News BITCOIN, Heists, Thefts, Hacks, Scams, and Losses

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The discussion highlights significant security issues surrounding Bitcoin exchanges, particularly focusing on the infamous Mt. Gox, which suffered a major theft leading to its bankruptcy. The exchange's management ignored critical warnings about its software's security flaws, resulting in millions lost and a tarnished reputation for Bitcoin. Other exchanges like Flexcoin and Canadian Bitcoins also reported substantial losses due to hacks and social engineering attacks. The conversation underscores the ongoing risks associated with Bitcoin transactions and the need for improved security measures in the cryptocurrency space. Overall, these incidents illustrate the vulnerabilities within the Bitcoin ecosystem that can lead to significant financial losses for users.
  • #871
It gets better. Where is Yap? The Caroline Islands.
Coincidence? I think not.
 
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  • #872
As the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried nears its conclusion, the disgraced crypto founder took the stand one final time on Tuesday to face cross-examination under Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon.

The first few hours of Sassoon's scrutiny came on Monday, with Bankman-Fried claiming ignorance as she confronted him with past statements he'd made to reporters and coworkers, all revealing that he'd allowed Alameda, the trading firm for his exchange FTX, to have special privileges, eventually leading to the collapse of his crypto empire in November 2022.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/bankman-fried-lieutenants-directed-them-164332140.html

Crypto-currency or klepto-currency?
 
  • #873
The most ominous statement was "Bankman-Fried's first criminal trial is expected to conclude in early November, with a second set of charges set to be presented in 2024."

That is not good for him.

Normally, however, (disregarding the 'dual sovreignty' argument) one cannot be tried twice on the same set of facts, though. I wonder what the plan is.
 
  • #874
Vanadium 50 said:
Normally, however, (disregarding the 'dual sovreignty' argument) one cannot be tried twice on the same set of facts, though. I wonder what the plan is.
One cannot be tried for the same CRIME. If the facts were to indicate a crime for which he has never been tried or even indicted then using the same facts is not a problem.
 
  • #875
One cannot be tried twice for the same "elements" of a crime. If I shoot and kill you, and am convicted of (or plead guilty to) manslaughter, I cannot be retried for your murder. Double jeopardy relates to the guilty as well as the innocent. (Probably even more so)

Assuming Bankman-Fried is found guilty, the government can say "OK, you committed crimes in October that you've been convicted of. We're now going to try you for different actions committed in December." What they cannot do is say "Your actions defrauded New Yorkers; now we're going to try you again because those same actions also defrauded Vermonters."
 
  • #876

4.5 hours.


 
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  • #877


prison-jail.gif
 
  • #878
On Nov. 2, a New York jury found Bankman-Fried guilty on all seven counts he was charged with by the Department of Justice, including defrauding customers and investors of his crypto exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried, the jurors decided, was part of a conspiracy to extract more than $8 billion from FTX customers and funnel it to his trading firm Alameda Research, which then spent it on Bahamian real estate, startup investments and political donations.

The jury’s decision comes exactly one year after Bankman-Fried’s empire first started to crumble, when the crypto outlet Coindesk published a leaked balance sheet from Alameda Research. The balance sheet appeared to show that Alameda was in much worse financial shape than it had let on. Fears about FTX’s solvency quickly mounted, with customers withdrawing billions of dollars. But FTX, it turned out, did not have the funds to pay them back, and the company declared bankruptcy less than two weeks later.

Since then, Bankman-Fried has consistently denied that he misused customer funds. He pleaded not guilty and testified of his innocence last week in a Manhattan courthouse. But the jury was not convinced. It took them less than five hours for them to find him guilty on all counts.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/biggest-bombshell-allegations-sam-bankman-133410648.html

Edit/Update:

FTX is bankrupt and SBF was on trial, so why are people still buying FTT tokens?​

Experts say the coin likely has no long-term value, but it could prove lucrative for professional traders who can quickly flip it.
 
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  • #879
That sure didn't take long to deliberate, did it?

I don't know how crypto tokens work for bankrupt issuers. I would imagine they are liabilities, but they could be picked up by some other company in the restructuring plan.

There is money to be made in trading stocks for bankrupt companies (symbol ends in Q). I did this, mostly by mistake. I bought a small amount to ensure access to the annual meeting. Thing is, these stocks are really volatile, and it went up so much I couldn't resist selling it.

While I blundered into this by accident, I assume Wall Street has hired people to do this full time, and i imagine they get good at it.
 
  • #880
Some more of DOJs strategy is becoming clear.

One of the things that Bankman-Fried will be charged with in the next trial is "bribing a foreign official". That's more complicated, and nuanced - with Bankman-Fried's lifetime this was not just allowed, it was tax deductible!

But suppose he gets, say 57 years. Half the max, and 5x what Elizabeth Holmes got for stealing an order of magnitude less. The DOJ can go to him and say "If you plead guilty to all these new crimes, we'll give you 20 years - to run concurrently" Barnkman-Fried has little to lose by accepting, so a whole stack of other charges can be quickly and cheaply disposed of.

Maybe he gets to go to Pensacola and not Leavenworth if he doesn't put up much of a fight.

His lawyers made an interesting statement: "We respect the jury's decision. But we are very disappointed with the result. Mr. Bankman Fried maintains his innocence and will continue to vigorously fight the charges against him." Note that they did not say that they would continue to vigorously fight the charges against him.
 
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  • #881
A pretty good overview of this SBF entire saga.


If he had just been happy with the first Billion and walked away it's unlikely he'd be in the slammer now.
I know
1699052851061.png
 
  • #882
Indeed SBF was disingaged from the very real possibility of being arrested. From November 2022 when FTX imploded to his arrest December 2022 he had a month in the Bahamas to get a fast boat to Cuba. Seems it is unknown how much real money/cash he had access to. But sure it was enough to be very wealthy in Cuba.
Screenshot_2023-11-04-07-09-43-22.jpg
 
  • #883
I think I said it before - Dubai is a nice place if you have money, and perhaps more tolerant of rich Americans than Cuba. If he prefers Europe, there is always Montenegro. They not only have no extradition with the US, they also have something called citizenship through investment, which is absolutely Not A Bribe.
 
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  • #884
Now that that bit of drama is on pause - with more to come I am sure (I do not think Mr. Bankman-Fried will do well in prison, even Camp Cupcake) there is something I don't get.

National currencies rise and fall depending on their balance of trade. Canada sends the US maple syrup, and the US sends Canada semiconductors. The relative demand for each of those items sets the relative value of the USD and the CAD. Ultimately, the maple syrup producers want to be paid in CAD and Intel in USD, (Although this is usually handled out of view by importers and banks)

So why do cryptocurrencies fluctuate among each other? Is there anything one can buy with one that cannot be bought with another? We saw the case of the doctor who wanted his girlfriend whacked, and he paid in crypto rather than USD. Fine...but which crypto. Do hit-men not take Etherium?
 
  • #885
berkeman said:
My brain just short-circuited...
Bored, I looked into it. She claims to have lost 3 bitcoins and 11 ether....etheriums? Etheria? When Celsius reached...um...absolute zero. Today, this is a little more than half the stated $200K. It was less at the time, so she's probably calculating from the peak.

Of course, this does prompt the question of how losing a bundle qualifies one to be what they call an "influencer". It sounds a lot like "I lost my shirt - you can too!"
 
  • #886
Column: Silicon Valley VCs wanted to believe SBF's lies. Now they want you to believe their excuses.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/column-silicon-valley-vcs-wanted-110021949.html

What's more important is examining how Bankman-Fried managed to gull the nation's ostensibly most sophisticated investors into bankrolling his firm — which, as testimony at his trial and discoveries by FTX's post-bankruptcy chief executive have shown, was built on quicksand.

Sequoia was not alone. Public pension funds in Alaska, Washington State and Ontario, Canada, had direct or indirect investments in FTX. So did respected money managers and venture investment firms such as BlackRock, Tiger Global Management, Lightspeed and Softbank.

There's scant evidence that any of them performed the due diligence — a focused inquiry into a prospective investment — that would have exposed the discrepancies between Bankman-Fried's claims about his firm's operations and the reality.

It's not merely that these investors were snowed by Bankman-Fried's unique variety of what the veteran and vigilant short-seller James Chanos calls "techno-gibberish"; it's that something spurred them to plunge without looking. To some extent it may have been "FOMO," or "fear of missing out."

As Alan Greenspan mentioned - "irrational exuberance".
 
  • #887
Due diligence? He said "blockchain" - give him whatever he wants before someone else does!

I'll just leave my Juicero here if anyone wants it and show myself out.
 
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  • #888
You mean, like, we shouldn't take financial advice from Giselle Bundchen?

I mean, she's no Kardashian, but still....
 
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  • #889
This is how you hack code.
 
  • #890
Can you give us a synopsis of what you found new and important in that rather lengthy video?
 
  • #891
Vanadium 50 said:
Can you give us a synopsis of what you found new and important in that rather lengthy video?
Important? Not much. New? The Python software hack using stock indexes, multiplying by some random number and dividing a billion tells me everything I need to know about what a grifting clown show this was.
1699642291568.png
 
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  • #892
Would you feel better if the fudge factor were generated the old-fashioned way, by hand, and not the new-fangled computer-generated ones?

"Bob's handcrafted cons!
Tired of mass-produced grift? Try Bob's handcrafted cons. Just the way Mom used to make - provided your Mom was Ma Barker. No computer-generated grift here. At Bob's we carry only the finest locally-sourced cons, No computers. No Nigerian Princesses.
Try Bob's!"
 
  • #893
Vanadium 50 said:
Would you feel better if the fudge factor were generated the old-fashioned way, by hand, and not the new-fangled computer-generated ones?

"Bob's handcrafted cons!
Tired of mass-produced grift? Try Bob's handcrafted cons. Just the way Mom used to make - provided your Mom was Ma Barker. No computer-generated grift here. At Bob's we carry only the finest locally-sourced cons, No computers. No Nigerian Princesses.
Try Bob's!"
Yes, I would feel something but I don't know if better is the correct term.?:)

There's a high probability this grift method and others from FTX will be recommended by some AI chatbot once it digests the transcripts of the trial. Not just fraudulent code, but bad fraudulent code.

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-fraud-was-in-the-code
1699661844989.png


Numpy.random is not cryptographically secure or as FTX proved, Numpy.random is not financially secure either.
 
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  • #894
The story of this con is not complicated. As I said, this is a bank that took customer deposits, and then spent them.

To cover it up, they inflated their assets with magic beans...er...Dutch tulip futures...no wait, "SamCoins". They liked using the word "illiquid", but the better word is "worthless" or maybe "made up".

The balance sheets were clearly just lies.

I think the more interesting question is who was scammed - does this include any members of The Outfit? Mexican drug cartels? African warlords? If any of these people were taken in, Mr. Bankman-Fried might consider prison a better option than being "Made a 'zample of".

Many years ago, Chicago mob boss Tony "Big Tuna" Accardo was robbed. Over the next few months, parts of the gang that did it were found all over town. And by parts, I mean parts.
 
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  • #895
Vanadium 50 said:
Many years ago, Chicago mob boss Tony "Big Tuna" Accardo was robbed. Over the next few months, parts of the gang that did it were found all over town. And by parts, I mean parts.
Ack! I missed a pun!
They used to be members of the gang that knocked over The Big Boss. And then they were dis-membered.

Back to Bitcoin. The FTX sacm sounds a lot like the MF Global collapse, where customer deposits were used to pay back loans. The customers ultimately got their money back, and the CEO (and former US Senator and NJ Governor) Jon Corzine was never convicted of anything.,
 
  • #896


Beating S&P 500. . .how high will its market cap get? Crypto is equivalent to a Google/Alphabet. . .Amazon. . .Nvidia, etc. - the greatest American (global too) companies not named Apple and Microsoft (the latter two with $2.75T market caps).
 
  • #898
nsaspook said:
What is the Total Crypto market?

Every coin that's been mined?
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/plutonian-dao
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/ftx-token
Sum of all [coins x price]? I assume its market cap is defined something like that.

To think total crypto is worth more than Amazon or Google is pretty amazing. Those holding crypto presumably think it'll go up a lot more. But that would mean it could get into Apple/Microsoft territory and more.
 
  • #899
kyphysics said:
Sum of all [coins x price]? I assume its market cap is defined something like that.

To think total crypto is worth more than Amazon or Google is pretty amazing. Those holding crypto presumably think it'll go up a lot more. But that would mean it could get into Apple/Microsoft territory and more.

Actually more in value is IMO questionable.

​

Market cap doesn’t = value​

It’s essential to find out what a company or asset you are investing in is worth when making an investment. If you understand what something is worth (its value), it’s possible to judge whether an investment is over or underpriced.

Herein lies the problem. Market cap is about price, not value. It does not reflect the value of the company or crypto asset you’re investing in. This is a fundamental distinction that is often overlooked. Price is what you pay for a coin or token, it has nothing to do with what you actually get aka value. It’s an indication of what people are paying for something, and this is usually driven by irrational sentiment, which has little connection to an asset’s real value. Assuming that whatever the market is willing to charge for an asset is equal to what it’s worth is a big mistake.