5 ms·

> The effort to paint over such blatant fraud and negligence and pretend it was all a mistake from a well-meaning kiddo is disgusting. I agree and this thread

> The effort to paint over such blatant fraud and negligence and pretend it was all a mistake from a well-meaning kiddo is disgusting. I agree and this thread is honestly plain disgusting too. Many here are happy and find it funny to see people's crypto being stolen by fraudsters. From TFA: "It is now clear that what happened at the FTX crypto exchange and the hedge fund Alameda Research involved a variety of conscious and intentional fraud intended to steal money from both users and investors." And from the bankruptcy filings: "On-chain analysis has found the bulk of movements from FTX to Alameda took place in late 2021, and bankruptcy filings have revealed that FTX and Alameda lost $3.7 billion in 2021. This is maybe the most befuddling part of the Bankman-Fried story: His companies lost massive amounts of money before the 2022 crypto bear market even started. They may have been stealing funds long before the blowups of Terra and Three Arrows Capital". People may hate on Bitcoin, Ethereum, ape monkeys yacht club etc. (or whatever these NFTs are called) as much as they want, it's not reason to rejoice when thieves do scam people (including a canadian teachers pension funds' money). There's also another angle: the very same who are cheering on people losing all their money to a scam were the first to say: "Pay your taxes on any crypto gain you made" (so that, in the end, they get their share of these winnings too through the state's spendings)... If the state collects taxes on gain made on crypto, the state go after people stealing other people's crypto. As simple as that. P.S: and I hope people are happy that their politicians got greased by stolen funds and aren't giving these bribes (pardon, donations) back.

JohnFen 4y ago
> Many here are happy and find it funny to see people's crypto being stolen by fraudsters. They are? I haven't noticed that.
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  The FTX meltdown has been a major source of schadenfreude.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    Yes, of course. But I'm not seeing a lot of people happy about the victims.
    - EamonnMR 4y ago
      Way I see it their shirts were lost as soon as they traded their money for fake money, they just didn't know it yet.
floren 4y ago
We're just happy it's our turn to say "have fun staying poor"
- suzzer99 4y ago
  The people who were completely obnoxious when anyone tried to warn them that monkey JPEGs going for $500k was nutso, have now flipped to obnoxiously playing the victim. It was the exact same way on The Motley Fool boards after the dotcom crash. The crowd that was all "Well you may have your facts and figures, but my CMGI keeps going up and up and up, so PPPPPTTTTHHHHH!!!", instantly pivoted to "How can you kick me when I'm down like this? Do you enjoy suffering?"
jfengel 4y ago
I interpret it less as "celebration" and more as "I told you so". That's never a pretty thing, and polite people don't do it... but when you have nothing nice to say, the polite people say nothing, and the impolite people say the impolite thing.
- jandrese 4y ago
  There's certainly a portion of the people who were annoyed at Crypto bros constantly posting about how they just made their third billion (on paper) and you're so dumb for not putting everything in crypto and hodl forever. It's hard to feel bad when those guys get wiped out. Everybody is a genius in a bull market. So many people who think they are God's gift to money management who were basically just leveraged to the max and the only real strategy was "line goes up".
- braingenious 4y ago
  Wait, is posting about how there are objectively only two groups of people (“polite” and “impolite”) a polite thing to do or an impolite thing to do?
  - braingenious 4y ago
    I’m genuinely confused by the downvotes here since nobody has responded. Am I to believe that lumping people into groups of polite and impolite as human beings is a polite thing to do, or am I meant to believe that lumping people into binary groups of polite and impolite is an impolite thing to do? Am I being downvoted by polite people or impolite people?? Is reductively judging people and putting them into antithetical groups based on offhand comments polite, or is it impolite? It’s a legitimate question.
    - JohnFen 4y ago
      I certainly didn't downvote you, but I'm not clear about what point you're making.
      - 4y ago
akiselev 4y ago
No one is rejoicing that normal people in Latin America or Africa lost their savings because they were trying to hedge against inflation. At least no one I have noticed posting on HN. That “canadian teachers pension fund,” however, is a $180 billion monstrosity that - in the process of losing a rounding error off their fund - legitimized a scam artist because they were too stupid to do a minimum of due diligence. They’ll make the money back in a fortnight off the safe investments they should have been putting money into in the first place while the little people who trusted FTX by proxy got fucked. Crocodile tears for the speculators. That’s the story of finance.
- themitigating 4y ago
  Isn't the pension fund for regular people?
  - akiselev 4y ago
    Regular people with a diversified portfolio of $180 billion who lost 0.1% of their fund. That’s a small price to pay when interest rates are 3% to find out your fund managers need to be fired.
    - throwaway2037 4y ago
      I Googled it. Here is the official statement from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan: https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/about-us/news-and-insights/2022/ontario-teachers--statement-on-ftx/ https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/about-us/news-and-insights/2022/o... In October 2021, Ontario Teachers’ invested US$75 million in FTX International and its US entity (FTX.US). In January 2022, we made a follow-on investment of US$20 million in FTX.US. ... Our investment represented less than 0.05% of our total net assets...
      - akiselev 4y ago
        Thank you for the exact numbers! I don’t know why but that extra factor of two somehow makes it even worse. 0.05% of assets isn’t even enough for petty cash for most businesses and they couldn’t do some due diligence when it was $75 million?!
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> not reason to rejoice when thieves do scam people (including a canadian teachers pension funds' money) I am strongly against using public resources to bail out folks who willfully sidestepped centuries of learned experience in financial regulation. Most financial fraud is privately pursued. SBF should go to jail. But beyond that, it's on the creditors to recover their assets.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- JohnFen 4y ago
  There isn't going to be any sort of bailout. There isn't a large enough impact to the economy for that sort of action.
deaddodo 4y ago
> it's not reason to rejoice when thieves do scam people (including a canadian teachers pension funds' money). I rejoice in that I would hope it deters future pension funds from investing in crypto. It’s a downright idiotic decision given the current sphere of hype-inflation that can balloon and burst on a whim. Just look at the effect a single tweet from musk had on Doge.
- klodolph 4y ago
  In theory, this would deter pension funds from investing in crypto. In practice, I don’t think this collapse will have the desired impact on pension fund behavior. The Ontario teacher’s pension fund had something like a $95M investment in FTX. It manages $241.6BN CDN in assets, making the FTX investment about 0.04% of the total assets. Pension funds normally put some percentage of their assets in risky investments, this is normal and good—and they will, therefore, invest in whatever new scam people come up with ten or twenty years from now. If not crypto, it will be something else. Yes, they probably didn’t do the due diligence that they should have done. But that is a different kind of mistake than the mistake of investing in something risky when they thought they were investing in something safe. The pension fund likely knew it was risky, they just didn’t figure out that the inmates were running the asylum, so to speak. Or in short, yes, this was a mistake, but pension funds invest, on purpose, in things that can balloon and burst on a whim anyway.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    The only proven practical purpose of crypto is evading regulation. So when regulation happens, it will effectively amount to making it illegal. Which won't kill it off, just move it into the black markets where it has actual use. (I'm not implying any moral judgment here. Personally, I think it's actually a net positive given the amount of harmful regulation, both in national laws and in international sanctions. But that's precisely why it would be silly to expect it to not be driven underground by the governments in the long term.)
klodolph 4y ago
> […] it's not reason to rejoice when thieves do scam people […] There’s very little solace in being able to say “I told you so” when disaster strikes. If there’s anything to rejoice about, it’s that the current crypto collapse seems to be more isolated from the rest of the economy than, for example, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. After the damage has been done, we can go in and regulate the way that crypto should have been regulated from the beginning. You can’t escape politics, and large, public collapses like this provide the political willpower to create the oversight that we already knew was necessary, to protect future generations. > There's also another angle: the very same who are cheering on people losing all their money to a scam were the first to say: "Pay your taxes on any crypto gain you made" (so that, in the end, they get their share of these winnings too through the state's spendings)... I don’t understand the criticism here. If I think that it is right to pay taxes, and I think that crypto is a scam, are you saying that this is somehow hypocritical? I think there might be some steps here in the argument which I don’t see or understand. I believe in due process and the prohibition on ex-post-facto laws. If you make money manufacturing widgets, but I think widgets are morally repugnant and pass laws to ban widget manufacturing, then I don’t get to go in and retroactively confiscate your widget profits from the past five years. You pay your taxes on crypto profits, and then if it turns out that you were breaking the law, you have to face the consequences for that too. Crypto tokens have blurred the lines between securities and other types of products and it makes no sense to pass new laws and backdate them to apply to old crypto transactions.
EamonnMR 4y ago
Imagine that every day for two years some folks showed up at your door trying to get you to join their UFO cult and every time you say 'actually, I'm pretty sure To Serve Man is a cookbook' then finally the mother ship arrives and they start eating up the cultists. Sure being eaten is rough but they A) didn't heed my advice and B) at least now they won't knock on my door anymore.
- dontknowwhyihn 4y ago
  That’s how I feel about people who got vaccinated.
  - brazzy 4y ago
    Then you are a delusional moron.
  - MrMan 4y ago
    idiot

JohnFen 4y ago

> Many here are happy and find it funny to see people's crypto being stolen by fraudsters. They are? I haven't noticed that.

EamonnMR 4y ago
The FTX meltdown has been a major source of schadenfreude.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Yes, of course. But I'm not seeing a lot of people happy about the victims.
  - EamonnMR 4y ago
    Way I see it their shirts were lost as soon as they traded their money for fake money, they just didn't know it yet.

floren 4y ago

We're just happy it's our turn to say "have fun staying poor"

suzzer99 4y ago
The people who were completely obnoxious when anyone tried to warn them that monkey JPEGs going for $500k was nutso, have now flipped to obnoxiously playing the victim. It was the exact same way on The Motley Fool boards after the dotcom crash. The crowd that was all "Well you may have your facts and figures, but my CMGI keeps going up and up and up, so PPPPPTTTTHHHHH!!!", instantly pivoted to "How can you kick me when I'm down like this? Do you enjoy suffering?"

jfengel 4y ago

I interpret it less as "celebration" and more as "I told you so". That's never a pretty thing, and polite people don't do it... but when you have nothing nice to say, the polite people say nothing, and the impolite people say the impolite thing.

jandrese 4y ago
There's certainly a portion of the people who were annoyed at Crypto bros constantly posting about how they just made their third billion (on paper) and you're so dumb for not putting everything in crypto and hodl forever. It's hard to feel bad when those guys get wiped out. Everybody is a genius in a bull market. So many people who think they are God's gift to money management who were basically just leveraged to the max and the only real strategy was "line goes up".
braingenious 4y ago
Wait, is posting about how there are objectively only two groups of people (“polite” and “impolite”) a polite thing to do or an impolite thing to do?
- braingenious 4y ago
  I’m genuinely confused by the downvotes here since nobody has responded. Am I to believe that lumping people into groups of polite and impolite as human beings is a polite thing to do, or am I meant to believe that lumping people into binary groups of polite and impolite is an impolite thing to do? Am I being downvoted by polite people or impolite people?? Is reductively judging people and putting them into antithetical groups based on offhand comments polite, or is it impolite? It’s a legitimate question.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    I certainly didn't downvote you, but I'm not clear about what point you're making.
    - 4y ago

akiselev 4y ago

No one is rejoicing that normal people in Latin America or Africa lost their savings because they were trying to hedge against inflation. At least no one I have noticed posting on HN. That “canadian teachers pension fund,” however, is a $180 billion monstrosity that - in the process of losing a rounding error off their fund - legitimized a scam artist because they were too stupid to do a minimum of due diligence. They’ll make the money back in a fortnight off the safe investments they should have been putting money into in the first place while the little people who trusted FTX by proxy got fucked. Crocodile tears for the speculators. That’s the story of finance.

themitigating 4y ago
Isn't the pension fund for regular people?
- akiselev 4y ago
  Regular people with a diversified portfolio of $180 billion who lost 0.1% of their fund. That’s a small price to pay when interest rates are 3% to find out your fund managers need to be fired.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    I Googled it. Here is the official statement from Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan: https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/about-us/news-and-insights/2022/ontario-teachers--statement-on-ftx/ https://www.otpp.com/en-ca/about-us/news-and-insights/2022/o... In October 2021, Ontario Teachers’ invested US$75 million in FTX International and its US entity (FTX.US). In January 2022, we made a follow-on investment of US$20 million in FTX.US. ... Our investment represented less than 0.05% of our total net assets...
    - akiselev 4y ago
      Thank you for the exact numbers! I don’t know why but that extra factor of two somehow makes it even worse. 0.05% of assets isn’t even enough for petty cash for most businesses and they couldn’t do some due diligence when it was $75 million?!

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> not reason to rejoice when thieves do scam people (including a canadian teachers pension funds' money) I am strongly against using public resources to bail out folks who willfully sidestepped centuries of learned experience in financial regulation. Most financial fraud is privately pursued. SBF should go to jail. But beyond that, it's on the creditors to recover their assets.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
JohnFen 4y ago
There isn't going to be any sort of bailout. There isn't a large enough impact to the economy for that sort of action.

deaddodo 4y ago

> it's not reason to rejoice when thieves do scam people (including a canadian teachers pension funds' money). I rejoice in that I would hope it deters future pension funds from investing in crypto. It’s a downright idiotic decision given the current sphere of hype-inflation that can balloon and burst on a whim. Just look at the effect a single tweet from musk had on Doge.

klodolph 4y ago
In theory, this would deter pension funds from investing in crypto. In practice, I don’t think this collapse will have the desired impact on pension fund behavior. The Ontario teacher’s pension fund had something like a $95M investment in FTX. It manages $241.6BN CDN in assets, making the FTX investment about 0.04% of the total assets. Pension funds normally put some percentage of their assets in risky investments, this is normal and good—and they will, therefore, invest in whatever new scam people come up with ten or twenty years from now. If not crypto, it will be something else. Yes, they probably didn’t do the due diligence that they should have done. But that is a different kind of mistake than the mistake of investing in something risky when they thought they were investing in something safe. The pension fund likely knew it was risky, they just didn’t figure out that the inmates were running the asylum, so to speak. Or in short, yes, this was a mistake, but pension funds invest, on purpose, in things that can balloon and burst on a whim anyway.
- int_19h 4y ago
  The only proven practical purpose of crypto is evading regulation. So when regulation happens, it will effectively amount to making it illegal. Which won't kill it off, just move it into the black markets where it has actual use. (I'm not implying any moral judgment here. Personally, I think it's actually a net positive given the amount of harmful regulation, both in national laws and in international sanctions. But that's precisely why it would be silly to expect it to not be driven underground by the governments in the long term.)

klodolph 4y ago

> […] it's not reason to rejoice when thieves do scam people […] There’s very little solace in being able to say “I told you so” when disaster strikes. If there’s anything to rejoice about, it’s that the current crypto collapse seems to be more isolated from the rest of the economy than, for example, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. After the damage has been done, we can go in and regulate the way that crypto should have been regulated from the beginning. You can’t escape politics, and large, public collapses like this provide the political willpower to create the oversight that we already knew was necessary, to protect future generations. > There's also another angle: the very same who are cheering on people losing all their money to a scam were the first to say: "Pay your taxes on any crypto gain you made" (so that, in the end, they get their share of these winnings too through the state's spendings)... I don’t understand the criticism here. If I think that it is right to pay taxes, and I think that crypto is a scam, are you saying that this is somehow hypocritical? I think there might be some steps here in the argument which I don’t see or understand. I believe in due process and the prohibition on ex-post-facto laws. If you make money manufacturing widgets, but I think widgets are morally repugnant and pass laws to ban widget manufacturing, then I don’t get to go in and retroactively confiscate your widget profits from the past five years. You pay your taxes on crypto profits, and then if it turns out that you were breaking the law, you have to face the consequences for that too. Crypto tokens have blurred the lines between securities and other types of products and it makes no sense to pass new laws and backdate them to apply to old crypto transactions.

EamonnMR 4y ago

Imagine that every day for two years some folks showed up at your door trying to get you to join their UFO cult and every time you say 'actually, I'm pretty sure To Serve Man is a cookbook' then finally the mother ship arrives and they start eating up the cultists. Sure being eaten is rough but they A) didn't heed my advice and B) at least now they won't knock on my door anymore.

dontknowwhyihn 4y ago
That’s how I feel about people who got vaccinated.
- brazzy 4y ago
  Then you are a delusional moron.
- MrMan 4y ago
  idiot