Bitcoin and other scams

Hah, jokes on them, the world ain't gonna be round that long.

Very true. If would roll off the turtles back if it was.

I don't think anybody needed a report to work that out in fairness.

Its crazy to think even just a year ago companies were investing huge sums and even pivoting their companies in that direction.

Don't corporations just chuck their money into any new upcoming thing just in case it takes off?

The SBF trial has started. No filming or recording but there are people attending / spectating then reporting what has been said. SBF seems to be absolutely fucked. Gary Wang testified already and Caroline Ellison was on yesterday and will be back on today. They are firmly pointing the finger at Sam

4.5 hours deliberation. Presumably that included a watch of the new scorcese movie and a Frankie and Bennys after.

Yeah, but then you think of how many poor saps he has completely ruined and the pity goes away pretty quickly.

Just following the case and working in the finance sector the whole thing makes my head spin. Its like where I work being ran by me. Genuinely. I was constantly thinking 'yeah, thats what I would do' and I am the last person who you'd want in charge of a billion dollar money pit.

Spoke to a friend recently who has non-life changing but still a depressing amount of crypto/money tied up in the FTX bankruptcy, he's active in various creditor committees and whatnot. The consensus now is that creditors will get 90-100% of their claims paid out at some point, though it will be at dollar value as of Nov 2022. So considering btc, eth and various others have 2x since then, anyone who held crypto on the exchange when shit hit the fan (like him) will still be 50% out of pocket assuming crypto stays at current levels or above, but fuck it, that would be a hell of a result considering how it was looking earlier this year. Large claims are now trading at 50% which suggests big money buyers are confident of close to 100% recovery, as they generally look for a 2x return. One big factor is SBF invested $500m of creditors stolen money into Anthropic, a stake which is now worth approx $2b and rising and is held by the estate. The Debtors also seem to have done a decent job of untangling a web of assets, crypto and holdings and bringing it all in, I gather right now the estate is likely solvent with regards to creditor claims, the problem at the moment is it's mostly illiquid with only a relatively small % in cash and liquid crypto, but at least it's there and will get sorted.

One interesting thing he mentioned is that there are currently 3 major bidders (to be revealed in December, I believe) to take over the FTX brand and relaunch the exchange, with creditors possibly being given equity in some form of token. This brings into play potential recovery for creditors going over 100%, as they esentially are part-owners of the exchange. Seems a hell of a stretch to me to think anyone would come back to an FTX branded exchange even under completely different management, purely because of damage to the brand. But he made 2 decent points - 1) the relaunched exchanged could be the first and only crypto exchange to have full proof of reserves and a legitimate regulated custodian and 2) you've got millions of creditors, now equity holders, who are massively incentivised to make it a success.

It's kind of fascinating to me hear from inside the bankruptcy, when the belief in the general public is that everyone lost all their money. That aint's the case.

Indeed, I'm not defending SBF at all here, total fucking scumbag. But Anthropic is a massive win for creditors.

In very slight mitigation, eroding our trust in experts and institutions has been very deliberate to allow rich people to do pretty much exactly this.

Used to work in a lab that had a suite of lab hoods in a room with the bad UV bulbs, if no one was using the room, the UB lamps were on to kill any bugs floating about.

A student forgot to turn it off when he went in, noticed after a few minutes he felt a bit hot. And looked a bit blue.

Got serious burns on all exposed skin.

Reminds me of the time I had to dump sand and boron over Chernobyl. Had a cheeky peek out the helicopter - still got the burn marks.