Not just Robinhood selling order flow. Robinhood was just the first to say "we can make enough money with order flow, so let's cancel trading commissions". Other brokers really hated that.
- onetimeusename 4y ago
  yes. It was widely reported on and criticized though and I believe the SEC decided not to ban it. This article[1] has some details but it seems like the SEC may not be able to. However, none other than Gary Gensler criticized the practice. That's my point is how different the reporting was on RH versus FTX over a similar practice. edit: FWIW this is not even the biggest issue. Alameda making bets with FTX customer money seems to be the biggest problem. I am bringing this up because closeness between a trading firm and an exchange might have been an early clue to financial journalists that the relationship should be scrutinized. [1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/22/robinhood-jumps-after-report-that-sec-will-not-ban-payment-for-order-flow.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/22/robinhood-jumps-after-report...

autotune 4y ago

It's easy to look back and say "it should have been obvious," but besides those who had general disdain for crypto like Buffett aside, were there any MSM outlets that actually saw through SBF for what he was at the onset and wrote an actual article about it before this all occurred? Because I can't seem to find any, and this just makes me want to avoid reading the news altogether at this point.

JeremyNT 4y ago
I read this article and I think this is the entire point. You can't trust corporate media's coverage of would-be wunderkind "entrepreneurs." Between access journalism, hero worship, a narrative formula that's known to sell, and laziness, journalists are all too glad to not only look the other way, but actively curate a reality distortion field on behalf of bad actors. It's not just that they didn't see through SBF, it's that it never would occur to them to even look. That's simply not what they are optimised to do when they cover this class of person.
- autotune 4y ago
  Yeah, the best any of them can say at this point is "we ignored publishing anything on him," and that was more likely due to sheer luck than responsible journalism.
- koofdoof 4y ago
  The book "Trust me I'm lying" goes into detail about this phenomenon. It is the interest of the media to be tricked, the authors get big stories and clicks and can then turn around and play dumb if things blow up. No one remembers the individual journalist who wrote the puff pieces, so the negative effects of eroding trust fall to a tragedy of the commons situation.
Lerc 4y ago
It's not clear to me that there was anything to 'see though'. This makes him seem like a Machiavellian genius putting up a front. It seems entirely possible that he is exactly what he seems. Sincere but lacking the skill and wisdom to run a large financial organization. While ignorance of the law cannot be used as a defense for breaking it, an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues. You can easily imagine naive hands breaking multiple laws in their ignorance. It is also possible that they did things knowingly illegal only after their lack of experience had put them into a situation where they were trying to stabilize a teetering house of cards. Some things are hard, very hard. In some domains, being clever without being an expert doesn't work. It is also worth mentioning that the media sources that said how great things were going are also the same ones that are telling us how badly it ended up. I say 'possible' and 'imagine' above because we can't really get a good picture of what happened from reading a few articles. There will be a few good well researched summaries in a few years time. Hardly anyone will be interested by then; besides, the truth will be boringly complicated and nuanced.

Barrin92 4y ago

I'm less surprised by the media coverage of the entire fiasco because when on earth have they ever not written sympathetically about your average millenial do-gooder cause driven entrepreneur, what I ask myself is, how have the investors not seen this coming, who are after all the people who open their own wallets for this and are professionals. And not just this case but any of the recent crypto-company explosions that lost customer funds to the tunes of hundreds of millions. There are experienced funders behind this who tout themselves on being able to differentiate BS from reality. People love to drag the NYT but I don't really expect them to have really deep insight into these firms, on the other hand people are way too uncritical of the whole Sequoia/al6z/etc alternate media machinery around this.

notahacker 4y ago
And let's be honest, the media are mainly writing the articles because the top tier investment professionals have spent millions of dollars giving the Bahamas crypto guy their seal of approval. They're not giving the same amount of positive spin to any old crypto guy who says he wants to save the world.

1vuio0pswjnm7 4y ago

"Doug Henwood, host of KPFA's Behind the News and the author of Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom, told FAIR: The business press is rarely skeptical about the speculative heroes of the moment. There are exceptions; if you read carefully, you can get a good critique. But the general culture is boosterish. Just a few months ago, SBF was a genius. Elon Musk, too, though his antics at Twitter are making that cult harder to sustain. Before that it was Elizabeth Holmes and her magical blood-testing machine. Go back a couple of decades and it was Ken Lay and Enron (celebrated by none other than [New York Times columnist] Paul Krugman, who'd also been paid a consulting fee by the company). There are a lot of reasons for this. Many business journalists identify with the titans they cover-some even aspire to join them, as did former New York Times reporter Steven Rattner, who became an investment banker." Another example from the so-called "dot-com boom" who went to work at Prudential and later Merrill Lynch.1 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/business/yourmoney/18shelf.html https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/business/yourmoney/18shel... After he was banned from working on Wall Street for life he returned to journalism and co-founded "businessinsider.com".

friend_and_foe 4y ago

This is just excuse making for journalists. They promoted him because they're as unscrupulous and devoid of ethics as he is, by and large. He didn't win them over with some con man charm, he won them over with money, or the allure of money, or even probably some politicking.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

> How could no one have seen this coming? I always hear this, after one of these Jurassic-scale meltdowns. The hard truth is, is that lots of people saw it coming, but everyone was making money, and they were all hoping that they'd "get theirs," before things went pear-shaped. Greed does strange things to the human mind... "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -Upton Sinclair "There’s no free lunch in this world unless you’re willing to run around to different dumpsters to get it." -Stay SaaSy

pixl97 4y ago
I've been one saying this to the coin people for years.... "You think crypto is a new design that somehow overcomes scammers while completely ignoring that every market that has ever existed has had scammers and has had to develop either impromptu or formal regulations to prevent said scammers from destroying the market. Your leaders are frauds. Your day of reckoning is coming." That day is finally here.
satvikpendem 4y ago
Bears make money, bulls make money, pigs get slaughtered.
dotnet00 4y ago
Yep, this has been my observation too with friends investing in crypto (fortunately they at least understand the golden rule of not investing more than they can afford to lose). They ask me about some new coin that offers some absurd gains and after looking through it, it becomes obvious that it's super sketchy and potentially a Ponzi scheme, I explain that to them and they proceed to go for it anyway because they think they'll be able to pull out before it goes bust. It was the same about SBF. I'm generally a fan of crypto (specifically with projects that have genuine utility though), but it was always obvious to me that he was probably doing something like this simply from all the hero worship surrounding him. Part of it is probably that successful CEOs of billion dollar companies don't tend to have such a goody-two-shoes type of reputation. Every big tech leader has had a pretty bad reputation while they've been in that position.

crazygringo 4y ago

No, reporters didn't "scam" readers. I'm sick of people trying to twist words to mean things they don't. Scamming someone requires obtaining something like money in the process (fraudulently). SBF ran a scam because he took people's money and used it fraudulently. Reporters just ran puff pieces. But they didn't defraud anybody. The reporters weren't investors in Alameda. They didn't obtain anything except the normal salary they get for any story. So no, reporters did NOT "scam" readers. They just engaged in run-of-the-mill journalism. You can critique that all you want, but it still falls under the category of "journalism", NOT the category of "scam".

conanbatt 4y ago
Newspapers sell legitimacy and scammers can buy it. SBX is a pretty significant example of the eroding value and public perception of media
rightrightnot 4y ago
Except we don't know how many of them got any kickbacks, and we probably never will. We don't live in moral utopia.
- dymk 4y ago
  What’s your evidence that any of them received kickbacks? Why’s your default assumption guilty until proven innocent?
  - wfme 4y ago
    This is not a default assumption. He made significant grants to Vox [0], Intercept [1], ProPublica [2], and others. [0] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/how-sbf-sweet-talked-the-media.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/11/how-sbf-sweet-talked... [1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1594386958314344454 https://mobile.twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/159438695831434... [2] https://www.propublica.org/atpropublica/bankman-fried-family-donates-5-million-to-propublica https://www.propublica.org/atpropublica/bankman-fried-family...

Jerry2 4y ago

New York Times is _still_ providing SBF cover by allowing him to speak at DealBook Summit later this month [1]. He's joined by such luminaries as Zuckerberg, Affleck, Fink, Zelensky etc. They invited him to speak long before the FTX imploded and now call SBF "Founder, FTX" instead of "CEO, FTX". The conference is by invite-only and costs $2,499 per person. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#sessions https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit#sessions

UberFly 4y ago
New York Times / David Yaffe-Bellany are looking pretty bad in this. Bordering on straight-up propagandists. Yaffe-Bellany should have his kick-back accounts looked over a bit.
- matdehaast 4y ago
  You need to read The Gray Lady Winked. This isn’t something new for the NYT. This is par the course for the last hundred years
  - Jerry2 4y ago
    >The Gray Lady Winked Thank you. I've added it to my reading list.
shapefrog 4y ago
> New York Times is _still_ providing SBF cover by allowing him to speak at DealBook Summit later this month [1] NYT is providing the US government with an oportunity to arrest SBF. If the guy is dumb enough to turn up, he wont get more than a few feet from his gulfstream before he is in irons.
- Jerry2 4y ago
  The talk will be virtual... he'll ZOOM/Skype it in.

nitwit005 4y ago

Go find some long article from a major newspaper on a current CEO. It's likely to be positive, glowingly positive. The industry doesn't matter. The CEOs won't provide an interview unless they feel the coverage will be positive, and people tend to want to read about rising successes, so negative articles face an uphill battle.

jeroenhd 4y ago
This, but there are more factors at play. Successful CEOs are often well spoken, have had plenty of press training, and usually have all the power in the conversation. Getting answers questioned is a privilege, not a right, unless you work in certain areas of law enforcement. When bad things are on the horizon, CEOs have a little story ready to go, together with the surprise questions that may come up during the interview, or they don't come to interviews at all. At a certain point, people collect enough money that press coverage is no longer much of a concern for them. Jobs, Musk, and other super rich don't need the validation and even manage to build a cult centered around their personality. As long as they say the right things to their key shareholders and don't start spouting unacceptable language that their core fan base disagrees with, it doesn't really matter if they come to interviews or not. Private interviews are not a level playing field. Press conferences come closer, because more reporters means having to deal with more and less obvious questions. It's not hard to be impressed by a young crypto billionaire if you have little to no knowledge about the platform and if their company keeps all the business details behind closed doors; for years, these people were actually running a moderately stable cryptocurrency business. Reporters couldn't know about how deep the company had sunk when the debts started to come in and a bunch of young people in bean bags managing billions of dollars for millions of people are doing something right; all they need to do is make the reporters comfortable and lie about or avoid the upcoming collapse and journalists are bound to write something positive about you.

Balgair 4y ago

Everytime I read about the antics here I'm just reminded of Mark Twain's Roughin It. His adventures as a 'journalist' in Virginia City, NV during the silver rush are just too similar to everything going on right now that it beggars belief. He's not an unknown or unpopular author, though the work is a bit dusty. If you're interested in the relevant parts, read from about here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3177/3177-h/3177-h.htm#linkch44 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3177/3177-h/3177-h.htm#linkc...

pschuegr 4y ago
Great reference, thanks for the specific link!

PaywallBuster 4y ago

Regarding FTX: How come VC and the Canada Teachers Pension are doing a series B that raised 420M without any due diligence? Why didn't we hear about this before?

Animats 4y ago

The crypto crowd has been able to promote a culture in which there is no supporting data for financial hype, and that's considered OK. Crypto is different, you see. If crypto exchanges had to file an S-1 and quarterly reports with the SEC, people would be looking at the financials and saying "WTF?". With no audited numbers, there's not much for serious reporters to look at. But they have to write something. Hence the softball articles. Now, there are the old-line balance sheet types who say publicly that crypto is bullshit across the board. Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, that crowd. People who read Graham and Dodd, and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. The crypto community argues that's outdated thinking. Go watch "Don't be like Larry" [1] again. That was an FTX commercial run at the Super Bowl. The reason the hype worked is the run-up of Bitcoin from sub-penny values to $60,000. World's best performing asset for a few years. It is hard to argue against success. Everything else rides on the coattails of Bitcoin. FTX has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies, really. It's a bucket shop out of the 1920s, a fake broker that pretends to do trades but is just updating their own fake database and issuing fake stocks for fake companies. The same stunts could have been, and have been, pulled with gold mining stocks. FTX benefited from the "we don't need regulation because this is innovation" mindset. That's how they did it. Big questions for journalists today: - Where is Binance, the company, anyway, what assets do they really have, and who controls them? - What assets are really behind USDT?

edanm 4y ago
You never linked to it, so here is the video (your [1]): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH5-rSxilxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH5-rSxilxo And I have to say, I'd never watched it before, and it is hilarious and awesome. Especially since I'm a big Larry David fan. So thanks for that! It's definitely funnier seeing it with the last few weeks' context.
- pnt12 4y ago
  There was an interesting discussion about this clip when the ad landed. The persona that Larry David presents in his show is someone who is selfish and doesn't care about fads and what others think. More often than not, this let's him see past the bullshit, although his selfishness and stubbornness end up being his downfall. In the ad, he is presented as a dumb dumb who is missing out on the cool crypto stuff - with a kind of uncanny valley persona who shares some traits but misses other. Well, in good irony, it turns out that FTX was good thing to miss, so I guess the original Larry's persona wins!

shapefrog 4y ago

So the "real problem" here is that the WSJ wrote "FTX is was today valued at 32bn after raising money from Sequoia Capital, NEA, IVP, Iconiq Capital, Third Point Ventures, Tiger Global, Altimeter ..." Filthy scamming reporters

m000 4y ago

Aren't reporters scamming us most of the time? "Reporting" for anything that involves a monetary transaction has turned into an advertorial, or at best a superficial enumeration of promised features. Why are we adding "site:reddit.com" to our search queries?

JaDogg 4y ago

It is scams all the way down. At this point I'm convinced everything is a scam.

SilverBirch 4y ago

This is just a stupid and absurd article. Yes, if you want to you can go around and cherry pick articles and opinion pieces that are flattering to crypto and point out they turned out to be wrong in retrospect, but that's what a free press is. You are going to have people with different opinions saying different things, and sooner of later some of them will be wrong, and some will be right and we'll all be better off for having heard the arguments. But to try and pretend there hasn't been media critical of crypto is just deliberately ignoring the facts. How could we have seen this coming? Maybe listen to the Bloomberg podcast where SBF genuinely just outright states they're creating ponzi schemes back in April. But what did you want? Bloomberg to storm the offices of FTX and drag SBF off in cuffs? The core of what happened at FTX was that SBF ran an unregulated exchange- that's a matter for the government and regulators. Not the press. Ocassionally talented investigative reporters uncover a fraud- and often it'll be the most impressive story of their lifetimes. But it's not a reasonable standard to blame them for every one that blows up before they catch it.

tim333 4y ago
It touches on a general phenomena in asset booms though, whether housing, crypto, stocks or whatever. The general pattern is: Asset goes up in a normal manner Agents, exchanges etc make money They then buy ads in media and journalists write "Asset is hot now" articles Public reads them piles in, everything shoots up And then eventually once they've run out of new buyers it all crashes It's worth bearing in mind as an investor. After the crash you'll get "It's all over for <asset>" articles followed by no articles when everyone is fed up which is probably the time to buy.
isitmadeofglass 4y ago
> You are going to have people with different opinions saying different things, and sooner of later some of them will be wrong That’s a rather dismissive attitude towards the craft of journalism. Imagine the same applies to medicine. Someone pays a doctor to let your mother die and you’d be saying “well sometimes patients die, we can’t go cherry-picking those cases and pretend it matters” The major problem around crypto reporting wasn’t that some reporters got it wrong. It’s that some reporters got major funding from crypto bros and then happened to write extremely naive and flattering articles about crypto bringing in gullible masses who now lost their money when the FTX Ponzi went bust. It’s not an attack on the free press to point out that writing sugarcoated lies about financial investments because you stand to earn is a scam.