Sorry for the confusion, I was adding on to your comment. I agree with you obviously. It was more a statement on the forum over the past five-six days.
Persona14246
Karma: 61
Just for some perspective here, the DOJ could be pursuing SBF for wire fraud, which comes with a maximum sentence of twenty years. FTX’s bankruptcy couldn’t be construed as a mistake past the first day or so of last week, and this is still very generous. I find that this forum has consistently underestimated how grievous the actions taken by SBF, Alameda and FTX have been compared to the individuals I know who work in finance or crypto.
This is just categorically wrong and mistaken. This is not a question of a company operating in a high-risk and high-reward sector, but one of fraud. FTX used its customer’s deposits to stave off Alameda’s own insolvency and essentially stole his users’ funds. Labeling this as a thought experiment or as something that could be handled better is inaccurate and does a disservice to the irresponsible and immoral actions that took place here. It is not an interesting exercise that FTX owes its users close to $10 billion. Now, we are all left wondering what exactly happened here and who enabled such egregious actions. This is honestly a Lehman moment for crypto or a Enron-type event.
At this point, it is very clear that they have not been “good” and it is in fact the exact opposite. It is very likely that billions of dollars of user deposits are now zeroed and the equity investments of all their investors in FTX are likely worth zero as well, and it isn’t because of a mistake but because of wildly irresponsible and most likely fraudulent and criminal actions on behalf of FTX, Alameda, and Sam. They are being investigated by both the SEC , the CFTC and the DOJ; Binance is walking away from any sort of takeover. My heart goes out to the users and the teams of these companies but this is egregious and one of the worst events to transpire within crypto ever.
I strongly agree with this comment because I personally created an account to comment on several posts that seemed wildly ignorant about the entire situation. It was incredible to me that the reaction was just “lets see how this plays out, they are going through a tough time” versus immediately reevaluating all of their priors about FTX and Sam. It was very clear that something was incredibly wrong and likely fraudulent once he tried to sell to Binance.