Bitcoin and other scams

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.

I'm just hearing about a hilarious situation that a bunch of absolute idiots in the US have gotten themselves into. The Chase Bank infinite money glitch (spoiler: it's not a glitch, it's cheque fraud)

So some bellend noticed that when they paid a cheque into their account via an ATM, the funds were immediately available for withdrawal (ie, before the cheque had cleared). An element of this is built into US law anyway but in this case the entirety of the cheque value was in the account.

So, they posted this all over tiktok and it went viral.

It goes like this: Write yourself a (fake) cheque for $30K. Money immediately available, withdraw it all, spend it on cocaine and whores. Cheque bounces. BUT you've got your free money!!!!

Except you don't do you because once the cheque bounces your bank balance is now negative $30K, and you've committed fraud and you're fucked.

Apologies for Daily Mail link:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13802991/TikTokers-Chase-bank-glitch.html

So fucking funny. How stupid do you have to be?