Patrick McKenzie

FTX is now a special purpose vehicle containing, prominently along with a list of other assets, a long list of legal claims. One of the duties of the bankruptcy administrator is maximizing the value of those assets. https://t.co/J3nEsvYIgf

1/ FTX CEO John Ray enters the ring. 

FTX filed a lawsuit against Grayscale and its parent company.

This is a surprise.

John Ray is turning over every rock - including legal challenges to Grayscale's model - to maximize recoveries for FTX creditors.

https://t.co/x1xl89B0cP

CEO of @lumidawealth. prev: Founded PeerIQ (exited to Cross River). ex-Wall St. crypto, markets, startups. Stay humble, stay hungry. Non-Consensus.

Ram Ahluwalia, crypto CFA

Note that this duty is extremely incentive compatible, because while it is not formally the subsidiary of a legal firm that has almost unlimited ability to staff and bill hours at white shoe rates, it looks a lot like that if one squints a bit.

I will note that this is not particularly unique to FTX. The number and dollar amounts of claims will be higher than in typical corporate bankruptcies, but claims are an asset every time if you’ve got them.

Many FTX claims will be pressed against people who thought, in the moment, that they enjoyed the trust of FTX management. Now FTX management is a different group of people entirely, but for legal purposes, FTX is the same jurijudicial person and has the same rights it always had.

Doubtless some of the agreements which will be sued over are underpaperworked, either without contracts or with contracts which are extremely less defensive than they would normally be. Parties were relying on mutual trust.

And thus this will go in the expansive list of We Told You So by the legal profession, which will generally tell you to get a contract and tighten it appropriately even in an environment of mutual trust, because the people enforcing the contract in the future may not be at table.

This has been memorably phrased to me as “You may trust X but do you know their future wife’s divorce attorney? No? Then get a contract that you’d be happy with him holding you to the letter of.”

This is, of course, not dispositive. Lawyers gonna lawyer just like security teams gonna security team. You have to make decisions with the totality of the factors considered, including (frequently!) making handshake deals, including in finance.

I work for the Internet and am an advisor to @stripe. These are my personal opinions unless otherwise noted.

Surprised and yet entirely unsurprised, because “laundered money for Hamas” is basically the paradigmatic way to screw up AML controls, and WSJ reports Justice Department says Tether…

https://t.co/gi4CHdsDdE

Now a thing they will tell you in Compliance class is that there is no de minimis threshold for screwing up on terrorist financing; the government purports to be offended by the first dollar as much as the last. But we are not talking about de minimis amounts: https://t.co/MLK3PoKsdE

I suppose I am not surprised by this, as a sometimes comms professional, but there is no trick for getting media appearances nearly as effective as getting media appearances, and after a representation passes one set of fact checkers it is repeated verbatim as if holy writ.

Like, one thing that you can probably say about someone who repeatedly shows up in any media is that they might have a calculated PR strategy. But a sufficient set of facts to cause that is a) show up once on something salient and b) answer your emails.

This is neither a good nor a bad thing in isolation, but I think many consumers of media output would benefit from understanding its production function better.

This includes one case I'm aware of which was passed by Fact Checker Group A as "obviously a tongue-in-cheek metaphor in context, not in scope for fact checking" and then in Outlet B as "As previously reported in A, [assertion made as straight truth]."

It is interesting how many encounters I have with the state of the general form:

X: "You must submit Y regarding a company [that no longer exists]."
Me: "That company no longer exists."
"You are legally required to submit it anyhow."

*sigh, 15 minutes of paperwork*

Me: "Let me try this again: <PDF>We totes do not exist.</PDF>"
X: "Thank you for your cooperation in the important mission of..."

I really hope that X does not use the phone number they forced me to provide to enquire for further detail on what non-existence means.

(Meaning, in addition to the maximum of 1,000 characters I wrote to try to dodge that phone call.)

Also that PDF thing is not an accident; a lot of the government modernization apps explicitly ride on the paper-based rails established previously, to the point where they are complicated, bespoke workflows for PDF generation and submission versus mere data entry.

Including, in at least one case, "The app that generates the PDF is bugged so download it, hand edit it in Adobe whatever, then re-upload it to the portal so that we can read the non-bugged response. Thanks so much."

(They did not actually say Thanks, but did say the rest.)

Well that is particularly interesting for those of us USians abroad who might or might not be timely in filing FBARs. https://t.co/iwqSB4e761

Husband to @ejbishoph. Executive VP @ntuf Taxpayer Defense Center. jbh@ntu.org. Adjunct @catoinstitute. Board @RaineyCenter. Advisory Bd @tax. Also @joe5f6

Joe Bishop-Henchman

I sort of hope they won’t start copy/pasting the $10k/year penalty on everyone who failed to file out of frustration that they are no longer able to get million-dollar penalties from international businessmen with other-than-on-the-ball accountants.

(If I were writing these regulations I’d remove 90% of FBAR scope and reduce the penalty by 95%+ unless non-filing was designed to further a crime.)

“What’s in scope?”

My daughter’s $400 savings account where she deposits e.g. birthday gifts from grandparents, among other things.

(Because she has over $10k in “overseas” assets because her college savings account is held at the bank across the street.)

“I bet Japan has something like this, too.”

It is somewhat more reasonable: if you are a Japanese taxpayer and have more than $500k in overseas assets, you are required to file a breakdown (not of accounts but of gross assets) once a year, which gets compared with tax return.

They thing which the National Tax Agency wants to avoid is mostly people sheltering financial assets in low tax jurisdictions and repatriating income from those assets, which is… surprisingly popular in the Tokyo finance community.

One of my not-so-subtle goals is raising the status of infrastructure work, because it does not by default get the allocation of people’s time and talent that it likely deserves given importance to society. https://t.co/vTFN3hLg2U

Please read @patio11's latest post on "improving how credit cards work under the covers." It's one of the best explanations of why working on infrastructure-level financial service problems is important. https://t.co/sdY4Y84M5R

Writer, payments nerd, coffee dad, @batchprocessing

Jareau

This goes for financial infrastructure, literal plumbing, transportation, etc etc we find ourselves blessed by a patrimony of systems which worked ~reasonably well and seem underprepared regarding that not being default state of nature unless we keep building the things.

A quirky thing you find under the covers of every capital item in the world is an ecosystem of brokers, flippers, mom-and-pops, and marketplaces that latch onto the waste supply and resell back into the market.

https://t.co/EZ8DZhaLFB

These are often very scrappy businesses, partly because no one grows up dreaming of becoming a furniture liquidator or used-canning-machinery broker and partly because you can get in on the ground floor with a phone, grit, and absolutely nothing else.

"I mean you need money for inventory."

Interestingly, you do not, because you can structure at least some deals such that buyer pays you and you pay seller *then* deliver, or even "buyer pays seller and then seller pays you."

There is, I assert without fear of contradiction, a woman somewhere in Nebraska or Kansas who knows more than anyone else about where the stocks of the old Singer sewing machines, back when they were built to last a lifetime, are hanging out and will be first in line when sold.

Categories within Brand Verticals that narrow down the scope of Brands

Business Taxonomy

Brands, companies, advertisers and every non-person handle with the profit intent related to Banks, Credit cards, Insurance, Investments, Stocks 

Financial Services Business

“Contagion is about to go parabolic” is a nice phrase.

Anyhow: in this thread, accountant explains accounting controls. https://t.co/pklvsInjeJ

As an ex big 4 auditor I can attest that the centralized crypto market (Cefi) is broken.

Contagion is about to go parabolic, here's why this is a bull case for decentralization.

Here's what needs to change.👇🧵(1/10)

Current: Decentralized AI Research

Researching at: @Moca_Network
Host: @modernmarket_

Previous: CA, Ernst & Young

s4mmy

Current: Analyst at @OriginsNFT 

Previous: CA, Ernst & Young 

My publications: https://t.co/Hm3kqEMjyW 

Information are my opinions, not financial advice.

S4mmy.eth

See also this thread from earlier, in case you missed it: https://t.co/A5mDVtEYgh

My somewhat contrarian take on this excellent thread: if your software offering papers over inadequacies in human systems which persist even though they’re obviously value destructive, then your software offering is *extremely valuable.* https://t.co/raUgJcvVaI

This, but for cloud migrations. The quarterly "cloud is cheaper than on-prem when you account for all on-prem costs and everyone who thinks otherwise is clueless" thread is happening again.

Every time, people with serious on-prem experience will point out that's false. https://t.co/8SxpmlRe4z

Active on https://t.co/WG71NrsDQk; also trying out https://t.co/DBk2OnBVL1. No longer read replies or notifications here now that tweetdeck is gated.

Dan Luu

Zoom isn’t just a communications technology. Zoom is an opportunity to renegotiate work norms that were extremely entrenched.

Github isn’t just an appealing UI over a system which is incomprehensible by mortal minds. Github smuggles in an entirely different development method.

Huh.

I think first thought is “Sounds like a joke” and second thought, articulated later in thread, is ~obviously correct. You’re providing executive function where people lack it and implicit leverage is absolutely silly. https://t.co/lJKWhhNU1d

i am starting a new grant program. 

if you sleep on a mattress on the floor anywhere in the bay area, if accepted someone will come to your house and install a bed frame.

(yes this is real)

https://t.co/MCq80T08Sg

anton 🏴‍☠️

anton

Someone once asked me to record a personalized video for their friend just exhorting them to do salary negotiation, Cameo style, and I should probably carve out a business process to do that in 30 minutes a week on a similar argument.

One of the key insights about charity that the EAs have is that you have to be really, really effective to justify not just buying bed nets, but I think local knowledge does offer some attractive bargains if one doesn’t need to have 7 FTEs to do a feasibility study of…

I work for the Internet, at @stripe, mostly on accelerating startups.

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