bit¢oin$

oh god why
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality

haaaa

Departing from J. K. Rowling's original books, Yudkowsky supposes that Harry's aunt Petunia Evans married an Oxford professor and homeschooled Harry in science and rational thinking.[6][8][9]

Same guy who created a panic over an imaginary vengeful superintelligence, by the way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk#Reactions

lag00n found your alt

Peak crypto living.

No physical possessions but a trusty rug to sleep on (rugged 4 lyf), an @FTX_Official hoodie that doubles as a pillow, a laptop (w/ Rust compiler ofc) and mechanical keyboard (max WPM for CT shitposting).

Everything else in NFTs or earning yield on #Solana. pic.twitter.com/bcqgfEIDS6

— Tristan (@Tristan0x) November 17, 2021

hard to tell without touching the thing (could be printed or machine made) but to this persian that looks like a couple thousand dollars worth of persian rug. also if sleeping on that is rugged then my grandma in her end of life stage (rip) was also rugged

pretty sure thats in ikea rug fwiw, and not because i bought it and thats my home be serious i would have a blanket too

lmao the mechanical keyboard is such a nice touch

really? that's pretty legit looking for a fake! last i checked the detail on ikea rugs looked a lot less crisp, though tbf since i started owning a dachshund (2010) i've stopped owning rugs

a trusty rug for the rugpulls

yup there u go

https://i.imgur.com/89FqxJq.png

it's a pretty nice rug

rugs are the original nfts

(I posted this to ILE but was informed there was an FTX discussion already happening here...)

Crypto skeptic Molly White's (creator of "Web3 Is Going Just Great") writeups are excellent - here's part 3 of her FTX coverage: https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-ftx-collapse-the-latest-revelations

Some highlights from it:
* The spreadsheet included an entry for “Hidden, poorly internally labled (sic) ‘fiat@’ account: -8 billion”. Apparently SBF wishes for us to believe that he somehow just misplaced an account representing eight billion dollars in liabilities. SBF also included an attempt at remorse in the balance sheet (as one does): “There were many things I wish I could do differently than I did…”

(I'm reminded of the Robin Williams joke about putting $50,000 on your tax form for "snacks".)

* The clean-up guy (who oversaw Enron's bankruptcy) John J. Ray III said: "Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented."

* The Debtors do not have an accounting department and outsource this function.

Heads up: rotating a few FTX wallets today (mostly non-circulating); we do this periodically. Might be a few more coming, won’t have any effect.

— SBF (@SBF_FTX) September 28, 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oFfScP0S_M

lol

lmao

ah well

Sequoia Capital Managing Partner speaking about FTX:

"[We did] careful due diligence...We’ve looked at it. There’s nothing much we could have done any differently...I can tell you that, for the next three to six months, we’re going to dream a little less"

[@CNBC] pic.twitter.com/6JxCJaFv0u

— The Transcript (@TheTranscript_) November 20, 2022

https://mobile.twitter.com/patio11 Has always struck me as a terrible bore who knows what he’s talking about. He seems pretty adamant that tether is about to go.

Give it to me baby

lets goo

A person I have known for more than ten years, who I consider trustworthy, is convinced the cryptocurrency economy will shortly experience a systemic risk. I don’t know anything concrete, but if I were exposed, I would be concerned.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) November 20, 2022

Vitalik subtweeting Paul Graham calling him out for being a total loser is the closest I’ve been to being bullish crypto https://t.co/7N1iw8zXJH

— Bucco *Parody* Capital (@buccocapital) November 21, 2022

lol the entire crypto industry is very publicly crashing and burning, paul grahams friend told him

am I to understand that if Tether goes it's game over

yeah

http://view.pics-or-gtfo.com/20221118-1ac139e922fcc59d088de21c946d2d81.jpeg

Put simply, the crypto system as it currently exists is unsustainable. Absent clear and easily enforceable property rights, relying solely on private investors to monitor and discipline the behaviour of opaque intermediaries has never been safe and effective. There is no prospect for a technological solution to these age-old problems.

So, the big question is whether authorities ought to create a new regulatory and supervisory framework that protects property rights and enforces the principles of safety and soundness. Concerned about further losses from the collapse of crypto, many people are calling for new rules to protect consumers.

Ironically, however, attempts to create a separate structure for regulating and supervising crypto will just make the financial system less, not more, safe.

This is true for two reasons. First, it will encourage banks both to purchase crypto assets and to lend against them as collateral, making the banking system vulnerable to plunging market values. In contrast, even the ongoing collapse of crypto values and institutions has had virtually no impact on the wellbeing of the traditional financial markets and firms.

Second, new rules would lead to a migration of financial activity from traditional finance to the still less regulated, but newly sanctioned, crypto world. Both crypto and traditional finance are simply combinations of a database and computer code. It would be straightforward for a group of technicians to convert any set of conditional cash flows from one into the other. For example, imagine someone choosing to issue claims on their firm as a crypto token rather than as conventional equity to take advantage of looser rules for disclosure, accounting, custody, and the like.

If any new rules are needed, they are ones that limit exposure of traditional leveraged intermediaries to the crypto world.

Banks, dealers, insurers, and pension funds should not be allowed to purchase and hold crypto or accept it as collateral. For the most part, crypto today is just a multiplayer online video game (like World of Warcraft). If virtually all the transactions remain internal to the crypto world without links to the real economy, the process might as well be occurring on Mars, leaving traditional finance unaffected.

The overriding goal of policymakers should be to keep crypto systemically irrelevant. The best way to do this is let it implode under the pressure of its unsafe and unsound business practices. Meanwhile, authorities should constantly point to the record that crypto is rife with failures and fraud.

Rather than creating a new legal and regulatory framework that legitimises crypto, we should simply let it burn.

https://www.ft.com/content/ac058ede-80cb-4aa6-8394-941443eec7e3

reasonable point

Isn’t Tether obviously fraudulent?

yes

Just curious why the shoe hasn't dropped there yet.

idk im sure not what it would take, all the big crypto players obvs really do not want it to happen

I assume there is a lot propping it up right now. also I don't really understand the finer points of stablecoins but my understanding is they can run on pixie dust for a while

yeah theres tons of collusion various fund sloshing around and whatnot, maybe itll take the rest of the industry deteriorating to the point where they just cant keep the charade up anymore

yeah I wonder if this is nearing the end of a big musical chairs game

seems like it

heh

lmao, wtf is wrong with these people? https://t.co/U5uvh2MtMl pic.twitter.com/sZIoBO7Pjb

— Cas Piancey (@CasPiancey) November 21, 2022

the grift is strong

Hacker moving all his ETH right now in 15k lots, seems likely he is getting ready to sell pic.twitter.com/TXjpaG7i6f

— Avi (@AviFelman) November 21, 2022

attempting to explain what’s happening in crypto pic.twitter.com/xGwxl6XxMk

— addie wagenknecht (@wheresaddie) November 20, 2022

lmao, wtf is wrong with these people? https://t.co/U5uvh2MtMl pic.twitter.com/sZIoBO7Pjb
— Cas Piancey (@CasPiancey) November 21, 2022
― lag∞n, Monday, 21 November 2022 16:46 (two hours ago) link

If you read the thread it sounds like the person is misreading the SEC filings. It would be pretty brazen to just dump every last share like that, even for a cryptobro. I'd expect him to already be out of the country if he had done that.

Come on - if you’re going to hold yourself out as informed crypto news than you should actually be informed. He sold all of his Class A shares - there are multiple classes. No board of any public company would allow their CEO to sell all their shares.

— Mark Osborn (@MarkROsborn) November 21, 2022

Hi Mark, we've stated in the article that we're talking about the common stock but realize this was not clear in the headline.

Edit 18:30 UTC, Nov 21: Headline has been updated to match the article and specify that Armstrong has sold all of his common stock.

— Protos (@Protos) November 21, 2022

looks like brian armstrong owns 2/3 of the voting shares too

oh whoops i see lags beat me

ok i think what happened is - a trust that brian armstrong owns sold all its class a shares, which is like 30k shares. but brian armstrong still owns like ~6 million class a shares. and a bunch of class b shares that give him 60% of the vote. he’s not going anywhere folks!

ah well nevertheless

I am just as bullshit on crypto as ever.

I mean you can make boatloads of money off your company stock without completely selling out of it and looking like an obvious fraud.

lol this mf lost money in the biggest bull market ever

NEW: FTX and Alameda Research lost $3.7 billion before 2022. The huge loss is perplexing for two reasons: It contradicts the image SBF has portrayed of his companies, and it bucks the trend of a highly profitable 2021 for the cryptocurrency industry. https://t.co/Qr8lH5CMJH

— Jeff Kauflin (@JeffKauflin) November 21, 2022

I was listening to Slate Money on FTX, and they kept saying how unprecedented it was for "a company as big as FTX" to turn out to have no internal controls, no compliance, no proper accounting etc, and I just kept thinking "well was it actually big?" Like wasn't the company just a giant pufferfish, creating an illusion of size without much there?

yeah hard to say how much was real, also its crypto, its a shadow financial system where everything is a scam, those other companies youre thinking of exist in the normal financial system

To give a very recent example, Enron existed in the "normal financial system" but turned out to be just as much of a Ponzi scheme as FTX, so this sort of thing is not really unprecedented. Bubbles based on financial/accounting/PR scams are as old as (modern) capitalism, cf. the South Sea Bubble, Dutch Tulip Bubble etc. etc.