What? Nothing on the arrest of SBF? The silence is deafening!

mtn said:

Then from the banking/risk/fraud side of everything, it baffles me that people could believe anything about crypto being legitimate.

What's hilarious is that all of my hardcore libertarian acquaintances like crypto because it's supposed to be outside of liberal Big Government control, while all my hardcore left wing acquaintances like crypto because it's supposed to be outside of the Koch Brothers / Trilateral Commission / Illuminati right wing control.

I have yet to meet one individual who  knows how the crypto market works. Those that claim to understand are unable to explain it in words that other people understand.

Sounds like something we should all be investing in eh?

That said, fiat currencies are on pretty thin ice also.

wearymicrobe said:

ShawnG said:

But it wasn't INTENTIONAL fraud. Lol

 

The old I forgot armed robbery as illegal defense.

Idiot keeps talking to the press, making his attorneys job almost impossible so now his farts are not going to make a sound for the rest of his life. 

^This, i swear he basically copped to the whole thing on the interview with George Stephanopulous on Good Morning America the other day.  I couldn't believe there was nobody there to slap him upside his head and tell him to STFU.

In reply to NOHOME :

It's really easy. Think beanie babies or baseball cards of the 21st century. Everyone wants to think it's rare and valuable, It gets talked up to high heaven, people put stupid amounts on money into it, then the last ones in gets hosed. 

As of right now, it's just another asset class that has less real world usability than other asset classes. The transaction speed is too slow for real world mainstream use. They keep calling it inflation proof but the pricing volatility is worse than any FIAT currency. Working for one of the major US fintech providers has made me realize how useless it really is in the current structure. 

Take an ungodly amount of electricity and turn it into a bunch of numbers that are hard to generate,  turn them into 'coins',  and then sell them as something valuable. Then these traders swap those coins for their own version (tokens) and use them to speculate on the open market. What could go wrong? Just like the Credit Default Swap Derivatives of the wonderful 2008 crash.

Everybody wants currency with no specific backing or government intervention until it all disappears...

STM317 said:

Everybody wants currency with no specific backing or government intervention until it all disappears...

Gold.

Gold still works without government intervention and we all seem to agree on it's worth.

It doesn't just disappear either.

ShawnG said:

STM317 said:

Everybody wants currency with no specific backing or government intervention until it all disappears...

Gold.

Gold still works without government intervention and we all seem to agree on it's worth.

It doesn't just disappear either.

I think you can argue that gold's backing is its inherent value due to its uses and scarcity/limited supply.

I believe he missed the mark when he didn’t become a modern day Robin hood. 

If he had lived a modest lifestyle and gave almost all of it to charity, I would be cheering for him now. Maybe that’s his long game. But I don’t think so. 

Fraud is wrong, but it’s fun to think about what could have been.  

Why should the government get involved by arresting him? Isn't the whole point of Crypto that there is no government involvement?

Let the libertarians hire their own hit men or pick up a gun themselves. Why do they expect the taxpayers to protect them from their own stupidity.

In reply to Tom_Spangler (Forum Supporter) :

Right? 

Call me cynical, but my first thought is "He's white-collar, they'll let him off light".  Power protects their own.

Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:

Why do they expect the taxpayers to protect them from their own stupidity.

Well, ostensibly at least, it's because a plethora of laws unrelated to crypto trading may have been broken.  Yahoo Finance - December 13, 2023

Having said that, the implosion has brought attention to the fact that massive political campaign contributions were made and it wasn't just taxpayers that got burnt but A-List celebrety tax payers that got burnt.

RX Reven' said:

Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:

Why do they expect the taxpayers to protect them from their own stupidity.

Well, ostensibly at least, it's because a plethora of laws unrelated to crypto trading may have been broken.  Yahoo Finance - December 13, 2023

Having said that, the implosion has brought attention to the fact that massive political campaign contributions were made and it wasn't just taxpayers that got burnt but A-List celebrety tax payers that got burnt.

"Wire Fraud" is a catch all charge when they can't nail them for anything else. They keep talking about "Digital Assets". I question whether such assets really exist. Was he trading things other than crypto that actually were regulated by the government? That would be a different issue. Bernie Madoff was selling actual securities that are regulated. Or at least he was pretending to sell them. Mixing your unregulated digital nothings with your client's unregulated digital nothings. I'm not sure there is a regulation that covers that.

A-List celebrities are taxpayers and get burned by their coke dealers all the time. I can't remember a single one of them that went to the FBI over the quality of the junk they were sniffing. He lost my unregulated digital nothings? Not sure they are even going to make that claim.

As for campaign contributions, contributions are limited to candidates. Unregulated contributions to 501(c)(4)s are less regulated. Lots of dark money goes there. That would be hard to investigate. The also mentioned assets going overseas. That's another can of worms. The cryptonothing market is truly international, except in China where it is now banned. It wouldn't surprise me if this case gets a lot of press at the beginning and after the investigation, the trial and some defense attorneys ripping everything apart, he walks. 

What I really want to know is what they are going to do with all those giant crypto mining factories they recently built out in West Texas. Now that we know crypto is a scam, will these guys abandon them and slink back into the darkness? Some of those guys were from China where they banned crypto mining. A lot of them were from Eastern Europe and other places. Do they all just go home and leave their server farms behind? Will they get investigated too? Did they leave some unpaid bills behind?

Beer Baron said:

Uber-hype crypto-bro was running an illegal scheme defrauding people?!?

The funny thing is that the mechanics of what is being considered fraud here is largely how our financial system/stock exchange works (at least with Citadel securities).

There is a market maker paired with a hedge fund, and they pass money between each other and control how customer money hits the market to maximize their advantage while delivering as little as possible.

This guy got in trouble and I believe 3 crypto uber-millionaires/billionaires all died within like 2 weeks of each other.

Tin foil off.

I'm sure this will be resolved in a timely, reasonable manner.

In reply to classicJackets (FS) :

ABC's mommy and daddy are on the faculty of Stanford Law School. Both are not teaching classes next term and/or rest of academic year. Both also have moved to SBF's Bahama mansion.

ShawnG said:

Gold ... and we all seem to agree on it's worth.

As someone who has bought and sold gold before... LOL.

Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:

Unregulated contributions to 501(c)(4)s are less regulated. 

true

The big problem is that Mom and Dad teach at Stanford Law School. That's the Number 2 rated law school in the entire country according to US News and World Reports. I'm sure their connections in the legal world include friends and former students at the U.S. Attorney's Office and maybe even a few Federal Judges. Finding somebody without conflicts to prosecute him is going to be a problem. Finding a top shelf defense attorney for him is not.

NOHOME said:

It would appear that the plaintiffs in this situation are all bazillionaires who knew this was a scam and wanted in.  My bucket of berkeleys is empty for these individuals.

But crypto is a game changer... The same opportunities to get fleeced are available if you have a billion dollars or just one! 

ZFG

In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :

Reminds me of what the guy who taught me about investing said:

"If you go to jail for stealing money,  you didn't steal enough money."

ShawnG said:

In reply to Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) :

Reminds me of what the guy who taught me about investing said:

"If you go to jail for stealing money,  you didn't steal enough money."

Like the saying "if you owe the bank $100k, you have a problem, if you owe the bank $5M, the bank has a problem"

Steve_Jones said:

What? Nothing on the arrest of SBF? The silence is deafening!

Nothing posted, because no one really cares.  How many people here lost money because of it? No one? OK, moving along...

If only that were true. I was using Gemini Earn as essentially a high-yield savings account, and all the money I had in there is now indefinitely pending transfer, and for me, at least, it's a lot of money. The reality has set in over the last month that I'll probably never see any of it again, and I can't even really fully comprehend it at this point.

Obviously it's at least partially my fault, I didn't pay enough attention to where Gemini was investing my money, and shouldn't have had that much in one place, but it seemed safe, and anyone I told about it seemed to think it was a good idea. I know at least one other person on GRM was using Gemini Earn the same way, and I hope they either got out while they still could, or at least had way less money in there that I did.

bmw88rider said:

It's really easy. Think beanie babies or baseball cards of the 21st century. Everyone wants to think it's rare and valuable, It gets talked up to high heaven, people put stupid amounts on money into it, then the last ones in gets hosed. 

Sort of. Watched a series of video essays about Tulip Mania, and one of the interesting things they pointed out is a major fundamental difference between the Dutch tulip market and crypto: Tulips actually had inherent value. They are pretty. You can display, admire, and enjoy them. People actually *wanted* tulips before the speculation started

Speculation greatly inflated the estimated value of them beyond their true market value. But once the market corrected, those Tulips still had an inherent value.

Beanie Babies were cute and fun. I have a couple of my old 90's baseball cards and comic books from the 90's that I put up on a bookshelf. They're not worth thousands of dollars, but they still provide value to me.

Crypto doesn't have an underlying value.

It's not a company that produces a product or delivers a service, but has so much hype around it that the stock price is boosted artificially. It's one of those dot-com "companies" that registers a domain and puts up a website about "engineering the future" in order to attract investment capital, but with no plans to ever make anything.