I'd like to see a public (or at least anonymized) accounting of how many FTX customers lost how much money. And I'm not talking about losses denominated in magical unicorn bucks converted to USD with the highest exchange rate ever traded. I want to know how much cold hard USD was actually "lost," meaning it was deposited into FTX and eventually became inaccessible, either due to exchanging it for crypto holdings that tanked, or because the funds simply couldn't be withdrawn. If we can identify the actual amount of inflowing USD, then the next question naturally becomes ... where did it go? Whereas the current obfuscation with mixing of peak altcoin valuations and actual dollars makes it impossible to understand the true scale of loss.
As it stands, I remain unconvinced that FTX was not a wash trading front for a money laundering operation run by an intelligence agency that is now throwing SBF under the bus as part of the larger plan to blow it all up so it's too messy for anyone to investigate. Just keep screaming fraud as loudly as possible so nobody dares question the premise.
There were a lot of red flags with FTX. It popped up out of nowhere. SBF was a relative unknown amongst his peergroup, eg MIT'14 Bitcoiners. I guess that's because he came from the econ side? I'm not MIT, but I am '14 and I was more involved than your average person with cryptocurrency back then. The first I ever heard of SBF was when he was put in front of congress in ~2019 and labeled the CEO of a massive crypto exchange I'd never heard of. Call me crazy but that set off alarm bells for me at the time, and I'm not sure it ever added up.
But by far the weirdest red flag about FTX was the dearth of Reddit posts from people asking how to get their money back when it finally crashed. There were hardly any subscribers to the FTX subreddit (~5k), and there was only a tiny trickle of posts from real users looking for refunds. Maybe this is attributable to FTX having more sophisticated "investors" (?) than other crypto scams, but the 5k subscribers made it a clear outlier.
Compare the Reddit activity (both volume and sentiment) around any remotely similar crypto crash and the difference is stark. Where are all the victims?
As it stands, I remain unconvinced that FTX was not a wash trading front for a money laundering operation run by an intelligence agency that is now throwing SBF under the bus as part of the larger plan to blow it all up so it's too messy for anyone to investigate. Just keep screaming fraud as loudly as possible so nobody dares question the premise.
There were a lot of red flags with FTX. It popped up out of nowhere. SBF was a relative unknown amongst his peergroup, eg MIT'14 Bitcoiners. I guess that's because he came from the econ side? I'm not MIT, but I am '14 and I was more involved than your average person with cryptocurrency back then. The first I ever heard of SBF was when he was put in front of congress in ~2019 and labeled the CEO of a massive crypto exchange I'd never heard of. Call me crazy but that set off alarm bells for me at the time, and I'm not sure it ever added up.
But by far the weirdest red flag about FTX was the dearth of Reddit posts from people asking how to get their money back when it finally crashed. There were hardly any subscribers to the FTX subreddit (~5k), and there was only a tiny trickle of posts from real users looking for refunds. Maybe this is attributable to FTX having more sophisticated "investors" (?) than other crypto scams, but the 5k subscribers made it a clear outlier. Compare the Reddit activity (both volume and sentiment) around any remotely similar crypto crash and the difference is stark. Where are all the victims?