Bitcoin Forum

If you check Twitter and r/CryptoCurrency, you'll see a lot of warnings about FTX[1], especially now after CZ decided to liquidate FTT (FTX token).

I don't claim to know what's going on, as I'm just sharing some of the things I've read the last few hours, but just to be safe and even though FTX CEO denied the rumors[2], it may still be a good idea to withdraw your funds from the exchange, for now at least.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/yo4vf7/serious_ftx_rumors_securing_your_crypto/
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/yo6kxe/ftx_ceo_pretty_much_confirms_mass_exodus_from_the/

This means nothing.

Here is some of the content Celsius was putting out in the days before they suspended all withdrawals:
https://nitter.it/CelsiusNetwork/status/1535669755042045958#m - continuing to advertise their services.
https://piped.mha.fi/watch?v=GyRO_W-utXs - an AMA, including a section at 9:30 about why they are so transparent.

And let's take a look at Voyager:
https://nitter.it/investvoyager/status/1536194363767902208#m - they claim to be "unaffected by market conditions", 3 days before taking out an emergency $200 million and 15,000 BTC loan.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/voyager-digital-provides-asset-risk-114500760.html - also claiming to be "transparent", "low risk", and in a "strong position".

Both these platforms then suspended withdrawals and then later filed for bankruptcy, with everyone who still had coins on them not yet being refunded a single satoshi.

Do not believe the CEO tweeting that everything is fine. Of course they will say that, since saying anything else will just accelerate the bank run they are already experiencing. Get your coins in to your own wallets now.

Of course, you shouldn't believe everything a CEO writes, it is certain that each of them will moderate the matter and try to calm the tension.
On the other hand, we have the Binance CEO, or whoever is behind their official Twitter account which with its big influence causes additional panic related to FTX.
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1589374530413215744

I personally don't like a single thing in all of this. The big impact of the biggest player or another fiasco with the exchange will certainly have serious consequences.

There is no doubt Binance have caused a large amount of this panic, but I'm not sure what else they should have done? Dumping their tokens in secret and then announcing it after would have been worse I think. At least this way FTX users are aware of what is going on and are being given some warning to get their coins off the exchange before its too late.

Unless of course CZ is also shorting FTT, and by kicking off this bank run is now making huge profits. That's definitely the kind of shady shit that Binance would pull.

Either way, the CEOs are making huge profits at the expense of the average users. Stop letting them.

The fact that the platform survived in the past months is a sign of wellness that it will continue for the coming months, but the user must think several times, especially if he plans to leave his money in the platform.
This problem will be solved, the platform is famous and the liquidity problems will not lead to catastrophic results, but past experiences have proven that it is the customer who will pay the price for the platforms' stupidity/greed.

Is it really possible to make leverage trading and shorting shitcoins like FTT?
I just can't believe that crap like FTT is still worth around $22 despite all the negative campaign surrounding it.
Since Binance still have the biggest trading volume for FTT than anything is possible, but I just checked Sam posting on twitter and he is saying that everything is fine, and competition is spreading false rumors about them.
Honestly, I never liked both of this guys (CZ and Sam), and this looks like some high level stupid chess game they are playing against each other.

Although the information shared by CZ and some crypto influencer was denied by the FTX CEO but one thing I learned so far from my cryptocurrency journey is that when 3-4 powerful or reputable people claim about something while the company in the subject said its all rumor what the company is accused of is true.
The issue may be hyped but the company is having related issues. I will advise people to wise and stay away from FTX for now.

I also write a tweet (https://twitter.com/milesdeutscher/status/1589631447517655040) about how it will go wrong for Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX

The block reported a few minutes ago, that FTX disabled withdrawals[1]. Can someone using the platform confirm if that's true or not?

Because when checking FTX status page, it seems like everything is fine[2].

[1] https://www.theblock.co/post/184176/ftx-appears-to-have-stopped-processing-withdrawals-on-chain-data-show
[2] https://ftx.com/status

Probably nothing, Right?  ???

https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1173418810918916096

https://i.postimg.cc/HsdwhB8s/1111.png

Binance are the bigger player in this situation, We could see massive liquidations in the alt markets things that have futures and degen traders to part with their capital.

Buckle up lads... Exchange wars are here.

Well, this is definitely not something I was expecting:


Let's hope that Binance doesn't pull the plug on the deal, otherwise FTX is finished.

As they say, FTX asked Binance for help cover the liquidity crunch
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1590013613586411520?s=20&t=0yfwU2oLZpEaG8_BHcz3_g

therefore, in order to avoid another big crash, we will be satisfied because Binance is strengthening its dominance. I'm not sure if I should be happy with this turn of events.

Again exchanges prove to be the weakest point of bitcoin. We had exchanges that got hacked (mt.gox), Scammed and stole (btc-e, quadriga), got shut down by the government like the exchanges in China, now FTX got insolvent and had to be sold to binance to avoid bankruptcy...

Every time this happens there's a widespread panic even when people know they shouldn't hold money on centralized exchanges.

Not your keys, not your bitcoins!

I am not getting what happened exactly right now. If Binance wants to acquire FTX then the market should be good. At least do dump. But seems suddenly the market crashed. I just looking for the reason actually. It was a good move for traders if Binance buy the FTX exchange. Also, BNB skyrocketed a few hours back. Just surprising to me everything.

Why doesn't he explain to us as well why his shitcoin seemed stable and was pumping too at a certain time, yet the rest of the market was plunging?

https://i.imgur.com/UQyep2z.png

It already happened. Cz got what he wanted.

it doesn't look good to me if there are no major competitors to Binance.

On my account everything looked normal, but I don't have any coins left on exchange so I can't verify if withdrawals are still working or not.

This makes you wonder how many more exchanges are on life support by Binance who is providing them fake trading volume, and I am sure it's not only FTX.
I am not saying FTX and other exchanges are not shady, but Binance is certainly showing top volume out of all exchanges, and they like to put their noses in everything.
CZ seems really desperate to crush any competition and have full control, maybe he is a bit more inspired by his communist regime policies :P

There are 1-6 Tweets from Sam @SBF_FTX to clarify things on what has happened which included the withdrawals and were posted 6 hours ago. And it as follows with the quotes:

---

I agree that it all lies to this. Whenever there are dramas like these from exchanges and also hacks, the market plunges and reacts so fast. It's always the best not to trust them with your bitcoins there.

I am very skeptical if CZ can really acquire FTX very easily. This might be blocked by some politicians from the executive level and also with the backing of political voices from the legislative level. I do not wish this, however, FTX might be left to die unless it can find an American company for a bail out.

What I speculate might happen is much of the derivative traders in the cryptospace might go back to Bitmex and Arthur Hayes will become the king of cryptoderivatives again. Bitmex has settled all of their legal problems with the government already.

https://i.ibb.co/CBQ76jr/6-A0-D89-B8-2-A50-431-C-9200-198-F0-CF0-D49-B.jpg

I'm amused at people who earlier brushed off rumors that FTX is probably silently insolvent. Lines like "FTX is a strong exchange," "FTX is popular," "FTX makes a lot of money," "FTX is a huge exchange," "FTX is solid," "FTX is one of the top crypto exchanges," "FTX is too big to fall/fail," and so on. They haven't learned their lessons.

And between SBF doing his urgent damage control versus CZ doing his greedy moves plus washing dirty linens in public, SBF is really bound to lose. CZ's moves created an extremely strong pressure that FTX couldn't possibly withstand. A perfect and lethal combination of CZ's almost $600 billion of FTT to dump in full view of the entire crypto public plus his popular public image with a big and strong body of followers who will definitely be taking a cue from his actions would certainly kill FTX.

Poor SBF! CZ is the man who knows the game! But he isn't the hero here. They're both villains.

And they won't from this one either. The Celsius rumors were dismissed as FUD, and then they collapsed. The Terra rumors were dismissed as FUD, and then they collapsed. The Voyager rumors. The FTX rumors. Current rumors about BlockFi are being dismissed, but I don't think they are in a particularly healthy situation either. Hell, even Coinbase only survived by laying off 20% of their employees.

I've said it before; it does not matter at all how reputable an exchange is, how long they have been operating, or how big they are. There is no such thing as too big to fail. This applies to all crypto exchanges, Binance included. Are all the people chasing promises of ridiculous interest rates and obviously unsustainable growth on these platforms too young to remember 2008? How an investment bank with almost $700 billion in assets (which is twice the market cap of all the bitcoin in circulation, so FAR more than Binance is worth) which had existed for over 150 years failed? I suppose an endless stream of naive teenagers new to the space would explain why these platforms keep attracting more users while simultaneously causing millions of users to lose everything.

To simplify: we are insolvent, we didn't have our customer's money and had to borrow from CZ, In exchange CZ will take over FTX but it will take some time to do the paperwork.
Please have patience, I fucked up.

Now with multiple exchanges deciding to provide Proof-of-reserves as reassurance for their customers, it would be interesting to see what the other platforms are up to and whether we're going witness the collapse of some of them.

I think it's obvious - if the exchange refuses to provide proof of reserves, then they are running fractional reserve and are lending your coins out to unknown third parties. All such exchanges should be permanently abandoned by anyone with an ounce of sense.

However, exchanges providing proof of reserves does not mean they are safe to use. There are endless ways they can fudge the numbers and make it appear as it they are fully backed up when they aren't. A prime example would be USDT/Tether. They released several proof of reserves, and court documents later showed that Bitfinex transferred hundreds of millions of dollars to Tether on the morning of the days of their audits, and Tether transferred hundreds of millions back out again the next day. There is nothing stopping an exchange taking out a brief loan on the day of the audit to make it look like they aren't fractional reserve, or pulling back several outstanding loans or investments for a single day, or even printing a few million more of their own shitcoin, or a hundred other things to make their books seem balanced when they are no such thing. And at the end of the day, the only "proof" that any of us will see is that which the exchange in question want us to see. It will be entirely trust based.

There is no way for an average user to independently verify what the exchange is saying is true, just like all the exchanges over the last month who have said repeatedly that everything is fine and then collapsed the next day. Want to verify your coins are safe? Get them in your own wallet. Want to verify your exchange isn't insolvent? Use a decentralized one which does not have the power to give your coins out to third parties.

I'm catching up on all of this, so forgive me if this has been determined before. What does proof of reserves actually mean, as in I know what it means per say, but what sort of proof is actually considered proof?

As suggested, couldn't the numbers just be fudged, and therefore you're none the wiser anyway. However, an exchange simply appears better since they're being transparent. Seems like the richer the exchanges, the more likely they'll be able to reassure customers they're safe to use, by giving the illusion they're backed by a ton of money.

They seriously think people are going to believe their words and statistics?  :D
I think most of us already knew that exchanges are reporting fake trading volume, and situation is surely no better with their reserves.
They can create fake reserve balance, unless there is some way to verify this with simple signing a message from their addresses and proving how many coins they have...
Let me predict what could happen next... new wave of ''evil hackers'' will show up and they will allegedly lose a lot of coins, so they can blame them for everything later.

For coins this should be signed message from addresses to prove ownership and balance.
I am not sure how they can do this for fiat currencies, maybe bank statements, but this can be faked so easy.

That's a good question because if an exchange is able to create and sell its own tokens or even like FTX send its token to another company, which they really own (Alameda), and make that company lend it out, this is at the very least a shady tactic. You make it look like another company holds assets, but in reality all their liquidity is fake because FTT has no intrinsic value. It has value as long as the issuer (FTX) shows profit and can act like its business has market value, and here we go into something much bigger like how do you value a company like FTX? You get their numbers which include number of clients, volume of trades, assets held, domain value, and so on, but it's all smoke and mirrors.
Their client number can go down by 90% in a week and Bitconnect, Luna, and a number of defunct exchanges like Quadriga are prime examples of this.
Their domain name is worth a lot only as long as the company is reputable. Mt.Gox domain used to be worth a lot when Mt.Gox was trading, but not when Mark went to jail.
Their volume can go to 0 when they shut down all trades, so it's worth looking into only when the company is in good shape.
Assets held usually includes assets that are borrowed, landed and levered. These can't be taken seriously. Also, they'll always add the value of their own token to that, but their token has value only as long as the exchange is in good shape. For instance if Sam would decide to drive under influence with drugs in the car and land in jail for it, the value of the token would go down.

All these companies, including Binance and Coinbase are building nice looking castles out of sand and hope that you'll give them money to buy a lifetime entry, or your own room inside.

Only decentralized coins held by you in your own wallet can be called solid. No stable coins and exchange tokens are.

Kraken has been doing it for quite some time now, you can see the technical details here: https://www.kraken.com/proof-of-reserves

From my understanding, it's not something that can be tampered with.

Yeah, that's how it really is.
It will take time until this mess will be fixed but with some help of Binance, they're now clear and making it look like they've never made a mistake from what they did.
The time they're asking really clicks on the time that they should fix the papers together with Binance. We will see if there will be some next the same scenario that shall happen for other exchanges which might involve Binance again.

You can't tamper with the Merkle tree once it has been created, but that doesn't stop them from using erroneous data to create the Merkle tree in the first place, or feed other erroneous data to the auditors. How do you know they have supplied the auditors with a complete list of all the balances on all their customer accounts, and not left some out? How do you know they haven't borrowed funds or pulled back in various loans or investments during the time of the audit, and they are running a fractional reserve the other 364 days of the year? Hell, how do you know they haven't just paid some whale to a sign a message saying that Kraken owns a few tens of thousands of bitcoin the whale owns? You don't.

There is exactly one way for you to be able to verify that your coins are 100% backed up without involving any trust in third parties: Keep them in your own wallet.

CZ is assuming an increasingly dangerous position in this market by controlling so much of it. It is possible that the FTT fracas is due to a fallout in a relationship (https://twitter.com/StackerSatoshi/status/1589971079703171072?s=20&t=Biw8cu_VWzt9WEcIT-UwqA). FTT is being forced to sell 580 million dollars of BNB to Binance, and the refusal is the penalty for the tweet and dump. FT has lost 70% of its market cap in 48 hours, along with a general market decline

Plot twist: CZ is not buying FTX. I guess he likes it that the prices are falling. Makes it easy for him and his rich friends to scoop some cheap coins.

I think CZ knew FTX was insolvent and made this a bigger deal than it would be without his involvement. I also doubt he's alone in this.

According to a tweet by bitmex reseach. Bitmex claims to be the early pioneer and strong advocate of Proof Of Reserves and Proof Of Liabilities (https://twitter.com/BitMEX/status/1590341270140248064)

Apparently, their fist snapshot was in the summer of 2021 (https://twitter.com/BitMEXResearch/status/1590332667769532416)

I am not that technical, and I don't know much about the merkle tree, so definitely I have no idea how this proof of reserves is verified. Maybe it's time to hit YouTube  :D

This plot twist is not for movies, though. This wasn't unexpected. This was a possibility all the while. And while I only read a handful of enthusiasts who raised this possibility, in hindsight it makes perfect sense. CZ went for the kill, why should he then save SBF's ass?

CZ made ruthless moves which actually served as the final nail of FTX's coffin. It was CZ who opened FTX's Pandora's box in public. It was he who made moves loud and big enough to be easily noticed by the entire crypto community, sowing fear and panic. It was actually CZ who fired the fatal shot. And now he'll take the responsibility to revive it? That doesn't make sense.

If CZ's motive was to take FTX, he should have been milder and circumspect with his actions. He shouldn't have been too harsh against the very platform he wished to acquire and make money out of. And he should be the one to make the offer in private, but no, it was the other way around; it was SBF who reached out to him.

https://i.imgur.com/h0SlEvg.png
https://twitter.com/binance/status/1590449161069268992

https://i.imgur.com/XK8pvNq.png
https://twitter.com/binance/status/1590449164932243456

https://i.imgur.com/pe0sjX0.png
https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1590463239925944320?cxt=HHwWgMDSwfv4upIsAAAA

Mission accomplished! FTX is dead! SBF has fallen! It's now time to release some soft and dramatic statements if only to pacify some angry and hurt souls.

Well said.

CZ is a drama queen. There's an interview with him on youtube where he's asked about the profits from being in the crypto business and he says something like I'm not in it for the money, I don't care about that, I'm here to build and i do it for the people. He doesn't look in the camera, avoids eye contact while saying this and looks a bit nervous like he's being pushed.

Remember guys, you are safu, it's all for your good!  :-X

He is, he surely is a drama queen, but let's give credit to where it's due. And CZ deserves it. He knows business the smart way. Seemingly dramatic and humble in the outside, ruthless in the inside. And he also easily bends with regulatory winds. He does unregistered business silently, dodges regulatory requirements, but when noticed by the authorities, he'd try to amicably comply with their demands.

On the one hand, he pushes the idea of decentralization to appeal to the crypto masses, but creates centralized products to earn from. He talks of freedom and privacy and also force KYC to everybody.

He constantly talks of building or buidl but he's also slowly but surely making sure others would crumble down.

The funny thing here why anyone still believe in Binance until now? CZ is just full of drama, I never trust a person who can't back up his own words with a real action. The reason why I say many people still use Binance is this exchange still on top 1 the biggest volume and popularity.

I think the SAFU that CZ offer on Binance is actually they don't have SAFU, but it's just a reserve money from their profit which actually the main purpose isn't to cover customers losses due to hack.

Let's say he did really tried to help but he's a businessman and understands that removing a competitor would make his business flourish.

Although many don't like the so called acting of CZ, we don't know what has happened behind. And for everyone that's using Binance, it's hard to jump off to another ship that we don't know if they'll stay for long just as what's happening for most things this year. That safu thing became popular every after hack that happens to them. It's for sure that they've got a reserve fund that will cover every loss that they'll make if they will be hacked again.

Was all this chaos caused by $2.1Bilion USD that Binance decided to liquidate, or was it the last nail, if such an amount caused all these problems, then most of the platforms are floating on an ice surface and it is easy to extort them by whales.

I will not believe any news at the moment, I will wait several weeks and then read the sequence of events, but we must learn that this market has become dependent on hot money, there are no real investments in all cryptocurrencies and exchanges.

So as entirely expected by anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention over the last few months, everything was absolutely not fine and they were lying through his teeth. What's more, FTX have now deleted the tweets saying everything is fine: https://nitter.it/corndalorian/status/1590326571792859136#m

I assume with the Binance deal fallen through (or more likely never seriously on the cards to begin with), all FTX users will have lost everything and will be stuck in months of bankruptcy proceedings just like Celsius, Voyager, and all the other collapsed platforms' users are.

Seriously, when will people learn?

Word up, homey.  I'm not sure what other CEOs are profiting off the backs of plebs, but after learning a bit about this Binance/FTX situation I'm fairly confident CZ is a prime offender.  And I'm still figuring out what went down--if you'd asked me what FTX was yesterday, I would have drawn a blank, because I'm not sure I'd even heard of them until this debacle.  Is that weird or what?

It might be unbelievable, but just look at all the shitcoins on the market and the valuations some of them have.  We were in a pretty raging bull market for a while there, and that's usually when even the shittiest of shitcoins get blown up like a ton of TNT.  I never thought BNB would ever reach $60, and yet here it is today trading for $275.  When you've got true believers buying coins they're in love with, rational investing goes flying out the window.

100000% yes.

And that is always going to be part of the problem. I never thought USDT would work, yet people love it. I thought once the lack of valid audits happened with USDT it would implode, but no it kept going. I thought once USDC was released and showed how to have public information and real shown audits and everything else USDT would start to die, but no it kept going. With the TERRA / Luna disaster I thought finally this will cause people to shy away from USDT....but nope.

Looking away from stablecoins there are 1000s of other shitcoins and tokens that people rode to the bottom. There are stocks that people do the same with.

Such is life, at least now we can get some cheaper BTC.

-Dave

At that point, I mean when CZ acted as if he's trying to help, I believe he had already made up his mind. Well, even long before he posted on Twitter that they are going to liquidate their FTT as a "post-exit risk management," citing the case of LUNA as something to learn lessons from, he already had a plan. That LUNA thing was obviously just an alibi. It was already obvious at that point that CZ wanted to kill FTX. The die was already cast.

So when he tried to look into FTX's financial state right after he killed it himself, to find out how he could be of help to its users, it was just pure drama. In the first place, you fired the bullet that killed FTX. And now you'd suddenly help it so that it won't die? Does that make any sense to you?

You initiated the dump yourself and now you'd take a look at its financial situation hoping that it could still be saved? You made the huge public announcement that you'd dump almost $600 million worth of FTT, causing an extremely damaging ripple effect, and now you're suddenly concerned of FTX's liquidity?

Come on, let's call a spade a spade! Let's not be naïve and act as if we're born yesterday. He's not trying to help. He was just acting as if he's not the ruthless competitor that he is.

I've always hated the made-up coins from exchanges, and didn't even know FTX made-up their own BS tokens.
They're an exchange, it should be very simple: I deposit dollars, someone else deposits Bitcoin. I exchange my dollars for his Bitcoin, and the exchange keeps a small percentage. So how the fuck can they be insolvent? Are they doing fractional reserve banking nowadays?

Updates: It seems like withdrawals are open once again[1] (but not for everyone based on what I'm reading on twitter).

This is good to see, but I'm not sure how they managed to do that when Tether just froze some of their funds (46$ M)[2]

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/10/crypto-exchange-ftx-reopens-withdrawals-nansen/
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/10/tether-freezes-46m-of-usdt-following-law-enforcement-request/

They aren't going to allow everyone to withdraw if Sam is down 8 billion unless he somehow gets a loan or sells the exchange and uses that money to make people whole.
Wow Tether froze 46m of the money they make out of thin air. How much of that 46 is backed?

https://i.imgur.com/64uvFzm.png

"stable" coin


Yes that's what they're doing. They have a lot of money and they use it. It's free money and money makes money.
You can lend it, you can make new companies, you can invest, you can help startups, you can do all sorts of things like when SBF wanted to participate in the acquisition of Twitter. Where would he get that kind of money?

I wanted to say this wouldn't happen with stricter regulation, but it's exactly what banks are doing, and they too get into trouble once in a while. Maybe the difference is they get a bailout.

Most people will never learn, and some will learn after they lose everything, I just hope they won't blame ''bitcoin scam'' after that  :P

Yeah I know what you mean, interesting coincidence that soon after I made a post about FTT price being strangely hanging around $22 it dropped sharply and it's now around $3... still high in my opinion.
Same fate could happen to Binance and BNB at any time in near future, don't think for a second that CZ and his gang are any better than sleazy FTX CEO Sam.
I don't see a single good reason for creating shitcoin for centralized exchange, since this is only made to make owners richer.

I think that situation with real estate is even worse, bubble readay to burst at any moments, Only thing different with stocks is that people have a false sense of more security.

I think that 99% od centralized exchanges creted with made up tokens, and most of them are centralized crap built on their own chain or on ethereum.
This is very defintion of shitcoins, with false label of use case.

Updates:

- Some of FTX's assets have been frozen by the Bahamas securities regulator[1].

Withdrawals:

The on-chain activity that we started seeing yesterday only involves Bahamian funds: https://twitter.com/FTX_Official/status/1590783569471115264

The dominos effect:

- BlockFi has stopped processing withdrawals[2].

- It also appears that many other trading firms/market makers have their funds stuck in the exchange:


[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/11/ftx-assets-frozen-bahamas-regulator-crypto-exchange-bankman-fried
[2] https://twitter.com/BlockFi/status/1590875997351866368

I've never even heard of most of them. It's annoying to see how much power all those "traders" (who try to get rich on exchanges, instead of using crypto as electronic cash) have over Bitcoin's value.

How's the DeFi-hype doing? Is it time to rename it to CeFi yet?

There are more of them not listed here, even some famous sport stars are FTX shareholders, and remember they also purchased some stadiums and arenas in United States, let's see what domino falls down next :D

Maybe rename it to DeadFi.... and I don't know how to call ''revolutionary'' NFT ''industry'' now ;)
This was not pleasant period for people who invested in various defi crap and exchange tokens like this, but in the same time it can be eye opener for many people.

Unlikely. If ICO-hype didn't open their eyes yet, I fully expect people to fall for the next hype too. Greed wins from common sense for many people.

So it looks like things just got worse[1][2][3]. I really doubt that this was a hack and not an inside job.

If this doesn't encourage people to switch to DEXes and non-custodial wallets, I don't know what would.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/ysunbs/ftx_started_transferring_millions_to_unknown/
[2] https://twitter.com/zachxbt/status/1591293813519253504
[3] https://twitter.com/0xfoobar/status/1591294791253258240

Again: I think that's unlikely. DEXes are more complicated, and require people to install their own wallet. I've seen many estimates that put the number of Bitcoin users several times higher than the number of funded Bitcoin addresses. I assume those include people who "own" Bitcoin on centralized exchanges. If they're not even willing to install their own Bitcoin wallet, there's no way they'll install dozens of different wallets for all the shitcoins they're using to invest speculate on pump and dump schemes.

CZ is just as bad. All the smoke and mirrors he keeps going on about - the insurance, "fUnDs ArE sAfU" and other such bullshit, and now the completely meaningless proof of reserves. All designed to install fake confidence, meanwhile he tricks users in to using his centralized scamcoin instead of bitcoin, overcharges bitcoin withdrawal fees by orders of magnitude, and gets their malicious code in to as much software as possible to gather as much data as possible.

I prefer to just call it what it is - a scam.

I don't disagree that there will always be users using centralized exchanges or ready to jump on the next shiny scam that comes along, but I would suggest that using a DEX is significantly less complicated than losing all your assets via yet another centralized exchange scam/hack/insolvency/whatever and having to go through a lengthy and expensive legal process to even have a tiny chance of recovering a tiny proportion of them.

Any normal person can install simple software on their computer to run decentralized exchange, it's not like they never installed anything in their life.
Sure, Dex exchanges can be improved and made better, but benefit is that you won't have to waste time sending your private information and documents to exchange scammers like Sam.
I don't know what people think will happen with their documents now, someone said FTX was hacked and Scam Bankman escaped with his private jet to South America... gangsta style.

He is even worse, because of his Chinese connections, and his net worth including Binance exchange is much bigger.
I know he likes to act as a good guy in public and twitter, but I don't trust anything he does, and btw he wanted to buy the same FTX, so I don't believe that he was so stupid and uninformed to don't know real condition of that company  :P

Rumors now are that he is still in the Bahamas and is "under supervision" from the authorities, meaning he will be unable to leave.

I don't think he ever seriously wanted to buy FTX. He probably just wanted to take a look at their accounts so he could open some short positions or try to pull back funds from other companies which were likely to fall after FTX fell, such as BlockFi. History has shown repeatedly that a centralized exchange will only ever do what is in their own interest.

CZ is a big irony!

This man is like a broken record advising everybody to stay sAfU while promoting his centralized exchange. It's not sAfU to keep money in a centralized exchange. Safety and centralized exchange are antonyms; they're antithesis to each other.

He wants everybody to stay sAfU and yet he's forcing every single user of his exchange to provide personal information and leak and sell them afterwards. He wants them to stay sAfU and yet he's making his customers believe they can withdraw Bitcoin through different shitcoins' networks. He wants them to stay sAfU and yet he's offering lending and staking and other centralized d3Fi nonsense. He wants crypto users to stay sAfU and yet rather than echo Kraken's Powell's advice to withdraw their coins out of exchanges, he deliberately kills competing exchanges thereby causing users' money to get stuck.

Yes FTX done a mistake but CZ wanted to shutdown FTX to kill competition. FTX was growing alot quicker than other platforms and Binance felt like it was a threat for them. CZ has the Chinese intelligence agency behind him he is backed by the Chinese state, if people didn’t find out yet soon they will when the staged “Binance biggest hack” happens and users funds head to addresses controlled by unknown group (Chinese controlled addresses). The chickens will come home to roost.

Yes, I agree with you that CZ is backed by Chinese intelligence and the Chinese state undoubtedly because he was one of the first people who caused this crisis after announcing the sale of Binance and liquidation of any remaining FTT coins, so how was he aware of this from the beginning? What happened to FTX can happen to any other exchange platform, even if it is Binance, and they can then announce that the platform is bankrupt or has been hacked and the money of the users of the platform was stolen by hackers to escape legal provisions. I see that the Binance team is the conspirator on the FTX platform, and they are the main ones responsible for the exacerbation of this crisis and the loss of funds for the users of the FTX platform, so we have to be smarter and not put our crypto in centralized exchange platforms whose main purpose is not the interest of users.

In business, it is not uncommon for competitors to destroy each other, if FTX does not make mistakes then binance will not have a chance. The mistake is still caused by FTX being too greedy and unethical in business when using users' money for the wrong purpose. Binance ruined FTX the same way FTX did with Luna and the projects they invested in.

CZ is of Chinese descent but he has Canadian citizenship. If all this is due to the Chinese government pulling the strings then the US government will soon respond with binance, because SBF is American and his mother is a member of the democrat party.

There are already some fears surrounding Crypto.com's portfolio: https://portfolio.nansen.ai/dashboard/crypto.com

And I can easily see a few more exchanges going down: https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1591690261029130240

Rise of DEX is now inevitable after the fall of FTX and the recent shady transaction between Cryprto.com and Gate for the sake of there snap shot reserve. This shady behaviour of CEX is what makes me twice to even deposit my Bitcoin in there even with a short time. They are using people money for there personal interest without any consent from there investors.

Btw does the news about FTX being the gate to wash democrats money from UK donation is already share here? This recent discovery will surely make the FTX irredeemable since there illegal transaction is already exposed same with all SBF invested company.

Speaking of CZ, here he is blatantly lying on Twitter and claiming that Binance-owned Trust wallet is open source: https://nitter.it/cz_binance/status/1591804907702874113
As I explain here, Trust wallet is not open source: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5415683.msg61049268#msg61049268
But hey, what's one more lie to his Twitter followers who just believe his every word without a second thought, just like his proof of reserves bullshit. And speaking of proof of reserves, is it just me or has Binance's proof of reserves page (https://www.binance.com/en/assets-proof) been down since soon after it launched? I'm sure that's not suspicious at all! ::)

There is a nice video series created on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWfuDeO9thk). It's quite nuts what was going on at FTX. He is even said to have had special accounting software that made sure no warnings are triggered when he makes transactions out of the system and others weren't supposed to get aware of it. He transferred out about $10 billion to Alameda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alameda_Research), and did lots of shady stuff here and there.

Now this Tweet is quite interesting and I believe that other exchanges also have a lot of borderline stuff going on for themselves. I'd be surprised if no others fail because of the current market conditions and over leveraged positions. But the video is a real popcorn video. The FTX corporate structure is more complex than the one of Lehman Brothers used to be. He shows a graphic in the video.  

https://i.imgur.com/J4XfnAQ.png

I received an email from Kraken, the summary is this:
It sounds more trustworthy. Since they're US-based and not hiding in some shady jurisdiction, and considering they've been around much longer, I am quite confident they're more trustworthy. Nevertheless, I withdrew all funds that aren't locked in open orders. I didn't expect FTX to go down this way either.

The Celsius CEO did an AMA where he spoke about how trustworthy and transparent they are three days before they went under.
Voyager released a statement saying they were "unaffected by market conditions" three days before taking out an emergency loan worth $200 million and 15,000 BTC.
FTX made a bunch of tweets showing off their new offices and saying how everything is fine the day before this all kicked off.
BlockFi made statements also reassuring users everything was fine two days before freezing withdrawals.

The bottom line is that no exchange is ever going to come forward and say "Yeah guys, we are struggling", because they know that doing so would kick off a bank run which would be guaranteed to end in them insolvent and bankrupt. Every exchange is going to come out with variations of the same nonsense over the coming days and weeks - we don't lend funds, we are fully solvent, we are backed 1-to-1, here is our proof of reserves, here are our bank statements, and so on. Every one of these statements will be exactly what the exchange wants you to hear, with absolutely zero guarantee or way to verify that they are accurate, honest, or truthful.

Statements are meaningless. Withdraw everything.

That's the thing: they say you can actually verify it! They explain how to verify your funds (https://blog.kraken.com/post/16139/how-kraken-continues-to-lead-the-way-in-transparency-and-trust/) with the Proof of Reserve audits (https://blog.kraken.com/post/15002/kraken-proof-of-reserves-audit-expands-to-include-five-new-assets/).

Note that I haven't verified it, but I also haven't read claims from anyone that they couldn't verify their funds.

Reading that Crypto.com has  of its reserves in Shiba Inu Coin (https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/11/11/cryptocom-preliminary-audit-shows-that-20-of-its-assets-are-in-shiba-inu-coin/20%) and guess what, they are into trouble right now because of some other meme or trash token (GALA). There was an arbitrage opportunity between exchanges and some people went for it and made lots of money with it. Now Crypto.com froze a ton of accounts, asking customers to pay more than they actually have in their accounts in order to get access to whatever is in their accounts. Worse than that, they are individually negotiating with people about the amounts they need to pay back and sometimes even admit they seem to have wrong numbers in their accounting systems.

The interesting question is actually, why would an exchange complain about customers making arbitrage gains? There aren't many good reasons, but one is that the exchange itself loaded up heavily on that token without disclosing it, intended to manipulate its price and then didn't react quickly enough to sudden arbitrage opportunities when dumps happened elsewhere. Huobi is also involved.

Thank god that Crypto.com has Shiba Coin as part of their reservers, that means we are all safe! ??? :P

There is probably a lot more to come over the next weeks and months.

You can verify it only by using data they provide, which will only ever show you what they want you to see. If they are insolvent, then they simply won't release a new audit until they are. And I can think of a dozen ways they could fudge this process. Only use a proportion of accounts to create the Merkle tree. Audit half their user accounts at once and the other half later. Take out loans or borrow funds for the day of the audit. Claw back some outstanding loans or investments for the day of the audit. Even just pay some large player to sign a message saying they own coins they don't. Convert some of their other assets which are not covered by this audit. Collusion with the audit firm. I'm sure there are plenty more you could come up with if you sat and thought about it for a while.

As utterly stupid as this meme-coin-based-on-a-meme-coin is, if customers are depositing it then the exchange should be holding it.

Those are valid points, but wouldn't all these mean jail time if it ever comes out? Getting richer is one thing, risking jail is still undesirable.

Didn't stop the likes of Kumbhani and Arcaro (BitConnect), Do Kwon (Terra Luna), or SBF.

I'd also point out what I pointed out earlier in this thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5419710.msg61263655;topicseen#msg61263655), that court documents have shown that Tether have done one of these exact things (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5322147.msg56656992#msg56656992), borrowing money from others on the very day of their independent audits and returning it the very next day. No arrests or jail time there, and in fact continues to be the largest fractional reserve scam in the whole of crypto.

of course, no matter how bad the whole FTX thing is, it can always be worse.
All FTX customers who have ever made a deposit or withdrawal on that exchange could become public in the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing.

https://i.ibb.co/1LG03Q1/image.png (https://ibb.co/56h1d4m)

source: https://twitter.com/GRDecter/status/1592277141684879361

This should be no surprise, really. This is exactly what happened with Celsius, in that they had to publish a full list of the users' names, holdings, associated transactions, and so on. As I warned over a month ago (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5416383.msg61084024#msg61084024), now that this precedent has been set, then any data held on you by any centralized exchange or platform is at the same risk of similar disclosure. I fully expect a similar full list of all FTX users to be published in the coming weeks.

Just as if you don't want your coins at risk then you need to withdraw them from centralized exchanges, if you don't want your data at risk then you need to be shutting your accounts and requesting they delete all data they hold on you.

It's one thing to support depositing and withdrawing of some shitcoins, but it's totally different level to keep this trash coins in your reserves.
I would imagine that reserves for any serious crypto company should be mostly in Bitcoin, some in stable coins and maybe few biggest shitcoins.
Analogy for shiba inu shitcoin reserves would be like if banks would keep bananas in their safe deposit reserves, instead of gold and silver.

Only in case IF they passed KYC verification.
This is one more good reason why you should avoid sending your documents everywhere, or even better switch to dex echanges like Bisq and p2p trading.

O_e_l_e_o is right: if someone has shitcoins in their exchange account, the exchange should have those shitcoins. Let's say they didn't have Doge, and Doge went up 100-fold. They'd be insolvent if that happens, and it's not something they should risk.

If a customer puts bananas in their safe deposit box, the bank should keep the bananas. They shouldn't speculate on bananas becoming cheaper later on, so they can turn a profit by selling the bananas and holding gold instead.

Exchanges should be holding exactly what their customers deposit, and not a single satoshi (or shiba) less. If I deposited a bunch of dollars at my bank, I wouldn't expect them to swap my USD to CHF on the basis that CHF is less inflationary than USD, even if doing so would make me lose less money long term. Similarly, centralized exchanges shouldn't be swapping customers' assets for other assets, regardless of how moronic those assets are. This kind of playing fast-and-loose with customer deposits is exactly the reason so many exchanges are in the mess they are in. If they just held on to exactly what was deposited, they wouldn't all be insolvent.

Now, if we are talking about the exchange's own money, earned from trading fees, withdrawals fees, and what have you, then yes, they should obviously be holding a bulk of their own money in bitcoin and not shitcoins. But if they are offering shitcoins to their users, then they should be holding whatever shitcoins are deposited. Otherwise they are essentially just trading with users' money, and well, we've got plenty of examples of how that's turned out for them so far.

My point was that bananas would get rotten soon in safe deposits, and I really don't think that 20% of all funds in Crypto.com was held in Shiba Inu by customers, when we know that price of that crap token is $0.000009 and it fell 90% in value.
This looks like deliberate misleading information by owners, maybe to justify if they shut down or close their business.
Someone has to be really stupid to have portfolio like this:

https://i.imgur.com/oc1KUC9.png

This is not how this platform works.
When you create account with them you are giving the full right to do whatever they want with your coins, invest in crap, to leverage trading, and you only have numbers on screen.
It's much different that bank accounts really, and if everyone would try to withdraw all dollars from bank account, system would also collapse.

It is also important to note the exchange CEO bankruptcy news that came earlier. CZ binance space defended his exit decision then. It has now been revealed that the CEO has taken major positions in BNB, DAI, and Ethereum, with over $250 million investment. It will be a challenge, even though it has not been verified. (https://thecryptobasic.com/2022/11/16/ftx-hacker-now-holds-235k-eth-74k-bnb-and1-68m-dai/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ftx-hacker-now-holds-235k-eth-74k-bnb-and1-68m-dai).

Wait, people still listen to these crappy "crypto billionaire" CEO's?

Our escape to crypto was away from the lying, corrupt, greedy and dishonest politicians and lawmakers. All the so-called CEOs and big wigs you see currently in the crypto community are just a replica of the normal world politicians and rich folks.

They will do whatever it takes to keep their position at the top, including lying. I don't trust any of them

That doesn't give the company the right to sell your bananas and speculate on turning a profit. If they don't want rotting bananas, they shouldn't allow them. But they do, because they earn money from trading bananas shitcoins.

So unregulated fractional reserve banking? What can go wrong :D

As Henry Ford (https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/henry_ford_136294) said:

But the problem with people is they don't listen and think these exchanges are best place to store your funds so well we have perfect example of how the FTX crash has lead to the whole market crash but those who have funds over there or say networth in FTT tokens it's all gone and have no chance of recovering from that loss.

As you have warned them in your previous post that they should withdraw funds from exchange and take custody of your funds they were having thoughts like it would never happen with FTX or Binance and people were inviting SBF to some talk show with showing youngest billionaire but now what? He is under supervision of the authority and said he fucked up but who lost funds? Those who believe in them and we have announcement from @theymos as well explaining the risk of storing funds over there but if we still prefer to keep funds over CEX then nobody can help in that case.

A kind of because you have deposited your funds with them and now they can utilise it like the traditional banking system to invest it anywhere keeping the reserve funds in treasury like FTX have them in FTT tokens with 1:1 but they couldn't manage to make balance between it and got liquidated.The wrong was on their part but actual victims were the people who lost funds in this scenario.

They don't make money only by trading shitcoins, they even created and sponsored creation of various crap coins like Solana, and all other exchange coins like FTT, BNB, etc.
Everything can find it's buyer if advertised a lot with pretty label, so you could literally sell shit if you package it in nice box and hire famous people to promote it publicly.
That is why you can see Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie and other actors promoting eating of worms and bugs.

I don't disagree. That is a moronic portfolio, and anyone holding it is likely to lose a large amount of their initial investment. But it is still their right to do so, if they want. The whole point of bitcoin is to let you do whatever you want with your own money, without third parties dictating what you can and cannot do. If someone wants to hold all their money in shitcoins, then that is their right, regardless of how stupid that decision may be. An exchange shouldn't be gambling with customers' deposits.

I'm well aware of that, but what I'm saying is that if exchanges simply kept whatever was deposited to them (instead of all this shady lending/leverage/trading/staking/other DeFi bullshit), regardless of how stupid those deposits are, then they wouldn't all currently be insolvent.

this only brings us to the necessity of partial regulation in the crypto industry. at least in this financial part.
some authoritative institutions would have to have insight or control of the allocated funds on the exchanges, where they would not be allowed to reinvest more than their users accepted.
they all offer profit on stakes, but nowhere can we see what percentage of users actually use it. the victims here are those who kept funds there just for trading, not those who believed that 50% APY on shitcoin could bring good profit.

As I said in another thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5420606.msg61289941#msg61289941), I don't even care at this point. I've long advocated to keep regulation out of bitcoin, but I'm fed up of bitcoin being associated with outright scams such as centralized exchanges and a whole host of centralized shitcoins. Bitcoin itself should remain unregulated, but I don't care if governments around the world regulate every centralized exchange so much that it is impossible for them to remain profitable and every single one of them shuts down. Sure, bitcoin would take a temporary price hit, but then at least it would be used as it was designed in the first place - peer to peer, without third parties.

Centralized exchanges were one of the worst things to happen to bitcoin.

Yup. Bring all centralized exchanges under even more centralized government control, just like banks, and let them run like the banks they've clearly been imitating for years. Highly risky, fractional reserve, printing new tokens out of thin air, and so on. I'll stick to actually owning bitcoin, not a worthless IOU from a scammer.

Here's an interview with SBF that just got released: https://twitter.com/TiffanyFong_/status/1597627998626160640

He'll also be speaking at the Dealbook summit tomorrow: https://www.nytimes.com/events/dealbook-summit

I just listened about half of this interview and I had to stop it at that point.
This guys sounds like being on drugs, and he repeated said word f*cking several times like he is speaking drunk in some bar.
He claims that FTX US was not affected at all and it was only FTX international exchange that got in trouble, but they are still filing for bankruptcy.
If you ask me Sam and guys like him just used Bitcoin industry and his exchange with crap tokens to wash his money and money from other people.
Case closed for me, but I doubt he will ever be convicted or sent to jail, because he has strong political ties.

Pretty much this. Bankers have been stealing billions from the common person to enrich themselves and their politician buddies for years. The last few months are just the first time that this kind of scam has been exposed in crypto, and everyone is acting surprised. The scammed and stolen money ended up in the pockets of the right people, and while doing so SBF simultaneously made a great case for regulators to swoop in and seize control over the entire centralized exchange ecosystem, which is important to the government in order to be able to keep absolute control over monetary policy and their money printer. He's pretty much a hero in their eyes, hence why he is being rewarded with speaking gigs and TV deals.

If there is enough public outcry to actually force an arrest, he'll get off on a technicality or with some meaningless slap on the wrist fine, just like all the other banks and corporations who screw over the average Joe.

I’m wondering how the heck there’s still no class-action lawsuit happening despite the damage done by SBF by mismanaging the FTX during his reign. SBF surely show shady transactions that worthy to have a case yet no one dares to start it since all affected user is just crying only on social media instead of uniting to make this class action possible.

I believe there are some popular law firm in US willing to take a case like this even on a pro bono basis since this will be a good advertisement to there firm.

SBF thick skin is surely back up by a god father high official.

The case you make here would make sense as the crypto community was usually confronted with unreasonable legal treatment, for example when you look at Ross Ulbricht's case. The guy got like two life sentences plus 40 years or something. I know there have been some unknowns but still, sending that guy to prison until his death is at least questionable. There has been a variety of other cases where people/scammers were cracked down on in the crypto industry, while bundling garbage mortgages, selling the bundles, bundling and selling them again, and accepting an accelerated suicidal rate because of ordinary people going insolvent led to no convictions at all as far as I recall. We'll never get to find out I guess, but when an exchange like FTX goes bankrupt, there are certainly people who literally lost their life existence.

Now they can say "hey crypto people, you have always complained that we were so harsh with you, but look, SBF is a free man. He made a mistake, but we don't want to be too harsh with you guys. SBF is a free man, but has to pay some penalty of course. However, and all of you will certainly agree, we now need some standards to be put in place."

That's a clever move and that is probably how it is going to play out. Eventually they know that the industry will grow one way or another. In a best case scenario from the governments' perspective there will be a vibrant network of centralized exchanges with limitless access for financial authorities to all the data. They are probably going to play with very well.

We already know that centralized exchanges widely sell your data to various blockchain analysis companies as well as data brokers, and they freely share your data with governments around the world. (And of course all these entities circulate your data between themselves even more). Given that, I would not be at all surprised if it came out that some centralized exchanges were working even more closely with governments, or indeed if a government flat out owned a centralized exchange for the purposes of harvesting data and enforcing regulations.

Breaking! SBF gets put against a wall and executed.




For those who had high hopes, unfortunately it did not happen literally, but during an interview.
Sam gets asked if he knew the funds were being sent to Alameda and he looks down down into the ground, avoids eye contact, starts talking abut how leveraged Alameda was.
When asked again if he knew, he answers "I can't speak for who knew what"  

This guy's mastered the art of conversation.
-Hey, Sam, do you know today's date? -I can't  say who knows what!  :D

The host responds by quoting FTX TOS where it's stated that no users funds can be loaned out but they were moved, and used to pay Alameda's credit.

In response Sam repeats "they can't be loaned out" like he has a mental breakdown :D

Full interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Hxf4Vf54PI

The part where he mumbles is at 4:30 but the whole thing looks unreal, like if there was a kid that said he has a degree in finances from Harvard and they start asking him some basic questions and he tries to do his best to look professional but he has no idea what to say. He knows he's full of shit, but tries to hide it as long as possible, thinking nobody will notice.

In your last sentence you make two possible propositions to describe ways that governments might choose to get information through some form of exchange cooptation, and in the USA there would be almost no reason for the US Govt. to actually own or control an exchange outwardly - because in the past 20-30 years, the US Govt has figured out a variety of ways to absolutely skirt constitutional protections when they can make it appear as if there is no state action - including getting information and data that would otherwise be subject to constitutional protections such as the 4th amendments protections from unreasonable searches/seizures.  Likely the last 5-10 years have been worse in this regards because of how easy it has been to build a variety of backdoors and the various surveillance devices that many of us are carrying in our pockets - so governments may well have figured out that they do not need to own any of these entities in order to be able to get almost any and all of the data that they want to get.  One of our challenges going forward is to figure out if there are ways to carve out ways in which we are able to continue to stay private.. maybe some security through obscurity, but with the advent of strong computing power, there are so many ways that data can be sorted through in order to pinpoint individuals with way more precision than any of us would hope to be possible.

Spoken like a true politician. How long until he runs for office?

Precisely this. This is his fault, he knows it is his fault, everyone else knows it is his fault, but he's hoping that he can still convince people that somehow he isn't to blame.

Absolutely. There is a reason that the US government and its various departments is one of the largest customers of data brokers. Even with their mass surveillance programs there is some data they can't access without it being obvious they are breaking the law, and no judge is going to grant a warrant for such illegal data collection, so instead they can just go to one of the thousands of data broker companies and buy that data for not very much at all.

The Southern District of New York (SDNY) has charge the Government Bahama through the United State Government to arrest FTX CEO Sam Bankmand Fried to be arrested for prosecution. He is expected to be extradited to the US, although there no enough information on the time. However, he had spent a night in custody and will be in court today, maybe without bail for now until the decision on extradition.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/13/sam-bankman-fried-arrest-ftx-cryptocurrency-exchange-what-happens-next
SEC sue him: https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2022-219

It's good that he got arrested, but isn't the timing strange? Why do this now if he was scheduled to testify under oath today?
 
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/12/sbf-scheduled-to-testify-tomorrow-at-us-house-hearing-on-ftx-collapse

I agree that frequently we need to attempt to be skeptical about what we are being told and the timing of matters, because it is likely to have been preferable to get testimony first, even if the testimony would have been by video - but that the same time, there could be some fast moving concerns, as well in regards to flight risk and even we might have to be skeptical regarding the extent to which the Bahamian government is actually cooperating rather than covering things up.. because if you recall there was evidence of FTX funds moving around and being anonymized and mixed (and fees being paid) which would have caused for a reasonable inference that those movements were happening from an entity that wanted to remain secret.. and then the Bahamian government claimed that it was them moving the funds.. which does not add up.

Another thing that does not add up is that some of the supposed responsible persons in the USA who had received FTX "donations" within a short time prior to the bankrupcy proceedings were announcing that they were "donating those funds to good causes" rather than returning those funds to the FTX bancrupcy proceedings.. which would be illegal to actually engage in that kind of conduct..

So my point is that there seems to be shenanigans at high levels that does not really add up...

.. but anyhow getting back to the timing of the arrest and the cooperation matter, I thought that there was an article that came out that asserted that Sam had said that he was not going to cooperate.. so initially he was going to cooperate, then he was not, and then he was and then the latest was that he was not going to cooperate.. (as stated in this article that was initially published about an hour before his arrest) (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/12/former-ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-fried-refuses-to-testify-by-senate-banking-.html)  so maybe the latest break-down in his willingness to cooperate to testify might have contributed to the decision to arrest him sooner rather than later.

There are speculations that the arrest is exactly to stop him from testifying against the people in the government who helped him to run the scam for so long. Among these people is the name of the current SEC chair, who has some connections with the father of one particular polyamorous crypto trader who openly admits to taking hard drugs ;)


I find it especially strange that it seemed like Sam was untouchable when the whole thing blew up because there were no attempts to arrest him and he got an invite to come and testify. He wasn't summoned, just asked if he'd come and clarify things and he declined and tried to buy time. He was so full of himself for weeks and it looks like some people lost patience.


Reminds me of how he said that he can't tell us what he doesn't know and he was the one with access to all the wallets but doesn't know how all that money ended up in his pocket. He sure changes his mind a lot and doesn't know anything.

Mr prosecutor, it wasn't me! I happen to have all this money but I don't know how it got there. I woke up one day and it was there so I bought a house with it and then a boat and a car and another house... I also bought a house for my parents and I paid a few million to Kevin O'leary and bitboy to vouch for me. Every day I was waking up and there was new money laying there no matter how much I was spending there was more and more because people were sending it to me. You have to believe me!

On this, it appears that Changpeng Zhao knew something or some secret information that we ordinary observers in the cryptospace are not very much aware of this.

This was mentioned in social media. On October 6, a hacker steals $570 million of BNB in Binance smartchain. On November 7, CZ begins dumping $580 million of FTT. On the same day, FTX asked CZ to stop dumping FTT. On the next day, CZ said that he will stop dumping FTT if FTX buys $580 million of BNB.

Was this concidence or did CZ imply that might there be something more behind this?

https://i.ibb.co/qs8shbT/F01-B8097-B824-486-A-B518-232-A9247-A825.jpghttps://i.ibb.co/Gptxw7q/E5-F83-F09-17-B4-400-A-96-A5-EE7-B4-CBED550.jpghttps://i.ibb.co/23RppTS/458-B5-A48-92-E6-4-A4-B-AF34-D383-D623-F375.jpg

Source https://mobile.twitter.com/stackersatoshi/status/1589971079703171072?s=12&t=cF4qhwqVDnGjycbctJQI3g

Yep.. there is so much of these kinds of matters that are really strange in and of themselves, and even playing out strange in a live way, as we continue to learn more and more details that don't add up in one direction or another - so in that regard, it could take quite a bit of time to see some of the connections.. and maybe to find out if some other folks might end sharing in some of the blame - because even though it seems that Sam had a lot of dirt on his hands, it is still hard to believe that he would be responsible for all of the fraud and other illegal behaviors - and there may even be some connection in which Caroline was counseled to cooperate - but who knows.. she is likely NOT free from wrong-doing either - even though sometimes cooperation-agreements will end up providing immunity to some smaller fish because the prosecutors are aiming to go after BIGGER fish - and really would Sam be the BIGGEST fish in this?  perhaps?  ....and who is going to be able to know if there might not be other agencies that might want to get involved.. or maybe we likely will find out that there is going to be some frustrations that come out from discoveries that will likely continue to be unravelled through the bankruptcy proceedings... for example, some folks are NOT talking in regards to relationships that they had with FTX, Genesis or some of the related entities, but bankruptcy proceedings are showing that some of the folks had financial encumbrances - and that may well end up leading to further investigations regarding why some other previously (private or unknown) entities/individuals had financial encumbrances that were connected to the various players.. and do we really believe that property transactions are going to be allowed to stand, even if some of those might have been funds (loans?) that were transferred to others. 

Claw back.  follow the money?  And there was a lot of money?  did that money just disappear?  Some of that money did just disappear because it was fake. just made up.. it did not exist except on paper (or an inflated token).. but other money was actually transferred into real assets.. that's part of the explanation regarding why they had no bitcoin, hardly any stable coins.. just a bunch of shitcoins that were hardly liquid.. and then there still will be questions regarding whether there is any value there?  was there value at one time? did some real value actually get transferred to people or entities whether in the form of a loan or a payment for goods/services?  any weird connections regarding how the finances were carried out?  Of course, there were some weird connections.. but how does several $billion get spent?  When the value is real.. and based on actual deposits, it has to go somewhere, no?  We have quite a bit of failure/refusal to create records, and then there seems to have been a quite a bit of record destruction too.. which seems to have had been part of the rationale for the hacks.


He likely did not realize how dumb he was being in regards to some of his "talking tours."


That seems to be part of the strangeness in which Sam actually seems to know that he could not do certain things.. but at the same time, did the things that he said that he could not do.. He is not a very sympathetic character, even if he thought that his "speaking out tour" might cause folks to become more sympathetic to him. 

I wanted to mention that there were so many reporters, politicians and even persons of influence who were speaking sympathetic towards him for a long time, and I would imagine that sentiment is going to change at some point.. or at least it should.  I would think that some of those folks are going to want to create some distance from Sam.. even though they had been praising him so much in the past year or so.... which is just so weird, given the extent to which Sam should have been realized as a phony and his level of phoniness is really starting to show itself which seems as if it would force a lot of the reporters, politicians and persons of influence to back off on their bullshit backing of him.. and even that bullshit in which they took it upon themselves to donate funds that they received from Sam/FTX - as if they were exempt from clawbacks, those fucks. .. .let the claw backs begin.. and it does not even matter which party received that FTX/Sam money (buying of influence or whatever the fuck sam/FTX was doing with client funds).. . .or even if supposedly the received funds are donating to good causes , such as saving babies.. blah blah blah, if Sam/FTX gave them the money, that needs to go back to the bankruptcy estate in order that it can be properly distributed to creditors.

I'm sure you've watched some of the hearings, so I'll share my thoughts because a lot of new and interesting things were said.
One interesting part is how dumb Sam and his friends really were. They weren't managing books for the company, had no board, most communication was done on slack, they had no control over money, they were giving loans to one another and to get money for something you just had to ask for it on chat... I don't get how a child of a pair of lawyers can be so oblivious to laws and regulations. On one hand he was trying to cover his tracks by offering Bahamian authorities to allow their citizens to withdraw their money if they'd take over the case, on the other he had no documentation that would cover his own ass from the prosecutors, like documents with signatures of all the FTX debtors. Now he can't even prove who in his company had access to what and who knew about what because what position you had was based on what role you got assigned by SBF via chat.

Another interesting part is that FTX was estimated to be missing 10B USD. It was said during the hearing that the liquidators had found and secured 1B and are looking for more because there are wallets on exchanges that they haven't checked yet but they know FTX had money there. They also suspect there are wallets they don't know about, probably implying that people behind FTX have hidden crypto.

As expected, FTX is considering to to claw back all those donations (~73 million USD) SBF made to political parties.



Since many of those who the FTX money already donated the funds to charity as a move to try distance themselves from it, what i would like to know is how they plan to get the money if charities already spent it? I mean what's the procedure in this case, will they go after the persons who received the money, or those charities?

The recipients of those donations are a bunch of fucking retards and possibly scammers themselves to spend the money or to donate to a further cause, even after hearing about the bankruptcy filings.  The organizations will still be responsible to pay back, even if they spent the money on poor starving babies or whatever the fuck they had claimed to have had been the "good cause."

Good luck trying to get back money donated to politician parasites :D
Maybe some explosion or big fire will happen soon with all documentations that prove all politicians that received this money including president Biden.
Interestingly enough White House refused to answer any questions about Scam Bankman-Fried donations....
I think that google could soon be manipulating and deleting search results related with this topic, but I found one article from 2021
https://www.vox.com/recode/2021/3/20/22335209/sam-bankman-fried-joe-biden-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism

Those bastards are capable of anything. If they paid twitter (https://watcher.guru/news/elon-musk-says-the-government-paid-twitter-millions-to-censor-information) millions to censor information, then I don't think what's happening behind the scene in Google and other major social media platforms isn't any different.

As for the fight to get back the donation, FTX is wasting time. The money is gone.

I am not so pessimistic about the money being gone, and I am not considering these matters in terms of partisanship, but instead in terms of people/organization openly stating that they are going to skirt the law... and sure there was some real money, real properties and there was some fake shit too.. but the real stuff can still be traced.. maybe not 100% traced, but should not be given up, even if the hack might have been done in order to destroy records and even if there seems to be the Bahamian government involved in attempting to laundering funds.. even though they later admitted that it was them who was engaged in the money laundering attempts. .which is also weird and does not really add up..

yeah.. fuck law and government regulations and all that bullshit (I am not anti-government, but I am against overreaching and bancruptcy proceedings are not necessarily overreaching especially when clawing back funds that were fraudulently withdrawn and spent) - and there is special kind of bullshit when it comes to any side (or organizations) trying to act as if they are exempt from the law.. and making public statements in that direction.. . or believing that they can skirt legal requirements and anyone should realize that if there is a bankruptcy proceeding, you cannot be spending those received funds (kind of a common-sense angle to that, too)..and then making public statements about such skirting of the requirements of bankruptcy proceedings... and I am not going to go along with such feelings of futility that decent amounts of that money cannot be clawed back, even if it was spent on poor starving kids.. nor am I going to conceded exasperation to concede that those funds cannot be clawed back.. especially to potentially make examples of folks doing it in public ways (doesn't matter which side of the politics they might be on.. or if their cause might be good or whatever, it is not their money to be spending, especially once they know bankruptcy has been filed).

Yeah, maybe some of the recipients were trying to exaggerate and distract and create more political theatre in regards to saying that they were going to donate those FTX funds or to spend them "in light of the vision of their 'benevolent' " organization and all that bullshit.  

Surely we cannot generalize and paint all of the situations with a broad brush because there will be some organizations (recipients) that either just held onto the funds to consult with counsel or others that may have given the funds back on their own.. even though I doubt that they are required to give them back until they receive some kind of a legal notice from the bankruptcy administrator.. .. and some of that might be in fairly early and disarrayed stages. but it can be really irritating for me to hear these matters as if they were partisan.. when even if the donations were meant to go towards one side more than another, it does not matter which side they went to, we have been finding out that clients' funds were being used for a large number of personal purposes.. and as much as possible the clawing back of such funds should be pursued..   and it seems silly to express futility in that regard, even though there may be some difficulties in regards to some of the clawing back of some of the funds.

And don't get me wrong, I am not referring to funds that the clients themselves had withdrawn.. because those kinds of funds fit into a different category.. .. even though we have conflict with that too especially in the days in which some customers (Bahamian residents, Tron customers and perhaps some others who were being given preferential treatment. .including out whether there really was a hack or if that was just some made up bullshit for insiders to skirt requirements of bankruptcy proceedings) were being  given preferential treatment.. and there may be some needs to figure out if some of those funds might need to be clawed back because of the preferential ways that they were being done.. and especially seeming to be attempts to skirt requirements of bankruptcy proceedings.

Some updates[1][2]:

- SBF is in FBI's custody and will appear in court as soon as possible.
- Both SBF's girlfriend (Alamada's research CEO) Caroline Ellison, and FTX's cofounder Gary wang plead guilty to fraud charges.

[1] https://twitter.com/SDNYnews/status/1605745361842327552
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/22/ftxs-gary-wang-alamedas-caroline-ellison-plead-guilty-to-federal-charges-cooperating-with-prosecutors.html

Nice girlfriend to have.  :D

Anyway, at the beginning of this drama I thought that SBF will somehow weasel his way out or eventually get a couple of years in a minimum security prison but the way things are developing he may end locked up for a little bit longer. I hope those two somehow involved Kevin O'Leary as well. Fingers crossed.

Why Kevin O'Leary?

IIRC, he was merely an investor in FTX and got screwed over along with the rest when FTX exploded. Or am I missing some hidden detail here?

He was also their spokesman, for which he was paid $15 million that he eventually lost. Well, at least he lost majority as based on the interview in this tweet (https://twitter.com/i/status/1600848102583320583) he should have $4 million left.
Anyway, its just my wishful thinking more than anything else as during his senate testimony blamed Binance and not his buddy SBF&Co for FTX downfall and that  makes me think he may known more than we think. 

So... this just came out:


Your thoughts?

Not sure how this works in the US, but I don't think he's REALLY going to transfer them $250 million cash. I've seen people saying (https://twitter.com/CasPiancey/status/1605998589720682496) that he only needs to pay 10% ($25m) secured by his home in Palo Alto and/or other assets?

On the surface, it is a bit of a WOW...

and, one of the main questions with any bail is flight risk... .. ..   

Another question would concern if $250 million would be enough to ensure no flight, as well, to ensure that he might not have more than $250 million in some other location..  Sure, SBF is quite the recognizable figure... and if he did flee.. would his parents potentially be on the hook for any of that?  I doubt it.

The whole thing is quite strange, yet Federal judges are authorized to make those kinds of assessments.. even though it seems that the public would be quite fucked if SBF were to actually flee.

There may also be some security concerns in regards to SBF staying with his family.... What kind of security do they have?  There may well be quite a few folks who really want to get at him and they are incentivized to spend a lot of money to accomplish getting at him.. .. so that's another risk that likely needed to be accounted for prior to SBF being able to secure his release.. Wow. 

Likely a Perception of injustice too.. ... fuck that guy...

soooo

the question is

did caroline and wang plead guilty to lesser charges and willing to give evidence against SBF to lessen the penalty of those guilty plea's

or has SBF already setup caroline and wang where they were lead to take a guilty plea. which is due to SBF working with authorities to lesson SBF involvement in whatever narrative he was posing about caroline/wang

as for the bail
a bail bondsman can upfront the $250m and ask SBF for only 10% deposit. IF SBF can show liquidity/access to $250m of property that the bail bondsman can take.

the US family home is not worth $250m so that would not have achieved a bail bondsman 10% deal
he would have had to put up other assets (bahama homes) into a deal with bondsman

i doubt he would reveal a bitcoin wallet of~15k coins. as that could end up working against hi of holding customer assets(one of his charges)

If you want to hear my prognosis for SBF, and I can be totally wrong, I expect to see him being suicided like Epstein, and recording camera won't record anything by some weird accident.
He knows to much, he has a lot of connections with politicians and they won't throw him under the bus just like that, but his girlfriend and other partners may end up in jail.
We could also see him giving away information about all other shady shitcoin projects and their creators.

They need to guarantee to pay all this money (one way or another) if he escapes custody or leaves country with fake documents.

With a home guarantee, he can only pay 10 percent of the amount for conditional release. But the amount is very huge and I cannot imagine that one house is able to cover it alone.
I find it funny how he was able to obtain this settlement despite the heinousness of his crimes and the involvement of his assistants. This means that this is like forming a criminal consortium, and it is not supposed to be subject to the rules of parole or house arrest.
It seems that this man's relations go beyond politicians and may also be in the judiciary.

im guessing part of the extradition process was not only transfer of SBF to the US, but also of who holds his assets seized by the bahama authorities, being passed to US authorities..

which could have been used as collateral for bail

That seems to be the  more likely scenario.



Does not seem to be a likely scenario.. in fact seems like an unlikely scenario.

Caroline and Wang were likely cooperating way earlier than Sam.. and Sam was in denial until he got arrested.

Sure facts could end up being different than that.. but we should go with the more likely explanation which is the first one of the two that you outlined.


When you frame the matter that way, it does seem surprising that Sam is able to come up with unencumbered assets that are liquidly worth at least $225 million.  I doubt that the bahama homes would be unambiguously free and clear... but hey, maybe they are able to figure something out.. I the guy really does not have any real assets and he is putting up assets that are not really his, then the bail would not stop him from fleeing.. so the bail should really be his... even though if he might be going to jail for life, freedom might not have a price.. if there is a way to get away.. which maybe he does not really have any easy way to  flee.. like Gerald Cotton may have had?


Wow.  I don't know how he could use proceeds of a bankruptcy (possible assets of clients) as collateral for bail.  It seems as if the assets for the bail collateral (like you said $225 million) would have to be unencumbered.

A&B
i only question it. because for wang and ellison to be charged, put into a courtroom first and plead guilty that quick. some evidence would have needed to be found that quick to put charges on them and get them to the US before sam
now who would do such a thing.. (rhetorical)

so my theory. (whiskey driven this evening) is that SBFdone a deal to blame wang and caroline for fund movements.
(much like his press tour suggested they were to blame when sbf was free and being interviewed)
so that he could have a month before its his turn to feel the handcuffs.. so SBF could have outted them last month before he got cuffed
though obviously now caught and guilty wang and ellison are definitely doing deals to lesson the penalty

C he paid $300m for the bahama homes and bought them outright and is owner of them. so he could have used them as collateral as good as his parents homes would (if parents homes were worth that much)

D depends
bahama should not have ordered funds taken out of a bankruptcy so the presumption is the actions of SBF and wang to move funds out hours after bankruptcy where it allowed 48 hours of bahama customers to withdraw from ftx.com..
where SBF could have said the funds it let bahama authorities seize were SBF's "personal" accounts. thus not part of the bankruptcy and not part of the fraud. thus normal asset seizure of a charged person in jail

I think that you are overly-complicating this.

yeah, sure I agree that all kinds of shenanigans were likely going on, yet I am not going to presume that:

 1) SBF had some kind of a front lead on Caroline and Wang.  It just does not make sense based on currently known facts and logic.  In other words, Caroline and Wang were likely more scared by the level of the deep shit that they knew themselves to be in and the fact that they could not really hide.. which means that they listened to attornies and front run getting their asses in front of the SD of NY authorities to work out some kind of a deal.. of course, through their attorneys..  Sam was delusional was not listening to counsel, thought he was the smartest guy in the room . and ended up getting himself into a pickle with those delusional thoughts.

2) There are clawback provisions in bankruptcies that would likely ONLY allow going back around 90 days - however, in this case, there seems to have been so much damned commingling of funds, fraud and lack of proper bookkeeping that personal assets are not going to be likely to be able to be kept separate from the assets of various companies.  So, I do have some questions regarding how a bonds bailsman would be able to muster up that level of confidence regarding any assets that were connected to FTX, Alameda or any of the likely various shell companies that had been created in order to engage in fraud.  Sure.. maybe superficially, there might be some confidence that some of the assets are going to be "free and clear" yet I have some troubles just imagining that a lot of the supposedly "personal" assets of some of the players might not get put into jeopardy. and rightfully, they should probably go back into the company and for clients, but probably there are going to be quite a few ambiguities in regards to the various legal entities that were created and whether they should be honored... perhaps even Sam's parents might get sucked into this too.. whether they were personally helping him or maybe they just "knew people" who could help sam to create so many sham organizations that were being used to steal money and to commit fraud.

I am not going to claim to know very much.. and especially there is still a lot of investigation going on regarding to some of the monetary relationships that are still being discovered.  Maybe we will never know if there are a lot of settlement agreements? or if Sam ends up self-suiciding... which maybe he is less likely to do since he is out of jail.. He might go back out on a press tour, against his attorney's advice (and maybe part of the conditions of his release is that he is not supposed to go out on more speaking tours?).

I think he's just an idiot. And those other two guilty people were using their heads and realized that they were in a losing position - which I think Sam is not acknowledging and believes a hail mary moment can still save him.

As a matter of fact he didn't have to spend a single dollar to get released from jail. At least not according to this article where its explained how this bond thing works.

---

In the other news, more info from Caroline Ellison plea hearing has been released, in which she admitted that her and SBF were both involved in hiding billions of dollars worth of loans that FTX was giving to their buddies. So yeah, it looks like she is ratting him out and not the other way around.

only in 'e-murica'
a place where you can say a massive number but never need to have the money to back it up

Who even buys this shit? This is almost as amazing as pumps on Tera Luna when there's an international warrant for Do Kwon.


Also, If I understand it correctly there's a bond and a bail. A bail is the amount you have to pay and it's only 10% of the total bond or even less like 5% so they only needed to procure about 25 million dollars to get him out.

Also there were 4 people that added to the pile so I doubt that any of the money were customer funds. If that was proven he'd get destroyed in court even more than he's going to be.

Manipulators and gamblers. If there's no lack of something in crypto, its those two things.


That's the thing, thanks to personal recognizance bond deal SBF didn't even need to have 25 million USD. All he needed is for his parents to offer their $4M worth house as a collateral and he was released and beside him and his parents, bond had to be signed by another person that is not part of the family. No cash involved whatsoever and its usually granted to those who are not perceived as a flight risk.

When you take proportions into account, 25% jump is not a big deal. Because it did not recover 25% of its ATH at $78 or something like that, it jumped only from $0.90 to $1.10, so it's an increase by pennies :D

What happens if the parents of SBF also become implicated more than they are already implicated on the level that we have already been hearing in public regarding their having had received properties and funding in connection with FTX/Alameda/SBF... and also that they might have been involved in some of the soliciting of endorsements, referring attorneys and maybe even going over some of the legal paperwork involved in structuring the company and various legal avoidance (aka fraud) strategies.

If they are all implicated.. at least SBF and his parents, then his parents would be worthy of jail time, too. and they might all figure out a plan in which they all avoid jail time... Really, if justice is going to be served, there may well be justice involved in setting up those fraud shell companies and the several practices of siphoning money off that we are finding out about.. and yeah, maybe his parents were not really involve and that shit is made up... but many folks consider that there may well have been some family involvements of SBF and also Caroline.. and I have not really heard too much about some of the possible nefarious nepotistic behaviors of Wang, so far...seems like the vast majority of profits were flowing through Sam.. and that some of the other were receiving pittances of pay-offs in comparison to Sam.. but still some of those connections and that information is still being fleshed out and allegations in complaints are left general and vague on purpose - and the actual evidence - to the extent that any of it might come publicly available can start to inform connections that may still be trying to be covered up. and that some folks do not want some of the connections to be made publicly.. because prosecutors might also be forced into directions that they do not want to go, either.

That was a good call when you wrote this now I am just following it on Altcoindaily man the bitcointalk days were fun times

SBF allegedly cashed out $684k from Seychelles exchange while being under house arrest. So much about having only $100K left lol (not that anyone believed it anyway). At first I thought he surely isn't that stupid but then I remembered all the stupid things he did lately so I wouldn't be surprised if he tried something like this.


Twitter thread with more info https://twitter.com/BowTiedIguana/status/1608653434387050496

After his closest buddies Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang pleaded guilty, SBF decided to go another route and pleaded not guilty on all charges. Bold move I must admit, after those two pleading guilty.

There is absolutely nothing abnormal or unusual about a not guilty plea at the first arraignment, even if he plans to negotiate some kind of settlement in the coming days or weeks.

I am not even going to say that I have very many ideas about the likelihood that this kind of a matter would go to trial, but it does seem quite regular that a primary defendant is going to plea not guilty.

The early witnesses are in a different situation... they are like the whistle blowers and or the ones that helped to build the case against Sam and against FTX.. sure, they might have ended up getting prosecuted.. but it seems that they turned themselves in.. and chose to cooperate quite early on.

Whether the other two early witnesses get overly delicate treatment may or may not be the case.  The two of them surely seemed to have had plead to pretty severe charges already.. maybe more than they needed to plea to.. but who knows, this has already been a quite rapidly developing and even quite a BIG matter, too.

That's why I thought that SBF might plead guilty, seeing that chances of him being acquitted after those two pleading guilty are slim to none. You are right though, it may be a part of the tactic as I read that by pleading not guilty his case enters discovery process so his lawyers can take a look at all the evidence they have against him and then later try to get a deal.

Considering all the bullshit that he was publicly saying about not doing anything wrong + two (at least) witnesses against him, going for a trial would be a stupid move imho. Anyway, still plenty of time left until October 2nd when trial should start.

My prediction on the conclusion of Sam Bankrupt-Fried's case on October.

He will be fined and he will be freed. His mother's connections with those politicians in Democtratic party will make certain of this because if he is charged guilty, there are important people in FTX that might also be implicated. They will be protected. The case will also mention Binance and CZ's liquidity attack on FTT causing a cascade of dumps that triggered the destruction of FTX. The American government will certainly use this to start a campaign against Binance. They have always looked for a reason to crackdown the biggest exchange, however, CZ appears to play cat and mouse very well hehehe.

However, he cannot play cat and mouse forever against the American government. I will not hold any coin in Binance if the case begin mentioning CZ.

so your prediction, SBF and the political figure behind it will attack CZ and Binance again, if this happens then the crypto market will be volatile again, withdrawing all assets from CEX, is a wise move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTX

https://restructuring.ra.kroll.com/FTX/
https://i.imgur.com/G4TcAn9.png

I guess everyone heard of what happened with the Celsius case yesterday[1]. Do you guys think we could see a different outcome for FTX?

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/us-judge-says-celsius-network-owns-most-customer-crypto-deposits-2023-01-05/

That was my initial thought as well, but after those two pleaded guilty I don't think that there's any chance of him getting away with fine only. I mean, both Caroline Ellison and that Yang guy pleaded guilty for some serious stuff (money laundering conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud etc) and probably involved him in all of that.

I don't expect him spending many years in prison either, but I don't think that he will walk away from it as easy as you may think. Don't be so pessimistic.  ;)

Nothing different. I think ppl should forget about getting their funds back from ftx too. I still haven't heard of a case yet about companies going bankrupt then coming back later again just to return customer funds. Mtgox case is still running (will be a decade soon) with no outcome.

---

However, these ceos who perform such big scams should be atleast sentenced to life imprisonment.
I know in certain countries, government doesnt even want to get involved in solving crypto related frauds.

The issue of Mt Gox is different from what happened to FTX and the victim of Mt Gox should have to get back their fund but the people in charge of the funds are playing the institutional banking game. that's they want to make some profit from the fund before they release it to the victim and that why the repayment date was pushed to September 2023 when the bearish market will be over.
About the life imprisonment for the CEOs that performed big scams, that may happen later after SBF because there seems to be a lot of powerful people involved and I believe this is the reason why SBF pleaded not guilty to the fraud charges when he was the mastermind of FTX bankruptcy.

Here is the ruling in question: https://cases.stretto.com/public/x191/11749/PLEADINGS/1174901042380000000067.pdf

And a few important quotes:

So this has finally been addressed in court and confirms what some of us have been saying all along. As soon you send coins to a centralized exchange, you give up all ownership and all claim to those coins. They are 100% solely the property of the centralized exchange, that centralized exchange can do anything it wants with them, and if something goes wrong (as it has here), you will lose everything.

Remember when Brian Armstrong said he "believes" users wouldn't lose everything (https://nitter.nl/brian_armstrong/status/1524233661997993985#m) in such an event? Or whenever CZ says "FuNdS aRe SaFu"? You can point to this ruling to show that they are 100%, provably, full of shit.

If your bitcoin is on a centralized exchange, then you do not own any bitcoin.

It is funny when you present the matter with that kind of "frank" talk o_e_l_e_o.

Hopefully, we are going to experience some kind of a real world (call it Streisand effect or whatever) in which the truth of the matter is the opposite.. and people should be doing the opposite - and stop relying on oral representations that do not stand up when the rubber hits the road, the ONLY way to be protected is to hold your own funds without relying on oral representations - and perhaps don't even rely on the written representations because no one really wants to side with the small dogs when they do not have enough money to go around, the small dog does not have anything close to adequate representation in the courts (or administrative systems).

From experiences, we are likely going to continue to witness a lot of folks who still overly rely upon proclamations that their funds are "safu"..... and surely, I am not even against using these kinds of services because there are some needs for price discovery and liquid markets and all of that, yet on an individual level, how much are any of us willing to lose when we find out that the exchange(s) in which we were holding some of our funds were engaging in degenerate gambling practices, and part of the reason that they had been engaging in such degenerate gambling practices was because they had seen that courts will end up siding with them when push comes to shove.. .and how well connected are you in order to get those kinds of favorable rulings? 

I suspect that there are some folks who are more well connected than others, and I doubt that any court (or administrator) in the west would have much if any sympathy towards CZ as compared with Armstrong.. and even that dicktwat SBF is still getting way more sympathies than he likely deserves.. based on connections, and likely many of us likely realize that SBF was a BIG ass fraud from the start (including several of his co-conspirators, it was not just him).. so it seems that he was not even trying to run a legitimate business.. so I am NOT so willing to go down the road of putting CZ in the same box.... there have been a lot of govt officials, TPTB, who would love to get CZ and also to get USD Tether.. and those guys have shown that they are way the fuck more backed than they are made out to be.. and they are not even as close as vacuous as SBF, and surely Terra/Luna bullshit or some of the affiliates.. and surely going down a big road when trying to figure out degrees of culpability and which ones should be in jail and which ones had been operating more legit than others.. including that we are seeing that some of the supposed straight-laced folks like Gemini, Grayscale, Genesis, etc are showing various degrees of fucking around too... and surely some of them had been trying more than others to engage in legitimate (acceptable) business practices, yet it becomes foggy regarding how degenerate they were or how culpable that they might have been when they find a $1.6 billion-ish hole in their balance sheets and trying to figure out how to cover it.. or who is going to get screwed when there are not enough funds to cover the balance sheets - even when trying to project out abilities to potentially recover over several years - there just might not be enough funds there.. so who is going to pay?  rich people or poor people or a combination.. and surely there are gradients of injustices - and also gradients to which any of us might decide to hold some of our funds with these various products (or even wrongly believe that it might be our only option - when the fact of the matter may well be that we have other options, but then we might be willing to gamble. .and end up getting fucked because we miscalculated the amount of "downside" risks that we thought were present).

By the way, I had not invested in any of the earn (or yield products) in recent times, though in 2017 I was earning some interest on bitfinex lending contracts before they kicked all of the USA peeps off of their platform..  but anyhow, what I am wanting to say is that there was a time prior to 2017 in which I had not realized how much exposure I had to various 3rd parties because I did not understand various ways that I was holding my bitcoin and the extent to which I may have had back up keys or whether my keys were being held by someone else, and prior to 2017, it seems that I had more than 50% of my keys held with third parties in various ways (likely higher than I want to concede at this point), and then after I had suffered some losses, I got my exposure to 3rd parties down to less than 20% in 2017/2018 and more recently, in the last year or two, I was likely in the 12%-13% arena, and in the past 6 months, I moved my exposure down to about 8%-ish... I had seen some ways in which I could probably get my 3rd party exposure to down to less than 5%.. but I have been somewhat lazy and reluctant to do it.. so in some sense, I can relate towards keeping some exposure with various 3rd parties... .. and of course, these are calculated risks - and also some desires to support aspects of the BTC infrastructure.. even though I do share realizations that shenanigans continue to exist, in the space..... .. yet in reality.. how much could it even be feasible to completely move into a system in which bitcoiners have a circular economy and we do not even need to rely on the various vulnerabilities of using/supporting third party services for liquidation or going back and forth between the bitcoin world and the fiat world?

Newbies coming into the bitcoin space still seem to have some reliance upon going through various third parties - unless we can figure out how to sell them our coins directly.. so there is a lot of infrastructure (and networking effects) still being built and developing.. and sometimes there are steps forward and other times steps back.  I used to really like getting connected with people through local bitcoins, and then being able to develop direct connections from that.. and surely there can be some advantages to bitcoin meet ups, but still.. there does seem to be needs to have a variety of options, including that there are geographical differences, in terms of options available to people - and countries seem to not quite going as far as El Salvador, yet.. so it does seem to take time for the progress (and options) to spread.

I can't understand why people do this. It is spelt out in every CEX's Terms of Use/Service, which have been carefully written and re-written by a team of lawyers specifically to work in the exchange's favor in every possibly scenario, that any coins you deposit are not yours. In the case of Coinbase, it is spelt out in legally binding contracts mandated by and filed with the SEC (a government agency), that you are an unsecured creditor with essentially no claim to your deposits. And now that has all been tested in court and, completely unsurprisingly, been held up and ruled in the favor of the exchange, confirming that users do not own anything they deposit. And yet people will continue to believe a tweet from a serial liar like Armstrong or CZ over the literal word of the law. It's unbelievable.

That dream is a long way away yet, but it is still entirely possible (and getting easier every month with new platforms and technologies) to go back and forth between bitcoin and the fiat world without ever needing to hand over your data or your coins to these centralized exchange scams. You just need to have the desire to do so and not just settle for handing your life over to Binance because you saw their ad somewhere.

It's interesting to see some news now with him not pleading guilty to some of the charges that were brought against him in contrast to the same 2 colleagues as Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang who pleaded guilty.
But on the other hand there are things that I think are a little unique now when I see some of the people who vouch for Sam Bankman now.
There are two parents who will back it up at this time and we know what the condition of the parents is like and their closeness to several big people will certainly have an effect and there are two people who don't want to be named who are ready to guarantee even though this seems to be imposing and of course if this being totally innocent and the accusations getting unproven i think its a bad joke from them and i see a lot of that.

btw ProPublica is also rumored to be returning USD 1.6 million received from the FTX founding family foundation Sam Bankman-Fried.
Later the funds will be transferred to several separate accounts until the legal authorities decide where the money should be returned and ProPublica also says it has ended its relationship with the foundation.

They likelihood is that Ellison and Wang were offered deals in which they pleaded guilty and dished the dirt on SBF in return for lighter sentencing for themselves. SBF will have no such possible deal available to him, so his best defense is to plead not guilty and let his lawyers come up with some sort of a case to lessen his sentence.

The parents are complicit, from what I've read. Properties bought with FTX funds but then registered in the name of the parents, the father widely promoting/shilling FTX, the mother moving FTX funds through her super PAC, etc. They could also be facing charges.

Isn't that the extra risk since Caroline Ellison pleaded guilty for 7/8 charges that SBF is charged with (afaik the only one that she wasn't charged with was "Conspiracy to defraud the United States and violate the campaign law") so chances of him getting acquitted for any of those seven charges are slim to none as his (ex?) girlfriend will get away with fine (and of course losing all the assets acquired via FTX/Alameda) as long as she cooperates with the prosecutor so you can imagine what she will say about his involvement.

Pleading guilty might be just the tactic to buy some extra time before he pleads guilty as well and ending up with a ridiculously low sentence like few years in a minimum security prison.

I don't disagree with that, and I don't think it will make any difference to the final guilty verdict, but at the same time there is probably nothing for him to gain by pleading guilty. He will not be offered a plea deal, or lighter sentencing, or anything like that, in return for doing so. So even if he knows he is guilty on all charges and fully expects to be found guilty on all charges, it still makes sense (from a personal preservation point of view) for him to plead not guilty and let his legal team try to come up with something or find some kind of legal loophole or grey area which could lesser his sentence.

Probably. He has the right connections and made plenty of political donations to both parties. I'm sure he will be rewarded accordingly.

This is possible because if they (Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang) deny this as well as the SBF then this possibility will also be a bigger shock, especially if their punishment will obviously be a little heavier so it's a good choice actually if they cooperate in this matter, especially there's plenty of evidence too now that they can't deny.


This is going to be a long one and actually difficult to investigate I think because it is especially if the current family is involved in it then it gets more complicated.

btw I'm reading another thread about funding issues because the machine learning-focused non-profit Attunement Research Center also announced it's returning a US$1.25 million grant it received from the FTX Foundation and this means it's aligned with the ProPublica I talked about earlier. But it's a bit of a problem for some of the other charities as it's rumored they've already spent the money or most of what it received earlier. It said the Good Food Institute, which focuses on plant and cell-based meat alternatives, had used up donations they had previously received.
As for Stanford Medicine, which received about US$4.5 million, they have removed some of the replacement funds from this donation and are withholding some of it pending a decision on this matter.

It's a good choice on their part, but it has nothing to do with doing the right thing and is pure self preservation. The same self preservation which is making SBF plead not guilty to give him a chance to get some concessions in court, is the same self preservation which is making Ellison and Wang plead guilty. All involved know there is overwhelming evidence against them and they will all ultimately be found guilty, so they are all picking whichever path will is likely to lead to the lightest sentencing for them, even at the expense of the others.

Absolutely, especially when you consider the political connections his family have and the donations they have made.

Footing what you guys pointed out. I have a reason to believe everything is all planned out before the fraud charge with the inclusion of Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang's arrest. Besides, SBF since has known this will happen that why he hired a powerful defense Attorney like Mark Cohen.
I don't know if you guys have read that Court filings have brought up the fact that $40 million were spent by the FTX on lodging, travel, and food for just 2022. Who does that?

Update: According to the bankruptcy attorney, FTX managed to recover 5 billion $[1] in both cash and liquid cryptocurrencies and securities.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/01/11/ftx-has-recovered-over-5b-in-assets-bankruptcy-attorney-says/

Wow.

Surely in the beginning of the reports, especially while the BIGGEST portion of the "crash" was happening and the seemingly fall-out from the "crash," it had appeared that there was so much fake shit there.. so that when the whole thing was crashing.. it was appearing to be completely vacuous.. such as the proping of of value through various shitcoins including the FTT token that they created.. and then even continued to create up until the end while it went from $22 to below $1 where it is now (which is probably overvalued, too  - oh and I just looked that that piece of crap scam coin has bounced up to $1.40 as I type this post), and there were also reports of crazy-ass wasteful spending that was going on, and of course, we wonder about the donations coming back and you are likely not getting money spent on advertising back, so it seems surprising that if the $5 billion ends up being true that they are able to find that quantity of assets that were still salvageable... oh yeah and remember the hack in the final days that the Bahamian government seemed to be involved in.. so wondering if that would be coming back, the moving around of some of those funds seemed to be bleeding value, too.

However, the article also mentions that FTX still remains short the amount of what the exchange owes their users and their creditors.

Sam also tweeted something which appears to show that he wants to fixthis problem. He is clearly doing this to avoid imprisonment hehe. However, what are the chances that Sam does not go to prison and FTX is given a bailout similar to the bailout given to Silvergate bank? Sam's parents are lawyers who are politically connected to the Democratic party,



yup my sense is that is and always has been the best recovery scenario for customers.  I think that them being made substantially whole is a real possibility; I think we were possibly a few weeks away from getting there in November.  (US is solvent, should make everyone whole.)

Source https://mobile.twitter.com/sbf_ftx/status/1613328989732601857

Indeed it's a good news to hear FTX is managed to recover $5 Billion, but I just think when they will distribute the money?

Mt.Gox was hacked since 2014 and there's a bunch topic where the exchange is promise to refund the money, but right now does Mt.Gox is already complete the task? nope. There's a progress but no one is able to confirm if they're get their money back.

This might be same with FTX where they want to recover all of customers losses and refund the money back, but when it will? I'd appreciate if there's a victim in this forum can able to confirm the refund if FTX already claim they already distribute the money.

i don't see him doing that any time soon.  the interesting thing that i saw was that it was proven that he has a family of lawyers who are very close to powerful politicians so there are various ways they have tried to reduce the charges against SBF.



[1] https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1613250259932553216

For all interested, SBF just published "FTX Pre-Mortem Overview" in which among other things he still claims that if given few more weeks FTX before declaring chapter 11 bankruptcy he could have made the people get their money back, again accuses CZ as one of the main reason for the downfall etc. 

https://sambf.substack.com/p/ftx-pre-mortem-overview

SBF is a delusional diptwat, and needs to take responsibility for his own actions.. including but not limited to filing for bankruptcy. He wants to make fantasy arguments about what if.. which is no longer applicable.. that ship has sailed.., and it is nearly pure fantasy intellectual masterbation to argue that filing bankruptcy was beyond his control, which is not true. 

Once FTX (including Samtwat) filed bankruptcy there are actual material irreversible consequences to such a filing.. in terms of rights that get transferred and relief from creditors and no going back... even if he had been rash when he had filed it, and too fucking bad if he had not figured out a way to make sure that the bankruptcy had not been filed on his behalf when things were spiraling out of control prior to it having had been filed, but it was filed and it was too late to change that it had been filed once it was filed, so you cannot go back an say.. what if?  who fucking cares about what if we should not have filed and blah blah blah.. Those are not the actual facts in front of us.. we are two months down the road.. that ship has sailed.. get the fuck over it.. we move forward from the fact that the filing was made... and too late to be hypothesizing about "what if" blah blah blah..   We should be dealing with actual facts that the bankruptcy was filed.. November 11th ...

 and yes.. if you had not wanted such bankruptcy to have been filed.. you should have been more vocal about it, right away.. that same day.. within hours of finding out that it had been filed.. and all of that same week.. otherwise grownups are actually making moves and decisions and taking actions based on the fact that bankruptcy actually was filed.. so the legal landscape changed at the time the moment that it was filed and at the time that people (including creditors and a bunch of others who had financial connections to that scam-designed machine of obfuscation and fraud) were put on notice that the bankruptcy had been filed.... legal consequences to that in the world of grown ups.. so grow the fuck up you whiner, SBF and anyone who wants to buy into (or sympathize over) SBF's crying over spilt milk approach... too bad you lost control over the company SBF and too bad you resigned... You made those choices too, which also have legal consequences, you lame twat.. if you wanted to act like a grown up and keep control over the company, you should not have had resigned... too late now.. now you are mere an accused criminal who has a lot of evidence of a lot of ways that you are guilty of a lot of crimes.. and only one of the categories of crimes happens to be about the money... also a likely proven liar, too... from his own words and his own speaking tour.  Heard enough of his lies, yet?.. what he should be saying is how sorry he is.. rather than ongoing bullshit failure and refusals to take responsibility for things that he did and decided.. whether he was on drugs or not.

In the end this will be 2 opposing sides because indeed they chose different paths but both the SBF and the camps from Ellison and Wang they have a way to make this work to their advantage at least even though they are still punished in the end with this cooperation of course would be a consideration other than his law.

They are now not colleagues and of course saving yourself is still possible because indeed in this case the difference of opinion between the two of them makes this drama even bigger, of course.
On the other hand, as for SBF, who is now bringing in bigger lawyers, of course to make himself really strong because if he loses, it is clear that several more people will be dragged away, of course in this case his family also does not rule out being dragged along and for To minimize this, there must be a strong defense to defend his argument to the end.

I don't think this will change anything much now
Seeing from this condition, I think this is still very lacking even though what they have collected is very large. On the other hand, I think that even if they eventually get up, I don't think that many people will trust them again, whether it's trading or saving money on the stock exchange, because regardless of their important reputation, their current reputation has been damaged. That's not to say there isn't a chance, it's just that it's very unlikely.

Honestly, Caroline and Wang need to work hard on saving their ass because the way this FTX case is going I don't see SBF going to jail although he may be penalized in the end but the penalty won't worth the damage is done to the FTX customer let's not forget that his father is also a good lawyer, he also hired a powerful lawyer and backed by some powerful people.
In the meantime, let's wait and see what will happen when his case continues since $5Billion have being recover.

I don't see how any fancy lawyers are going to save the asses of SBF, Caroline or Gary, plus a few more heads are likely to roll.

So even if funds are recovered, the magnitude of the shenanigans and the quite apparent nature of the ways that various systems were set up to obfuscate - which likely goes towards specific intentionalities to defraud, it seems quite likely each of them are going to see some jail time.. and perhaps it is a matter of how much.  

They might try to either play the innocently delusional angle or that they were all on drugs.. but that does not seem like it is going to fly sufficiently to keep any of them out of jail.. and again it is a matter of how much jail.. and sure, maybe some of the jail will be relatively cushy.. and yeah, maybe it will be way lighter than it should be, but I would not be so willing to expect that none of them are going to see jail time of decent amounts of time, even if they have fancy lawyers making a variety of wheeler dealer arguments.. . and yeah of course, there is a lot of corruption and a lot of insiders who should have known better in terms of their supporting those dweebs as if they were legitimate.. and a lot of folks were fooled.. so I am not even saying that anyone should have necessarily known because the whole system and construction of their business was set up to create appearances of legitimacy.. which took some sophistication to carry out such levels of defrauding with so much money.. even if they end up being able to recover a lot of it.. the behavior is way beyond repulsive.. for all of them, even if they try to act like innocent children with effective altruistic vegan social justice warrior intentions, their actual actions should really establish that they were frauds and liars the whole time with very specific intentionality behind the various kinds of ways that they were both taking funds and spending the funds.

Don't get me wrong.. I don't want to come off as some kind of pie in the sky fantasy believer that justice prevails in all circumstances because I understand and appreciate that there are a lot of injustices in the world that perpetuate, so even if I am not correct in terms of how these matters play out, I am not going to concede to some projection that injustices have to happen merely because the whole world is corrupt blah blah blah..    There are a lot of pretty influential folks who got fucked pretty bad by the various kinds of deceptions that were going on, and those very influential people are likely NOT going to get bought off too easily.. or at least I would like to think that people are not so willing to get hood-winked when there were $10s of billions of dollars flying around, even if some of that show of value ended up being fake.  A lot of us.. including the public were snowed by their bullshit, including their trying to influence American politics while locating their business off shore and using their high connections to engage in manipulation behaviors, and likely the parents of each of those fucktwats have quite a bit of involvement that may well need to be punished too.. even if the parents of those twats might not get any jailtime.. which those kinds of manipulating designer (and advising) folks likely deserve some of the punishment too.. because those snot-nosed drug-induced privileged vegan dweebs were not even close to smart enough to be able to set up all of the various systems in the way that they had been set up.. even though they did engage in a lot of deception too in terms of various set ups that they had involving lack of armed-length relations between Alameda and FTX and various kinds of deceptive computer coding, naming of clients and lack of accounting practices.. which were also likely designed to obfuscate rather than merely because they were a bunch of incompetents... which shows more intentionality.. from the way it looks from the information that we have so far... NO need to give the twats any kind of pass.. ... even if there were a lot of twats engaging in behaviors that either directly contributed to the deception or some of them might have been more passively just looking the other way.. which is surely not necessarily free from culpability, either.

From what I could read in media, at least two out of three of them probably won't go to jail as both Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang won't be prosecuted on any of the criminal charges as long as they cooperate in the investigation so I guess we will have to satisfy with only SBF (hopefully) doing some jail time.


Kevin O'Leary publicly said that SBF is a brilliant guy and the he would hire him again so don't you worry about them, they will be just fine. After all,  an average crypto investor won't remember any of this in a couple of years and would use another exchange started by SBF.

Well, there is likely some prosecutorial discretion in terms of what to push for, and the judge would have to approve whatever level of punishment is contained in any settlement agreement.  Prosecution could also drop some of the charges against those two also, if they are striving to reduce the sentence and to get the judge to agree that their sentencing recommendations are fitting to include what the two had done that includes considerations of their cooperation and also perhaps considerations in regards to what the evidence might turn out to be once we get another 9 months or so of investigation.  I am not set in stone about my speculations because there are a lot factors that tend to be considered, and settlement agreement are not always completely public, so in that regard in any high profile case, there would need to be some attention given towards how much evidence is known by the public, too... and if a settlement might trigger public outrage that the prosecutor's office or the judge would not want to be laid at their feet.  You might be correct in the end, but I would not bank on such early conclusory assertions in regards to what the prosecutorial recommendations are going to be by the time the sentencing is needed to be carried out... which might not be clear until either Sam goes to trial or enters into some kind of settlement himself, and whether there also might be some potential BIGGer fish than Sam in terms of people who might be brought up on charges.. and so far from Sam's lame ass public statements in which he seems to ongoingly in denial of culpability, it seems reasonable to conclude that so far Sam does not seem to be cooperating too much with any attornies and/or prosecution.. and sometimes if reality might sink in that his stupid-ass public statements are not really paying off for him, then he might at some point realize that it would be better for him to take more responsibility rather than continuing to make public statements of denial that are pretty likely to NOT be true.


Kevin O'Leary seems to be suffering from his own levels of delusion, and it could be that he will shut up with his dumbass public statements defending Sam at some point too.. especially if O'Leary might have some of his own levels of culpability.. perhaps? perhaps?  I am not sure. Those are different areas of law that involve the promotion of securities like O'Leary was doing versus the kinds of fraud that Sam was doing in terms of running the business and the various ways that Sam should end up being responsible for the various ways that he (whether through FTX or through Alameda) was being fraudulent with funds... and Sam is trying to publicly argue that he had an arm's-length relationship with Alameda - and the evidence that we know about does not seem to support that Sam was really not calling any of the shots in regards to Alameda.. so anyhow, my part of my point is that O'Leary might be able to get away with making some of those kinds of public statements that are sympathetic to Sam, but the more and more that we end up finding out about the level of outrageous criminal behavior of Sam and some of the others, O'Leary may really be forced to change his tunes, even if he (O'Leary) ends up NOT being criminally (or civilly) liable for some of the bullshit that he has been publicly spouting.

I don't think they did this to make them completely free because in any case their sentence was waiting for quite a long time if I saw from some of the news I read.
Source (https://www.afr.com/technology/alameda-s-caroline-ellison-pleads-guilty-to-criminal-charges-faces-110-years-jail-20221222-p5c8bi)
With those who are currently cooperative, the hope is that they will receive the leniency of their sentence so that they are not imprisoned for that long because this is like spending the end of their age there.
As for SBF, I actually feel that with his current condition he still won't be able to say he is completely right and I actually hope he is cooperative and doesn't prolong this matter because regardless of anything he actually has to realize that he is clearly guilty.
If it was only Caroline and Wang who were punished without SBF, I think this is outrageous because in plain view of me, who can be said to be blind to the law, it should already be seen that what he did was a mistake.

I don't know why I agree with what you said, regardless of anything a crime is still a crime and this cannot be tolerated. Even though his parents had quite a close relationship with several high-ranking officials and influential people, wouldn't if he was released for reasons like this, it would actually create a bigger reaction in the end.
I can't imagine if indeed he walked freely and seemed innocent of the impact he had done which was actually detrimental. At least his conscience was broken if it was like that.

I'm not too strange about this because indeed if you look at it from the beginning this case sticks out he is one of the people who most vocally supports and defends SBF so he will definitely do something like that. But with this condition, can't we judge when a businessman supports someone desperately, of course there are things that make him feel benefited in the end because it's impossible for him to do something like this when he doesn't get any benefit, especially since he is a businessman.

You have a valid point and I also don't expect a fancy lawyer to save SBF wholly but I believe his penalty will be reduced since he's known for focusing much of his work on charitable operations and he would have been one of the most respected cryptocurrency exchange CEO if he didn't blow it through the abuse of position when he created a back door which also him to make use of users fund.


;D
Yes, there's a lot of injustice in the world starting from the political space, institution, medical, and education there's a lot of corruption. I suspect the involvement of SBF parent in the FTX fraud activities and I believe they preparing something through SBF house arrest.

According to Coindesk, 196/535 members of congress accepted donations from FTX related people. We all knew that SBF was giving money to politicians left and right, but I don't think that anyone thought it would to this extent. Maybe that explains why they behaved like they were invincible.

I wouldn't be surprised if all of this corrupted politician parasites now become one of the biggest advocates to add new strict restrictions for Bitcoin  :P
This is the way how Scam Bankman and people like him do normal ''business'', and politicians are probably even worse.
You can mask every transaction you make in fiat currency by sticking it ''donation'' and ''charitable'' label, and you will get bonus of reduced taxes for that.

...to $2.27 !!!  :-\


No.

Even if they do restart, everyone's funds in the international corp have already been lost to users, and they will never get them back because FTX will just zero out their balances.

Don't think they're going to extend an olive branch after they screwed people over. It's like expecting a scammer to give you your money back.

I don't know about you, but I just want FTX to keep burning. And stay in their crash (and all execs involved in this crap jailed).

I think in the end this coin will only last a while. Regardless of anything there are still many people who still get losses here so that when they come back it will only be a pump and dump scheme like what happened to Luna by always doing hype and returning to basic prices. In the end a coin that has lost trust and reputation will obviously not be able to be cured I think because it will only be like manipulation in the end.

looks like a pump and dump where the whales and other manipulators keep hunting for noobs and small fish that have no idea what's going on with FTT expect just buying due to FOMO but long term,  I don't think it will make a come back.


I really doubt and I hope they never succeed

Afaik, part of his his bail agreement is that he is on the house arrest meaning he can't fly around and hold meetings. Sure, everyone would like him to sit in prison cell while waiting for trial  but that's how it goes for rich people even for bigger scammers than him, like Bernie Madoff for example.


If they manage to to make at least users of FTX US whole I can see them trying again. They are very well aware of the fact that an average crypto user has the memory of a goldfish so in a few years barely anyone will remember this fiasco.

It is yet to be determined whether Sam is a bigger scammer than Bernie.   Bernie is dead so his history is locked in, and perhaps quite a bit is already known about the level of Bernie's scams and looking at Bernie retrospectively.

Well, Bernie ran his ponzi scheme for decades while SBF business went down in a couple of years which says a lot already. On top of that (unless something surprising happens)total amount of money lost will probably be on Bernie side as well.  Anyway, at least I hope the in the end SBF doesn't turn out to be a bigger scammer, for the sake of all the people that had money in FTX.

It is not easy to be making those kinds of comparisons because the situations are different, and from the facts that we so far see, it appears that there was a lot of political connections involved in FTX in ways quite different than the various ways that the Bernie Madoff system was set up.... even a kind of attack on bitcoin people consider in this particular case.  My point still stands that it seems to be way too early to be calling which one was BIGGER - except maybe if you are trying to limit the ways in which you discuss it, such as how long it was going on or how much money was sucked out and from what kinds of clients..   

The number of organizations involved in FTX in such a short time, and the various likely deceptive organizations that FTX created in order to obfuscate what they were doing seems to involved way more people in the scamming, even though so far there seems to be some focus on the three that had been indicted (Sam, Caroline and Wang).. there may well be other indictments and complications, and I would not even presume that everything is necessarily going to be uncovered - even though we have a lot of internet sleuths (including peeps on this forum like you and me) who are also looking at and double checking the FTX case as it is investigated.. and sure some of that may have been happening in the Madoff case too.. but I would be careful in terms of making too many narrow comparisons when this FTX case still seems to be in its pretty early stages of figuring out various financial balances (debts/liabilities), who was involved in what capacities, other entities falling around it (prior to its fall and afterwards), possible prior attempts to affinity scam and influence regulators that may have been prompted by some of the regulators themselves, etc etc.

I don't know if there is anyone else who still believes anything that thug says  ;D

Everything he says just seems to be a lie. F**K the justice system. The A-Hole should already be in a Super-max prison, locked away in solitary confinement with a key thrown away in the middle of the Pacific Ocean!!!

Has anyone read this news? After publishing a 116-page list of creditors, it can be seen that FTX is really the biggest crypto crash ever when it involves a series of famous large companies like: APPLE, Netflix, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Fox Broadcasting and CoinDesk, Coinbase and Binance, American, Spirit and Southwest Airlines...Although the document did not specify the specific amount of debt, many sources revealed that FTX owes the 50 largest creditors up to $ 3.1 billion. It's a lot bigger than the demise of Mt.gox, IMO.
https://cryptoadventure.com/netflix-apple-and-wsj-were-creditors-to-ftx-filings-show/

It was not my intention to dig deep into who will end up being remembered as a bigger scammer, I merely mentioned Bernie Madoff because people were surprised that SBF was out on bail and not rotting in prison while waiting for trial, to show that's just business as usual and it was unrealistic to expect that given the circumstances and usual practice.

News update. More on this comedy show.

It appears it is now presently Silvergate that is being under an investigation. The backers of these honorable senators from the American banking system might have ordered this because the partnership of Silvergate with an exchange from the cryptospace threatens their monopoly on moneylaudering and other services they have available for the crime lords hehe.



The Department of Justice’s fraud unit is looking into California-based Silvergate Bank’s hosting of accounts tied to FTX and Alameda Research, Bloomberg reported, citing anonymous sources close to the probe.

After the collapse of FTX in November 2022, Silvergate reported that worried investors pulled $8.1 billion in crypto deposits in an epic bank run that some called worse than those seen during the great depression.

Regulators have also taken aim at Silvergate, with Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), John Kennedy (R-La), and Roger Marshall (R-Kan) saying in a letter to Silvergate CEO Alan Lane that the bank has “further introduced crypto market risk into the traditional banking system” through its dealing with Bankman-Fried and FTX.

Source https://decrypt.co/120482/silvergate-bank-ftx-justice-department-senate

The story is getting more and more fun and funny.
According to Unusual_whales posted. FTX has sent a letter, claiming back the donations from politicians they have donated over the past 2 years in the amount of more than 90 million USD and the deadline for politicians to pay them is February 2023. It seems that donations to politicians over the past 2 years cannot help SBF avoid punishment, so he is trying to get back what he has donated. This is the first time I have witnessed someone asking for a refund after donating :D :D.

https://i.imgur.com/HRdwbDn.jpg
https://twitter.com/unusual_whales/status/1622339655013392384

Its not the SBF that is asking for money back but FTX, and its been expected as it was pretty much announced a month ago that they will ask for money back from all those who received donations from FTX &SBF. From what I understand, so called claw back is pretty much standard practice in bankruptcy cases similar to this. and is not a precedent.

I expect majority to give back the money asap as they know it is a bad PR to be connected with anything related to FTX at the moment.

This was done by FTX and I don't think this has anything to do with SBF, although we really don't know what's behind it all, but judging from the current news,
 
https://watcher.guru/news/ftx-sends-confidential-letters-asking-politicians-to-return-donations (https://watcher.guru/news/ftx-sends-confidential-letters-asking-politicians-to-return-donations)

With this, they really seem to want to return FTX to its original condition and this was preceded by taking back the funds that the SBF had previously given to several politicians who were deemed inappropriate.
On the other hand, apart from taking from politicians, it is also rumored to have taken back the funds he donated to Florida students as scholarships. Although indeed with this it makes several statements that consider that taking back funds from children who get scholarships is a mistake and is considered a moral problem.

They have to return the money back with interest or they face bankruptcy court according to PRN (https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ftx-debtors-send-messages-to-recipients-of-avoidable-donations-301738948.html) 

This is insane and it's really a disaster if the politician already spent the money like that Florida student scholarship. That politician still has to get it back because it does not prevent the FTX debtors from seeking recovery from the recipient or any subsequent transferee./ https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/06/ftx-exchange-sam-bankman-fried-donations

I don't know what they are really up to but bringing back FTX is not possible. With the kind of people in crypto who are not very trusting, I don't think many will be using it.

It does not matter if the funds that FTX and/or SBF had donated to politicians were used for good causes or to save babies or whatever, those funds were fraudulently donated, so they should go back to the FTX estate for potential distribution to creditors.

It also does not matter if FTX is or is not going to try to open up again.. the fraudulently donated funds need to go back to the FTX estate for potential distribtution to creditors.

This is the point. The problem is that in this condition even though those who receive donations there don't know anything about FTX, with the wrong decision before they get into trouble. FTX wanted the money back because indeed it was their money that was misused by SBF but on the other hand this was also a little complicated because SBF's mistake was that everything that was originally not related to their finances was carried away now.
But seeing from the article provided by @bittraffic, actually the amount of this donation is only a small part of the total money they manipulated.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/06/ftx-exchange-sam-bankman-fried-donations (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/06/ftx-exchange-sam-bankman-fried-donations)

Now FTX is still eager to get things back on track despite recovering $5 billion last month.

Its finally been revealed who are (beside his parents) the other two SBF's $250 million bond co signers: his parents work buddies from Stanford Andreas Paepcke and Larry Kramer. I am kinda disappointed that Kevin O'Leary wasn't one of them. :D

According to Bloomberg, another one of SBF buddies plans to plead guilty. Considering how involved this guy Nishad Singh was and how close was he to him (+ whatever Caroline and Gary already provided to prosecution), chances of SBF getting acquitted keep lowering.

@Rikafip. There might be a twist in the ending of this movie if Sam Bankrupt-Fraud's backers remain in support of him. It might become Sam being the witness against those who have already pleaded guilty because the backers cannot allow Sam to be the person on trial because if he pressured enough, he might begin talking and become a whistleblower on a much bigger conspiracy that might include people from the Democratic party, moneylaundering and the war in Ukraine.

If there is a much bigger conspiracy and if those involved are afraid of him talking, he will be dealt with in the same way Epstein was as that's the only way to be absolutely sure he will keep quiet. So no, I don't believe  in that scenario in which SBF testifies against those who already pleaded guilty and have deals with prosecution not to go to jail if they cooperate.

---

Edit: some good news coming for FTX Japan users as allegedly they will be able to start withdrawing their money by the end of this month.

I agree with you Rikafip.

Sure there have been clown trials in the past, but clown trials can ONLY go so far, and if these matters actually went to trial, it would be almost impossible to keep out a variety of the angles and fleshing out of facts that some public officials would like to NOT come out... so much of the negotiations are behind the scenes and perhaps some entities deciding to enter into various kinds of settlement agreements or limitations of the evidence.. .yet part of the problem that they likely have with these matters is that people know too much about the level of shenanigans that happened (including that some governing entities and even agents in charge of matters) are likely not really cooperating in terms of cover-ups or limitations, so it is quite difficult to completely set forth some half-baked snow job presentation without looking totally foolish..

Similar to what I have said before in another thread, Sam did not kill himself hehehe. What I also speculate might be the storyline for Sam's trial is it will be mentioned that Changpeng Zhao triggered the dump on FTT, also causing the liquidity cascades on Alameda Research's leveraged trades because they used FTT as collateral and which also caused the collapse of FTX because it credited user deposits to Alameda Research. For this, the backers of Sam might also crackdown on CZ and Binance after the trial.

What is actually the legal situation for the donated funds? As JayJuanGee said it doesn't matter what cause they have been used for but they should go back in order to reimburse creditors.

Now let's say I run a cancer research institution and receive a million dollars and spend it, can I be legally forced to pay it back? What if the money came from an anonymous sender in the first place and only later do I find out that it was misappropriated? I mean the result can't really be that I might have to go into insolvency, can it?

I am still puzzled how this 30 year old kiddy pulled of a scam in just a couple of years that was half the size of that of Bernie Madoff, which actually took decades to build up! :D

This is a good thing for them, at least for FTX account holders in Japan, because this can be a good solution for them to return their assets.
There are several steps they have to take for that because according to some of the information I've read, there they have to have access to Liquid Japan and link their accounts to transfer assets from FTX that can eventually be withdrawn from Liquid Japan.
In fact, this could be a good step to partially restore their reputation, especially in Japan, which is indeed one of the countries whose users were hit the hardest after South Korea and Singapore for the fall of FTX.
But on the other hand I think it's still the same even for cleaning reputation but I think the conditions for entrusting to FTX will lessen there in the future.

He will probably try put blame on others if this reaches the trial but I doubt that will work since people closest to him already pleaded guilty and most likely incriminated him as well.



Nah I don't think that this will help them much to restore their reputation, not even in Japan because FTX is not giving people their money because of the goodness of their heart but because of Japan regulation which forced them to insure the funds. Only because of that FTX Japan users are able to withdraw their money.

I missed this report and it makes my previous statement not very useful.
Now with the current state of affairs it is reported that a massive drawdown occurred as in just 9 hours alone ¥2.7 billion or the equivalent of $20 million was already withdrawn from this exchange.

However, on the other hand, I really appreciate what the Japanese regulators have done, which indeed moves very efficiently and this action deserves a thumbs up.

As for the conditions of some users' complaints, maybe in this case there are several conditions because I also read in several reports such as:
This could be one of the reasons that they can argue later but if the users comply with the procedure then this will be much easier.

Today's latest news regarding the FTX case says that currently a new Indictment was opened against SBF which contains 12 indictments now.
But what is sticking out now is that in one of the indictments it is alleged that the SBF has committed a conspiracy to make unlawful political contributions and defraud the federal election commission.
This will be a new chapter in the problem that he is facing because now it's not just about FTX anymore if the charges like this even though it is indeed inseparable from FTX because the funds provided by SBF are estimated to be more than $ 10 million.

I guess this indictment will be the least of worries to SBF since some of his buddy politicians he "donated" to are currently in power

I keep telling people here. Politics and elections are just fraud. It should completely be abolished. It never does any good to the common people except endless exploitation and corruption by the so-called Leaders

We just give those jerks more power to enrich themselves and get more privileges, all in the name of elections.

What does unlawful unlawful political contributions and defraud the federal election commission imply? Are they trying to imply that Sam was bribing some politicians?

I reckon that this also proves that everything Sam did in the cryptospace and the political sphere was not done only by Sam. The moves of Sam was really the moves of his backers and some of those backers might be part of a political group. If they do not want Sam to become a whistleblower they should support him or Epstein him. I do not want to see him Epsteined.

They have already been asked to give back the money (if not willfully then by court order) and they might wanna distance themselves from him so I am not so sure how much protection he's gonna get.


You can find detailed explanation here (https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.590940/gov.uscourts.nysd.590940.80.0.pdf) (pages 34-36), but from what I could understand, among others things he gave more money than allowed in one year and then tried to conceal it.

@Rikafip. It appears like the extra money might be a personal donation to be collected through personal favors for future need hehe.

In any case, who gave Sam Bankrupt-Fraud access to the internet? I am not quite certain if he is bored in custody and trolling or if he is sending a concealed message through social media and he is only making it appear that he is trolling.

https://i.ibb.co/0mbjbZ6/F1-EE5-C47-7331-4530-85-D3-7770486-E99-F2.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/6s506dq/BFBAAFF5-2-BF7-47-B0-8-CA4-90-A4-C4560-A29.jpg

What was rumour two weeks ago now has been confirmed that Nishad Singh (SBF's buddy and FTX chief engineer) has agreed to plead guilty on 3 charges. With 3 of his closest associates pleading guilty I wonder how SBF plans to get out of this mess, other than pleading guilty and reducing his sentence that way.

Wow, just wow. Just read up a little on the recent development of the case. Hadn't done so for a few months now.
The shitpile he / they produced with FTX is still getting bigger. It's not really suprising, but still insane to see what was going on for years behind the scenes. If the bullrun would have continued for another two years, who knows how many billions more they would have embezzled.

Yep. If there is any positive thing about all this mess, its that it happened sooner than later because God knows how many more people would lose their money as FTX kept growing due their aggressive marketing, no withdrawal fees and other tactics to attract as many users as possible.

---

In other news, FTX confirms for the first time that 8.9 billion dollars of users money is missing so if there's anyone still hoping that they will ever see their money back, think again.

please someone quote this https://i.imgur.com/BMWIAC2.png
FTX owes less than 0.1% of customers BTC. Honestly, I can't believe how the financial position of this platform has collapsed in this way.

You did not even cite the chart properly Yamane_Keto, so I fixed the way that you cited it for you so that the chart would show up.

Some variation of that chart might have already been provided in this thread, especially since it purports to be a snapshot of assets that FTX claimed to have had at the time of the filing of the petition (which was right around November 11, 2022).

Another thing is that I am not sure why you are saying that FTX was in some kind of financially stable situation at the time of the filing because from the chart, it looks like FTX was not even close to having as many assets as they owe to customers.. and the total column on the right that shows deficit/surplus and shows that in each asset class FTX had a deficit - meaning that they owed customers more assets than they had "on the books" at the time of the filing of the bankruptcy petition

So the total deficit in that particular chart shows as almost $8.7 Billion, and of course, even if some assets have been found since mid-November 2022, we would still need to look at the totals of the then balance sheets in terms of recalculations of assets versus liabilities to attempt to figure out if FTX would still have a deficit or if a surplus might be present and then perhaps make plans that are based on the size of the deficit or the surplus.. and surely there are ongoing costs in current times too, and I have my doubts about if any of the assets (or the business) is still earning income.

Edit: When I went back and I looked at the content of your post again, "FTX owes less than 0.1% of customers BTC," I see that upon my first reading of your post, I probably misunderstood what you were saying... (but I am going to leave my earlier response in there, anyhow).  

You seem to have been saying that FTX did not have any BTC in their possession at the time of the petition filing, so yeah, the chart shows that at the time of the bankruptcy petition FTX owed customers around 1,591 BTC, but they ONLY had 6 BTC in their possession (which would be around 0.377%), and probably still we would likely need to look at more recent charts to attempt to figure out if some of those numbers might have changed in terms of the quantity of BTC that they have versus the quantity that they owe to customers.  I think that there has been statements from the trustee regarding the real bad record keeping, and surely there has been quite a bit of proclamations in the past 3.5 months or so regarding assets found or other irregularities in the FTX books.

There might be other types scams that might have occured. They might also sometimes be done on their own services similar to this hedgefund.

It is speculated that the founder of Multicoin capital has been selling his own cryptocoins and tokens to the hedgefund before the bubble pop of the bull market.



Multicoin Capital’s hedge fund lost 91.4% in 2022, according to a copy of the firm’s annual investor letter viewed by CoinDesk.

Source https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/03/04/multicoin-capitals-hedge-fund-lost-914-last-year-investor-letter-reveals/

That Multicoin Capital’s hedge fund news goes to show one of the scariest aspects of "crypto-space": The interdependence of many non-decentralized coins / tokens and platforms. If one fails, it will create a snowball effect that's hard to stop.
I think truely decentralized coins (there's just a handful, if at all), most and foremost Bitcoin, are less vulnurable towards these influences, however still take a hit when a big ship things, such as FTX.
Especially stablecoins - if they were to fail in a similar way as FTX - could bring down even Bitcoin by quite a bit for several months, up to a few years, worst case scenario.

I don't really disagree with anything that you are saying Kryptowerk; however, we likely need to recognize and appreciate that a variety of monetary projects, whether complete scams or potentially having some value seems to be inevitable - and it is quite likely a lot of normies, or even rich peeps, institutions and governments might end up getting lured into (or taught about) bitcoin based on their fucking around (getting exposure) through other various projects, and like you mentioned some of those projects might have more basis for their value than others.

Another thing is that currently many of us (who are into bitcoin) are likely becoming more and more aware of the various ways that value is held, and surely some of the ways that value is held is more efficient than others, and surely there are other ways (besides pure monetary characteristics) that any asset might have value, such as a house has value to be lived in and even gold has some values in terms of being used in various industrial and/or jewelry purposes - and maybe another one that I could mention would be equities (stocks) in which there may well be (or should be) actual company value that is represented through the stocks in terms of their capital, good will, intellectual property, inventory or maybe even the kind of products/services that they sell.. and so in some regards, some kinds of assets will hold more kinds of ways in which they might be representing a kind of monetary value versus other kinds of value that they represent, and money is the same too.. in terms of some monies are more liquid than others and some monies are diluted more than others, so in that regard, sometimes making an assessment regarding the current price of any of these items versus their true value is going to be difficult to measure and frequently we will have to speculate in regards to the extent to which we might consider that they are over valued or under valued in comparison to their current price, and accordingly, it would seem that if we are trying to be aware and in touch with accurate assessments of price versus value, then we are going to want to hold and accumulate assets that are relatively low price versus their value in contrast to other assess that we might assess (or even guess) to be less valuable than their current price.

Surely some stable coins might have some value, but of course, when we get to unsound practices, such as what FTX was doing with their FTT token, we likely come to realize that the token did not have as much value as it was being held out to have - yet at the same time the information was asymmetric, and some people may have been gullible to be buying the coin, but at the same time, FTX agents (such as SBF and his other cronies/henchmen) were engaging in deceptive and misleading practices, so we cannot necessarily always blame the innocent folks from being deceived.. while at the same time, there may well have been obvious signs that FTX and its shenanigans were fraudulent.. but still easier to see in retrospect rather than sometimes there is value in places in which other people do not see the value.. but then sometimes there are scams going on, and sometimes even if we have high levels of confidence that we can make a lot of money from scams / fraudulent products, each of us still need to choose for ourselves the extent to which we want any of our money (or our profits) to come from those kinds of fraudulent products that seem pretty obviously built upon scamming and misleading others (even when they may well make a lot of money)...

To me, it seems like bitcoin remains as one of those places that many of us can recognize and appreciate that we have the ability to be both ethical and likely have really good chances to get richie as fuck at the same time, without even necessarily having to gamble or to put large quantities of our assets/value into it.. We can attempt to be reasonable, prudent and ethical and still have decently good chances of being rewarded for those kinds of behaviors.. even though of course, we should also appreciate that there are no guarantees that we are going to get rewarded or that bitcoin is going to pay off in the end, even though it does seem to be amongst the best, if not the best of asymetrical bets that are currently available to a large number of people .. even available to relatively poor people, so long as they are able to see it, recognize it and to at least take actions to ongoingly invest into it in reasonable and prudent ways that are personally tailored to themselves in a way that they might be aggressive/asssertive but without over doing it.

You are comparing different things. The founder Kyle Salami can also have bitcoin and ethereum which he also dumped on his own hedgefund Multicoin Capital. Also, this might not only be happening in organizations similar to hedgefunds. Development teams of different Defi projects might also be dumping their own stake from the project to hold in the project's treasury.

https://ftxnetworth.com/00152360.htm

Who is this creditor that lost 3403454FTT ? ($75M)
It appears that he is also a FTX equity owner

Thanks for that link Creditor11 (and welcome to the forum), and I see that yesterday you had created a forum thread on the topic of that "leaderboard" (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5445909.msg61957293#msg61957293)  

I had not really been aware of that website, so I will look through your forum thread later today.. and see what members have to say about it...  (maybe in a couple of hours.. depending on whether I am able to take care of some other matters first that I have to do or if I decide that I will look at your thread before I do my other tasks.... your thread is still pretty new and therefore still pretty short (it's still on page 1).

Charges against SBF keep piling up as now he has been accused of "conspiring to violate anti-bribery provisions of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act." as he allegedly transfered at least $40 millions to Chinese government officials. I am not a lawyer of anything of that sorts, but that sounds damn serious to me.

Yeah sure some of the devil might be in the details because for sure bribery might be a cost of doing business in certain jurisdictions, and so whether SBF was merely facilitating a kind of business necessity cost versus if he was trying to curry special favors might be a matter of how to frame the matters, and many of us are already familiar that in the USA, SBF was engaging in a lot of "donating" of money in a lot of directions, which may well be considered a kind of influence peddling.. in regards to trying to get favorable treatment, but sure there are likely "fine lines" that vary in terms of what are the elements of the law (thresholds to cross) that are required to be breached in order to constitute a violation of the law... sometimes the elements that need to be breached might have to deal with intent, and other times there might be some monetary threshold, or maybe other times, there might be requirements that there are kinds of egregiousness in circumstances, so for example in the transfer of $40million to unfreeze accounts, maybe the general practice would have had been to go through a certain kind of a process that could have still achieved the same objectives for less than $1million but going through a kind of regular process, but instead, SBF skipped up one or to steps and then went outside of normal business channels, which thereby ends up constituting what is framed as a violation of the law... because there were normal channels of unfreezing or even perhaps some irregular ways that accounts could be unfrozen, yet what SBF did was way beyond any kind of normal, acceptable or even somewhat irregular means which shows that it ONLY could have had been a violation of the law.. of course, an allegation is not yet proven in court, and whether they have enough evidence to actually prove the allegation in a court of law versus having a sufficient factual and legal basis to allege it could be two different (but surely related) stories..

So yesterday I received an email about Scheduled claim information and unique customer codes because FTX account balance was a net positive (I had some bitcoin sats in there and Locked Luna 2 from the Luna airdrop)

Not that the coins really matter as they had very little value, but It would be interesting to watch how this case goes through fast hand experience.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/05/14/blobe3dab2ee21965203.png

FTX-EU (a subsidiary) users can now log in to a new site and make a fiat withdrawal request[1][2]. To be clear, this doesn't involve EU customers from FTX global. This is a different platform that opened a few months before the collapse of FTX.

[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/ftx-eu-launches-withdrawal-website-to-pay-back-european-users
[2] https://cryptoslate.com/ftx-eu-opens-european-withdrawals-website/

That's probably the reason why they opened withdrawals for them in the first place, knowing that not many people actually have account there. Its similar to why Celsius is giving back the money only to those in their custody program, not earn.

Update: FTX continues to have the plan to refund investors, FTX sent an email informing that it is seeking to refund many investors in Vietnam. However, the email also notes that this email is a confirmation for investors, and the payment schedule will be decided by the court.
There has not been too much information about FTX refunding investors in Vietnam, but it also brings hope to investors in other countries.
https://e.vnexpress.net/news/economy/bankrupt-ftx-raises-vietnamese-investors-hopes-with-email-4588667.html

As far as I know, users from other countries/regions also got the same email so I think that its too early to celebrate, especially since we know that billions of dollars are still missing so chances of people getting all of their money back are slim.

You are right, there's actually going to be a long process as so many court proceedings are going on back and forth. And they haven't even reached the stage of filing proof of claims electronically. It's not automatic that the proof of claims could just get accepted from anyone as they have been sent.

Even in part of the email

They say this about the unique customer codes

Somewhat good news for users that got money on FTX. It looks like the exchange is going to relaunch in Q2, 2023:


https://i.imgur.com/KlhLq2p.png

Source: https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1646207148244844560

Hopefully people will get at least part of their money back. Let's see if there any more updates in the coming days.

/edit: $FTT pumping on the news:

https://i.imgur.com/DWHkOjn.png

Source: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ftx-token

No no no no no.

That exchange must not be allowed to relaunch, if it does, then it will demonstrate that people have learned nothing from the collapse and the shockwaves across the industry it caused.

You have all these celebrity FTX endorsers hit with lawsuits... do you think they're just going to forget what happened and come back?

And sure, SBF is no longer around to screw around with stuff, but how can you be sure that they won't mess something up like last tie?

It's going to be huge black mark on the industry, as there is still not enough money to reimbruse everyone (they are still $3billion short, so some people will still be screwed).

Even if that exchange "launches" again, there will be a huge bank run again where everyone tries to withdraw their money from FTX at once and FTX will be left with no assets (and some leftover angry customers).

That's right, the Reuters report says that it says FTX has now managed to recover quite a lot and this development comes amidst the bankruptcy hearing which makes this great news for those who managed to increase their recovery by more than $800 million since January.

The hope is obviously that people can now get their entitlements back but for their continuation to force a Q2 launch for them this will be a double edged knife.
Even if in this case they can prove that now they can to minimize what has happened but I think for some people obviously reputation matters and it's not just about future problems but about their track record as one of scary embezzlement for large funds so people will take this into consideration more. Even if there are still some who will go back but there are many who won't and I'm one of them who won't go back there even if they do an update on Q2 which they think is promising.

Of course, this is a real strange development, and it was mentioned a couple of months ago as a possibility.

One strange thing is to say possible relaunch in Q2, and we are already in Q2.

It may well not be a bad thing for the space or for the coin holders (clients).. but still I wonder if they ever would be able to accomplish some kind of a reopening that would even be as close to as successful as Bitfinex did in late 2016.. even though the Bitfinex reopening was not without controversy.

I recall also that some folks thought that MTGOX should have reopened.. and who knows?

Some thing are just messy as fuck, and I find it a bit surprising that FTX believes that it is not as messy as fuck as it seems from the outside, and the quantity of entities that were engaged in obfuscating, fraud and influence peddling seems like a broken business model, and the so far failure/refusal to conduct an independent investigation seems like there might be some covering up going on, and is the new CEO part of the limitation of damages by diverting and continuing to obfuscate what actually had happened in terms of some of the heads of decently high level folks that may still either need to roll or to be held accountable in some way for their participation in that seemingly outrageous scam project that they are wanting to reopen "the non-scammy" parts, if any.

Frequently creditors will be concerned about how to get the most money back, and maybe some regulators want to save face, but if they are trying to say that some of the aspects of the exchange was "illegal" then are they reopening as a "legal operation"?  Will there be an international division and a USA division?

The article does not give very many details, and surely seems to be quite soon to be able to launch whatever they are going to launch by this quarter.. which would be ending in June and Q3 starts on July 1.

Well actually when talking about them not being so bad I actually quite agree because of course what makes them bad is the higher-ups who don't do well and commit crimes that are indeed very detrimental but regardless of anything of course the ftx is not bad if there are no people like that there.
But on the other hand we also don't know what the conditions behind the scenes are like now, we know that some news reports say that they will reshuffle some people who are considered guilty in this matter but on the other hand other possibilities about people behind the scenes still exist and this could be a risk again and in the end this can be a double-edged knife just like I said before
I think there will still be further updates on this because as you said there are no further details on this and right now saying Q2 is actually also almost unlikely in the midst of their condition which is a little bit tight although it can be forced but this means they are taking more risks in their current condition.

I am not exactly sure how much power and what the reporting requirements are of the "emergency interim CEO John J. Ray III" , but there are various systems in which bankruptcy, fraud and mismanagement causes a company to go into a kind of trustee relationship - and surely a team of leadership is put in place to determine how to proceed, including they will likely make fresh assessments regarding the extent to which they might need the expertise of prior FTX workers/executives or if they believe that they might have people on their teams that they believe would be more suitable for any kind of transition that needs to be made.. as well as any plan that they make has to be approved by the bankruptcy judge and also giving opportunities for any of the creditors to make objections, and surely sometimes there could be some spin or some ways of selling everyone on the idea that the better course of action would be to open up, especially if they have assets that seem sufficient to operate the company and perhaps to segregate off some aspects of the business in order to create stages of opening up and including if there are assessments that they retain a sufficient amount of brand recognition and good will that the whole thing would not end up failing as a fiasco...

and surely it may be bit too early to know if what they end up doing would end up being better for the various creditors and investors.. and of course, there could be some thoughts that they have sufficient regulatory approval and some of the liability angles could come out cleaner if they are able to reopen in a somewhat successful way.. probably not as successful as Bitfinex in 2016 - but Bitfinex in 2016 did not suffer from the same degree of complications in regards to why it had shut down in the first place.. and also the bankruptcy lawyers are going to make sure that they (and their team) gets sufficiently compensated for their efforts, and they likely have experience and models in terms of ways that bankrupt companies had reopened in the past and also to be capable of assessing what resources that they have in place in order to accomplish some similar kind of success with FTX.. whether they start out with the international version or the US version or if they have some kind of way of figuring out how they would stage which products are going to be offered or discontinued and maybe the order in which they would go live - including making assets available to creditors and maybe even spinning up their own shitcoin... (or shitcoins)..   


Yes.. whether you agree with this whole matter or not, it is kind of an interesting idea that they would be proposing (and even putting resources into) such a plan to reopen.. given the level of clown show that many of us longer term bitcoiners are able to recognize from the levels of scamming and duping that was likely happening, including that it is quite likely that some people are not really being held accountable so far.. and I am referring to people in Sam's family such as his dad, mom, brother and there may well be some other connections that could be followed in terms of how much some of those insider fucktwats (including lawyers and I am not sure if John Ray is wanting to protect any of them) were involved in setting up a lot of scam entities that were purposefully designed to obfuscate and scam the flow of funds, and we likely realize that chubby vegetarian virtue-signaling hypocrite dweeb - aka Sam - was way too dopey, emotional and retarded to be able to really run or organize such an operation - which for me seems to show that he had some higher level help in setting up some of those systems, legal structures, and keeping track of the matters with any kind of hope that they would not blow up and there likely is criminal intention with those people who were involved in organizing and setting up those various systems that FTX had in place.

Sam Bankman-Fried's legal defense team claims that it was crypto winter that caused the failure of FTX hehehe. Are they telling everyone that Sam and his team never moved user funds under FTX's custody to Alameda Research's trading account? I shake my head.

However, if Sam's case is dismissed or if there is a trial and he wins the case, I speculate that this will be taken as bullish by the market and much of the people in the community. We will try to forget what happened because what we really want is a market pump.

https://i.ibb.co/b58gKtN/97664-A81-BB0-A-47-B8-B2-A9-BC5918-E33457.jpg

Sam Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have come out swinging against federal prosecutors, seeking to preemptively dismiss most of the criminal charges made against the disgraced FTX co-founder and former CEO before a trial can take place.

Calling the U.S. government’s pursuit of Bankman-Fried “a classic rush to judgment,” the FTX and Alameda owner’s defense team argues that shortcomings leading to FTX’s demise are common throughout the crypto industry. They also contend the company’s failure stems from a broader crypto winter, rather than reported failure to back FTX’s native token FTT, or secret loans from FTX to Alameda alleged by both prosecutors and the bankruptcy team put in place to manage the repayment of FTX customers and creditors.

Source https://www.theblock.co/post/229881/bankman-fried-crypto-winter-ftx-failure-dismiss-charges


Also, FTX will return. This will be taken as very bullish and the community will celebrate.

I am not sure if the odds are very good for such an outcome of his either winning or the case being dismissed.

I am also doubtful if such an outcome would end up being bullish - even though does bitcoin itself really care?  The BTC price is still somewhat based on its soundness, not the fact that there are various scammers and/or injustices in the world, so if some kind of injustice ends up playing out in regards to that twat going free, then it just has to do with deficiencies in various aspects of our current justice system rather than being any kind of specific reflection of the foundational principles regarding how bitcoin is built and how it works.. who cares if people fail to understand bitcoin and get the wrong signals, in the end, people will find out that honey badger no doesn't care.. either you stack sats and build into bitcoin or you have fun staying poor in various aspects of clown world, including such a world in which sam is allowed to go back out their and spread his bullshit scams some more.


Bitcoin is not going to pump merely because scams (and clown world) continues to exist, bitcoin is going to pump because it is already designed to pump forever, whether aspects of clown world get fixed or not... bitcoin continues to contribute towards an environment of sound money, and surely scams, snake oil and worthless shitcoins are still going to build up around bitcoin, and that is not necessarily a reflection on bitcoin merely because bitcoin has built in sound money principles, and games are going to be played (or attempted to be played) on it, and some of those clowns are going to get wrecked along the way because they fail/refuse to sufficiently and prudently stack sats and secure their private keys and make sure that their coins do not get taken from them in the process of continuing to witness surrounding systems with ongoing bad incentives built therein.


True.. it might return.. and that is neither here nor there.. I would not proclaim to know how the return of FTX might play out in terms of the various stakeholders that might get screwed in participating in such a process.. They seem to be in a better position to return than MTGOX was in 2014.. even though some folks talked about the possibility of MTGOX being able to return.. and we know that did not happen with MTGOX, so far.. and if there is enough capital or even enough potential good will that might be able to be built (or squandered) through another attempt at operating FTX is still to be seen whether it will happen (as you are predicting) and how it might play out, which is not exactly clear that it would be long term bullish or good, even if there might be some short term bullish sentiment with such an outcome... at least for some aspects of the market, and the market is not a monolith (community) as you are wanting to pigeon-hole your evaluation in such terms as if "we" were all part of some cult or religion and/or that everyone feels the same about something that might end up developing in the direction (or some variation) that you are suggesting might end up happening.

Correct me if I am wrong bbc.reporter, but I understood your sentence regarding the dismissed trial or won case more like it is a good sign because that would imply a more Bitcoin friendly tendency among the judges, the people with the power to decide over SBF's case. If I am correct here, then there is some merit to it because the judiciary is what can slow down or accelerate Bitcoin adoption in the short-term and mid-term. But I am fully aware that this would only be a tiny part of the judiciary in the whole U.S.A., but still.

However, if the judiciary understands Bitcoin well and would rather tend to support it, then SBF's case doesn't really have much to do with their understanding of and attitude towards Bitcoin. Actually, I think it would be the wrong signal because the community doesn't really want any SBF's. Whether it is crypto winter or summer or whatever they want to call it, he took a gamble, at the least on "crypto seasons". He accepted that in the case of a crypto winter, people lose fortunes, and in the case of a crypto summer, people don't lose but he wins. That is criminal intent taking into account all these shady transactions within his own corporate network. Transactions with sums of money where everyone  gets dizzy. Even some of the richest guys would struggle to move customer funds in the amount of what SBF moved for his private amusement.


This is so true. The strongest characteristic of Bitcoin is that it will continue to thrive independently of what other systems are doing or not doing. The only impact other systems can have is to either provide temporary useful options, thereby slowing down the speed of the growing need for Bitcoin, or fail so hard that they literally force the masses into Bitcoin adoption right now or tomorrow. It is a question of speed of adoption, not of Bitcoin's ultimate existence. Bitcoin will pump, we only don't know whether it will pump quickly or slowly. A pumping balloon is a pumping balloon, no matter how fast it's pumping. If you only look at the price, of course you could be trapped into thinking that Bitcoin is shrinking at times. But there are many, many more metrics that evidently show that Bitcoin is pumping regardless of its temporary price. Take the balloon that is going up into the sky, it might only go up slower even when it is losing some air. The balloon falling off the sky would be equal to Bitcoin going to zero and I am confident not too many people are convinced of that possibility. ;)


I am not convinced that a lot of people truly want FTX to return. They want FTX to return what it took from the people and if that in a first step requires FTX to return as a company, so be it. But at a bottom line I am sure that nobody wants another FTX, or a former FTX to be revived because they like FTX. They like their lost assets and the hurdle they might have to take is FTX's return. I wish the victims the best and that is why I am indifferent about the process how the compensation could be accomplished.

But I want to close by saying that everyone should ask more questions before entrusting SPOFs (or SBFs) with money. The similarity between the short cuts, that's ridiculous. But  how that kid in the first place got double digit billion dollar amounts of money under management is really a problem.  

@JayJuanGee. You are correct that the outcome of the case might not occur as I have speculated. I was only thinking that if the market is not as bullish as expected for the year 2023, the community might welcome any type of good news it can get and also might choose to forget and stop questioning what was has occured in FTX hehehehee.

You are right that various aspects of "the market" can frequently have very superficial reasons, expectations and explanations what they believe is happening in bitcoin, yet at the same time, many of us longer term bitcoiners (you should be included in this group, no?) likely realize that the superficial assessments are frequently NOT very telling about what is actually happening in bitcoinlandia as compared to macro happenings as compared to various shitcoins that might also affect market sentiment, and even the concept of market sentiment might sometimes contribute towards momentum in one direction or another (or lack of momentum), but I still would consider market sentiment (news, politician/banker announcements, prosecution/regulation/many bankruptcies) to be a potentially misleading way of thinking about what is happening or to make any reasonable bitcoin stacking preparations based on market sentiment assessments.

And, of course, you can put a lot of weight into some of the current happenings - sentiment, news, and hype and whether or not those kinds of considerations are going to help you (or anyone else) with BTC stack accumulation and/or maintenance might be another question, and I would not even be saying to ignore the news, even though I still believe that some of the better way to attempt to assess bitcoin has to do with the three categories of consideration that I had continued to outline having to do with 1) stock to flow, 2) 4-year fractal and 3) exponential s-curve adoption based on network effects and Metcalfe principles..and yeah, even if there might be some ways in which any of us might suggest that those considerations might not be exactly right, we should still be able to make some directional assessments regarding where bitcoin is, where it came from and where it might be going that is not so much concerned about various noisy aspects that might have more to do with short-term baloney rather than keeping our eyes on the main prize that has to do with being better off by making sure that we are continuing to stack and be sufficiently/adequately prepared for UP, even if there may well continue to be quite a few short-term bumps along the road.

News update.

When did Sam engineer a giftof $10 million to his father? Within 1 year of CZ's action to dump FTT? This might be already planned as a countermeasure fund and if it is really a countermeasure fund then Sam might have already known that FTX would collapse 1 year before anyone else.



Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is reportedly paying millions to his defense lawyers using stolen funds. The accusation has come from lawyers on behalf of the now-collapsed crypto exchange. Specifically, they are claiming that the founder is paying $10 million in his defense using money that was misappropriated.

CNBC reports on the initial accusation against Bankman-Fried. Moreover, lawyers have stated that the FTX founder “engineered a gift” of $10 million to his father, Joe Bankman.

Source https://watcher.guru/news/ftx-claims-bankman-fried-is-paying-millions-to-lawers-using-stolen-funds



There are also rumors that Sam was seen outside the building of the district court for the southern district of New York. It appears all these jokes we were making about Sam being an informant for the American government might be true hehehhehee.

This is a very strange news update and very shocking if confirmed true.

In any case, the story. There is this token called Bald issued in Base, Coinbase's Ethereum layer 2 network. It became popular to a small group of traders and pumped by more than 50x from the first day of issuance. However, it appears to be a rugpull when the developer removed most of the liquidity from Uniswap and sent the ETH to Binance. There is nothing strange with this hehehehee. The strange part of the story is it was discovered that the deployer of the contract for Bald tokens also had transactions from a wallet speculated to be owned by Sam Bankman-Fried.

I have no comment, only a question. Why would Sam use this wallet to deploy a contract if it was really him?

All transactions and discoveries are in this thread shared by @MidasFoolsGold.

https://twitter.com/midasfoolsgold/status/1686126874500767744

Following the news that FTX will restart the exchange, FTX recently sent a proposal to restart FTX.com (global) to international customers. And according to news reports, the plan will only be implemented if FTX's creditors agree. But the interesting thing is that they will restart their exchange for the international market, not including the US market.

I think their restarting the exchange is good news for their victims, because if they want to restart their business, they need to return the money to their victims.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/08/01/ftx-plans-to-restart-crypto-exchange-for-international-customers/

https://imgtr.ee/images/2023/08/01/35750e49f86861fe6fde830d0d362bb2.png

affected tokens are instantly destroyed :D
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/08/01/Qelra.jpeg
although I don't really care about this because sooner or later it will also be destroyed for coins like this but with the link from SBF this accelerates the destruction.

It's hard to see any certainty in this but it does look like a typical scam where an anonymous token developer deletes thousands of ETH in liquidity which makes the price of the memecoin plummet which makes a lot of impromptu crypto detectives start checking :D
But if it is proven that SBF and his henchmen did it then why he can still control it while in jail and automatically if proven then the punishment will be much bigger.

One of the tweets that caught my attention.
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/08/01/QqUCT.png
https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1686135610317103104?s=20 (https://twitter.com/RyanSAdams/status/1686135610317103104?s=20)

What is the news of the claim portal that they have spread via email? It will not be easy to quickly return customer funds let alone to start re-launching the exchange, this is not good news but they are launching their action again.

Especially with the recent allegations with BALD shitcoins more and more people do not believe in FTX or SBF.

It was reported that at the beginning of the launch there was someone who bought with $500 and then the token was pumped he got double the profit, but for those who bought behind it became victims of the ferocity of shitcoin.
If I'm not mistaken, the liquidity was almost 66M at the time this shitcoin was pumped.

I suspect that the one who did it was SBF's henchman, I read the news that SBF has been punished and is not allowed to use any internet, but if he does it again then there is a leak in the prison room that SBF occupies.

There are still many SBF henchmen who are loyal to their masters. ;D

Yes mate you are absolutely correct on this statement, for FTX.COM to restart their exchange they have to repay all those money they collected (defrud) from victim's, for FTX exchange to exclude US from their platform I strongly believe that they are planning to take their scam exchange to another level, SBF was arrested in  the US for his crime's and I believe that the US government has given him conditions to exclude US from his scam exchange. FTX has lost enough prospect in their platform because of the defrauding, so my conclusion is that FTX exchange will not have much investor like before because no body will like to make same mistake double times, it might only be those that didn't hear the incident about the platform they might only be the once to use the platform. Anyway let's watch out the part to of their reopening maybe it might be little different from the previous.
https://talkimg.com/images/2023/08/01/Q0EaW.jpeg
Meet Mr John Ray III the new CEO of FTX exchange

Maybe it was not really him; there might be something going on under the ground. For someone who has crypto knowledge, deploying a smart contract with an address that he is already familiar with will be a big mess to his name, adding to the already trouble going on around him. Either someone else has access to that address and might have made everything seem as if it was done by Sam in order to prevent suspicion from coming back to the real person.

There are a lot of possibilities here, and it could also be Sam, but he forgot he was using a wallet that was already known to him before he realized it was already late.

By looking at the pump they did it's actually hard to even seem impossible to know how much fake volume they did because it's like it was well planned and I think it was definitely started from the beginning so it's impossible for this coincidence to come suddenly when the coin was pumped and the BALD developers removed the liquidity that was stored in the DEX pool the price dropped dramatically. It seems like this was done by not just one or two people but this group is really terrible and this is what we have to realise that shitcoin is really destructive.

On the other hand, actually in this case even though there is still a lot of debate whether SBF is behind everything or not when looking at the wallets associated with FTX and Alameda Research it is already one of the strong reasons and we are also not fools who will believe that it is a coincidence right.
Hell it is very difficult to judge people like this because even in punishment they can still launch other scams.

It might be Sam, it might not be Sam, however, it might also be someone who wants everyone to think that it is Sam hehehe. But what would be the real reason behind this? Is this a demonstration on the power of DeFi and DEX of listing anything and for the SEC to begin cracking down on them? Is this a message for Coinbase that their chain is not safe? Everything about this is head shaking.

The victims of mt.gox have been waiting for years and they have yet to receive nothing but promises, but as long as there is hope, they should not give up. I am not saying that FTX will return the money to the victim immediately, but with the news that they will restart the exchange, it is worth expecting them to return the money to the victim. Because they want to rebuild their reputation, if they want to have customers, they must at least return the money. This is just a rumor, it may or may not come true, but as I said, as long as there is hope, we should not give up so easily. If FTX victims get their money back that's a good thing, so we should hope that happens.

But I think this plan will be challenging to implement because according to the news some of the creditors of FTX do not agree with the intent to restart their exchange. According to the report, creditors want more control if the exchange is restarted, and they also expressed concern that FTX is paying too much for lawyers and advisors.

It's all just a plan and there hasn't been any formal negotiations between FTX and creditors, so the implementation won't be easy. These disagreements not only hindered the process of restarting the exchange but also slowed down the refund process for FTX victims.
https://www.theblock.co/post/242575/ftxs-creditors-say-they-werent-looped-in-on-plan-to-recoup-funds

I have already expressed that I am skeptical of becoming too conspiratorial about these FTX matters; however, I will admit that when we add up several of the things that are happening, then several of the conspiratorial theories become a lot stronger in terms of the whole situation potentially having had been a kind of PsyOP that might have been coming out of the US Government in the first place - because aren't there just so many amazing things that are either happening or being presented.

Frequently creditors can end up getting rolled over, so I would not necessarily count on creditors getting their way, yet surely if the creditors make BIG enough stinks in regards to how they are getting rolled over in various ways, then perhaps there might be some hesitations in terms of attempting to open the exchange back up.

Can you imagine that if the exchange were to open back up and there are various appearances that the opening of the exchange is resulting in value not being lost and creditors being made whole, then SBF and a variety of the other criminal conspirators, including several of his family members, various string pullers in the company (we know Sam could not have done all this shit on his own) and including the various politicians that seemed to have various tentacles into various aspects of this mess, they are either let off with a slap on the wrist or some of them are not even shown as being involved in their various ways.

And, right now there seems to be some attempts to separate out the liability of some of FTX's Dubai operations... and so it can sometimes be difficult to keep up with how matters might end up getting separated out, and then potentially causing questions regarding which ones are being paid off first, or is there some reason why there needs to be separation of entities, except to potentially cover up (and confuse) some of the connections.  

I seem to remember there has not been much success in terms of getting any kind of "independent auditor" assigned to looking further into this matter either... so John Ray III might start to seem to be more and more of a kind of a spin master than anyone who is really trying to get to to the bottom of some of the more important things, especially in regards to certain likely involved peeps who are likely ongoingly being protected from liability, public scrutiny and their potential criminal acts..and even if they might not have had intended to do some of the things that they did (in terms of their behind the scenes involvement in FTX or even in their holding or trading value there.. which there seems to be a decent amount of evidence of possible money laundering going on too.. and for sure attacks on bitcoin.. who cares about crypto?.. but the attacks on bitcoin are likely important..), they still could be held liable in non-criminal ways, if the facts were to support that kind of a lesser culpability approach.

It appears another FTX does not want to bite the dust and will plead guilty to appeal for a lighter sentence in exchange for cooperation. What they might not know is Sam has been cooperating with the government in secret hehehehe. That is my own speculation only for anyone who thinks I am being annoying again.

In any case, it is very head shaking that FTT is being traded with a price of $1.20 and remains listed.



Ryan Salame, the former co-chief executive of FTX Digital Markets, is in negotiations with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to criminal charges following the implosion of the cryptocurrency exchange, according to people familiar with the case.

The Republican megadonor may enter a plea as soon as next month to offenses including campaign finance law violations, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions aren’t public.

Salame, who headed the company’s Bahamas subsidiary, has been under intense scrutiny in the sweeping criminal and regulatory investigations. He was a prolific political donor, shelling out $24 million in support of Republican candidates during his time at FTX.

Source https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-08/ex-ftx-executive-salame-talking-to-prosecutors-about-plea-deal


This will not be good for Ryan Salami because he is a Republican hehehehe.

So this just came in: SBF's bail has been revoked over witness tampering and he's going back to jail[1]. I would imagine there's no way for him to get out now? Not until we see the trial's outcome at least, which is planned for the 2nd of October.

[1] https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/08/11/sam-bankman-fried-jailed-ahead-of-trial/

@OmegaStarScream. Similar to the questioning and the skepticism of him being a philantrophist, it should also be questioned if he is really a vegan heheheeh. I reckon the vegetarian community should investigate this. Sam's criminal actions can only be done by an aggressive meat eater.

Also, he is fat! I have never seen a fat person who only eats vegetables.

https://i.ibb.co/5WJ1V1k/AECAF75-F-0-FD7-4-D58-AE0-F-78-D306-F5-A481.jpg

Not to get too far into a tangent.

I mostly agree with your assertion about the aggressiveness of meat eaters, or at least that is a kind of a decently good myth to latch upon.

Nonetheless, there seems to be some kinds of hidden assumptions regarding why people are fat, and to me it seems that there are all kinds of foods (or even non-foods or food like items) that vegans (or even vegetarians for that matter) could eat to make them fat, so then the question might be what makes us fat from our lifestyle choices and particularly to your honing in on dietary considerations .. but then there are sleep and exercise too.. (beyond suggesting genetic abnormalities).. which I would suggest that carbohydrates contribute quite a bit to making people fat.. and sure maybe the industrial seed oils contribute to nutrition absorption issues.. and I really doubt that there is any kind of evidence that the fat in meats makes people fat,.. except to the extent that it is combined with carbohydrates.

and even with carbohydrates, there are different types.. and even some vegetables have toxins in them in regards to plants defending themselves from being eaten.. probably not cucumbers.. yet there could be some combination of foods.. but probably more like breads that might be contributing sam being a fatty.. .. consider books like Life Without Bread (https://www.amazon.com/Life-Without-Bread-Low-Carbohydrate-Diet/dp/0658001701) or Wheat Belly (https://www.amazon.com/Wheat-Belly-Revised-Updated-Weight/dp/1984824945/ref=pd_vtp_h_pd_vtp_h_sccl_1/139-8856873-3521467?pd_rd_w=kqKy8&content-id=amzn1.sym.e16c7d1a-0497-4008-b7be-636e59b1dfaf&pf_rd_p=e16c7d1a-0497-4008-b7be-636e59b1dfaf&pf_rd_r=MGT8ZWEW38216VECANAQ&pd_rd_wg=FsJVY&pd_rd_r=1f29a18e-c381-46b1-a786-8f6e696601cb&pd_rd_i=1984824945&psc=1).

Who said that he is a vegetarian and he eats only vegetables and stays away from meat ? If he said this himself, would you still believe a dishonest and scammer person ?

He spoke falsely about the FTX exchange reserves, he hided many things from the public, used people's funds in his personal ventures & investment companies and he also spoke falsely about his dieting habits.

Hope now it's clear that he is not a vegetarian and please do not believe on the words uttered from his mouth.

@virasog, @JayJuanGee. It was only a joke telling everyone if Sam was not really what he was portrayed to be and he was also exposed to have lied and created one of the biggest scams in the cryptospace, I reckon his own declaration of being a vegan should also be questioned in court. Lying of being vegan is an insult to the vegan community heheheheh.

Also, the cucumber he is eating will be meat if he is sentenced guilty and brought to prison hehehehe.

Latest news on August 14 - Sam Bankman-Fried [criminal] used $100 million in customer funds for political donations in order to pass laws.

More and more news about Sam Bankman-Fried as the prosecutor continues to prosecute on this matter because it is alleged that SBF continues to do what he wants, he is a high-profile criminal who does not care about the customer funds that he continues to use to launch his actions.

The interesting part of the allegations.


Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/willskipworth/2023/08/14/sam-bankman-fried-accused-of-using-100-million-in-stolen-funds-on-political-donations/?sh=13785dfe485d

The word "donations" is misused in my opinion. Politicians who were willing to accept that money and thus seek to change legislation to suit the case could be considered complicit. This is called "bribery" and has no other designation. But we have not heard that any of these members have been suspended or held accountable.
Even before the collapse of Ftx, Sam Bankman Fried was known to give money to some MPs and politicians without any legal reason for doing so. I find it strange that this is not punishable and is considered a "donation".

Agreed and it would expose many politicians' names during the cross examinations in the trial. I would become very worried if I was the parents of Sam Bankman-Fried. If he goes to prison, he might become something similar to Jeffrey Epstein before he can say anything. I would say it in advance again, Sam did not kill himself.

They might put something in his Adderall and declare that he died of an overdose.

https://i.ibb.co/BG0GWDG/F83-E51-D6-84-FA-41-B3-9634-38926-C7362-B6.jpg

Sam Bankman-Fried’s legal team is asking a U.S. district court judge to grant the former FTX CEO “uninterrupted access” to his daily prescribed medication while he is in jail. That includes Adderall for treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

Source https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/14/sam-bankman-frieds-lawyer-demands-he-get-adderall-for-adhd-in-jail.html

It is quite logical since investigations with him may lead to the implication of influential personalities. And perhaps the issue is worse than what these influential people might imagine, since scrutiny of Sam Bankman-Fried's financial operations can reveal their relationship with him, and they will find themselves forced to provide justifications.
For the defense team to formally request protection for their client, this increases the chances of implicating everyone whom the investigations will refer to, given the integrity of the American judiciary, although I personally doubt that, especially if those personalities belong to one of the two major parties in the United States. I mean, in the best case, if Sam Bankman-Fried's is not eliminated by killing him, the research will be tampered with.

As a follow-up of the last email (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5419710.msg62006599#msg62006599) i received from FTX sometime back in March and my attempt to login to my account (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5459878.msg62555569#msg62555569) via the claims portal (https://claims.ftx.com), I received yet another email from FTX reminding me to go through KYC verification three days ago.

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/08/19/MmtMq.png

Yes I agree with you that it is a misuse of the word "donation" which then only benefits one party, and also I agree that the only word that can be said is bribery. How can it not be said to be bribery when clearly in this case it is trying to influence politically in order to launch the action.
Donations and bribery are two completely different things, and I think we can see what constitutes a donation and what constitutes bribery.
I understand that someone will do anything, including using a misused word, but here we can see the real purpose of it.

At the moment, I don't know whether the judge will question some politicians for receiving donations from SBF: [url]Reports from the media time[/url=https://time.com/6241262/sam-bankman-fried-political-donations/] with some MPs who received donations.

More news
SBF submitted a request to see a lawyer outside prison for 5 days a week with a laptop and internet at his disposal.

The article mentions that only two days a week are given to check his case files, but no laptop and internet to see his lawyer.

Imagine if he could access the internet maybe he would transfer other assets or start another drama with other plotters, for 2 days or 5 days of course he would utilize the internet for his next mission.

Source: https://news.bitcoin.com/bankman-fried-wants-to-see-his-lawyers-outside-jail-five-days-a-week/

When the accused or the defense team uses the concept of “donation” instead of the concept of “bribery”, this is understandable because he wants to distance himself from the charges. But in this case, even the media that transmits the news chose this phrase in complete abandonment of the principle of impartiality. And if it were normal, there would be no fear for Sam Bankman Fried's life that he would be poisoned or silenced in any way.
Noted also that he was giving "bribes" gifts to active members in the political field before the collapse incident occurred. I think he was preparing himself for the possibility of his business going down.

If he had a laptop and an internet connection he might create a token called Bald in Coinbase's Base network and rugpull the holders by removing liquidity from the DEX hehehe.

There are some people in social media who speculate that Sam might use the Ghislaine Maxwell tactic if he is brought to prison by becoming a consistent prison complainer. According to them, Sam's mother is a lawyer who specializes in criminal reform. She can use the Ghislaine Maxwell tactic through Sam to open an argument for reforms in the American prison system.

Updated:
Recently, FTX proposed to sell 3 billion cryptocurrencies to pay creditors, and if this proposal is accepted, they will gradually sell their assets. As expected, each week they will sell 50-100 million to avoid excessive dumping in the market. They partnered with Galaxy Digital to implement this strategy to reduce the negative impact on the market. This news will be good news for their victims but it will put enormous pressure on the market.
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/08/24/ftx-taps-galaxy-to-sell-stake-and-hedge-its-crypto-billions/

@Iranus. Is there a real need to sell? This is head shaking. I reckon that before the creditors count how much they will receive, they should also know how much FTX will pay in legal fees for this bankruptcy hehe. According to some articles General Motors' bankruptcy paid, $1 billion in legal fees and Lehman Brothers paid more than $2 billion. There are also other similar cases like this.

The problem is that if FTX doesn't sell the assets, where will they get the money to pay the victim's debt? They have come up with a lot of options to find ways to recover assets and find ways to revive their business. But so far, all are just plans, and no feasible plans have been implemented. I don't know what is the best solution as we are not them, but I think selling their crypto holdings would be easier to do than other solutions. Although this will be detrimental to the market at the moment.

But anyway this is a proposed option and whether it is approved and implemented, we need to wait and see. Or are they just trying to buy time with their victims like Mt.Gox has been doing for years. It's been over 10 years and no one has received any compensation from Mt.gox other than empty promises. Is FTX learning Mt.gox's way of appropriating investors' assets?

News update, however, this is unconfirmed.

According to some people in social media, data on everyone who has used FTX and Blockfi has been leaked from Kroll. I am not quite certain what is Kroll but I assume this is their website.

https://www.kroll.com

FTX and Blockfi might have hired their services for compliance and regulations.

https://www.kroll.com/en/services/compliance-and-regulation

In any case, this is one of the unwelcome occurrences of KYC. It is a collection of customer data waiting to be stolen by hackers.

Not related to the case, but James Jani just released a documentary about FTX[1] if anyone is interested. I still haven't watched it yet, but I have seen some of his previous documentaries, they're pretty high quality.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3EYKuFGJ5c

I watched it, and there were a lot of good things in there.

Personally, I do not appreciate these ongoing attempts to suggest that Binance caused FTX to crash or that Binance is engaging in the same behaviors as FTX - and implying that Binance is a model for FTX or that Binance's crash is imminent.

Another thing that bothered me a bit is a kind of seeming attempt to show how logically a business like FTX could have grown so much, but maybe leaving out some of the conspiracy angles.. .and hey I am not exactly prone towards conspiracies, yet in this case, it should still seem fairly obvious that FTX could not have grown as quickly merely from some of the stories that we are told about it, including the bullshit story about the Kimchi arbitrage trade or even leaving out that there might be some insiders, right from the start that had contributed to FTX being able to grow so quickly, and sure maybe they do not have any kind of meaningful evidence for those angles - but if there is a lot of emphasis on suggesting some causal evidence of what happens, there may have had been too much closing of some of the conspiracy angle doors in which there are likely several pieces that we don't really know, including that John Ray is handling this matter but now allowing any independent auditing and some questions regarding the dropping of the political influencing charges (and some of that might have happened after most of this film was made - which seems to be 6 months or more old by now.. and sure editing takes a while to the things together with a case in which we are still learning some of the new pieces of evidence... and/or so far, some angles are being allowed to not be pursued)

Though you are right that Binance didn't cause the crash, FTX didn't follow what they should have done which in result caused the crash, but indirectly Binance was a part of the crash. Maybe it was planned or not. Regarding Binance following the same behaviors of FTX- I think it has been there long ago, maybe even before FTX popped up. They had recently used a collateral fund of BUSDC if I can remember correctly. There was news that more than $3 billion of their BUSDC has remained without any collateral which was supposed to be backed by USDC. This isn't fair if true of course. It's alarming but it's not affecting because it's Binance.

Are you sure that they are collecting this advance KYC data (including the proof of address) for some other purposes and will not return the funds to the individuals?

So i should not be worried if i am unable to do the KYC (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5459878.msg62772149#msg62772149)  ???  
Though i have already submitted my KYC data again but they have rejected it somehow. Once they rejected my real documents, i started to feel all this process a shady one.

Yes, these are various ways that businesses "legitimately" are able to get out of paying people who deserve to receive their payments ... Sure there may well be sometimes that the payment needs to be refused based on lack of compliance, yet you are right there is something scandalous about those kinds of practices happening. and similar when insurance companies figure out ways to not pay claims based on technicalities.

Before the FTX crash, nothing was affecting too as everyone knew that SAM would take his exchange to the level up from Binance CZ. Also everyone thought that FTX would become the number 2 exchange after binance and people were blindly trusting FTX.

Same goes for Binance, as people close their eyes on everything as they trust Binance blindly. It is only a matter of time when they all will be shocked to see their beloved exchange ditching them.

Binance and FTX are not even close to the same, so hope you do not get too distracted by your US Gov talking points.

@JayJuanGee. I was also tricked that FTX would be the Binance killer and Sam would be the Bill Gates or the Jeff Bezos of the cryptospace. I am a clown for getting drawn into this hype. However, with everything being very clear today, Sam appears to be like this character created by an exclusive group of politicians to serve their needs on moneylaundering and pump and dump schemes in a not very regulated industry.

https://i.ibb.co/zmxNStJ/C5-EDD5-EE-AD7-C-4-B93-9803-CCB25-C551-A5-B.jpg

News update.

James Jani made a video that summarizes the story behind FTX and it also speculates what might happen to CZ and Binance for being the trigger of the collapse of FTX and Alameda Research which might have also been caused by Sam himself for using his political connections to lobby against his competitors. However, FTX was also not in a very good financial condition. It would have fallen later if CZ did not dump Binance's holdings of FTT and it would have left them with tokens of no market value.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3EYKuFGJ5c

Well this was posted by @OmegaStarScream a few days ago on Youtube - James Jani.

I knew there would be more speculation about SBF because behind them are some politicians who support them for the sake of other things, money was flowing in the beginning but once it collapsed in the last year and that's how the more ruthless politics play.

Today's news about SBF:  Sam Bankman-Fried appeal against bail revocation ‘meritless’: Prosecutors (https://cointelegraph.com/news/prosecutors-call-former-ftx-ceo-sbf-appeal-against-bail-revocation-meritless)

Speaking of Binance I found one tweet about "Binance slow train wreck (https://twitter.com/Travis_Kling/status/1699135859885236432)"
Will Binance suffer the same fate?

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/09/06/mtRnP.png

I am starting to question the extent to which any of us should be tolerating these kinds of posts comparing Binance to FTX, and maybe they deserve their own thread - because not ONLY are they likely bullshit government sponsored kinds of claims (even if the people who are making such claims do not realize that they are engaged in bullshit FUD spreading), but they are also off topic for this particular thread.. so maybe there is a "Binance is a slow train wreck thread?"  

Even though mostly I don't believe those bullshit talking points which seem to be similar to the ones made about Tether (USDT) since about 2016 or so, I would still watch and even likely participate in such a "Binance is a slow train wreck thread."

Probably, a thread like this one, should be attempting to focus on what the fuck is happening with FTX and the various shenanigans therein (and there are a lot of them, so why get so easily distracted, there is not a shortage of FTX materials and connections and threads of evidence that likely could be discussed and unravelled), rather than getting distracted into supposed Binance comparisons that may or may not even exist in reality.

News update.

FTX executive Ryan Salami has pleaded guilty and has made a deal to become the next whistleblower against Sam. My speculation only hehehe.

In any case, according to this documentation, he owes the American government $1.5 billion, however, the government has accepted these substitute assets worth $6 million as full payment. This is head shaking. We can only speculate on what other agreements were made in this settlement.

Substitute assets that were mentioned are 2 houses, equity interest in East Rood Farm corporation and a 2021 porsche 911 hehehehe.

Source https://www.docdroid.net/j71g1oq/forfeit-salami-pdf

Ryan Salami's guilty plea means that to date, we have had four FTX executives plead guilty. Gary Wang, Nishad Singh, Caroline Ellison have all pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with the investigation before, and this time Ryan Salami. According to a news report, SBF and four accomplices will appear in court for fraud to be held in October. Previously, the SBF had denied the charges that the court had ruled him. But with his accomplices pleading guilty one by one, I think he's starting to panic.

@Marvell1. We cannot be quite certain in what mental condition Sam is presently right now, however, we can be very sure prison is not a very good place for him.

In any case, does anyone in this thread know Martin Shkreli? He was a hedgefund manager who commited securities fraud and who is also quite known and admired in the cryptospace. He has recently been doing twitter spaces where he talks about updates on Sam in prison.

The information comes from his source, a person he also met in prison.

Here is one of the spaces.

https://twitter.com/wagieeacc/status/1699971326776123594?s=20

@bbc.reporter, I don't know about this guy but I just discovered one more interesting detail. In addition to the four senior leaders of FTX who have pleaded guilty, we also have a very rarely mentioned character, Sam Trabucco. This is the official CEO of Alameda, and Caroline Ellison was only CEO of Alameda for a year before FTX went bankrupt. So far, Sam Trabucco has not been arrested, and the question is whether he knew something, or if there was a larger force backing him.

Another piece of information I just found is that the SBF trial will take place in March 2024 instead of October 2023 as expected.

https://imgtr.ee/images/2023/09/09/bec16981e52eda2c18cb9cd1c0495ae5.png

There is chatter on Twitter about FTX liquidating assets next week, does anyone have more info on this? In total it's $3.4b, $268m (https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F5lAkwhWcAA4LF7?format=png&name=900x900) of which is in Bitcoin (7.8%).


This would mean liquidating assets for the next 17 weeks if kept at the same pace (and info is correct).  For Bitcoin, this would only mean around $16m per week which doesn't sound too bad.

This could be the moment where certain altcoins get crushed even harder against Bitcoin, and it's higher liquidity will be a lot more resilient to selling pressure.

Also another guess would be taking the Bitcoin to OTC and potentially selling it there a lot quicker while the rest of the market suffers. for longer.

That is the other Sam, the Sam who retired before everything went to shit with Alameda and when they took billions in loans and used FTX's illiquid token FTT as collateral. It might also be possible that other Sam is a secret agent working for the government. Once his work was done and knew what would happen to FTX, he resigned. Why is the SEC or another government agency not asking questions about him?

After reading these posts, I had to look up some of the Sam Trabucco information, so yeah he was at Alameda Research from about March 2019 until August 2022, and so he was co-CEO for only about 10 months.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Trabucco

I guess it is not really clear where he is, but I suppose if he is on his $2.5 million yacht.. then people might have some kind of ideas where the yacht is..

Bought a Yacht in 2022 (September 2023):
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ftx-yacht-former-alameda-ceo-sam-trabucco

Might be in South America area (March 2023)
https://bitkan.com/learn/where-is-sam-trabucco-now-who-is-sam-trabucco-12918

@JayJuanGee. His official location is he might be on his yacht sailing international waters where he cannot be under any law of any jurisdiction and he might only secretly be docking on land through another boat if wants rest and recreation hehehhe.

Also, if you look more deeply on the history about Sam, other Sam, FTX and Alameda, where did they come from? Their story is nothing similar to CZ or Jesse Powell where you knew they were in crypto for years before they became successful. On Sam no one knew who they were or Caroline or Gary Wang. They suddenly became crypto celebrities.

We are on the same page regarding the various bullshit backstories of the overnight child wonders of FTX. It surely does not add up, and quite a few times, I have posted about my own various skepticisms - including when there are attempts to equate CZ with those childish FTX twats - including that even some of the credible bitcoiners are being divided into the baloney ideas of CZ being the problem (or a problem that is even in the same ballpark as those snot-nosed vegan supposed effective altruism FTX PsyOp twats)...

Even various aspects of the official story(ies) are still not adding up, even though some of these ideas about the seemingly fake backstories are coming up from time to time and they have to either be quashed or ignored or pushed under the rug when possible.

@JayJuanGee. There is another that does not add up. Sam is almost obese, however, the cryptonews media declare that he is vegan hehehehe.

In any case, news update on Sam Tabasco. There is a court filing that exhibits a trading account in FTX might have special powers heheheheee. There is a user called trabby under Alameda Research's main account which appears this account cannot be liquidated. It is not certain if this username belongs to Sam Tabasco, however.

https://www.docdroid.net/ZIMK5tP/sdny-1-22-cr-00673-lak-272-0-pdf#page=15

I read something quite interesting about FTX and Sam that made the latest headlines.

The title is quite explicit in that Sam feels that he is the one who is ostensibly innocent in the current FTX collapse.
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/09/18/6JNvT.png
Source (https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/09/15/sam-bankman-fried-blames-everyone-but-himself-for-ftxs-collapse/)

The same article also contained Sam's words that "And the truth is that I did what I thought was right."
Honestly, it is a very high confidence from SBF because in this case it is as if he is someone who does not feel guilty for what he has done so far and confidently says that all actions that have proven to make many people suffer are not his fault.
On the other hand, psychologically it seems that in this case SBF is a little damaged because with his ambition and goals he will do whatever he thinks is the truth without caring about how others feel.

We are not at the punishment stage yet and sure Sam yet been found guilty, so he has rights to defend himself, and maybe there is more tolerance for not feeling guilty or showing remorse before being convicted (presuming that he is going to end up getting convicted of some of the allegations), yet I get the sense that mentality (if his claims of innocence and sweetness does not simmer down a bit), that way of thinking and speaking out likely will end up getting him worse punishment, because if he does not have any remorse, then it is less likely anyone whether judge or jury is going to feel that he deserves a break... but yeah, hey, maybe I am jumping ahead of myself and he has rights to proclaim himself as innocent until some point that he decides that he has lost and either needs to enter a settlement or if he gets a judgement against himself.

I wonder if his parents feel remorse about their involvement?  or alternatively about their having had raised such a psycho kid?  I hear that they are similar kinds of personalities and philosophies... and maybe we are hearing exaggerations of how Sam is similar to his parents because we don't really know his parents too much even there are some discussions of them.

Mom and Dad are still staying out of jail, and that might be part of the important story. which seems to not be too good of a reflection upon our justice system.

If there is evidence that parents are involved and know about SBF activities but still support it, then there is no reason not to go to prison. Moreover, with large amounts, it will likely be easier to prosecute legally with the evidence attached. SBF continues to defend actions that no one can justify. Once wrong is always wrong and he must follow the law as proof of responsibility. So in my opinion this is just SBF's awareness and responsibility, he has to make peace with the fact that his position is on the wrong track. Psychology cannot be a reference, because from the start SBF did this very consciously without any pressure or threats from anyone. How is it possible that someone who is psychologically disturbed could easily play a huge role in creating losses for millions of people.

The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree, lol
In essence, a person's behavior and actions, or in this case SBF, start from the smallest things that are influenced by the surrounding environment.

Of course there is evidence of their involvement in various aspects of Sam's business, including setting up the business and including Sam's abilities to get contacts/meetings with high ranking people in various political positions.


For the parents to go  to prison or Sam? 

There can be multiple culpable persons and each person should be punished in accordance with their level of culpability, and sure some persons work out cooperation agreements with the government, and other people don't end up getting charges brought against them, and prosecutors do have some discretion regarding who to charge and what to charge, and they are supposed to have some accountability to the public in terms of bringing charges, but sometimes they might not bring charges against certain people whether it is lack of evidence or some other reasons is not always clear without delving into what evidence they actually have and maybe other complicated aspects that might not always be publicly available in terms of whether prosecutors might be failing/refusing to prosecute when they should be prosecuting...

And, I personally have been suggesting that it is my belief that there is enough evidence that Sam's parents should at least be investigated.. even if there might not be enough evidence to bring charges.. I am not sure about the exact level of evidence that is available, but I am also suggesting that there are a lot of pretty strong inferential aspect that seem to show problematic connections including one that that many people bring up regarding the father getting paid $10 million from Sam (or was it from FTX) and then now seems to be using that money to pay for Sam's attorney fees (legal defense).


I agree with you on these parts.

 On Sam's parents being involved, read this article. I reckon this is good that a mainstream news media outlets have begun reporting this reality.

I speculate during the trial, we will know how deeply involved his parents were in the decision making of Sam as CEO of FTX.

https://i.ibb.co/RzkzqsM/9-F7-AC430-D89-F-4-C4-F-AA4-A-436-C8-DFCFC5-D.jpg

Bankman and Fried have steered clear of much of the scrutiny that’s enveloped FTX. That’s at least in part because they’ve yet to deliver a full accounting of their roles in helping their son build a sprawling business and political-influence operation. Instead, they’ve generally been portrayed as spectators, who, often in tears, offer emotional support to their son at frequent court appearances. But their names will almost certainly come up during the trial. The defense team has signaled its strategy may, in part, rest on advice Bankman-Fried received from lawyers, including his parents.

A spokeswoman for the couple, Risa Heller, declined to make Bankman or Fried available for interviews. She’s said previously that neither one had much to do with FTX beyond being a supportive parent. Fried never worked for the company, and Bankman’s brief tenure mostly focused on philanthropy, according to Heller. Last year, Bankman-Fried told the New York Times that his parents “weren’t involved in any of the relevant parts” of his company.

Former employees and business partners say this wasn’t the impression they had at the time, and legal filings suggest Bankman and Fried were crucial to their son’s transfiguration from schlubby startup nerd to hyperconnected crypto mogul. The couple profited tremendously from FTX, netting $26 million in cash and real estate in 2022 alone. They were regular fixtures at the company’s offices, offered words of encouragement to employees and were included in internal company communications. Their reputations and connections were essential to FTX’s success.

Source https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-09-14/sam-bankman-fried-s-parents-did-they-enable-ftx-s-rise

Yeah, that article is 5 days old, but there are some other articles in the last day or so, including that the FTX estate has only just filed a civil lawsuit against SBF's parents for their fraudulent involvement of the business and their taking of customer money (Apparently alleging $16.4 million).. and perhaps these kinds of civil actions will end up leading to criminal actions against those slime balls parents.. that we already know that they have way more involvement than they have been given credit....

Fuck those trying to stay behind the scenes twats (it's all alleged at this point.. and prosecutors better also get on the scenes and allege some conduct that will put them where they belong, behind bars.. maybe they can all share cells.. hahahaha.. that would be too lenient... but they might be able to meet each other on the prison playground during times when they are allowed to go outside.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/sbfs-parents-were-given-16-4m-house-paid-for-entirely-by-ftx-lawsuit-says/

Yep, I am curious about that as well, but I think everyone is aware that his parents were balls deep into FTX and (almost) everything that has happened there.

In other news, Stanford University ((where his parents work as professors)) decided to send back $5.5 million they received from FTX.

It depends, he can be punished or can be used as a witness (not as a witness on the part of SBF) in terms of his involvement as the mastermind behind SBF or he was only involved when he knew that his son was holding a lot of money but hid that fact from legal scrutiny. In fact, law enforcers have no shortage of evidence to convict SBF. In fact, in my opinion, the case is being played out too much, well, it's being played out as if it will buy time so that gradually the media gets bored and there is no more news about major violations. In fact, this case is not much different from the case of politicians who have poured large funds into a political campaign, SBF plays a big role in it so that the flow of funds traced leads to>>>>>>>>> :)


Believe me, there are many people involved, so every time this case is tried to be uncovered, it brings more danger to those who investigate it. There are those who don't want this to continue because it could result in the puzzle pieces being more easily arranged.

You are starting from a pretty lame-ass framework in regards to the roles of each of the parents.

Sure it is possible that the parents were not actively involved in certain day to day running of the business, but one of the ONLY ways that Sam ends up getting access to high-level people is because of his parents, including the legal and complicated ways that FTX was set up with hundreds of shell companies and hundreds of ways to complicate the flow of money.. .. Surely daddy bankman helped out with those kinds of things... or set him up with attorneys who would engage in such fraudulent ways of setting u such a relatively new business that was rising to fame so quickly.


I agree with you that there could end up being some wearing out of the public based on how much some of the angles of this case are in the media.. and surely there are also deeper and more boring angles that will also likely lead to more ways in which fraud was going on and maybe even hiding of funds and maybe even justifying the charging or the filing of lawsuits against high level people (whether politicians or other high ranking folks.. maybe investors)....

Another thing that I had mentioned previously is that the FTX executors have so far been  successful in their being able to keep out outside and independent auditors.. and probably part of the strategy of the FTX executors will be to make it appear that they are doing a "good enough" job so that no one is asking for the outside auditors to come in and to help out with some of the forensics and to bring to light some facts (relationships) that are not readily apparent from whatever crowd sourcing kinds of proddings that are going on.


I agree on this part.

The involvement of his parents has taken a new turn... It turns out that I just realized that Allan Joseph Bankman SBF's father as an advisor to FTX and also he is a tax expert means he knows what to do including the money of his own son.
Read more in detail in today's article that Allan Joseph Bankman has enjoyed many facilities provided by FTX including staying in a hotel with a pull of 1200 USD and still complaining because his salary is paid $200,000 per year but his agreement is $1,000,000.

His mother also did the same as his depraved actions, with a tax expert but he gave donations to politicians to cover the source of the money, well the parents just helped their children to carry out this planned action.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66857146

The skeptical people in the cryptospace community speculates, however, much of the people inside and outside of the communith would be shocked if the real story was made into a movie and shown to them.

There was also a meme with the Rock and a girl where it said Sam had sex with Caroline with the lights on! This would be shocking and funny in a movie.

Found a thread on Twitter of a former FTX/Alameda employee.
https://twitter.com/aditya_baradwaj/status/1694355617576898838

Don't know if this was previously shared here or not the thread was created in August.

I read the whole thread it turns out that SBF's vision is not just a crypto exchange but there are other crazier things like going to make a vaccine factory and many other things he wants to build. :o

That's quite a long story from the confession of a former Alameda employee. And some interesting things can actually be summed up here especially for the 6th thread written where this former employee found something inappropriate when SBF did business while playing games at the same time.

https://x.com/aditya_baradwaj/status/1694355626338742384?s=20 (https://x.com/aditya_baradwaj/status/1694355626338742384?s=20)

At another point I also highlighted SBF's bold desire for a transformation for the Bahamas where the money channeled to the country is taken from the profits they receive from FTX.
SBF's desire is very good but his way is wrong because with his vision of goodness he is doing it at the expense of investors, employees, and customers trusting FTX.

https://x.com/aditya_baradwaj/status/1694355651546546371?s=20 (https://x.com/aditya_baradwaj/status/1694355651546546371?s=20)

There are people in social media who are spreading rumors that Sam's father was part of an advisory board of the Democratic Party's dark money network. Also according to them it was mentioned in FTX's lawsuit. There were no sources presented, however. It might only be fud.

But what does have a source is according to this, Sam Tabasco's yacht was bought using customer deposits hehehe.

https://i.ibb.co/9NMF8kT/417-E0-E92-DFED-4328-85-B1-90-D35509-F4-B3.jpg

Source https://twitter.com/sunil_trades/status/1697657482674360357

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/09/27/PRVKP.png
Source (https://x.com/WatcherGuru/status/1707047232409579741?s=20)

It looks like there will be an interesting new chapter in the FTX drama now that US Congressman Patrick McHenry has threatened Gary Gensler for not being transparent in his interactions with SBF and FTX and will be seeking a subpoena for this.
Patrick McHenry thinks that Gensler has been very secretive about the FTX case even though it is a huge financial case.


I think if this continues to be raised it will be an interesting new drama but what I think in this case is whether there is personal gain from the officials who have authority in this matter?

Updated 9/28: In updated news related to FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried, the judge continues to deny Sam Bankman-Fried's request for temporary release. This is the second time SBF's lawyers failed in their attempt to secure bail for him. Last week, they also requested his release on bail but were unsuccessful.

According to the article, it seems like SBF won a few small victories last week but perhaps prosecutors have more complete evidence so they don't want him released on bail until the criminal trial takes place next week.

https://www.theblock.co/post/253445/sam-bankman-fried-loses-bid-for-temporary-release-from-jail-reports?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

https://www.theblock.co/post/253303/sam-bankman-fried-can-wear-a-suit-to-court-take-notes-on-laptop

@DanWalker. The skeptical me is starting to speculate that if the rumors of Sam being only a frontman to a moneylaundering scheme for the powerful people of the Democratic party, would it not be safer for him to be in prison to avoid assasination?

He might know much sensitive information and this might also be why he will never plead guilty because this opens his case to more divulging of information and also possibly to be under a protection program. It might be better for Sam's life to be sentenced guilty for fraud instead of admitting that he is guilty and look for a settlement.

I quite like what the prosecutor is doing at the moment especially the argument that the judge said was correct where when the SBF lawyer's excuse that it was difficult for him to make a defence with limited time was actually well refuted by the argument given by the prosecutor because SBF before August had a very large amount of time and it should be enough for them to prepare a defence in the trial.
There were some victories such as him being allowed to wear formal clothes instead of prisoner's clothes but I don't think it will last long because he is more suitable to wear prisoner's clothes than formal clothes with a neat suit :D

As far as we know, his close associates all pleaded guilty one after another, so it was only a matter of time before he was sentenced soon. When FTX collapsed and SBF was arrested, there was a lot of news regarding his relationship with democratic party politicians. But since those rumors, have we heard any more news about it? Almost not, so I don't think the FTX incident has anything to do with politics anymore.

The upcoming trial he faces is a criminal trial so I think it's understandable that the judge won't grant him bail. SBF has become a dangerous entity and the case is no longer a civil project.


In addition to being allowed to wear a suit to court, he was also allowed to use a computer in prison, but the computer did not have an internet . I don't know if that makes him happier. :D :D

Yes which would make everyone assume that Sam Bankrupt-Fried would also plead guilty to also be allowed to settle and get a lighter sentence. However, what does Sam know which does not make him want to plead guilty? Does this imply that if he pleads guilty he might be forced to share confidential information that should never be share? This is very headshaking unless Sam has become crazy and he thinks he is innocent hehehehe.

Also, if Sam wins this court case, what would happen to Caroline and the Chinese quant Wang who might presently be sharing confidential information.

Interesting news that I heard from X.com/twitter.

SBF is now rumored to be paying Donald Trump $5 billion not to run for President (https://watcher.guru/news/bankman-fried-wanted-to-pay-trump-5b-not-to-run-for-president), although this is under SBF's consideration but I find it ridiculous that SBF continues to do politics with its donations.

Although there is a rebuttal from Donald Trump's spokesman - Steven Cheung and considers SBF as a fraud. Source (https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/1708788491792839152)

SBF is threatened with 115 years in prison as stated by @Watch.guru. (https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1709051990351720837)

What happens if SBF does receive such a long prison sentence? Although this is not fully finalized because it is said that today is his first hearing.

https://watcher.guru/news/bankman-fried-faces-115-years-in-prison-trial-to-begin-on-oct-3

Well, since he 31 years old at the moment, that would mean that he will spend rest of his life in prison.  :D While I woulnd't mind see it happening, I really doubt he is going to get that kind of sentence as imho its more realistic that he admits the guilt and gets reduced sentence.

Then again, Bernie Madoff got 150 years for his ponzie scheme so you never know.

It is ridiculous that the SBF does not want to admit fault for this problem, while there is already a lot of evidence about the downfall of FTX including its dark side with political games and other donations. Let him live as long as he can in jail even if it is impossible.  :D

I remember when there was news of Thodex crypto exchange in Turkey because the founder committed fraud, I am sure what he did was smaller than the FTX collapse with billions of dollars lost and used for the pleasure of SBF and his family.

After all the same founder of Thodex, - Faruk Fatih Özer was sentenced to 11,196 years in prison.  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5466135.0)

I don't think he has the slightest chance of winning the case, what he should be thinking about is how many years he will spend in prison when the collapse of FTX is considered the biggest fraud in US history.

The trial started today, and one of the news I heard was that it took them a day to pick a jury for this trial. An interesting thing is that these jurors are all people who know nothing about cryptocurrency. The reason given to explain this issue is to have fairness in the trial process, without bias. This has caused some mixed opinions.
https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/sam-bankman-fried-trial-potential-juror-dismissed-after-saying-he-cant-be-unbiased-given-everything-negative-he-heard-about-crypto/amp_articleshow/104141095.cms


Once the trial begins and if we have enough evidence to send him to jail, it won't matter whether he wants to plead guilty or not. His fate is no longer in his hands anymore.

I do not care who wins the case or who will lose this case, my only concern is what will happen to our funds stuck at FTX and whether will we ever be able to recover them. This is a big question which is not addressed by anyone, not even the court of law.

Also, this is strange that the court and everyone is more interested in giving punishment or bail to the SAM but no one really cares for those who have lost their life savings there on the FTX exchange. Though it is also people's fault to keep money at exchanges but still some people have a high trading volume and the money stays in exchange if you are in any future trade.

SBF might not be favored very much by pleaing.. and there are some small chances that he could hang the jury or something like that, but there are still other charges that are outstanding.. ... so it is difficult to imagine any scenario in which he does not get at least 5-10 years.. would really be some long shot kinds of scenarios, and perhaps his going to trial is an attempt to shoot at those long shot scenarios.. even though he is likely using other people's money for the cost of the trial.. but that's another matter... remember at one point, he said that he ONLY had like $100k in his bank account.. another one of his lies.


You sound mixed up UmerIdrees.

There are various kinds of proceedings, and yeah, there is no one stop place for justice, and sometimes justice is not meted out..

The criminal trial does go personally after Sam because that is the general nature of a criminal trial.. sometimes there could be orders of restitution for victims.. but there surely needs to be found evidence of guilt first before the trial would go into the damages phase (whether that is ONLY sentencing or if their might be ways in which restitution could come from Sam to the extent to which funds/property can be found and attributable to him).

The hearing resumed but I was quite strange with the reasoning by the lawyer from SBF where SBF's lawyer argued that his client never intended to steal customers' money and claimed that SBF was just overwhelmed with the speed of growth of its two businesses.
I as a layman don't really accept this argument because after all when it commits a conscious act of taking customer funds it must have known that it was wrong and it was stealing but the lawyer said it didn't intend to do so which makes me a bit ambiguous because logically there is no way it would take more than $10 billion in customer funds just because of the element of accident.


On the other hand, claiming to be overwhelmed by the growth of the business shows that he was not able to manage well and could not calculate the plan from the beginning of his business (because he played too many games) as expressed by his former employees in a long thread on twitter (X)  (https://twitter.com/aditya_baradwaj/status/1694355617576898838) then why do several businesses if you can't manage them well.

The lawyer's reasoning honestly makes me a little sick of the current drama and defence of SBF.

Actually in this condition I do not really like to see trials with the common law legal system because I prefer to see civil law which in my opinion is more applicable especially for SBF cases but when it comes to SBF and USA cases, it is definitely common law that will be used with the jury as one of the reinforcements even though it is the judge who has the decision.
On the other hand, looking at the scope of the current 12 jurors if you look at their background, they do not have any background in crypto so this will clearly confuse them so that this could be an advantage for SBF in his trial even though indeed with some facts that have been spread such as he was proven to take advantage of FTX for his own interests, it is enough to be used as one of the irrefutable evidence but this could also be reversed.
However, if this is just a long term scenario as you say, then it is likely that this case will drag on even though it would be better for him to stay in jail for a long time.

The US government has said that SBF is a crypto empire built on lies (https://twitter.com/WatcherGuru/status/1709663127724228628) or to enrich itself no wonder it is evasive but prosecutors have insisted that SBF is guilty as charged and this will be proven in court.

According to the prosecutors the US government has gone after the two jets that resulted from this scam (https://twitter.com/BloombergAsia/status/1709979252232208890), this will reveal even more as he has stolen billions of dollars and luxury goods.

Hopefully he will be proven wrong because he will be imprisoned for more than 100 years.

That SBF lawyer is on the payroll of course he will defend his client to the hilt. Lol

I am not sure how fruitful it might be to get into discussions of common law versus civil law because SBF is currently being tried in the USA.. so sure, it seems best to attempt to figure out what is the system in which he is being tried, and you are suggesting that the judge is in charge, and I am not sure if you understand the role that the jury plays.. yet I think that we can say that the jury and judge have powers in various kinds of ways, but in some senses, juries can engage in kinds of behaviors that the judge cannot stop.. both in terms of their determination of facts and their ability to sometimes be able to nullify laws (which doesn't happen too often).. so I suppose that I am just quibbling with your trying to suggest that the judge can still decide certain matters opposite to what the jury finds.

Pretty much the judge instructs the jury in regards to what is the applicable law, and when it comes time for the jury to make certain decisions regarding some of the facts, the judge cannot overrule the jury.. so sometimes the jury can end up nullifying the law based on their factual findings... and the judge would most likely not be able to do anything about that, absent some kinds of unusual circumstances.

The judge might instruct the jury that this allegation number 1 needs to show criminal intent to use client funds and it needs to show conduct of the defendant that led to negative consequences of the funds getting lost.. but then he might say that allegation number 2 has all the same elements as allegation number 1, but intent does not need to be shown.  Juries are supposed to be following the judge's instructions in terms of finding the elements of the crime, and if they don't find intent in allegation 1, the judge cannot tell them that they are wrong and make them go back and rethink the matter, even if he believes differently about the evidence in the case.  And if the jurors are spending time talking about intent in element 2, the judge might re-instruct them that they do not need to consider intent in terms of allegation 2 because it is not required in order for there to be a violation of the law... Maybe my examples are not very great, yet I am just making the point that the jury can sometimes even purposefully defy what the judge says or wants, especially if they make sure that they are expressing what they are doing in terms of finding facts.

Whether it is good or not may be another story.. it is what it is in terms of the system in which Sam is being tried, currently and the system  under which he may or may not get convicted.. and sure there is quite a bit that needs to happen yet prior to his actually getting convicted, and in the meantime, it still seems that he is spending his time in jail during the trial... even though I would imagine there is quite a bit of times that attorneys are getting access to him while he is "in custody" but he surely does not have the kinds of liberties that he would have if he was not "in custody" during the trial.


SBF's lawyers have legal duties to argue vociferously for SBF.  They could get charged with malpractice if they do not make as many strong and good arguments as they are able to make, even if they are favoring certain facts over other facts and presenting matters in the best light for SBF... and yeah, it goes to show that they don't have a lot to work for if they are not able to present very convincing arguments... based on more and more facts that are likely to ongoingly come out during the trial.. especially if the trial goes the full length, we might be hearing quite a bit of dirt, and even continuing to hear a decent amount of surprising and/or shocking drama in the process.

I don't know if anyone shared this here but just as we think we have seen it all, and then a witness in Sam Bankman-Fried's trial, a former FTX developer, Adam Yedidia comes out and says that he resigned from FTX after finding out Alameda Research used stolen customer funds to repay loans.
More reading: https://watcher.guru/news/ex-ftx-developer-discloses-8b-discrepancy-during-trial

I mean, where was he to talk about this before the disaster happened? This case is filled up with drama left, right and central  :D

He was probably too busy enjoying the severance pay so he couldn't warn anyone about what's going on in FTX.  :P

---

In other news regarding the ongoing trial, FTX Co-Founder and SBF's good buddy Gary Wang said that Alameda was allowed to withdraw the unlimited amount of money from FTX. Seeing how things are developing, I really don't see how will SBF avoid long term sentence. Then again, if OJ managed to get acquitted, anything is possible.  :D

These are statements made by Sam's Chinese quant Gary Wang when the quant was questioned on the witness stand. It is more than 3 pages and some of the statements might not anymore be shocking because we know the news, however, this is still very head shaking on how all of these have occured. Why is this not on show everywhere similar to the court trial Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard?

https://twitter.com/wagieeacc/status/1710559548094771301

According to BitMex Research, FTX used a random number function to generate the insurance fund it published to the public:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/10/08/RwzUP.jpeg
https://x.com/BitMEXResearch/status/1710739315611877533?s=20

FTX exchange supposedly used fake information for the insurance fund it showed to the public, which gave a false impression of its real value. At the same time, FTX's former CTO, Gary Wang, testified against FTX's insurance fund and admitted that the displayed figure on FTX's platform was completely fake.

source (https://coinedition.com/python-code-ftx-used-to-randomly-fabricate-insurance-fund-exposed/)

@FatFork. This is really very head shaking because these new information being discovered and shared make it appear that FTX was created as a criminal operation from the beginning. It is also strange that Sam Tabasco's name is not mentioned anywhere in the Chinese quant's testimony. Is Tabasco being protected? What does he know? Why is he not called as a witness?

In any case, Caroline Ellison will be on the witness stand this week. I am quite certain this will be another head shaking time of discoveries.

https://i.ibb.co/NF7xNr5/F36-D1-D42-EE7-B-46-BA-85-F7-1-CC5853173-D2.jpg

She was on the stand today, and she just confirmed what people suspected. I am really curious to see how will SBF try to minimze his involvement in all this as he keeps saying that he is innocent.

Here are some excerpts, pay attention to bold part.

https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1711783668971188355

Here's one for you: our boy SBF planned to be a president of US.  :D

@Rikafip. I am very skeptical that sweet Caroline has stopped supporting Sam. I reckon from that testimony it appears that Caroline is being told or already has a plan to make Sam appear insane so Sam can plead insanity or temporary insanity caused by Adderall and avoid time in prison if he is charged guilty.

Sam and Caroline were lovers and on a psychological level, sweet Caroline is not very beautiful and the attention from a man she might have only felt from Sam. Her loyalty to him might be very deep hehehehee.

I really don't see on what you are basing that, especially since he still claims that he is not guilty and I don't hink that jury will buy insanrity defense even if he tries (which I don't think he will).


You see them as a Bonnie & Clyde type of lovers but from what I read about their relationship, it wasn't like that at all. Allegedly, he was embarrased by her and didn't even want the others to know that they are together so I wouldn't be surprised at all if she is now vindictive and coulnd't wait to turn on him, which she did in the end.

No wonder... he made a lot of political donations, apparently his ambition was to become President of the United States.
The dream of becoming president is buried now, the one who is now waiting for a sentence of 115 years in prison if convicted. :D

What's more interesting is that Hakim and Ellison's conversation is expressed in this tweet so we know all the conversation: https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1712172823005810935

What is interesting is that Ellison said that there was a Thai prostitute who was involved in re-accessing Alameda's wallet in the name of another person with assets worth $1 billion but that had been frozen by the Chinese government.

What's interesting is that Elon Musk also commented.
https://twitter.com/TiffanyFong_/status/1712145358535512511

@BABY SHOES. On Sam's political ambitions, he never had a chance and if FTX was not a scam but a successful exchange, I reckon the chance will never be there for him.

In any case, the Chinese government having frozen $1 billion and bribing Chinese government officials was a shock for me. The other statements from Caroline similar to planning on scamming Saudi investors and convincing the regulators to crackdown on the competition is expected.

Knowing this will never happen despite FTX's success to date, SBF will never become president.  ;D
It's just that he's so ambitious that he uses the power of customers' money for his own desires. :D

Reportedly Chinese officials will be bribed $150 Million through the prostitute and this will be an interesting drama again.

Then the question becomes where Sam Trabucco, who was once the co-CEO of Alameda Research, is now a mystery after the fall of FTX.

What's interesting about Matthew's article is that he's a reporter.


Source: https://matthewrussellleeicp.substack.com/p/sino-sam-trabucco-bankman-fried-bribed

@BABY SHOES. I reckon having the type of illusion Sam was having for himself might be caused by taking too much Adderall. This is a drug that will make the user feel good but also might make the user think he can achieve bigger goals than what is within his reality.

https://i.ibb.co/4tRKB9t/A1-EFE13-A-400-D-4-C02-AE9-E-F1-CDA89-B9249.jpg

Drugs like Adderall may help you feel more alert, awake, and focused. It has a stimulating effect that releases dopamine to the brain, giving you a sense of euphoria and well-being.

Source https://www.leehealth.org/health-and-wellness/healthy-news-blog/top-trends/does-adderall-make-you-smarter

On Sam Tabasco, it has been speculated that he is an informant.

Also, I have not read all of the statements made by the Chinese quant and sweet Caroline, however, it is being mentioned in social media that Caroline got a loan for a gambling company. What is this gambling company? It was never mentioned.

News update.

It appears Sam and his lawyers have found a way to manipulate the trial by using delaying tactics caused by Sam's addiction to Adderall.

Also, I speculate that Sam's Adderall addiction might be used to argue the case towards the effects of this drug to a person and how the drug affected Sam's decision making in FTX to make it appear that he is another victim of the pharmaceuticals business.

https://i.ibb.co/HT9g8Qt/FE971-D6-D-A622-482-B-8818-2267896-A0869.png

Stimulant misuse is responsible for many issues, especially more commonly known drugs like Adderall. This use is extremely common on college campuses and with young adults more prone to risky behaviors. While both problem gambling and stimulant use have negative effects and are closely related in terms of their usage demographics, the relationship between Adderall and gambling disorders is an unknown for many individuals. Let’s explore how this drug can impact one’s propensity to partake in uncontrolled gambling activities.  

What Is Adderall?

Adderall is a class of stimulants used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder and related problems. It can be an extremely effective drug, and with that comes a desire for doctors to avoid overprescription or early refills. Yet, as with any medication, there are ways individuals can access it without a prescription that can lead to misuse and other related issues.

Stimulants and Gambling

Gambling and drug use are often lumped together in one, and for good reason. A surprisingly large percentage of college students report gambling, taking drugs, or both each year. With the popularity of gambling increasing over the past few years, there’s increased importance on understanding the relationship between drugs (like simulants) and gambling.

Many studies report that individuals who report gambling problems are also more likely to report misuse of stimulants or other drugs. So keeping these stimulants out of the hands of people who don’t need them and educating others on the impact of these drugs can go a long way to preventing gambling problems.

Source https://800gambler.org/can-adderall-cause-gambling-disorders/

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/16/RcOUG.png
the FTX case has widened again and has led to several well-known celebrities and athletes now being questioned and charged for allegedly supporting FTX.
In some of the articles I've read there are at least a few names such as Naomi Osaka, former baseball superstar David Ortiz, and Kevin O'Leary currently being investigated for their involvement with Sam and FTX in addition to Tom Brady and Steph Curry are also now starting to be investigated for receiving money from Sam (which came from stolen customer money) for their endorsement deals in the form of FTX paltform advertisements.
Tom Brady reportedly received $55 million for just 20 hours of work advertising FTX for 3 years and $35 million for Steph Curry who did the same for 3 years.

https://fortune.com/crypto/2023/10/02/sam-bankman-fried-tom-brady-gisele-bundchen-michael-lewis-60-minutes/ (https://fortune.com/crypto/2023/10/02/sam-bankman-fried-tom-brady-gisele-bundchen-michael-lewis-60-minutes/)

https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/sam-bankman-fried-tom-brady-ftx-60-minutes-michael-lewis/ (https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/sam-bankman-fried-tom-brady-ftx-60-minutes-michael-lewis/)

@Fauderz. These sports celebrities are also victims by Sam Bankman Fried and no one is implying that they were supporting the scam. They supported FTX the cryptocoin exchange. They did not know Sam was scamming everyone since since 2019. The year is according to some speculations on social media.

I reckon Tom Brady, Steph Curry and the others should return the money and have their own lawsuit against Sam for damages caused. It might have caused the divorce of Tom Brady's marriage hehe.

Cited for viewability of image

I have to say I am glad that I don't see Larry David's name being mentioned even though he made FTX SuperBowl commercial (which I think it was hilarious lol). For those who missed it, here is the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWMnbJJpeZc

---

In other FTX related news, Cointelegraph reports that FTX debtors could get $9 billion by the end of Q2 2024. The big question is what's the percentage that each debtor will receive though and another interesting thing is that those who withdrew more than $250k within 9 days of FTX collapse will have their claim reduced by 15%.

@Rikafip. Will the debtors recieve all of the $9 billion in stablecoins? This is my only wish for 2024 and this will certainly be a pump on the market when they want to speculate on bitcoin and other cryptocoins affer the halving hehehehe.

In any case, does anyone have a news update on when we will hear Sam Bankrupt-Fraud speak on the stand? I am waiting for a twist on this trial where Sam becomes something similar to a witness and blames the collapse of FTX on CZ.

I have no idea in which currency they plan to send these money to debtors. Does anyone know what's the practice in similar cases?


It would probably be best for him not to testify at all as I don't see how he can improve his position considering everything that has happened (if anything I think he might make it even worse) It would be very interestingness to hear him though and I have no doubts that he will try to put the blame on CZ/Binance for FTX downfall.

On the hearing to be very interesting, I very much agree. Why did they not make this a public trial where we can watch it on video similar to Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard hehehehe.

Also, I have noticed that there many articles from mainstream media that appear to report any type of fud they can create for clickbait. They want the people outside of the cryptospace think that FTX represents crypto and make it imply that crypto is a rotten business.



Why the SBF Trial Reveals the Dark Side of Crypto: Unveiling the Rotten Business

Source https://vigourtimes.com/why-the-sbf-trial-reveals-the-dark-side-of-crypto-unveiling-the-rotten-business/

The SBF trial is a reminder that crypto is a rotten business

Source https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/opinion-features/sbf-trial-reminder-crypto-rotten-business

The SBF trial is a reminder that crypto is a rotten business

Source https://ustoday.news/the-sbf-trial-is-a-reminder-that-crypto-is-a-rotten-business/



The crypto is a rotten business storyline, paid for by George Soros to cause a bitcoin dump then he will buy heheheehe.

You know, I was thinking about the same thing when SBF trial started. Just imagine all of that meme material that we would get...especially when his ex-girlfriend appeared.  ;D


That was expected to happen, but just look at alll that media changing tune when bitcoin reaches new all time high. Then we gonna see titles like "if you invested $500 worth of bitcoin in 2010, today you would be a millionaire.

Crypto is a rotten business... especially when you say the word crypto, I don't understand what the fuck you are talking about...  Crypto is an amorphous concept... but yeah, maybe it might be an o.k. term when talking amorphously about things, and not really being clear..  

I have some folks try to say that there is good altcoins and there are bad ones and trying to distinguish from that direction, but it seems that the way to distinguish is to start from the understanding of bitcoin and then perhaps to suggest that there are a variety of affinity products and various kinds of shitcoins, so yeah some are worse than others, but you still should be trying to start with bitcoin rather than repeat to use their dumb, vague and misleading language. .which generally they may well be correct when they say crypto is rotten, because they are mostly failing/refusing to be specific (and perhaps purposefully so).  

So yeah they are also mixing up crypto and bitcoin and not really talking about matters in very clear ways.. but who would really expect mainstreamers to know what is bitcoin or even to attempt to talk about these kinds of matters in clear ways, and then many of them might even be intentionally working on exacerbating the confusion, so if they are talking in vagaries, then yeah many people are going to end up getting all kinds of confusing messages... and likely ongoingly we are going to see that generally the information tends to be bad, but every once in a while there will be some folks who are clarifying matters in ways that help to make it more clear, and sure many of us here might be able to do better jobs of explaining, but some of us might not really help in terms of putting matters into a kind of proper, better and less misleading context.

@Rikafip. If CZ did not trigger the collapse of FTX and only waited for the market to become more bullish, I reckon FTX would be out of insolvency now after this present pump on bitcoin and altcoins hehehehe.

https://i.ibb.co/jgqmwj1/FF2-C65-B1-7822-40-BC-B74-A-4-FF911-AF1-FCF.jpg

It's hard to know isn't it.  They were such degenerate gamblers that it seems sooner or later their goose was going to get cooked.

And surely CZ did not trigger their collapse in as much of a way as that overly-simplified narrative is frequently spun with way more emphasis than it deserves.  But, hey whatever, believe what you like.

I have to agree with JayJuanGee - the way things were ran there it was just a matter of time before shit hit the fan. I say it was better that it happened sooner than later as if this thing ran for a couple of years more, way more people would end up getting rekted as they kept expanding.

I feel sorry for all people that lost money there (and few of my close friends are among them as well) but in the end it was blessing in disguise that it happened last year.

The famous degen and one of biggest scammers in history, Sam Bankman-Fried, made extremely stupid mistake like majority of cryptocurrency degens.

SBF was super greed with altcoins and his money gone with altcoins, his Tier 1 exchange FTX gone with his degen gamble in altcoins but victims are more painful because many of them even lost their savings or before this fiasco, they did not enjoy their life with lucrative things like SBF.

If SBF had gambled with Bitcoin, maybe he, FTX and Alameda Research would have gotten better results.

Great news everyone, FTX is considering proposals from three bidders to restart the exchange!  :D

I have no doubt that people will forget about everything that has happened in the past and will use FTX once again in the same way they were before, meaning using CEX to store their crypto.

I also agree. FTX's collapse was coming sooner or later and if CZ did not trigger it, certainly another triggering event would have certainly occurred later. I never implied that FTX had a healthy balance sheet. It was only making a comment on how it would be funny that this pump on the cryptospace would have removed FTX out of insolvency hehehehe.

From my understanding all coins will be liquidated and debtors will be paid in USD for the USD equivalent of their balance at the time of the ftx bankruptcy filing.

You may well be correct Numenor... but what are your sources of information besides just suspecting that is how this valuation of reimbursements matter is going to be handled.

News update.

Sam Bankrupt-Fraud might have gotten his new supply of Adderall because it appears that he has agreed to be on the witness stand and testify. There should be prediction market for this hehehe.

In any case, will he mention CZ and blame him for FTX's collapse? Will he tell everyone something new and cause a plot twist on the trial? Will he act strangely so he can plead insanity later and have his criminal sentence reduced?

This is very thrilling heheehehhe.

https://i.ibb.co/BP2jbNh/0983-FD28-D0-E8-4248-8-FB9-FBF3615439-B3.jpg

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has decided to testify in his criminal trial, a direct appeal to jurors in his bid to prove he did not commit fraud or conspire to commit fraud at his once-giant cryptocurrency exchange, his defense attorneys said during a Wednesday teleconference.

Bankman-Fried will begin testifying as soon as Thursday, his team said.

Read in full https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/10/25/sam-bankman-fried-will-take-the-stand-in-his-own-defense/

There are some websites talking about that.

"Opportunity Cost: The Biggest Loss No One's Talking About
According to court filings, 'Petition Date Value' is defined as the "value of any Claim set forth in U.S. Dollars as of the Petition Date," with the petition date being Nov. 11, 2022.

That means you'd be eligible for a dollar amount, not your lost cryptocurrency, based on prices from last November.

Let's consider bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, as a proxy for the broader cryptocurrency markets. On Nov. 11 of last year, the petition date, bitcoin was trading around $17,000. On Friday, it crossed $30,000."

ref: https://www.investopedia.com/why-ftx-plan-to-refund-90-percent-of-recovered-assets-doesnt-add-up-to-90-percent-of-what-customers-lost-8362556

Looking forward to it!  ;D


And chances are that bitcoin will be higher than it is now by the time FTX actually starts sending the money to their debtors, meaning even bigger loss.

I talked with few friends who have money stuck in FTX and they all pretty much say that is the least of their concern and at this point they would be happy if they get 100% of the money out even if it was only in the dollar value as they already accepted that they lost everything they had there.

I doubt that the status of the desperate state of mind of the claimants should be a reflection in regards to what "should be" done, and surely there is a bit of a problem in these kinds of situations in which the entity may well not have been holding value in the asset that they claimed to have on the books and the recovery of value might end up taking place in other assets, so there can be some difficulties resolving the books if the trustees are recovering value in various kinds of assets and then reflecting that value in dollars, but a decent number of claimants are wanting to receive bitcoin that may or may not end up being recovered by the trustees and may not be recovered in that form. if the value does end up being recovered.  

It is pretty sad that the value of the estate is determined from the bitcoin price at the time of the filing when a lot of the worse aspects of the crashing of the bitcoin price may even be attributable to criminal and/or fraudulent actions of that very exchange.

Many of us lay persons are not going to have a lot of information regarding what were the claims versus what were the recovered assets and if they might not even have the bitcoin to reimburse but they might have dollars or they might have property.. and sure some of that will get converted (such as the property), and most likely converted into dollars.. so then if the exchange ends up having obligations to reimburse into the asset that the claimant had there (especially the more common coins, such as bitcoin), then does the estate then need to go into the market and buy bitcoin.. maybe that would be the most just thing in this kind of case, even if they are recovering assets and converting into dollars.

SBF is finally on stand so here is live Twitter thread for all those who want to hear what is he saying.

https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1717603416468324686


edit: our boy Sam believed its perfectly legal to take money from FTX through Alameda  ;D

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/26/TrwyJ.png

@Rikafip. People on social media who are posting memes are very distracting hehehehe.

https://i.ibb.co/CB8jRjk/6-D783468-B5-DF-4726-A703-E3154-AB701-D3.jpghttps://i.ibb.co/Hpcz7rp/5-E294942-D802-4912-9-F54-2980-E905-B32-B.jpg

On his statement that he thought it was legal to take FTX deposits would later be connected to Sam's absence of discernment between right and wrong. This will be blamed on his longterm use of Adderall and the defense will create a storyline that he is the victim.

This is my prediction.

Nah, I don't think that his defense will go that way, but I guess we will see. Either way, I don't think he will avoid a long jail sentence considering all the pepple that testified against him, unless by some miracle he gets a deal and give them something big enough (maybe connected to CZ/Binance?).

Anyway, round 2 just started, for those intersetd to hear what he has to say.

https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1717898718232350770

It is a bit ironic how there were some pretty strong voices proclaiming that Sam was not going to see one day in jail and some other skepticism regarding the process, and now the tone is kind of changing in terms of thinking that Sam is going to get put away for a long time...and surely he does not seem to be helping himself in terms of how dumb he actually seems when he is pretty much allowed to speak, absent either some rabbit pulled out of a hat, or some kind of fluke. .. so in that regard, prior to the collapse of FTX, he was being touted as a genius (but the level of fraud was not understood)..and gosh in light of what was actually going on, he seems so foolish and so lacking in anything that is going to save him from getting quite a few years.. maybe 30 at minimum.. ?  it is still a bit difficult to know.. and also anyone else going to go down?  He has not thrown his parents under the bus yet, and I would like to see some criminal charges against those seeming connivers. 

I have to admit that initially I thought that he will weasel himself out somehow and put blame on some other people from FTX, but the moment his ex girlfriend and his buddy Gary Wang pleaded guilty and got deals it was becoming real that he may end up in jail after all. Some like @bbc.reporter are still skeptical though, but the way things are develooping I really see no reason to feel like that.


With everything that we know now, its obvious now that he did some of the things with their help so yeah, they definitely deserve some charges as well.

I disagree. If someone is facing a lifetime in prison, all types of other options on how to reduce sentence will certainly be more attractive than the option facing him.

However, agree on Sam Bankrupt-Fraud becoming a whistleblower. Sam Tabasco is waiting for him and become partners again hehehe. I speculate Sam Tabasco to be whistlerblower no.1 who might have made a deal with the government already.

Of course, but woulnd't someone who plans to use drug abuse as part of the defense already admit guilt, instead of repeating that he doesn't feel guilty? The way I see it, so far SBF is going for all or nothing tactic.


Chances are that he would already do it if he actually had something good like his ex gf and few of his FTX buddies did and not go through trial.

@Rikafip. They might be seeding the information of Adderall addiction presently and use this later. It will be one of their options of escape if their all or nothing tactic does not work hehehe.

On being a whistleblower, I am speculating more on exposing information about FTX's role as the moneylaundering apparatus of the Democrats.

News update. Sam Bankrupt-Fraud is found guilty for defrauding FTX customers by the trial's jury.

I reckon this will have a positive effect on the market because it is closing a bad chapter of a story and it starts a new chapter where we can have a new beginning, where we can find new hope and where we might witness a new pump heheheh.

https://i.ibb.co/TvHyMHc/440499-AC-7-B87-4756-B064-6-A0-AFC5-D1805.jpg

A jury has found Sam Bankman-Fried guilty of all seven criminal counts against him. The former FTX CEO faces a maximum sentence of 115 years in prison.

Read in full https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/02/sam-bankman-fried-found-guilty-on-all-seven-criminal-fraud-counts.html



@Rikafip. You are correct. It was all or nothing hehehe.

It looks like deliberations were pretty quick.  Around 4.5 hours from 3:15Pm to 7:45pm and they also had a kind of lunch break in there and during that time, too.

https://edition.cnn.com/business/live-news/sam-bankman-fried-trial-verdict-11-2-23/index.html

so really pretty quick deliberation before reaching their verdict....

and another thing is that sentencing is not until March 28, 2024, so there is nearly 5 months to wait for sentencing.. and whether he will receive close to the 115 years or not remains a question that will still need to be answered, and just to note that the sentencing will come less than a month prior to the halvening - maybe even around 2 weeks prior to the halvening if the halvening ends up coming more quickly than currently anticipated to be around the 3rd week of Apriil.

Hearing this recent news about SBF, "Judge, Lewis Kaplan set SBF's sentence for March 24, 2024". Which is when the big "Halving" event will happen.

Haha the verdict has finally arrived and the Judge has decided that SBF is guilty, he deserves this punishment.

Situation at SDNY court with @innercitypress reporter, many people were waiting for this decision and now it has arrived.
Source: https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1720236074385969601

I also just saw this news, the jury even made a verdict less than 1 day after the trial ended, it was really an extremely quick and decisive verdict. What's more remarkable is that SBF's lawyer couldn't even help him get away with even one crime. 115 years in prison is deserved for what he did.

Although SBF has paid the price for what it has done, I believe that centralized exchanges will continue to collapse for thousands of other reasons. Therefore, this is not only a new chapter for the market but also a wake-up call for all of us as well as the exchanges that are intending to scam investors.

Even though its definitely a good news, I don't expect it to have any infleunce on the market whatsoever.


You see? You worried for no reason that he will end up getting acquitted or getting some kind of deal. The moment his cloests allies ratted him out it was obvious that he is not getting away with is and now the only question is how many years he gonna spend in jail.

---

Maybe some crypto gambling site active here on bitcointalk should sponsor jail sentence prediction topic?  ;D

I think in the long run there will definitely be negative and positive impacts on the market. On the positive side, this is a deterrent, warning that those intending to commit fraud will receive results similar to or worse than what SBF is responsible for. Government intervention will reduce scams and the market will develop healthier. The negative here is that the government will tighten regulations, introducing more regulation and control over the cryptocurrency market. Our freedom and privacy will be somewhat threatened.


If he is indeed sentenced to 115 years in prison, it will be when BTC is fully mined  :D :D.

That would be perfect that he would be released around 2137 since time served may well be counted, so if he gets the full amount then his time would likely run from around September 2023... though he does not seem tough enough to even be able to make it in prison until 2037.  He's likely going to need to toughen up or figure out some ways to get protected.. He doesn't really seem very likable in that kind of a tough guys environment, so he may well be trying to seek some kind of separation for protection, and I am not even sure if some thing like that would be sustainable.. but surely there are some prisons that are less rough than others... yet he still does not seem to have a personality that would even work well in a prison that is not as harsh/rough.

Hehehe, yes but you should have noticed that I watch a lot of movies and my love for them. I wanted action, drama, mystery and also some comedy for Sam's case. However, reality has shown again to be boring hehe. It might have been different if it was streamed on video.

Also, speaking of movies, it will be the Oscars betting season! I have created the thread already. We need your knowledge and analysis hehehe.

I don't think that he will be sent in some maximum security prison with killers so he would need protection and instead to something more like medium to minimum security with other white collar criminals. Afaik, Bernie Madoff was also in that kind of prison.


Haha, I noticed that long time ago, that you like all kinds of crazy scenarios so for you this must have been a very boring trial, which in the end was a good thing I think as he was found guilty.


Odds are already out? Will take a look!

I seriously doubt there's going to be any sort of deal at this point.  What more he could even give them that he already did? What whistle there is left to blow?

There already was 15 days of testimonies and pretty much everything has been revealed. Only after that jurors found him guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy, so now he is facing up to 110 years. He most likely won't get full sentence but enough to sit rest of his years in jail.

SBF was a main character behind this and he is taking most ofl the blame on this.


This pretty much summarizes the attitude against SBF and he won't be walking.

@o48o. Agreed, however, until the sentence is given and considering Sam's parents have connections with the top politicians and leaders of the Democtratic party I will not be shocked if there was a plot twist.

In any case, the cryptospace is a very crazy place. Similar to what the people in social media are saying, Sam was a pump and dump. A billionaire at 29 years old to being bankrupt and jailed in less than 1 year hehehehe.

Since he is only ~30 years old, I seriously doubt that he will die in jail.


I really doubt that he was capable of doing almost everything by himself and I would like if they look a bit more into his parents as there's no way he did some of the things without their help.

@Rikafip. Yes we can be quite certain he was not alone on this. It might also not only be with the help of his parents. It would not be shocking if it was with the help of the influencial people his parents are connected to.

This is a documentary on FTX created by James Jani. There are things mentioned in this that we might never find the answers like the moneylaundering activities by politicians and other questionable people.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=w3EYKuFGJ5c

I am pretty sure that I commented on that video previously, and surely it makes quite a few good points, but it also has a lot of bullshit and subliminal messages trying to suggest that Binance is the same and blah blah blah.. rather than looking at the parents and likely the connections from that angle, including the 100s of fraud companies that were set up to obfuscate several of the aspects of what they were doing and creating abilities to obfuscate the moving of money around (or to trace the money).

@JayJuanGee. Binance is the natural next target heheheh. However, this case on CZ and Binance might be something similar to Tether, Bitfinex and iFinex. There were many rumors and fud, however, there was nothing, they were not true or their team members are experts in escaping and supported by powerful backers. I was also one of the people who thought that a takedown on Tether was possible. It appears that I have made a mistake.

In any case, I speculate that CZ and Justin Sun are secretly backed by China also. This might be why they will never be taken down.

I am questioning whether I should respond further regarding your seemingly loonie ideas, because in some sense I don't mind some of the original theories, but I get irritated by some of the xenophobic comparisons that try to act like CZ, Binance and/or tether are the same or similar to FTX and SBF.. it is just ridiculous to be playing into those convenient, yet inaccurate hit-piece type narratives.  Sam went down in spite of being a darling and he was engaging in shady shit that is way worse than anyone else.. he was a slimeball from the start, and probably we don't really know some of the guilt of some of the folks helping him out, and that wasn't CZ, Binance and/or Tether, even if they had some business relationships with SBF and FTX, and Alameda, but CZ, Binance and/or Tether have been largely running legitimate operations.. even though they have had been somewhat elusive in terms of exactly figuring out where they are at and how they might be supported (Chinese maybe and/or other governments allow them to have operations in their jurisdictions).. but whatever, this thread is not about CZ, Binance and/or Tether... I probably said more than I wanted to say.. and I largely just repeated myself when I saw that video.. I was like, I already saw this video.. and made that comment about the CZ, Binance and/or Tether hit piece angle of it.

While its true that CZ is definitely more capable than SBF which he proved in these 6-7 years since he launched Binance, we still have no idea what kind of shady things are happening behind the scene so imho its still better if people think that all those centralized exchanges and people behind it are the same, than thinking that what happened to FTX can't happen to Binance, that they are too big to fail and that their money there is #SAFU.

---

In the other news, names of those who might relaunch FTX started leaking out. According to WSJ, one of them is former NYSE president Tom Farley

That is fucking dumb, and it is part of my point.  People are not the same, and the ongoing hit pieces on Binance/CZ and trying to equate them, and even bullshittedly proclaiming that CZ caused FTX to collapse are the kinds of pieces of misinformation and false equating that the powers that be want people to draw in terms of they do not like Binance/CZ becuase they are outside of he system and the powers that be want to control everything including bitcoin  Having people like CZ and Binance are likely better for the bitcoin ecosystem rather than guys like SBF and FTX who had been trying to curry favors with regulators while committing BIG time fraud (including not having hardly any of the BTC that they claimed to have).

I have no problem with being skeptical of people and not having heros and looking at situations for what they are and even including minimizing how much money that each of us keeps on exchanges, but exchanges (including somewhat centralized) exchanges remain a transition that bitcoin likely needs to go through, and some folks suggest that the solution is decentralized exchanges (and then wanting to pump their various shitcoins that supposedly provide those services), but even the concept and putting into actual practice of decentralized exchanges is way easier said than done..


Sure negative things can happen with Binance, but they are still not even close into the same category as FTX/SBF, and I am not even making any claims that there might not be issues with Binance and/or CZ.. yet I will admit that it is irritating as fuck to be ongoingly witnessing these false equivalencies.. and similar ongoing hit pieces on USDT ever since they went into existence in 2014, and USDT has been quite a powerful force that has actually helped bitcoin's liquidity a lot, but the powers that be really hate USDT. even though they are likely way more backed than any other dollar-pegged system.. including in 2016 or so when the USGovt or some other shady banking institutes pretty much robbed USDT of around $800 million of their accounts, and then at the same time the New York AG, thereafter tried to go after USDT for their not having backing that they claimed to have had (even though yeah they had pretty much gotten robbed, and you never know if NYAG or even other government institutions were giving winks and nods to the robbers so that they could make up bullshit and file charges against USDT)... ..

Anyhow my main point is false equivalencies and also that many of us get caught up into similar matters which I believe facilitates the opposite of critical thinking when you just jump on board to some nonesensical false claims and attempts at equivalencies that have ONLY slivers of truth in them, at best.. Yeah.. CZ done some shady things.. but so what it is not even supposed to be part of this thread's topic, even though I doubt that I am going to dissuade some of you guys from continuing to want to play into these kinds of hit pieces... and even believing that you are on the right side of history in doing it.


It is starting to seem more and more likely that they really are going to go through with some kind of a relaunch, so it would end up being somewhat of a curious thing that might even include questions of whether rebranding would happen.. which may or may not be necessary.. I suppose during the relaunch and then the transition into operating, the new name and formerly known as FTX could be part of a relaunch... Never a dull moment.

I know and I agree, but what I wanted to say is that those two positions (every cex is an exit scam waiting to happen scam vs Coinbase/Binance are too big to fail) are by far the most popular and the former one is less bad.

I have a close friend who has money stuck in Celsius and FTX (and is one of the reasons I follow those two topics closely) yet he still thinks that Binance is too big to fail and is holding there large amount of crypto, and he thought the same about FTX when those stories about them having issues first start appearing. That's why I would like if people are more cautious, even if it means that they think every CEX is an exit scam waiting to happen as that will make them realize that those are not places where you are supposed to hold your crypto for longer period of time.

Of course, people are going to vary in their levels of taking risk on exchanges, and their misunderstandings of the value of self-custody,  yet I think that each of us have made our points, and I surely understand that a lot of people are going to get burned through various aspects of NOT realizing the level of risk from NOT taking self-custody, including that governments are increasingly trying to mislead people into believing that there is something wrong, inferior and/or shady with self-custody, so surely many of us longer term bitcoiners realize that a lot of power comes from trying to have most of our bitcoin in our own custody rather than keeping coins with third parties, so yes there are a variety of ways that third party custodial solutions are trying infiltrate some of the value and power of bitcoin, which remains our abilities to transact without third parties - and even we have to be careful with some of the wallets that we use...

but that still is getting into some differing opinions and even topics than merely the earlier assertions that were equating FTX/SBF and Binance/CZ.. which I stand by my earlier comments about that, even though surely I agree and understand that you are raising legitimate concerns regarding some of the dangers of various kinds of third party custodians... we are not really disagreeing about the overall ideas regarding the problematic nature of third party custodians, even though I frequently frame the matters differently from you, and surely very beginner bitcoiners might not even know how to self-custody, and maybe it does not matter very much until they get into the thousands of dollars of bitcoin rather than smaller amounts that might not even rise to the level of $1k... even though I know that it all adds up, and if $1k equals a half a year's salary for some people, then some of them might want to make sure that they remove their coins earlier than those who might have 80%-90% or more of their coins off of exchanges.

Agreed on the wrong comparisons on CZ and Sam. This is why I was speculating if the fud on Binance is similar to the fud on Tether, Bitfinex and iFinex. There were much speculations on insolvency and printing stablecoins without backing to pump the market, however, there was nothing. All of the speculations of their bankruptcy were also not true.

Also, it is headshaking that there are people in the forum who want to witness the imprisonment of CZ and the takedown of Binance hehehe.

Now that SBF has been found guilty and prosecuted for around 110 years it seems that the case against SBF is officially over but not FTX who is now starting to come back wanting a new situation with new ownership.
Currently some news is starting to be heard where the current CEO Jhon Ray has recovered $7 billion of the $8.7 billion that was lost previously and now as a form of their desire to return FTX to being one of the most trusted exchanges today they want to do a crypto sale plan worth $100 million per week as the first step of money they want to take.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2023/11/15/bankrupt-ftx-wants-to-sell-100-million-of-crypto-per-week-will-the-sec-stop-it/?sh=78d866923e90
 (https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenehrlich/2023/11/15/bankrupt-ftx-wants-to-sell-100-million-of-crypto-per-week-will-the-sec-stop-it/?sh=78d866923e90)
will this work again, or will this create a new drama with the SEC that they don't expect something like this in America just like what happened to Binance before? I think if this is really happening then we should be prepared for the new drama.

Its no surprising at all that there are people (especially bitcoin maximalists) who would like to see Binance and CZ crash and burn as he pushed for Bitcoin rollback back in 2019 after someone stole 7k bitcoins from his exchange, or when he said that its better for average person to hold their crypto on centralzied exchanges and not in their own wallets. Add on that the fact that he is behind a completely centralized blockchain that goes against everything that Bitcoin stands for and you get loads of people who would like to see him fail.

As I said before, the main reason why I wouldn't like to see it happening is because people wouldn't learn anything from the Binance fall and would still trust someone else to take care of their money and all that would cause is setting crypto market few years back.  

I would not characterize the case against SBF as being over, even though a certain level of drama in regards to SBF has had some resolution in which we may well be going through a bit of a quite period, and surely Sam is not in as great of a bargaining position as he might have been earlier on.. Notheless, there could be an appeal, and yeah there is the sentencing in March 2024, and also there are other potential campaign law related charges that are pending against him and surely questionable how those other charges might proceed or if they might end up not getting pursued..


Seems a bit crazy but the fact that the proposals to reopen are still alive, there seems to be decent chances that they are going to continue to pursue such an angle.  Anyone loves the potential to make money, so some BIG players might be willing to bid for the job with an expectation that they would be able to "pull it off."  Personally, I am not willing to get involved.. but you never know about people who had already been involved, or who might end up being captured customers to some extent, and surely there are always the potential for newbies to fleece.   I remember proposals of trying to figure out ways to revive MTGOX, and I remember being in favor of those kinds of proposals, but it never really did get any kind of a serious run.. Surely FTX has a lot of negative name recognition.. but there still could be ways to make some kind of transition to FTX work without screwing too many people. and sure it might also be another attempt to attack bitcoin, who knows? but if reopening allows prior customers to recover their value in bitcoin rather than in dollars, then those kinds of remedies seem preferable to me.. I hate people getting fleeced out of their bitcoin and then getting a dollars settlement, which is seeming to be one of the things currently being batted around in regards to how they might be making claims of recuperation because they are not planning to pay customers back in bitcoin, but instead dollar value. .which is a bunch of bullshit since bitcoin is getting close to doubling in value since the November 2022 FTX bancrupcy filing.


FTX is not like Binance... so you are not going to get me, personally, to agree to any of those kinds of distracting and misleading framings.


I think the goal would be to try to open it in a way that would be lacking in drama.. so in that regard, is there any such thing as FTX without drama.. that might be part of the question regarding whether a re-opening would end up being dramatic rather than just something that might end up happening.


We are going to continue to pursue these Binance and CZ comparisons in this thread?  Oh gawd..  ::) ::) ::)

Of course, there are some examples of CZ taking some stances that are in tension with bitcoin, but overall CZ seems to understand a lot of the concepts of bitcoin and generally represent the concepts of bitcoin pretty well, but surely, I would imagine some of the more recent intensification of lawsuits and pursuit of his exchange and even him personally in the last year might end up causing him to potentially have more conflicts in terms of his own figuring out ways to preserve himself and/or his exchange.. which surely is part of the difficulty in being a controversial quasi-public person.. who is under attack for quite a bit of time, and even trying to get bitcoiners to go against him seems like an attack on bitcoin more than CZ should be considered an attack on bitcoin.

I don't really buy the CZ is not a real bitcoiner kinds of claims and framings of matters, even if you can point out to some examples of such.


which blockchain is he behind that is supposedly completely against bitcoin?  Are you talking about BNB? or Tether? Or something else?


Fuck crypto, whatever you mean by that.

I would not want binance to go down because I think that they are pretty much a good actor, and sure there are quite a few tensions between some mainstream financial institutional players and some of the transitioning into bitcoin matters, and one of the things that they would love to take down is Binance... .. and so yeah, Binance seems to be holding a lot less value in recent times, but they are still operating in a variety of ways.. so yeah, lot of peeps have been wishing for their downfall, and the supposed tweet from CZ saying that binance was selling their FTT seemed to be the thing that triggered a lot of people into hating CZ even more because CZ said something against the out-of-shape regulator dick-sucking supposed effective altruism vegan... poor widdo sam.. CZ caused it all... blah blah blah.

[/quote]
Well, those examples I shared are the things I don't expect to hear from a bitcoiner.


BNB Smart Chain, which is a diametrically opposite to Bitcoin.


As a matter of fact I think that's one of the positive things that he did, speeding up the FTX demise as the longer FTX with Sam at helm went on, more people would end up getting rekted.

Anyway, this is my last CZ/Binance related post here as I don't wanna go into offtopic anymore.

Well I knew about those examples, and it did not seem that you mischaracterized any of them, but surely from time to time there has been discussion of those kinds of behaviors out of CZ depending on the topic, so I doubt that there is any kind of shying away from the topics and/or past behaviors to the extent that they might be relevant to some potential issue about CZ's motives..

I am not sure how many exchanges he was at prior to launching Binance, but surely when a person is running an exchange and trying to be open to shitcoins as well as bitcoin, he is going to end up in various contradictory positions over the years including maybe going through changes that might end up causing him to be self-conflicted or maybe no longer a very good bitcoin steward, but I doubt that those kinds of examples would be strong enough to convince me.. and some of the facts that I find to be more compelling regards how so much western propaganda exists against him in terms of wanting to diminish his status, which likely contributes towards my sympathy with him and also my tending to be ongoing sympathy towards tether too..   

I also hardly consider myself to be defending CZ or trying to analyze his particulars, yet as I repeatedly stated, my concerns likely more revolve around his being brought up in this thread and unduly compared to SBF and FTX.. which as I already stated is both a bunch of bullshit and off topic.


Oh?  There are a bunch of shitcoins and shitcoin projects, yet I am not sure exactly what you describe.  My understanding is that BNB started as a project on Binance, maybe around 2018 and then it started to be a kind of ethereum competitor to be able to pump out shitcoins and support various shitcoins, so it is similar to ethereum and/or an ethereum competitor.. and sure there are also aspects of ethereum that are competing and maybe antithetical to bitcoin, yet maybe other than that I don't really feel it is worth my time to waste studying the extent to which he is involved in various shitcoin projects and some of his values might be less than a true bitcoiner.. which I personally don't completely have any ideas the extent to which I might side with someone or not based on his true bitcoinerness .. it is kind of like some of the controversy around Erik Voorhees... and sure each person is different and more complicated when they are involved in various businesses that promote shitcoins.. but still for the reasons that I already stated, my further finding out about CZ's various shitcoinery does not cause me to consider that it is even close to fair to be comparing CZ with SBF and/or FTX.


I think that you already said that previously.. so I am not going to necessarily hold my breath.

Now look, CZ is officially stepped down as a Binance CEO in the last month SBF accused Binance for triggering FTX's downfall (https://coinpaper.com/2419/sam-bankman-fried-blames-binance-for-initiating-ftx-s-downfall).

Last week FTX sued Bybit for "misappropriated funds" (https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/11/13/ftx-sues-bybit-to-claw-back-953m-in-misappropriated-funds/), would SBF able to drag Bybit in a trouble?

It seems like SBF isn't happy when he see other centralized exchanges are working without any problem, so he want to destroy other person/CEX's reputation too. :D

SBF is going to jail.  He has little to no power, and so his star is falling quite quickly... He's not pulling too many strings, even though he is likely having another trial in regards to campaign financial issues which he may have some potential negotiating... . but maybe he might want to consider if there might be ways that he might want to attempt to reduce his sentence.. but then would that be problematic for him in regards to who might be drug down in terms of their involvement (considering his mom, dad, other family members or even some politicians or government officials involved with what was happening), but would any of those things come out and how much benefits would their be to go down those paths.

Regarding current FTX estate issues, the estate is likely acting in all kinds of regard to attempt to recuperate funds and perhaps try to bring value back to the various stake holders - which both involves figuring out relationships and perhaps going after certain funds if the clawbacks are showing other kinds of previously unknown shenanigans.. which may well relate to what's being found out about the Bybit situation... but then some of the possible reopening efforts might create efforts to discontinue some of the recuperations and just to let the exchange operate in a way that may well "make whole" the various customers through issuing them tokens.. if they are able to try to do something like Bitfinex was able to accomplish in 2016/2017.. if something like that might be part of the goals and/or paths forward... though maybe they could not get approval for something like what Bitfinex was able to do when there was a bit less oversight over that situation as compared to the oversight that might be happening with the FTX situation since it is in bancruptcy proceedings.

What will happen to the FTX-token?

If the rumors that FTX will return are true, it might have some value if the exchange recognizes FTT and if they give the holders the same discounts and other advantages for using the exchange. There is also the automatic buy back and burn mechanism that was being done on the token to increase the value.

In any case, has everyone heard the latest news update on Sam? He appears to have adjusted to life in prison. He presently uses mackarel as his currency hehehehee.

https://i.ibb.co/JRwjn5n/C4-FDD064-A4-E8-402-B-BB5-F-56934-F135871.jpg

Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is adjusting to life behind bars where mackerel has replaced cigarettes as currency, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Thursday.
With smoking now banned, the age-old practice of paying for certain goods and services with cigarettes in prisons has given way to trading preserved fish. Bankman-Fried traded some pouches of "macks" for a haircut, the WSJ reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Source https://www.coindesk.com/business/2023/11/24/sam-bankman-fried-used-mackerel-to-pay-for-a-haircut-in-brooklyn-detention-center-wsj/