Maximizing FTX Recoveries – Management and committee meeting [pdf]

https://restructuring.ra.kroll.com/FTX/Home-DownloadPDF?id1=MTQzODU1NQ%3D%3D&id2=0

by aorist • 4 years ago

55 35 4 years ago

restructuring.ra.kroll.com

chedoku2• 4 years ago

Is it a screenshot from a smart contract? Why $65,355,999,994?

golem14• 4 years ago

maybe related to 2^16?

oh_sigh• 4 years ago

It is suspiciously close to 65536*1e6. Can't explain why it is $6 short though

wolverine8763• 4 years ago

C'mon, this is serious money; you're off by a couple orders of magnitude: 2^36 =

  68,719,476,736

Which doesn't explain it. Maybe the subtracted $3 billion in other debts? Got to watch every penny, you know.

jzymbaluk• 4 years ago

65 billion? That feels like an absurdly high number. The scale of these companies are mind-boggling

kasey_junk• 4 years ago

That’s just a limit in their risk system not a judgement of any real scale. Better to read it as “infinity” because the point of the setting was to remove any real limit.

dgrin91• 4 years ago

Does anyone know what the AWS environment mentioned here is? It doesn't really make sense for it to be Amazon AWS, or am I just overthinking it?

rockemsockem• 4 years ago

Amazon AWS, the new ATM machine :)

fragmede• 4 years ago

You're overthinking it and in fact AWS has a bunch of security stuff (HSM, secure enclave, etc) that makes it extra attractive. For reference, Stripe (which isn't FTX but it's Fintech and handles large amounts of money) uses AWS for their environment. If you're asking if there's some secret hidden AWS region FTX was using, why would they bother? The known special region, GovCloud, is a couple years behind the other regions in features. Also from what's been publicly revealed, FTX isn't exactly the shining example of the finest possible engineering.

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/stripe/

thinkingkong2• 4 years ago

I suspect that this limit was just the Max value of whatever number format they were using was. The chances of it not really being 65536 are fairly low. Its just too coincidental.

crazygringo• 4 years ago

Except it's not 65536 -- it's 65356. (I just verified in the PDF.)

Which actually makes me wonder if somebody fat-fingered it and meant to type 65536 by hand and got it wrong. Which given everything we've found out about the sloppiness there, would seem quite apropos.

Normally I wouldn't think so, but the trailing "999994" also just seems so strangely floating point-derived... but who even knows.

kevin_thibedeau• 4 years ago

65536 requires 17-bits. So maybe they tried the one-too-large number, failed, and assumed they transposed something.

thinkingkong2• 3 years ago

Well at least someone in this chain of information is dyslexic.

hgsgm• 4 years ago

Where is that number? I only see $65B

xyst• 4 years ago

look at page 18 on the pdf, it shows a screenshot of configuration which states the "borrow" property is set to "65355999994"

kccqzy• 4 years ago

The eighteenth page of the PDF.

wolverine8763• 4 years ago

[PDF]

Centigonal2• 4 years ago

hahahaha holy shit

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34373113

Kranar• 4 years ago

The author of that comment was incorrect though. Page 18 of the PDF shows that it was an arbitrarily hardcoded number encoded in a BigDecimal, has nothing to do with 16 bit integers. Furthermore the limit was 65*3*55... whereas the max 16-bit unsigned integer is 65*5*35, so the digits don't even match up.

It's a cool hypothesis, and perhaps the person who hardcoded that number was even inspired by 2^16 - 1 in some way, but as the replies point out it doesn't really make much sense beyond an odd curiosity.

Centigonal2• 4 years ago

I didn't catch the 65355 vs. 65535 thing. That just raises more questions...

anigbrowl• 4 years ago

Bet he wishes he'd stuck with 32-bit unsigned integers

mr90210• 4 years ago

When your programmer is also a thief.

const FTX_LIMIT = Infinity;

jvans• 4 years ago

Someone find the memo from sbf demanding a switch to 128 bit longs

chedoku2• 4 years ago

He said sorry.

Imnimo• 4 years ago

Has someone tried just getting SBF into a Twitter Space and asking him what the significance of this particular number is?

matthewdgreen• 4 years ago

Nobody on Twitter had any good ideas. However Jon Callas suggested it might be a Singapore phone number, which was the best suggestion I saw ;) I even called it (it’s one digit too long) and got an error message.

ftxbro• 4 years ago

So people are guessing what the number is from, I will guess too. I never really worked at ftx you guys. It's a work of parody etc.

  > be me
  > new employee at ftx bahamas office
  > sbf is busy in dc doing effective altruism
  > polycule ppl just got text from him
  > tfw not in polycule
  > sbf got a text from caroline
  > we have to double alameda's credit line again
  > guess that's my job now
  > open excel spreadsheet
  > they are planning to convert it to python soon
  > find "borrow" column
  > dozens of accounts have millions of dollars of credit
  > find the alameda borrow entry
  > feels goodman.jpg
  > 32678000000e-3
  > wtf is that
  > it's 32678000000 mils divided by a thousand
  > a mil is a tenth of a cent, it's finance jargon used by exchanges
  > the e-3 at the end is scientific notation to divide by a thousand
  > $32,678,000
  > they've been doubling it by hand while high on stimulants
  > last time they mixed up the 6 and 7
  > bigbraintime.png
  > i can just put parentheses around it and multiply by two
  > leave it like that in the excel cell
  > 32678000000e-3
  > (32678000000-3)*2
  > sbf texted again he says we solved caroline's problem
  > success.png
  > $65,355,999,994

dang• 4 years ago

Submitted title was "Alameda Research's borrowing limit from FTX was $65,355,999,994", which broke the site guidelines (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, that's fine, but do it by adding a comment to the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Maximizing FTX Recoveries – Management and committee meeting [pdf]

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