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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29310 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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This is funny or sad ,depending on how you look at it

US Justice Dept Mulling Criminal Charges Against Binance Founder CZ: Report https://decrypt.co/116961/us-justice-dept-mulling-criminal-charges-against-binance-founder-cz-report

Imagine you're CZ. You just exposed one of the biggest fraudsters ever. And now the DOJ wants to investage...you. Meanwhile, the actual fraudster is still free, giving interviews. Yeah, the DOJ has been looking into binance for years, but it shows the unfairness of it all I guess.

I think it's fair enough. Binance is shaky itself, CZ just managed in time to pull the rug out from under FTX to do down his rival before anything happened to his own house of cards.

Bankman-Fried is running his mouth off enough that I imagine some kind of criminal charges are in the works, but I also have an idea that the Justice Department is holding off while the receivers are in charge to try and let them recover some assets for the creditors. Once that has been sorted out as much as it can be, then jail time (even if a short period) for Bankman-Fried etc. is not impossible. I do think they have to sort out who knew what and can be held responsible, because of the messy, tangled way FTX and Alameda Research were run; should Singh and Wang and Ellison, for example, all be held equally responsible as Bankman-Fried?

I have also seen some online speculation that Ellison is maybe in the US talking to the Justice Department to cut a deal about giving evidence against Bankman-Fried in return for some sort of plea bargain, but that's all only speculation.

I think it's fair enough. Binance is shaky itself, CZ just managed in time to pull the rug out from under FTX to do down his rival before anything happened to his own house of cards.

So many variables here: did CZ expect to pick up FTX for cheap after crashing it to shore up his own position and then discovered SBF had been even more profligate than he thought?

Now no one has confidence and people keep asking him to audit (I assume, since he keeps tweeting deflections).

I think there were politics at work. Bankman-Fried seems to have represented FTX as the better alternative to what was out there - let me quote that invaluable Sequoia article once more:

The biggest headache for Alameda wasn’t finding the opportunities, but executing the trades. At that time, when it came to crypto exchanges, the choice basically boiled down to Coinbase or Binance. Coinbase makes a point of being regulated by authorities in the U.S., but as a consequence, didn’t offer the kinds of options contracts and derivatives professional traders need to hedge their bets. Binance, on the other hand, offered the kinds of derivatives SBF was familiar with when he traded for Jane Street—but as a company, it was continually moving from country to country in an attempt to evade all jurisdictional authority. Neither exchange was particularly good to trade on.

...At this point, mid-2019, SBF decided to double down again—and scratch his own itch. He would bet Alameda’s multimillion-dollar trading profits on a new venture: a trading exchange called FTX. It would combine Coinbase’s stolid, regulation-loving approach with the kinds of derivatives being offered by Binance and others.

He was also cosying up to politicians and regulators, even writing his own set of suggested regulations (which seem to have been widely panned) and part of that was badmouthing rivals like Binance. So there was bad blood there and no love lost and it seems to have hit a peak when FTX bought out Binance's investment in it in 2021.

I think, but this is only my own personal view, that Binance 'riding to the rescue' when Bankman-Fried was begging for investors to keep FTX afloat was nothing more than a way of making sure the entire thing collapsed. Revenge and profit in one!

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