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Not sure if folks here keep up with crypto much, but over the weekend FTX had a liquidity crisis and agreed to sell to Binance. This is pretty huge news - FTX was one of the bigger crypto exchanges known for buying out other flailing firms that had crises. This may lead to a larger spiral within the crypto economy. @aqouta curious for your take here.
Also as some folks here may know Sam Bankman-fried of FTX wealth is one of the three major funders of the Effective Altruism movement. Given the circumstances of this bailout, it's likely that FTX was sold for an incredibly small amount - if Binance didn't help them with the liquidity crisis they almost certainly would've fallen to $0 value. Unfortunately this means that the money EA has been pledged/receiving from SBF is going to dry up. I'm curious to see if the EA movement can weather this storm, as they have been rather aggressively growing and it looks like they've been betting on this funding being in place for a long time.
Time to add some wild speculation - Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance, is Chinese. Now that Binance owns FTX, they are clearly the dominate player in the crypto space, or at least positioned well to become the dominant exchange. I wonder if this shift will cause China to reconsider their decision to make crypto illegal? Or is it too much of a risk to state power?
Update: This definitely seems like a coordinated attack. Apparently Coinbase released an article slamming FTX’s native token, then Binance pulled out their entire stake. Without those two events not sure if this would’ve happened.
As someone who had never heard of FTX until this week, I found this article by Matt Levine very helpful in explaining what happened.
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FYI the deal is now off (AFAIK they only ever had a letter of intent) https://twitter.com/binance/status/1590449161069268992
So it's game over, right?
Yep looks that way.
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Unregulated depository institutions are always vulnerable to a bank run, so should they ever cease to be confident about the future, the admission will generally trigger a bank run and leave them immediately insolvent.
It's an exchange, by deposits I meant the money (or coins) people have given them to facilitate their trading. In a bankruptcy they will be unsecured creditors, but while withdrawals are allowed they can usually cash out for their value at any time.
To do support that promise, the company's assets need to be very, very liquid or they need a way to pretend to be very very liquid. It's really hard to earn money with assets that are that liquid, so it should be assumed that most deposit giving institutions cheat by assuming their deposits will sit for a long time. The Fed exists to let banks get away with this fiction, but other deposit taking businesses are usually gone the minute enough customers all want their money back at the same time.
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Not that I'm aware of, rather by having a significant portion of their liabilities in the form of deposits, they have a gigantic asset liability mismatch regardless of whether their assets are loans or other longer term assets. I know I saw on twitter evidence of something like $900million in redemption requests expected within a day or a week, few businesses can liquidate their assets to match that pace of liability reduction.
They weren’t a bank though as far as I know - they were an exchange which should be segregating their deposits. It shouldn’t be a liquidity crisis since their not a bank.
What seems to have happened is Alameda had large trading losses and FTX gave Alameda cash to bail them out. Then the market found out that the customer accounts weren’t segregated.
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My understanding is that Alameda had an enormous FTX stake and used it as collateral for other cryptocurrencies, meaning that when FTX value goes down they get liquidated.
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Yeah, this definitely seems like a coordinated attack. Apparently Coinbase released an article slamming FTX’s native token, then Binance pulled out their entire stake. Without those two events not sure if this would’ve happened.
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EAs ought to have acquired enough momentum via their PR in major outlets (rather, this PR seems to indicate the momentum) to not care that much about Sam now, I believe. They're getting their AI safety and longtermism discussions, they've got their China chip ban, and they'll keep getting more stuff. Aren't they already plugged into networks much more valuable than anything crypto bros had to offer? Like, national security council tier?
Off topic, but China making crypto illegal and thus giving up their stake in the digital economy the US cannot control by decree has been the first of many ruinous, small-minded mistakes of Xi era (I mean, outside the obvious geopolitical ones like their handling of Hong Kong and Xinjiang) and they haven't shown the ability to reverse any of those.
Crypto is being pretty thoroughly neutered, no wonder its value is dropping. Ruskies who enabled much of the privacy side are suiciding or getting arrested, and Ethereum is ensuring that blocks are kosher now.
It's darkly amusing to be proven right. People thought that technology will disrupt traditional governance, and instead we're seeing bureaucratic sanctions effectively enforced against abstract cryptographic protocols. Social technology and human networking keep trampling over nerdy bullshit. How about a nice central bank digital currency? It's very high-tech, like in China, but without the scary Social Credit! Just a little oversight from your friendly democratically elected government, to make sure you don't use any of that nasty anonymous fake money like XMR or financing something evil... like Kiwifarms (more evil things are best left unmentioned and dealt with professionally).
I suppose we'll see Tor and i2p and other such bastions of net freedom dismantled completely in a few years, maybe blocked on the level of hardware, with forced upgrades under the guise of onshoring the supply chain and ensuring safety from RussiaChina threat and AGI risk. What a time to be alive.
Glad to hear EA should be safe. My intuitions were broadly in the same place but outside confirmation is nice.
Some people have been arguing that access to the high quality networks is a function of receiving billionaire money, and that once the money dries up the access will as well. I tend to believe that it’s the other way around, and EA ideas are what has directly led to that level of access.
What do you mean by social technology here? If anything crypto used memes extremely well to become so big in the first place.
Also assuming you are on the decentralized side, what has to happen for mass adoption of decentralized currencies?
I mean practices which are to «memes» as ASML engineering is to redneck engineering. Mature practices not to produce random flashy effects on the social tissue or have a few crude immediate-term uses, but to steadily and reliably expand your domain and degrees of freedom, and suffocate your competitors. Such as exacerbation of fear of unapproved non-state actors and normalization of anarcho-tyranny. Things behind campaigns like this one.
Widespread fear of incumbent Western state-affiliated actors, which is strong enough to negate all of their propaganda about monster-of-the-week threats like islamchinarussianazis, but simultaneously not so strong as to be mind-numbing.
Their goal is to move us past that sweet spot as quickly as possible.
I find this fascinating! Any blogs/books you'd recommend to learn more about how these types of practices operate? I've read Manufacturing Consent and a bunch of anti-PR work, but anything more in depth and modern?
What does moving past this sweet spot look like in practice? Are you saying the goal is to make us terrified of the incumbent Western state actors, so much so we lose the will to resist?
I have not read "credible" literature on this subject but there's plenty of literature on it. Pinging @eetan. I spoke more of the above-ground long-term social engineering, even detailed by Scott, like the success of the Fabian Society.
Perhaps not «us» in the broadest possible sense, but yes, the goal is to make e.g. unsurveilled communications on badthink topics, and crypto business that's not entirely fetishistic (like "waow I'm paying for Mossad VPN in Bitcoin from my Coinbase to discuss Elon Musk's racism on Mastodon! this is the future of freedom!") as mentally taxing as building FGC9's in your garage in Europe.
Thanks for ping ;-)
It depends what you count as "credible".
Open source publication in the realms of marketing, advertising, PR?
Lots of material showing how to do "memetic engineering" for profit.
Everyone heard about Bernay and his torches of freedom (lung cancer so liberating, light up!), fewer know , for example, how diamond rings became necessary part of every traditional marriage.
https://edwardjayepstein.com/diamond/prologue.htm
Official declassified documents?
Lots of material here too, starting with CIA efforts in arts and literature (while various neanderthals were braying that abstract art is bolshevik conspiracy, CIA was busy supporting it as the perfect capitalist art form).
https://www.theawl.com/2015/08/literary-magazines-for-socialists-funded-by-the-cia-ranked/
https://twitter.com/marina0swald/status/1579138604911439872
Moving to more clandestine things, we have COINTELPRO.
Many of their methods look rather childish to modern eye, but they worked at the time.
https://twitter.com/RobertSkvarla/status/1448816158807838720
https://twitter.com/RobertSkvarla/status/1567226620687122435
https://twitter.com/TrueAnonPod/status/1588173962768285697
What happened since the sixties, since three letter agencies promised to be good guys and do not do bad things any more?
Few "credible" sources, but we saw hard to explain rise of causes that could appeal only to extreme minority to worldwide acceptance
https://archive.ph/XH5v5
and even clearly mentally unstable individuals with no achievements and no distinction at all thrust to worldwide "stardom" overnight
https://www.theartofannihilation.com/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/
When we burrow into these rabbit holes we find nothing spontaneous. Do they end at big business both profit and "nonprofit", or do they lead further?
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They still have moskovitz. But - how did they get those billionares in the first place? And how did they get so many 'earning to give' people working at big 4 accounting firms before / at the same time? And why do those 'ideas' stop getting new people / billionares in the same way?
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Have to start work in a second, but to give a quick overview:
Strong focus on expected value of specific actions, and a staunchly utilitarian belief on the ground level.
Individuals should work to gain high amounts of status/wealth, then actively coordinate to leverage that status or wealth into benefitting the movement as a whole or pushing 'effective' policies
Personal fit is extremely important. If you are a politician or in that sphere and get into EA, you should use your existing networks to further the goals of EA.
Generally, the idea that most things are broken and we need a class of super intelligent elites to come in and fix everything for the masses. Not only that, but these elites need to be able to coordinate and work together in a high trust environment.
These are a bit all over the place but that's the gist of why I think EA has been so successful. Political leaders seem to be floundering in recent years and having a tightly knit cohort of successful, intelligent, and driven folks providing answers to serious moral and political conundrums on a silver platter is probably quite attractive I'd imagine.
I'm not necessarily endorsing any of these, just calling it like I see it.
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To be clear, the source is a screenshot of dubious (admitted!) second hand provenance showing a discord bot posting something and a guy saying "this bot is Kelsey Piper posting on irc, trust me bro"?
It is very difficult to get a man to doubt something when his worldview depends on him not doubting it.
It is. I admit this is perfectly plausibly deniable.
On the other hand, this guy, ex-director of IARPA and ex-Assistant Director of National Intelligence, he spoke on EA Global, leads RAND, writes recommendations of semiconductor restriction policies for White House, and checks every box of EA zeitgeist.
But hey! Maybe he's JuSt A SmArT WoNK and we shouldn't assume anything beyond that!
@bro
Not that I know of.
Although i'm not sure what 'popularizing' or 'founding the first nonprofit dedicated to supporting' really indicate about his importance in popularizing it
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Not only that, but if the goal is to limit computing to a single supplier of chips to simplify future regulation as alleged, this policy is much more likely to motivated by a confluence of corporate and NSA interests: corporates wanting to control what can be run on computers (app stores, copyright, company secrets) and governments wanting backchannel access to spy and monitor the flow of financial instruments. I would have low prors on EA backchannels concerned about AI takeoff actually motivating governments to work against their interests.
Although as I heard these export restrictions, it sounded more like the actions were to limit China's access to next gen compute, which is probably due to NatSec people concerned about China militarizing AI. That has some overlap with the EA interest.
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There's an update; tho it doesn't exactly change anything about credibility
https://unknought.tumblr.com/post/699908646940901376/so-kelsey-has-confirmed-in-a-fairly-public
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HN comment
Maybe it's not quite over? It doesn't seem to be getting much worse.
Which now operates in the clearnet without issues, seemingly.
The admin of the Kiwi Farms, Joshua Moon, is blackballed from most credit card payment networks and large crypto exchanges like Coinbase will even block crypto transfers to his wallets if you attempt to send him money through them.
This blacklisting, as well as his site going down for months, is all due to pressure campaigns from activists and journalists, not any legal wrongdoing — he claims to have never been charged with a crime nor has he lost a civil suit.
Bringing cryptocurrency under the same unaccountable bureaucratic blob as our current financial system would further reduce his ability to operate and fund his site. It remains to be seen if the site will even remain up, as this is not the first calm period of things looking stable since the pressure campaign began.
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How'd they manage that? Things calm down for the admin guy?
They don't. Or rather, they're on the clearnet, but several US Tier 1 providers are still null routing them.
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Unforced error of their opponents who have escalated the attack to potentially-internet-breaking levels (again, via social technology).
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Is there anywhere else a public discussion of this is happening besides that impenetrable tumblr thread? This seems incredibly significant.
What an absolutely fucking wild thing to off-handedly drop as a polemical jab in an off-topic subthread lol
Writing bills is complex (it's not that far removed from code written in legalese) and boring, it's not that surprising that the job frequently gets fobbed off to true believer activists. Congress and their staff mostly take already drafted bills from outsiders and their job is negotiating to build coalitions of support to get them passed.
Not boring at all but can confirm that electeds and most staff cannot parse things, as well as that legal code is extremely similar to computer code. The amount of trouble I once ran into at a state government where my boss was running a "clean up" bill to update part of the code handling signs in government offices so that a sign warning people that the fine for violating section a.b.c was $x was frustrating because all they saw was a delta of "it used to be $y but now it's $x!". So many people thought that my boss was trying to increase the fine. Got it resolved and removed the necessity of fixing a previous legislature's failure to keep the code consistent by making that section referential instead of literal.
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The absolutely fucking wild thing here is not that some particular group of policy wonks wrote a policy.
The absolutely fucking wild thing here is that what is potentially one of the most profoundly consequential geopolitical things to have happened in our lifetimes may have been done with any (much less a primary) influence from EAish concerns/panic over the risk of imminent human-extinction from out-of-control AI.
Also, putting the purported screenshot through another round of broken telephone for (what I'm fairly certain was also @DaseindustriesLtd's primary intended) emphasis:
Uh...
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It's very plausible, EA does a lot of policy stuff, and that can mean writing the text of bills / regulations
What do you mean? I'm basing that partly on a lot of reading the EA forum. Mottizens, I'd expect, generally won't like EA too much because of the 'giving poor africans lots of money', 'animal welfare', 'universalist', etc bits
Ehh, as a sorta-utilitarian sorta-universalist I wouldn't bet on this without a survey.
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Yeah that makes sense. Weird EA still has a presence though, see this shrimp welfare report lol, the top post on EA forum recently (although the ranking system is odd)
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Curious to speak more with you on this. I've been active in EA spaces quite recently and also think many people see it with rose-colored glasses.
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Is there a practical way to short crypto via regular exchanges? I’m both mildly confident that it will deflate and moderately lazy.
the chicago board of exchange has bitcoin and ethereum ETFs last I checked. haven't ever looked into what it'd take to short it but it should be possible. I think it's pretty unwise though, believe in the long term future of it or not that's a bet that can go quite pear shaped.
Futures not etfs. If you are referring to the cbot.
Right, it's been a while and I only heard it from a friend who was trading on it.
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That he would gamble and eventually lose was foreshadowed here
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-fried/
Eh but he didn't immediately say yes - SBF went on to say a bunch of caveats and talk about parallel universes and the nature of infinity. I don't know if that conversation leads to him gambling and eventually losing?
I think he was quite clear that he honestly believes a 51% chance of double the population and a 49% chance of killing everyone is better than keeping the same population. The firs caveats was just that if you doubled the population in the same world, you might not really get double the population in the long run because it might slow down population growth somehow (e.g. through reaching the carrying capacity earlier). The second caveat was just that he didn't think that if you started talking about infinite numbers of people that it would make any sense.
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Just before he said yes, Cowen was trying to get him to back down due to St Petersberg paradox:
Ahh ok that slipped by me. Thanks for clarifying.
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Wild, I wonder if the fortune cookies from shops around me will stop having FTX quotes/ads in them. Sounds like it was them fucking up more their corporate sister which was involved in the trading for profit end of crypto rather than infrastructure that failed so I'm not sure this really says much about crypto. It's a relatively young exchange which started in 2019 and seems like it's less resilient than the other players in the space. Volume wise Binance does seem dominant but they have been dominant for a while. I'm not much of a fan of their centralized BNB chain as it seems like it's all just pretending to be a decentralized to avoid solving the hard problems projects like ethereum have struggled hard for. Exchanges are mostly a means to an end for crypto and I doubt this will be what makes China change their minds, although I'm never really sure how serious they are about stomping out crypto, it feels like they've banned it a dozen times now.
That is... strange? Never heard of FTX ads in fortune cookies but good for them I guess.
Yeah, what's worse to me is just the reputational hit to crypto. FTX was one of the exchanges that, at least to me, seemed much more credible than things like Terra. They directly claimed they didn't invest their clients assets... then when a bank run comes in they very quickly succumb to the death spiral. Personally makes me update away from crypto firms being stable, even big ones like Binance.
I haven't looked into this - could you explain what the centralized BNB chain is and how it's different from ETH?
In day to day use it's pretty similar to ETH as it's basically just copied the EVM. However Binance's chain has only 21 validators, they've been trivially able to shut it down before after a hack, which at that point it's basically a really inefficient public database with some functions dressed up like a blockchain. This has allowed them to beat the classic blockchain trilemma of scalability, decentralization and security by sacrificing decentralization. So you can do cheap and fast DEX transactions on BNB but ultimately it's a sham.
Ahh that is a shame. Yeah @daseindustriesltd mentioned above that a lot of crypto is being taken over by centralized actors and I have to agree.
I definitely believe in the classic decentralized use case for crypto, but it seems maybe there just isn’t enough dissatisfaction with the status quo for people to go all in yet. At least we will hopefully have the option of moving off fiat currency if or when things really hit the fan.
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This is not surprising. I haven't even looked at Coinbase or touched my Coinbase credit card in like half a year. In 2021 those things were very, very important to me. That was a banner year.
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I get the sense that crypto is incompatible with authoritarian regimes. People love to say "follow the money," except that's much harder when you're dealing with mobile wallets not tied to national IDs and social credit that are subject to strict party controls etc.
So as much as China would love to wield an economic weapon, and surely its state sponsored hackers are constantly probing vulnerabilities, I strongly doubt the Chinese state would ever embrace the major cryptocurrencies on the market today. Maybe they'll do some kind of central bank Yuan if it comes with significant controls that go well beyond KYC, but it probably would operate quite differently and serve more of a traditional financial role.
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