[bboylen]

Not seeing much remorse here, but what can you expect from a guy that gambled with billions of dollars worth of people's savings. Don't buy that he didn't realize what they were doing until it was too late. He admits in this interview to lying about previous public positions, so wouldn't trust anything he says here either.

I just hope crypto learns from this and normalizes Proof of Reserves

[Gigachad]

I’m not sure why people are surprised. He was a crypto guy, of _course_ he was a scammer. It’s so obvious.

[zerbinxx]

At this point, I'm not sure who is honestly considering investing in a crypto exchange. I'm not sure there's a "feature" they could implement to make me consider placing my money there. I'm not sure why crypto people don't see the writing on the wall that the events of the last 6 months all but guarantee an exodus from the space - or at least from the weird exchange model, which seems to completely do away with everything good about crypto and replace it with facsimiles of traditional finance concepts.

[lottin]

Proof of reserves only proves (for the sake of the argument let's assume it's an actual proof) the exchange has some amount of reserves, which is mostly meaningless. The quantity of interest is the share of deposits that are backed with reserves, not the absolute amount of reserves.

[bogomipz]

Interesting, is this intentional then? Or is there some other reason why showing the absolute amount of reserves would not be feasible?

[lottin]

I don't know, it looks like a half-baked idea, like everything surrounding crypto-currencies. Someone probably came up with this proof of reserves idea, and everybody else said yeah let's do this, because it sounded like it does what they wanted to do, except it doesn't.

[RustyRussell]

Yeah, the original Proof of Reserves proposals (and this is probably a decade ago, on the bitcointalk forum) was a merkle scheme IIRC in which each user could verify that their amounts were added into the proven total.

Most people seem to be just using "prove you hold some amount" which is a very poor cousin. However, it is pretty clear that FTX would have failed even that, so maybe we should lower our expectations?

[yeet_yeet_yeet]

What about you just keep custody of your own damn coins? Isn't that the point of cryptocurrency, that it's like cash except you don't have to physically carry it.

[SilverBirch]

I'm very critical of SBF and what went on here, but let's not over sentimentalise this, they gambled billions of dollars of peoples deposits, not savings. Which clearly is a crime, but you don't store your savings on a crypto exchange, BTC arguably the most reliable of the crypto-currencies is down 70% in the last year. Moves that happen once in a lifetime in real markets happened multiple times in crypto. No one reasonable has their savings in crypto exchanges.

[FireBeyond]

> but you don't store your savings on a crypto exchange... No one reasonable has their savings in crypto exchanges.

Many, many, many people have absolutely bought into the crypto dream, put their savings on an exchange and absolutely ended up entirely destitute. There are swathes of evidence of exactly this.

[zerbinxx]

It can be hard to tell. On one hand, as a longtime observer of spaces like r/wsb and various crypto/opensea spinoff communities, people will very seriously gamble and lose vast quantities of money (and, to be fair, sometimes win vast quantities) in risky bets that they don't understand, and then post about it on the internet as if they didn't understand what the term "betting your life's savings" meant. On the other hand, I find enough schaudenfreude in reading such posts that I can see exactly why and how someone would fabricate such a story merely for their own amusement. It's a good heuristic to take anything with a grain of salt, including this half-baked explanation from SBF on exactly what went down with FTX.

[MisterSandman]

The Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan lost around a $100M because of FTX. It isn't that unbelievable that other individuals also put a significant amount of their savings into crypto. The trust for FTX was there.

It was a stupid decision, but at least from their PoV, it was only a stupid decision in hindsight.