It's not clear to me that there was anything to 'see though'. This makes him seem like a Machiavellian genius putting up a front. It seems entirely possible that he is exactly what he seems. Sincere but lacking the skill and wisdom to run a large financial organization.
While ignorance of the law cannot be used as a defense for breaking it, an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues. You can easily imagine naive hands breaking multiple laws in their ignorance.
It is also possible that they did things knowingly illegal only after their lack of experience had put them into a situation where they were trying to stabilize a teetering house of cards.
Some things are hard, very hard. In some domains, being clever without being an expert doesn't work.
It is also worth mentioning that the media sources that said how great things were going are also the same ones that are telling us how badly it ended up. I say 'possible' and 'imagine' above because we can't really get a good picture of what happened from reading a few articles. There will be a few good well researched summaries in a few years time. Hardly anyone will be interested by then; besides, the truth will be boringly complicated and nuanced.
> This makes him seem like a Machiavellian genius putting up a front.
It is not so much that he was a "Machiavellian genius," it was that he was basically the main character in Idiocracy; the smartest one in the room, but the room was a circus made for his own entertainment than anything else.
> an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues.
It is unclear if this complexity was designed specifically to hide blatant acts of fraud or just cover up incompetence. Either way, the lack of transparency does not look good for him.
>It is also worth mentioning that the media sources that said how great things were going are also the same ones that are telling us how badly it ended up.
I am sure the individual investors who got scammed out of their investment(s) due to getting suckered into it by the MSM will be more than forgiving as well.
>There will be a few good well researched summaries in a few years time. Hardly anyone will be interested by then; besides, the truth will be boringly complicated and nuanced.
Until the next fraudster gets propped up and we can all look back to this and hope for the revival of independent, constructive journalism that the internet was supposed to bring over this current iteration of the MSM circus.
>> an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues.
>It is unclear if this complexity was designed specifically to hide blatant acts of fraud or just cover up incompetence. Either way, the lack of transparency does not look good for him.
I would strongly suggest neither. I did not intend to imply that this complexity was specific to FTX but rather all organizations in that field. The complexity is a unavoidable result of combining the demands of financial, technological and most significantly legal aspects.
Pretty much everybody deeply involved in the crypto space, especially old timers, suspected something was off and stayed away. There are lots of examples of people deep in crypto sounding an alarm before it all went belly up. When the most crazy shenanigans started in June (fraudulently modifying customer orders to cover FTX’s own losses), there were calls for people to pull their money out.
The thing is though, mainstream media kept publishing fluff pieces.
While ignorance of the law cannot be used as a defense for breaking it, an organization such as FTX comprises a complex interaction of financial, technological and legal issues. You can easily imagine naive hands breaking multiple laws in their ignorance.
It is also possible that they did things knowingly illegal only after their lack of experience had put them into a situation where they were trying to stabilize a teetering house of cards.
Some things are hard, very hard. In some domains, being clever without being an expert doesn't work.
It is also worth mentioning that the media sources that said how great things were going are also the same ones that are telling us how badly it ended up. I say 'possible' and 'imagine' above because we can't really get a good picture of what happened from reading a few articles. There will be a few good well researched summaries in a few years time. Hardly anyone will be interested by then; besides, the truth will be boringly complicated and nuanced.