bit¢oin$

the answer I'd jump to is "because it's a scam" but this guy has more thoughts

https://fakemoneynews.substack.com/p/shorting-tether-for-fun-and-profit

Welp, crypto insider trading is *officially* a thing now:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/tippee-pleads-guilty-first-ever-cryptocurrency-insider-trading-case

Basically the guy got inside info from Coinbase on which currencies were about to be listed and would trade them before the listing was announced.

same scenario as the nft one, kinda funny prices driven by availability on an exchange rather than say some sort of financial quality

#onethread

Markets are highly unstable institutions. When other institutions exhibit such instability, we question, criticize, change or end them. But market idolatry is like religion. People dare not think critically about markets. Most just suffer them meekly. https://t.co/J80jq8EiEQ pic.twitter.com/3lwloYK4fm

— Richard D. Wolff (@profwolff) January 9, 2023

all sorts of anti social behavior spiked during the pandemic

Frog that seems like kind of a simplistic tweet from an often simplistic dude. Are you quoting it unironically/uncritically?

I'm just amused both graphs have the same shape

/Welp, crypto insider trading is *officially* a thing now:

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/tippee-pleads-guilty-first-ever-cryptocurrency-insider-trading-case

Basically the guy got inside info from Coinbase on which currencies were about to be listed and would trade them before the listing was announced.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, January 10, 2023 11:48 AM (twenty-three minutes ago)

wire fraud charge and not a 10b-5 charge...

still waiting for The Big One

yeah I don't think they're going to do crypto insider trading as securities fraud. At least not most of it. As I said upthread there are situations where you can argue that a "Crypto" asset is a security, but the "coins" themselves (btc, eth, etc.) typically aren't.

i love wolff. great tiktoks from a professor emeritus imo

As I said upthread there are situations where you can argue that a "Crypto" asset is a security, but the "coins" themselves (btc, eth, etc.) typically aren't.

― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Tuesday, January 10, 2023 12:24 PM (forty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

as you said right after i said

i said it first but very quietly

Crypto lender Nexo, which pulled out of the US market last month, is being investigated in its home country of Bulgaria. Offices raided. https://t.co/0jaBMZVMmR pic.twitter.com/lyNI05a4BD

— Jacob Silverman (@SilvermanJacob) January 12, 2023

https://sambf.substack.com/

this guy will never take a lawyer's advice to shut up. just posting through it all

truly bizarre behavior

🚨 SEC sues Genesis and Geminihttps://t.co/XpA5YjiiXh

— kadhim (＾ｰ^)ノ (@kadhim) January 12, 2023

a promise to pay interest is definitely a hallmark of a security lol

It is, although an interest-bearing savings account isn't a security.

https://sambf.substack.com/

this guy will never take a lawyer's advice to shut up. just posting through it all

― mh, Thursday, January 12, 2023 1:57 PM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This guy is so fucking ridiculous. It's like he's saying, "I didn't deliberately break your priceless china, I just juggled it without asking, and I don't know how to juggle, so I didn't do anything wrong."

he really thinks he going to use his amazing pitch skills to talk his way out of this, getting all that money goes to your head

probably was told he was a genius his entire life, never held accountable for anything

feel like there are a lot of people who fit that description that would nonetheless at least listen to their lawyer once under federal indictment, this guy is special

If FTX had been given a few weeks to raise the necessary liquidity, I believe it would have been able to make customers substantially whole.

Nice to have an unfalsifiable narrative that you can repeat to the end of time.

you all don't understand, he needs to get all the money back so that he can give it away at the end of his life

🤞

"We can't pay the price of the demo tapes unless we take the demo tapes to the record company and get paid!"
"Hello, exactly!"

lol

pretty funny bitcoin is up 15% over the last few days of terrible crypto news just goes to show you how fake it is

surely cryptocurrency won't rise again in value against all conventional wisdom and with nothing solid underpinning its existence

Some “whale” (I hate using their terminology) I’m sure is pumping it right now.

or all of them coordinating

crypto pumping slobo whale

or all of them coordinating

ums looool

tbf "whale" is not crypto-specific

e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_JPMorgan_Chase_trading_loss

rich gamblers in general iirc

The ceo of FTX US, after posting a 48 tweet long tweet storm about how sorry he was and how honest he is, blocked me for asking why he said FTX US accounts were FDIC insured. My guess is because he doesn’t want to say “I lied” or “I was lied to” or “hee!! im da hobgoblin!!” pic.twitter.com/PVVtSBlYq2

— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) January 15, 2023

Bored Ape Yacht Club finally announced a video game…. It’s about searching through a sewer for monkey poop and has an incredibly complicated leaderboard system. I’m literally wheezing pic.twitter.com/T7pwbRXHrN

— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) January 15, 2023

xp It's also used in pay-to-win mobile gaming and prostitution.

the leaderboard system doesn't seem complicated. like the game itself, it seems like a million other kind of facade-like offerings that are kind of the equivalent of spam - you wonder who in the world would actually be playing a game like that, and why they have such horrible taste. with the free iOS games i always assume it's children playing games on their parents phones, which is maybe why those kind of games always have some sort of transparently bullshit monetary scheme that you can't believe anyone would actually pay money for.

another trademark of those kinds of games is that the leaderboard is almost always filled with people who have somehow hacked the game. i don't even know how that shit works, but anyone who has played an ios game with a leaderboard in the last 20 years will know what i'm talking about. this makes it especially fitting for bored ape whatever, because they've said that whoever is on top of the leaderboard at the end wins some shit that i already forgot about. people ALREADY hack games with leaderboards just for the thrill of doing it, without any monetary reward. this dumb shit incentivizes them to cheat, on top of that.

this looks even worse than logan paul's game

Only just noticed this gem in SBF's substack
"I didn’t steal funds, and I certainly didn’t stash billions away. Nearly all of my assets were and still are utilizable to backstop FTX customers. I have, for instance, offered to contribute nearly all of my personal shares in Robinhood to customers–or 100%, if the Chapter 11 team would honor my D&O legal expense indemnification."

His D&O isn't honoring his legal expense indemnification BECAUSE HE COMMITTED FRAUD.

(directors and officers insurance policy)

levine goes deep on why some crypto things are securities

https://archive.ph/DIH97

lol cmon

[DB] New FTX CEO John J. Ray III Says He's Considering Restarting Crypto Exchange: WSJ

— db (@tier10k) January 19, 2023

he got the bug!@

really great description of the FTX code from money stuff yesterday:

If you were a normal customer at FTX, you were not allowed to have a negative balance in your account. If you put up $100 of money to buy $200 of crypto, and your crypto lost $50 of value, then your account balance was $50. If it lost another $50 of value, then your balance was $0 and you were liquidated. Your account could never be worth -$10; you got liquidated before that.

If you were a market maker on FTX, though, you were allowed to have a negative balance: Effectively, FTX would lend you the money so you could open a position without depositing the money first, or have the market move against you without instant liquidation. In FTX’s code, most accounts had a “borrow” flag set to zero, meaning that they could not have negative balances, but some 4,000 accounts had the borrow flag set to some positive number, meaning that FTX would lend them the money up to some credit limit. Of those 4,000 accounts, 41 had credit limits of $1 million to $150 million. One — Alameda — had a higher limit. Alameda’s limit was $65 billion. (Slide 18 shows a code snippet, showing that the actual limit was $65,355,999,994.) “FTX will allow Alameda to have a negative balance of up to $65 billion” is functionally equivalent to “Alameda can use as much of FTX’s customer money as it wants.”

There was another flag in the code, though, “can_withdraw_below_borrow.” The “borrow” flag determines how negative your account can be and keep trading: If your borrow flag is set to $10 million, and you put on some trades and they move against you and you end up with a balance of negative $5 million, then you can keep the trades on. But if you went to FTX and tried to cash out $4 million to spend on groceries — giving you a total balance of negative $9 million, still within your credit limit — FTX wouldn’t give you the money. You could use your credit limit to trade on FTX, but not to take out cash. “No, you still owe us $5 million, pay us that first, we’re not letting you take any cash out before you pay us what you owe,” FTX would quite reasonably say. Unless you had the “can_withdraw_below_borrow” flag set to “true.” Then FTX would say “sure, here’s the money.”

One account had that flag set, says the presentation: Alameda. To the tune of $65 billion. Setting the borrow flag to $65 billion and the can_withdraw_below_borrow flag to true is functionally equivalent to “Alameda can take as much of FTX’s customer money as it wants, remove it from the exchange, and spend it on whatever.” (Slides 16 and 17 give you a sense of what “whatever” meant, including $253 million of Bahamas real estate — including $12.9 million for “The Conch Shack”??? — and $93 million of political donations.)

The presentation describes this setting as “God Mode,”[6] which I am not sure is a technical term found in FTX’s actual codebase or documentation, but you get the idea. FTX built a video game for other people to trade crypto, but FTX — or rather its affiliate Alameda — had a cheat code. Everyone else got to trade crypto, and if they made money, they could take out the money that they made. Alameda got to trade crypto, and it got to take out as much money as it wanted, whether or not it made money. It was playing in God Mode.

Alameda had a very long straw

The Conch Shack

the alameda thing is just obvs fraud one company pretending to be two companies but these 41 guys whats up with them, theres obvs a huge amount of collusion between the big crypto players seems like this could be some of it, tho i guess in the grand scheme of fake money $150m isnt even that much and if they wanted to really move big amounts around they could just do it manually, but still whats up with these guys

4,000 accounts had the borrow flag set to some positive number, meaning that FTX would lend them the money up to some credit limit. Of those 4,000 accounts, 41 had credit limits of $1 million to $150 million.

are they 41 difft guys tho