I still remember the investor who learned that SBF was playing LoL during a meeting instead of focusing on it and thought to himself "Man, I'm gonna give this kid a bunch of money because obviously he's a genius!" Complete troglodytes all around.

Let me remind everyone here scrolling through the comments before finishing the video that the head of the FTC was about to give this company the power to regulate ALL CRYPTOCURRENCY in the United States

Daniel Friedberg, the chief legal counsel you mention here, was previously disgraced for helping the boss of a gambling company hide that they were cheating on their own poker games. The fact Sam hired a previously disgraced lawyer affiliated with a criminal as his legal counsel speaks volumes...

I had a fortune cookie with FTX on it. I didnt know who they were at the time and I dont watch TV or pay attention to crypto. I saved it because it said something about living a block at a time which I thought might be minecraft related. Was pretty funny when I saw it while cleaning and realized what it was after their collapse. Its now worth more than the company lol!

9:51 What they likely mean is that instead of actually replying and confirming things, they would just "react" to the message with a thumbs up or a checkmark emoji.

So basically they ran their billion-dollar company like I run my Etsy shop which has made me about 100 dollars.

9:30 Generally speaking when you're operating a business and someone wants to move a lot of money from one place to another the CFO and accountants would have to sign off on it and agree the transfer and make sure it was logged in the books. At FTX, you asked, you waited for someone to respond or react with 👍 and you moved the money.

How they were capable of operating for that long without being looked into by any diligent governing or auditing body is beyond laughable.

I bet they were planning to have a "breach" and claim that's where the money went. They just got caught before they could.

Hacker 1: "Let's try to steal from FTX" Hacker 2: "Nah, they are too big. They sure have tons of security measures"

I can't imagine 50 million lying around that a business lost track of, like a dollar bill in a coat pocket. That should be red flags right there.

I've gotten pestered by the financial side of the company if our orders were off by a few dollars even with complete documentation as a retail drone. These clowns can run a company like a poorly managed side hustle and become rich for a few years.

I wonder if there are any employees of FTX who saw how poorly controlled the business was and syphoned it, completely undetected?

“Sam, we lost 50 million dollars! What do we do!?” 🤷‍♂️

So basically working at FTX was like science class in Fast Times at Ridgemont High... Mr Vargas: "Are you in my class?" Spicoli "I am today!"

One of the factors, which in no way excuses the negligence and fraud, is that it would have been impossible a long time ago to hire and retain anyone capable of running it. Any honest people with the necessary skills would take one look at the mess and run. Anyone that didn't immediately run or remained beyond 3 months didn't have the combined integrity and skill to clean it up.

This thumbnail is the best description of the whole FTX saga there is.

storing private keys in AWS is just absolutely insane on so many levels.

All this does is prove how incompetent the rich can be. Yet somehow we're led to believe they deserve their wealth.

today i learned that my crew and I with our BeamNG mods have better security than FTX. fuck yeah we do!

Now I know what we’d get by combining Wall Street and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

4:34 Imagine being told by executives that you need to apologize to your superior because you brought up a serious issue. I can just imagine SBF with the same head as he has now, but then the rest of his body is like boss baby. I can imagine him sitting in his little walker with his arms crossed and a big angry face, while the other executives are yelling at that guy telling him to apologize. Also how the fuck did this guy, SBF, get into MIT or work with any financial related business prior to ftx and come out this incompetent when it comes to how to manage finances?

Honestly, being that this was run in pure chaos and completely disorganized that thieves likely had a hard time figuring it out when and if they ever did get in. To add to that, if someone did get in they probably thought all this lack of security was a 'trap'

@10:30 It isn't that "basically he was handing out IOUs", it is the opposite. Alameda was handing out money without having people sign IOUs. The example was Alameda wiring out money for a real estate purchase, but the person who "borrowed" the money to make that purchase didn't bother to create a promissory note until four months later. The line is the claim that there were other loans for which no promissory notes exist, so people were taking "loans" from Alameda without even promising to pay back the loan.

10:00 That's literally what they did. It's not uncommon on like Discord to have a "vote" for something with a thumbs up emoji as a yes, and a thumbs down emoji reaction as a no, so I can definitely see them approve/denying it with a checkmark/thumbs up or X/thumbs down.

Encrypted currency is THE FUTURE, guys. But let's not go overboard and like, encrypt our passwords or anything. We're just here to PRETEND to be smart about money and tech!

Blows my mind that they were worse with their finances, as a giant crypto exchange, than I am with my single employee own and run small business. I at least once a year find all my dang receipts and crunch all the numbers (cause taxes) and know what's gone in and what's come out. These clowns appear to never have even once even known their actual balances... friggin insane.

Hiding fraud as incompetence isn't going to help SBF in court, it just outlines that he shouldn't have been able to do all this in the first place, and tells us that it was all just a cover for the crime. In essence, SBF and staff made themselves look TOO stupid, and their alleged incompetence is suspect in itself as a result. Either way, fraud did take place, they did know about it, and everything coming out now is just further evidence of those facts, while pointing at possible premeditation (IMO).

I mean to be fair if you put money in your bank, they don't actually keep it in a vault. They hold onto a fraction of it and invest or lend the rest. I sort of see what they were going for in a fractional reserve crypto bank but obviously they didn't have the experience or knowledge to it and didn't disclose that that's what they were doing. But to be fair a majority of people using actual banks but don't know or understand fractional reserve banking either.

Amazing how investors and individuals throw cash at stuff without any sort of thinking or due diligence beyond "ooh, money!"

I'm pretty sure the North Dimension is between everyone's sofa cushions, it's where all the coins that fall out of pockets end up along with every lost sock.

Simple equation of capitalist consequences: Rob the poors = become rich Rob the rich = hard time

"You know what we need? Less financial regulations and oversight. It would only help. Let the free market decide!" - Financial bros

There should be some discussions between all of the major nations using crypto to establish new and update regulations on what constitutes computer crimes. Ours in the US are hopelessly outdated and need to change with the times.

It sounds just like what an "organization" of adult sized toddlers would operate like. It's all online, that means it's just a game ....... right?

molly always does such a good job with crypto journalism, love it, ty for covering these topics

Are they trying to make it unauditable in the hopes that if they can’t find the money they can’t get prosecuted?

"Babe, wake up. The new Kira Video is ready!"

I wish I randomly found 50 mil in assets I didn't know about I have.... that shit would be nice.

this entire FTX thing is like a Killer7 bit, even got Ulmeyda in it.

Dark money donations actually are perfectly legal, despite being effectively bribery. Basically, you can have a corporate entity which you control give money to a "Political Action Committee" that pays for campaign-boosting things like ads and events but isn't officially the campaign itself. By doing it this way, there is no obligation to disclose anything about the donation and no limits on donation amounts.

Multisig less than a login basically requires transactions to be signed by multiple people. Depending on the setup it does not have to be all keys needing to sign, but also a subset configured at wallet creation can be used (a common setup for individuals wanting more security is for example 2 out of 3, so there are 3 different keys and any 2 of them are needed to sign a transaction) Bonus fun as each signature is more or less independently added to the transaction rather than bringing the keys together and "fusing" the parts into the real key (like would be the case in a shamir backup) at no time are the keys needed to be under the control of one person or even in one location, which makes this also really great for assigning keys to multiple individuals who can agree or disagree to a specific transaction and no one can just go and try doing something else.

Maybe the " North Dimension" is where socks that get lost in the laundry go......😂

What makes all this shit so infuriating is that there is basically no excuse. I work for a small startup company which only now has more than 10 employees and even they've got the basics down - they're doing it for their first time but even they wouldn't run things that badly. Here it's just laziness and greed, all the way down. Every problem is avoidable by putting in a minum amount of effort, every issue is unnecessary, that s*** ain't rocket science!

Re. the Slack emoji, I work in post-production and approvals for video releases often involve a "stamp of approval"-type emoji on the corresponding post. Obviously how FTX was using it is horrifying but it's a common practice.

Be cautious when assuming the M is for 1,000,000. It is correctly used to signify 1,000. MM is for 1,000 1,000's (or one million.... is can be 2,000 depending on the context as well.). That being said, you will from time to time see it used interchangeably in journalism leading to the confusion of whether M is 1,000 or 1,000,000. Either way, for this story 100M= 100,000,000 or 100,000 is still FAR too much money to be so carelessly managed and protected.

"... Sammy's had his fee-fees hurt" 🤕😭 👌🏻 Kira's SoH is perfectly on point!! 👌🏻🥰🤣🤣🤣

I have a feeling some of that “missing” money isn’t missing. Bankman-Fried is a supposed philanthropist, so why don’t we check who he or FTX donated to, if possible?

yeahh, I feel that companies not spending enough on security is common. I worked as customer care for a certain fortune 500 company a few years back and the computers running the tools used to check the customer's info still ran on windows xp even though windows 10 has been out for a while

“Ask my accountant” they can’t be serious with this shit 😂😂😂

Another Crypto L? Must be a day ending in 'y'

Wait, the GQP told me that billionaires are where they are at because they are just smart and hard working! Surely this whole situation is just not happening because that would mean billionaires aren't physically smarter than the rest of us...

Why is Sam not charged with theft? They comingled funds that were not theirs to use. It was customers' money, not FTX's money, they took it and they lost it.

The best part about this all is how they literally stated in public interviews that they don’t do math well and have no experience. People just laughed and kept giving them money.

I can only imagine how many people who didn't work there anymore still had access.

9:16 "Slack emoji" I'm guessing it means that if there were a message relating to a money transfer, the transfer would be approved simply by replying to it with an emoji, like a thumbs up. I know at least some companies stress written communication specifically to prevent this.

The most generous billionaire guys

As a computer science major, the “cybersecurity” practices at FTX are actually horrifying. I’m surprised that no one at FTX stole the money and disappeared. (Or maybe that happened and we just don’t know yet)

Tidbit on political donations because it just highlights the complete lack on any competence. When donations are done thru companies (PACs), it's not to obfuscate the donations but because there are no limits to how much you can spend/donate on the company. This company that is "not directly affiliated" to the candidate then goes out and pays for the ad campaigns, social media influencers, rallies, etc on behalf of the candidate. They donated directly to the candidates which has strict limits and they far far exceeded those. It's like a "fight club rule" in big-boy politics. Everyone knows the way to donate, there's even a giant sign that tells you how to donate as much as you want legally; But you don't talk about it. And they still fucked it up...

The slack emoji thing is probably someone going "Yo is this bullshit approved?" and the response was like a thumbs up or a thumbs down

Thank you again, Kira! I think of the block chain as a conveyor belt for delivering wealth to scammers. #ResistCrypto #ResistNFTs

RE: 12:30 -- relying on third parties to audit code is pretty common. One might even consider it a "best practice". It's like getting someone who has no skin in your game to do a review of your work. They're coming in unbiased, and can give an objective review. It's also worth noting that a lot of third party auditing is done programmatically / in an automated way. For example, there are things like Snyk (snick? sneak? snyke?) which can scan code for vulnerabilities and alert the engineering team responsible for fixing them. Linters can spot opportunities for XSS attacks before code is even committed, let alone deployed to a production environment. There's probably always a way in, and it's fair to say that crypto businesses are _prime_ targets for criminal hacking. This just means they have a disproportionately high burden of due diligence for keeping their systems secure, and it's no surprise that these startup-like environments are A). unwilling to do that, and/or B). unable to keep up with the new holes being found all the time.

Just watched a 20 minute video released 3 minutes ago. 10/10. Just kidding, watching now haha

Sam was one of the first crypto billionaires to learn the lesson traditional finance already knows... you need to give politicians their share of your profits and they'll ignore you unless something goes catastrophically wrong. Everyone knew he was shady AF well before the collapse of FTX, but didn't care because they got paid. He may still get off relatively unharmed.

0 views in 1 minute. kira's channel is officially dying without the earth 2 videos

FTX is an exmaple of CeFi not DeFi. This is another example of open-sourced code and people being flat out lazy and not using these technologies as intended.

Slack emoji comms...holy hell. I mean, I personally use emoji's to mark certain tasks that I've done with a custom "DONE" emoji, but these tasks are limited to small, under half-a-day projects with low cash value that can easily be clarified within another pair of messages and is still more permanently logged elsewhere, not managing large volumes of crypto/cash. :o

My first exposure to FTX was their Super Bowl commercial, comparing people who didn’t think that crypto was the next big thing to poo-pooers and naysayers throughout history. The thing was, at the time that was more a realization that the crypto market was probably on the verge of crashing, because the crypto people were spending big commercial money to try and get new people involved in buying their stupid coins and crappy JPEG‘s before everything collapsed. I didn’t even remember the company because that part wasn’t important. Until FTX actually collapsed last year, and I realized they’d been behind that commercial. Christ all of this crypto and nft stuff is so blatantly a scam I’d almost feel sorry for the people losing everything, if it weren’t for everyone warning them in advance and them mostly telling us we were fools for not getting in on it.

They were knowing criminals from the beginning.

It should concern everyone that the theme of all these findings revolve around “incompetence and hubris” and NOT on fraud. SBF will be made to look the fool, get a slap on the wrist, and all politicians and government officials who got paid off by him over the years will get to keep YOUR money

A "promissory note" just means the document on which a loan is based. Most loans that aren't mortgages involve a promissory note. The term isn't an indication of anything shady going on necessarily. If you finance a car, you sign a promissory note for the amount borrowed. Now about hte "hot wallet being topped up from a cold wallet" -- that's not *possible*, at least not via automation. A cold wallet can't be accessed without human involvement. Or, if it can be, it ain't a "cold" wallet.

@Kira - transactions done by Slack emoji means, the employee post the transaction with the accounts on slack towards the management and the management post 👍(for approved) or 👎(for no go) - this can be done on the text with 1 click... quite efficient documentation of the approval lol...

they literally acted out the plot of dumb and dumber but got real life prison prizes

LOL FTX was run on Quickbooks and Slack lololol. This whole thing was a house of cards

How they thought they would get away with it for more then a couple of years is beyond me xD, what a bunch of a-hats

It was literally a thumbs up or thumbs down emoji. They used this system to ask for time off work, loans from the business and basically any day to day decisions

Jesus! It’s like if I let my 8 year old have control of my finances, there would be nothing left except sweets and Pokémon cards.

Saw the Twitter thread and just knew you'd make a video on it. Absolutely stunning stuff at FTX, just laughable how badly managed it was...

Gather round kiddies, Unca Kira has another story for us

As someone who uses Slack for work, I would guess that "Slack emojis" means they simply reacted to a Slack message with a thumbs up or something, which is just...

Imagine trusting a man named Scam Banking Fraud with your money.

The disorganization of SBF's enterprises reminds of when the gov't audited Charles Ponzi only to learn he kept all of his client's data on index cards haphazardly strewn about his offices

Oddly enough you probably use (or used) promissory notes every day. That's what any kind of bank note or paper currency is. It's a promissory note with the signature of the head of whatever bank issues it present to make it an official contract.

You got the slack emoji thing right. Q: "Shall I transfer this £100 million?" A: "Smiling emoji"

Molly the MVP.

I have seen grocery stores with more sophisticated accounting than FTX, once again show the lack of competency is rampant in the crypto industry.

OH THEY KNEW. The money was just enough to make them not care.

Oh Molly... we love you :3 Stellar job!

9:23 - Dramatisation of my read of that statement ("slack emoji"): Rando (potential?) employee: Hey SBF, i'm going to go buy a company sports car for reasons. SBF: 👍

hell yeah bro. crypto content! HODL TO THE MOOOOOOOOOOOON

They weren't bad with their finances at all. They were bad with other people's finances.

Honestly, while this is really fucked up, at least they had a sense of humour about it. I cracked up over 'ask my account'

Do you take a left just before the Shadow Realm to get to the North Dimension..?

Keep in mind, there's a snowball's chance in hell the judge and jury will understand anything crypto related. Sure, the disorganization and other things *look* criminal, but I can see a field day for the defense attorney while obfuscating all the technical fails and mismanagement.

Superb report!

People said Glass Onion was about Elon Musk, but hopefully they realise that it wasn't *just* about him. Way too many people seem to have been willing to believe that someone who sounds like an idiot but has lots of money must be operating on a level beyond their comprehension.

I know u put a lot of work into your videos, but this is your best one yet. I have never laughed so hard.

That's Numberwang!

RE: 9:58 -- yep. "slack emoji" means someone responded to the proposal with an emoji response, like a thumbs-up. =P Same functionality exists in Discord. You can respond to a message with an emoji and it shows up directly beneath the message.

9:28 It's basically saying that someone would post in Slack "hey can I move this 10 mil over to this place?" and instead of getting a written response to approve or disapprove they would just get a 👍 or 👎