I have not had the time to figure out what’s happened yet (and it’s not that easy to do because this crisis? has many parts to it). My surface level impression is that this is a carastrophic failure, but one that will mostly affect those who did anything with FTX. Mt.Gox happened, we all learned our lesson and moved on. What reasons do you/we have to believe this will be more consequential for a longer time perhaps?
Ohhhhhhh shit son 1) Sam Bankman-Fried's parents are tax professors at Stanford and Democratic insiders 2) Sam Bankman-Fried's girlfriend/the CEO of Alameda is the daughter of a statistics professor at MIT whose lab has been financed by Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein 3) What money FTX has spent? They have spent on buying Democrats. SBF was Biden's 2nd-largest donor 4) All of their money was created out of thin air - they would make a token, sell 1% of it for $1m, keep 99% of it, and then say they had $100m in assets to get a loan with 5) The only people who could invest were chummy rich people who were basically greater-fool-theorying each other ("I can tell this is a scam, but I am smarter than the average bear, so I just need to sell it before the scam is revealed") 6) The actual failure is Gob Bluth stupidity, over and over and over and over and over again 7) It's a bunch of kids in the Bahamas mainlining Adderal and fucking each other (while also fucking over the banking system) 8) It's the guy who pretended to practice "effective altruism" while also grabbing the money brazenly 9) They were pushing real hard for regulation that would lock everybody else out while allowing them to pursue their shady shit under defacto monopoly status 10) Michael Lewis was embedded in this bullshit for the past six months fanboi-ing the shit out of SBF so of course, not even he saw the surprise ending 11) Jonah Hill looks a fuckton like Sam Bankman-Fried 12) errrrbody hates crypto, and this is crypto that bought naming rights to a goddamn stadium ...that's just off the top of my head. If you would like some hot takes, here's the financial view There was an awesome thread (since deleted) that legit mentioned reptilians.
I didn't realize how big and entangled FTX was. jeesus. Michael Lewis being involved is a breathtaking cherry on top of this formerly 32B-sized cake. So here's my hope: this event will launch investigations, will shake up the US gov enough to pour more, not less, resources into regulating the crypto space. Ever since the ICO days has the pendulum swung towards more VC money, more centralization, less transparency. This event might be big enough to, on its own, swing the pendulum back towards more accessible, transparent and regulated version of crypto. On a scale from one to ten how naive/starry-eyed is this hope?
The interesting development, as I see it, is Gary Gentsler and the SEC attempting to paint the CFTC with it as a way to distract from how deeply in bed he is with all this. Because ultimately? I think the CFTC has the charter to regulate blockchains and the SEC has the charter to regulate exchanges. But right now? I think they're both trying to avoid the impression that meeting with a large exchange in the course of determining regulation was a bunch of chummy insiders. I have been maintaining for... six? Seven? years now that any exchange that interacts with Americans needs Bitlicense-level oversight. I think that's gonna be the easy, everybody-approves-it legislation - "hey look in New York State, where all the money wants to play anyway, there have been stringent rules in place for the past eight years. How much contagion spilled over New York? None. How much loss did New Yorkers suffer from New-York-legal exchanges? None. Is the legislation battle-tested, capitalist-approved? Yes. ...and then there's the witch hunts.
Since the tweet is now deleted, here's what appears to be the same story compiled into his newsletter: https://blockcrunch.substack.com/p/the-definitive-post-on-the-ftx-scandal
Guess the dems want to get ahead of this before the committee heads flip flop: https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-committee-to-hold-hearing-on-ftx-collapse-11668612170?mod=mhp