bit¢oin$

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

im santos-pilled

same guy with 41 different sweaters

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

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"

*you* not intended to refer to anyone specific

borrow > 0

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

it's not a new thought, but jeez sotheby's suuuuuuuuuuuuuucks

what is even going on

https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion

all that money from investors wow is that real money

I presume the Ontario Teachers Pension Fund was not minting their own coins

teachercoin™️

Never use Slack pic.twitter.com/jxyxK1fWeU

— kadhim (＾ｰ^)ノ (@kadhim) January 31, 2023

unveiling my new cryptocurrency PonziCoin

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

at least he was handsome, none of these aholes are handsome anymore

no one knows how to be a proper dandy these days

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.

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 stETH

January 23, 2023https://t.co/uiHwcpktlu pic.twitter.com/c47XRPPY5F

— web3 is going just great (@web3isgreat) February 1, 2023

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

throw your lot in with standford grads who do not have crime experience

is this effective altruism butterfly.jpg

lol

fwiw not sure crypto was really a big part of that investigation but still

lol

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.

Presumably they did this through the loophole known as “being white”.

sound like theyre chinese, they were rich tho

were they crazy rich

criminal rich azns

crime imitating art (movie titles)

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

Buy the dip(shit)!

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

a long packed thread on the failed bank signature, not even sure where to drop it it touches so many sides: the recent unpleasantness (big bank run, wobbliness ongoing), and thus thiel, musk (walk-on), anna selvey (who comes out looking good!) (ish), FTX, wirecard (comparison), BCCI, crooked new york landlordism (what other kind is there), madoff and ponzi, def jam & murder inc, russian and israeli oligarchs, diverse mafias, putin and the ottoman empire, and to start it all an assassination (perp very disputed) (someone got locked up but may have been framed!)

This is a deep dive on Signature, the "other" bank failure of March 2023. Barney Frank & the WSJ editorial board have called it an "Execution"

Appropriately, Signature's origins date back to an assassination.

The year was 1999, dateline Monte Carlo https://t.co/7fReQf2uHv

— moe tkacik (@moetkacik) March 24, 2023

good article but i want everyone involved to be thrown into an active volcano

keep anne selvey, she has a funny voice and like robin hood only scammed the rich to give to the poor (herself)

tbf its handy for wash trading too sure the whales already have their ways to do it but what about the lil guy who wants to pump n dump some shit coin whos looking out for him

Here comes another fraudulent Tether exchange, which openly admits to being a no-KYC/AML money laundering exchange.

It makes sense for Tether to integrate with more money laundering operations. How else would terrorists launder their money?

Tether 🤝 Terrorist money laundering. pic.twitter.com/1RdDNHweb2

— Bitfinex’ed 🔥🐧 Κασσάνδρα 🏺 (@Bitfinexed) April 11, 2023

Bitcoin miners can also avoid fees Texas charges to maintain and bolster the power grid by strategically powering down during peak demand, when those fees are assessed. And when power prices are high, the miners can also shut down and resell their allotted electricity — which they prepurchase at low rates — for hefty profits.

The Times gave two examples of how this works. During 2021's Winter Storm Uri, during which about 40 Texans froze to death during extended blackouts, ERCOT paid Bitdeer's Bitcoin mine in Rockdale an average of $175,000 an hour for not operating, earning the company more than $18 million over four days — "from fees ultimately paid by Texans who had endured the storm," the Times adds. Another Bitcoin company made tens of millions reselling electricity during Uri.

https://theweek.com/in-depth/1022698/how-voracious-bitcoin-mining-is-messing-with-texans