or all of them coordinating
― Lord Pickles (Boring, Maryland), Friday, 13 January 2023 19:52 (one year ago) link
ums looool
― Tracer Hand, Friday, 13 January 2023 22:20 (one year ago) link
tbf "whale" is not crypto-specific
e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_JPMorgan_Chase_trading_loss
― circles, Saturday, 14 January 2023 09:23 (one year ago) link
rich gamblers in general iirc
― Tracer Hand, Saturday, 14 January 2023 10:34 (one year ago) link
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
― lag∞n, Sunday, 15 January 2023 03:33 (one year ago) link
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
― lag∞n, Sunday, 15 January 2023 18:52 (one year ago) link
xp It's also used in pay-to-win mobile gaming and prostitution.
― Christine Green Leafy Dragon Indigo, Sunday, 15 January 2023 19:12 (one year ago) link
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
― Karl Malone, Sunday, 15 January 2023 19:16 (one year ago) link
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.
― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Monday, 16 January 2023 23:33 (one year ago) link
(directors and officers insurance policy)
levine goes deep on why some crypto things are securities
https://archive.ph/DIH97
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 17 January 2023 19:53 (one year ago) link
lol cmon
[DB] New FTX CEO John J. Ray III Says He's Considering Restarting Crypto Exchange: WSJ— db (@tier10k) January 19, 2023
― lag∞n, Thursday, 19 January 2023 15:51 (one year ago) link
he got the bug!@
― mark s, Thursday, 19 January 2023 15:51 (one year ago) link
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.
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.
― 龜, Thursday, 19 January 2023 15:54 (one year ago) link
Alameda had a very long straw
― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, 19 January 2023 16:13 (one year ago) link
The Conch Shack
― mh, Thursday, 19 January 2023 16:21 (one year ago) link
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.
― lag∞n, Thursday, 19 January 2023 16:24 (one year ago) link
are they 41 difft guys tho
― mark s, Thursday, 19 January 2023 16:26 (one year ago) link
im santos-pilled
same guy with 41 different sweaters
― lag∞n, Thursday, 19 January 2023 16:27 (one year ago) link
Gemini’s co-brothers are alleging that Barry Silbert used his loan company to increase the amount of Bitcoin in Grayscale’s coffers to increase the amount of money it made, using stupid loans from 3AC, the hedge fund that killed the market. It's SO dumb.https://t.co/dWWMSOaDUu pic.twitter.com/B1QU4O50Ym— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) January 19, 2023
― lag∞n, Thursday, 19 January 2023 16:45 (one year ago) link
I mean as with a lot of frauds (though not all) it's almost funny that you need an explainer for FTX/Alameda, because it's like "It's this very sophisticated computer code where they could take your money and do whatever they wanted with it even though they told you otherwise"
― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, 19 January 2023 16:59 (one year ago) link
*you* not intended to refer to anyone specific
― longtime caller, first time listener (man alive), Thursday, 19 January 2023 17:00 (one year ago) link
borrow > 0
― G. D’Arcy Cheesewright (silby), Thursday, 19 January 2023 17:30 (one year ago) link
My BIG story on the NFT collapse for Vanity Fair has a bombshell: the buyer of the $24 million trove of Bored Apes at Sotheby's appears to be Sam Bankman-Fried's disgraced FTX. It's a deep-dive into deals with the devil during a gold rush, before the fall. https://t.co/PseW1YVIaZ— Nate Freeman (@NFreeman1234) January 18, 2023
― groovypanda, Friday, 20 January 2023 06:52 (one year ago) link
it's not a new thought, but jeez sotheby's suuuuuuuuuuuuuucks
― Karl Malone, Friday, 20 January 2023 07:44 (one year ago) link
what is even going on
https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion
― Karl Malone, Saturday, 21 January 2023 00:52 (one year ago) link
all that money from investors wow is that real money
― lag∞n, Saturday, 21 January 2023 00:58 (one year ago) link
I presume the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund was not minting their own coins
― Lord Pickles (Boring, Maryland), Saturday, 21 January 2023 01:26 (one year ago) link
teachercoin™️
― lag∞n, Saturday, 21 January 2023 01:31 (one year ago) link
Never use Slack pic.twitter.com/jxyxK1fWeU— kadhim (^ー^)ノ (@kadhim) January 31, 2023
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 31 January 2023 13:41 (one year ago) link
unveiling my new cryptocurrency PonziCoin
― Critique of the Goth Programme (Neil S), Tuesday, 31 January 2023 14:16 (one year ago) link
btw i watched this video on the real ponzi, its a wild story, people were going crazy for his investment opportunities
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4waqVKanxA
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 31 January 2023 14:41 (one year ago) link
at least he was handsome, none of these aholes are handsome anymore
― ꙮ (map), Tuesday, 31 January 2023 19:16 (one year ago) link
no one knows how to be a proper dandy these days
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 31 January 2023 19:27 (one year ago) link
thinking its best not to use a technology that publicly exposes an immutable record for crime
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/property-grab-afp-smashes-alleged-10-billion-chinese-money-laundering-operation-20230201-p5ch7k.html
Federal agents have dismantled an alleged Chinese-Australian money laundering organisation that moved an estimated $10 billion offshore while amassing a blue-chip property portfolio comprising Sydney mansions, a luxury city building and hundreds of acres of land near Sydney’s second airport.
....
Police have also seized cryptocurrency and are examining how the syndicate used crypto exchanges to transfer tainted funds around the world without drawing the attention of authorities, according to confidential sources with knowledge of the investigation.
― lag∞n, Thursday, 2 February 2023 16:14 (one year ago) link
menawhile scrunkly is scrimblo-staked blarf, many take this as an indication the hacker is a wangspung bluvbif
Wormhole hacker becomes the third largest holder of stETHJanuary 23, 2023https://t.co/uiHwcpktlu pic.twitter.com/c47XRPPY5F— web3 is going just great (@web3isgreat) February 1, 2023
― mark s, Thursday, 2 February 2023 16:15 (one year ago) link
tho tbf there are some cryptos that dont leave such a trail and mb they were just busted by records kept by the exchanges, either way better to use time tested crime methods and not throw your lot in with standford grads who do not have crime experience xp
― lag∞n, Thursday, 2 February 2023 16:16 (one year ago) link
throw your lot in with standford grads who do not have crime experience
is this effective altruism butterfly.jpg
― mark s, Thursday, 2 February 2023 16:19 (one year ago) link
lol
― lag∞n, Thursday, 2 February 2023 16:20 (one year ago) link
fwiw not sure crypto was really a big part of that investigation but still
― lag∞n, Thursday, 2 February 2023 16:21 (one year ago) link
The alleged transnational crime organisation exploited Australia’s migration system, with a senior syndicate figure being granted a significant-investor visa and another receiving Australian citizenship despite being a wanted fugitive.
― lag∞n, Thursday, 2 February 2023 16:22 (one year ago) link
Presumably they did this through the loophole known as “being white”.
― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Thursday, 2 February 2023 23:27 (one year ago) link
sound like theyre chinese, they were rich tho
― lag∞n, Thursday, 2 February 2023 23:33 (one year ago) link
were they crazy rich
― 龜, Friday, 3 February 2023 00:01 (one year ago) link
criminal rich azns
― lag∞n, Friday, 3 February 2023 00:08 (one year ago) link
crime imitating art (movie titles)
― mh, Friday, 3 February 2023 17:27 (one year ago) link
BREAKING per @EleanorTerrett & my reporting: Securities lawyers including a past top @SECGov official say SEC looking to largely "cut off" crypto in all its forms after FTX debacle. @SEC_Enforcement has "blanketed" crypto w so-called Wells Notices signaling intent to bring cases— Charles Gasparino (@CGasparino) February 14, 2023
i am guessing that, despite appearances, this will have no effect and right now is actually a great time to buy crypto
― President of Destiny Encounters International (Karl Malone), Wednesday, 15 February 2023 00:22 (one year ago) link
Buy the dip(shit)!
― Alicia Silver Stone (Boring, Maryland), Wednesday, 15 February 2023 13:49 (one year ago) link
interested to see where the political donations stuff goes some compelling evidence out there that big name consultant types, lis smith sean mcelwee, might be wrapped up in this
Nishad Singh, former director of engineering at FTX, has pled guilty to six charges including fraud charges, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and a charge related to campaign finance violations. He will cooperate against SBF.— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) February 28, 2023
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 28 February 2023 17:42 (one year ago) link