I have been watching the slow decline this year and now these exchanges are collapsing. What's more, there is a lot of money gone missing. I wonder if the owners have been gambling with their client's fund and now the tide is out they are stranded.

FTX are reportedly shy of about $1 Billion. This is from Reuters:

People familiar with the matter told Reuters at least $1 billion of customer funds have vanished from FTX.
Bankman-Fried secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Alameda, they said. A large portion of that has since disappeared, they said, with one source put the missing amount at about $1.7 billion and another estimating the gap was between $1 billion and $2 billion.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/furt ... 022-11-12/

There must be a lot of people who have made lots of money shorting crypto on the last six months, plus all the wave traders, who have seen their profits evaporate.

Just this morning I received an email from TWO exchanges that I have dealt with: KuCoin and Coinbase trying to convince me they are all safe. Glad I have nothing in any of them anymore.

Doc67 wrote: ↑Sat Nov 12, 2022 2:46 pm I have been watching the slow decline this year and now these exchanges are collapsing.

I'm no crypto fan, far from, but dived in financially and started learning from 2017 on. Still have some money in there because of the long term potential.
My analysis on this situation is the coins are not effected but crypto companies are. Lack of checks and balances and a large influx of 'free money' made the companies do everything despised in the notes of the first block of Bitcoin. They became the worst banks themselves despite preaching sweet words.

But you better brace. Who really guarantees the large ones like Binance or Kraken have a real hard line between customer deposits and company funds? What uf people start withdrawing the deposits there?
The fact major exchanges have their own token which can be used as a 'collateral' is another red flag speeding up problems when the sh!t hits the fan.

truffledog wrote: ↑Sat Nov 12, 2022 5:56 pm what would you say if you lost 15`000´000´000 dollars in ONE DAY.

https://www.joe.co.uk/news/crypto-boss- ... ire-366628

A lot of the stuff thats going on in financial markets is correlated to the "gambling and information theory"- No one knows whats going to happen tomorrow. Its just a guess.

If you guess it right, you win. If not..

This was pure gambling. With deposits from customers. Doesn't last in a bear market.

When you invest in what to me looks like a pyramid scheme, with something created out of thin air in the fluffy clouds, it's no surprise to me.
That's my description of it , I could never get my head around any of it.

I did invest in bitcoin briefly, I put the effort into learning about candle charts and tried to make gains by buying the dip and selling the peak. its not quite that easy lol. With the downward spiral of crypto prices i got out about 6 months ago. i lost money but not an amount i lost sleep over.
overall I consider it a positive learning experience.

... The FTX fiasco makes you scratch your head and wonder what the bosses of these companies are really doing. What's his name -Fried looks like he was making it up as he went along with his left hand, without knowing what he was doing with the right.

I wrote this elsewhere, but copy it here for fun...

Crypto is a scam for quite obvious reasons.

• The most laughably glaring reason is its alleged unique independence from state managed fiat currency. The commonly bleated gimmick about crypto being a “decentralized system” is pretty weak, especially when one considers the rather large (and few) coin mining operations that are required to validate / generate more transactions / coins. Add to this another most obvious fact: crypto is only “valuable” so long as one values it against fiat currencies… Crypto is an extremely inconvenient currency for daily life at best, and there isn’t a single crypto investor who isn’t everyday mentally converting his crypto back into dollars – “to measure his/her profits”…

• It costs very little to exchange fiat currency and shift it around the globe via instantaneous telegraphic transfers. For a very long time already our old-fashioned fiat money has become a digital entity. Defending crypto becomes ludicrous when you take a look at how much many crypto-exchanges will ding you in fees for cashing out, converting, etc. Is that the only way these lazy but brilliant guys can make money? Alarm bells should be ringing…

• Crypto has no inherent worth. The mumbo-jumbo about the supposed value of the Blockchain validation / generation process is rather like a species of mystification akin to an old-fashioned “idol of the marketplace” (1) that so troubled Francis Bacon: visit almost any crypto promotion website, and try to read through the convoluted rationalizations they use to justify the strange contradictions between the “efficacy of crypto” versus the cumbersome process and gross energy waste required for its propagation and transaction. If you don’t start laughing, they’ve successfully pulled the wool over your eyes! (And if you don’t understand what I am talking about, read Bacon.)

• Finally, crypto is proved even more worthless because of its volatility. While gold may not be worth what people are willing or forced to pay for it, that doesn’t detract from the fact of its substance and ease of measure, even as crypto is totally insubstantial and intrinsically worthless.

• Fiat currencies retain their value mostly due to the “money cycle” – a continuous, uninterrupted exchange process generated by real work and the consumption of real goods. Crypto doesn’t come close to playing any such important socio-economic role.

• I think fashionable greed and gullibility are behind crypto: time and again I noticed that crypto enthusiasts do not actually understand how validation and coin generation actually work in relation to the Blockchain transactional system. Instead, the highest discussion they can muster is always about buying this or that crypto and converting it via this or that exchange system, and that blabber runs pretty thin. Comes down to this: most crypto guys confess that it’s all just random speculation and lucky timing, lol. Air-head-lemming-land…

(^)(°) (•)(•)

(1) "Idola fori (singular Idolum fori), sometimes translated as “Idols of the Market Place” or “Idols of the Forum”, are a category of logical fallacy which results from the imperfect correspondences between the word definitions in human languages, and the real things in nature which these words represent.

https://fs.blog/francis-bacon-four-idols-mind/

Crypto is the future. These are just speed humps.