SBF of FTX: I'm sorry. I fucked up. (Twitter thread on FBX failure)

https://twitter.com/sbf_ftx/status/1590709166515310593

by bhouston • 4 years ago

29 13 4 years ago

gvb• 4 years ago

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1590709166515310593.html

h2odragon• 4 years ago

The point of many of the banking regulations, is that it's easy to make mistakes, even for the most honest brokers, when handling other people's money. "Crypto prophets" have praised freedom from onerous regulation as a benefit; but that position misses that some regulations are more beneficial than not.

Or it could all be rich arseholes fleecing the gullible tech bros by dealing in "crypto" labeled ponzi schemes that never had much to do with the distributed, unregulated exchange structures the prophets preached about.

gonehome• 4 years ago

The advantage of crypto and DeFi is that it’s possible to have everything be 100% transparent and visible on chain. It’s also possible for users to self custody funds which avoids this issue entirely. Exchange failure is mostly an independent phenomenon from the new capabilities of the underlying tech.

This was an execution by a rival: https://twitter.com/sbf_ftx/status/1590709197502812160?s=46&... (tweet #20) though SBF is right that he fucked up and shouldn’t have been in this position. That FTX US is fine is decent evidence that the regulations there do protect users.

nonfamous• 4 years ago

The advantage of crypto and DeFi is that it’s possible to have everything be 100% transparent and visible on chain.

It wasn’t in this case though, was it? In practice, is it ever?

togs• 4 years ago

it's easy to make mistakes, even for the most honest brokers, when handling other people's money.

If I accidentally charge the wrong card, I can reverse the charge in a few seconds; it's beautiful. The credit card system is amazing. I even forgot my card once, and learned how to use my iPhone in its place.

With crypto...well, transacting is like programming except when you make a mistake you lose money. There are no safeguards. Like, sure, it's technically my fault for sending $400 to a null address, but that doesn't change the fact that I'm upset about it! And I consider myself somewhat tech savvy...imagine the customer complaints!

frontman1988• 4 years ago

Will he go to jail? Losing billions of dollars might create a lot of powerful enemies I guess.

Bubble_Pop_22• 4 years ago

24x avg. daily withdraws

Something something about sudden black swans and fat tail events.

It doesn't even have to be about FTX either, can be anything, if Musk takes more drugs than usual and tweets something like: "Lost all my faith in Crypto, now is mortal enemy!" you'd go way above 24x the withdrawls happening in an avg. day.

This is pure greed. From everybody involved, and I mean the users too! How greedy you have to be that you cannot take 4 days to send/receive an international wire. Nobody trades 24/7/365, when you are done trading just take 4 days to extract the money from exchanges , let it reach you bank and park it in cash or Treasuries. Now the option became availible to also earn interest from your bank. First time in 10+ years.

If you don't do it then these people are gonna do it and put your money to work for them (not for you) and you'd never know about it unless something like this black swan happen.

limpbizkitfan• 4 years ago

The amount of blind faith in this industry is insane. Normal Finance already has dubious grey areas like dark pool trading, but the amount of blind faith put into crypto, especially with companies led by people like Sam, is misplaced. Nobody has yet to explain what makes crypto a viable alternative to other forms of contract. Certainly, use cases do exist, but none of them seem better than what we already have in place. Nobody has turned this technology into something profitable outside of speculating on coins themselves. I would really want to make sure people who openly lie about the capabilities of this technology end up in prison, these exchanges only exist to launder extremely large amounts of money. The fact that they presented themselves as a regulation-free alternative to other markets should be a signal to the SEC or FTC that these companies are trying to present themselves as legitimate exchanges, when they are far from that.

DLA• 4 years ago

SBF is a total criminal and should be arrested for fraud, lying, and for using client funds for FTX's own trades (per Dow Jones Wire; seen on Bloomberg).

bmm6o• 4 years ago

Is he claiming that FTX is illiquid but solvent? I thought the reports were that they are $6B in the hole.

bhouston• 4 years ago

I believe his FTT was illiquid because if you tried to sell it, it would kill the price as there wasn't any real demand for his FTT. I am unsure if that is a standard definition of illiquid.

sanjayio• 4 years ago

This is hilarious, telling an absurd amount of people that their money is gone because of a simple math mistake on margins by “me”. You raised many millions on valuations of billions to avoid these very mistakes and have redundancies. To hire experts that double, triple, quadruple check these and create systems that check these margins in near real-time. It’s disgusting that he’s using emotions to retain the US-based costumers that he has remaining.