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I mean, the reason the fraud looks so brazen now is because they were obviously true believers - they never expected to get caught. If crypto had gone up and up
by hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I mean, the reason the fraud looks so brazen now is because they were obviously true believers - they never expected to get caught. If crypto had gone up and up and up forever as intended, the fraud would never have been discovered.
Of course, the other possibility is that at least having this amount of visible paper trail was intentional - the CTO probably had a little voice in the back of his head going "Umm, maybe committing multi-billion dollar fraud is a bad idea...", but the GitHub history probably helps him more than it hurts now, at the expense of SBF.
- SilasX 3y agoI made an earlier comment explaining it as SBF coming to believe that his tricks kept working so consistently that he regarded them as some kind of fundamental aspect of reality, that he could always find another investor to give him a reprieve, he could always find another sucker to buy FTT at an inflated value (sorry, “exit liquidity”). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33973023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33973023
- bmitc 3y ago> If crypto had gone up and up and up forever as intended, the fraud would never have been discovered. I'm not sure of that. When you need an account's credit limit set to $65 billion because the account (Alameda Research) kept hitting the credit limit, something is seriously, seriously wrong irrespective of the state of crypto. It seems like they were inevitably going to fail hard. FTX was literally allowing Alameda Research to trade with make believe money. Some of the major traditional brokers will just up and close your account permanently if you abuse, even within their already strict rulesets, their margin accounts.