[robocat]

It is just as crass to say people "lost" their savings.

Who were these hypothetical savers putting their money in a safe place?

Few people should have been unaware of the risks they were taking by investing in crypto.

Certainly not saying they deserve to be defrauded, but I am saying they took obvious risks and then got burned by those risks.

[rootusrootus]

The obvious risk was that FTX would just take their money? I would have thought the obvious risks were crypto tokens losing value. They didn't get burned by that, except in the sense that their tokens were no longer theirs while the value went way up.

[robocat]

I agree it wasn't obvious FTX would just take all the money, but it was obvious that you could lose all your money.

"The very first Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, collapsed in 2014". Different reason, similar outcome.

And Bitcoin was down 2/3 from peak when FTX collapsed. Close to losing it all. And enough doomsayers to know any gambler was running that risk.

And countless prior examples in lots of markets showing that speculation in risky assets is very risky!

You often don't know the specifics of why something is risky, so even if a particular outcome was unlikely, that doesn't mean an investment was "savings".

[Aeolun]

Uh, yes. They should have. One of the whole shticks of this whole thing is that the money transfers anonymously. Once you are gifting someone money with a credit card for some numbers in a database under their control? In the ** bahamas?