FTX CrApp

It’s hard to know where to start with all this. For disclosure, I’m a cryptocurrency skeptic because I’m a Trotskyist, which means I’ve read Capital (1867), so I understand where money comes from. In short, money in any currency is the congealed value of human labor. Labor that produces any use value commodity is the source of money’s value. Gold has historically been a store of currency value because it is coveted & useful. The key to this Marxist idea in terms of crypto-currency is “use value.” Bitcoin & any other non-fungible token (NFT), which I will refer to generically as “crypto,” has no use value.

Money is now globalized to the point where Ponzi schemes like crypto-currency can gain a following with libertarian ideologists, followed by a massive boost of liquidity injection from venture capital (VC) in the early days of quantitative easing (QE). After the 2007-08 sub-prime mortgage collapse, venture capital was looking for new industries to invest in (loot), with billion$ in hot money from the US Federal Reserve being handed to them at near-zero percent interest. And if it fails, there’s always another US taxpayer bailout approved by Congress with strong bi-partisan support…

This 2008 economic crash spread to all the big banks, who were all insolvent with massive amounts of bankrupt home loans that were essentially worthless. The housing boom had ended, and industries were wiped-out. These job losses meant that tens of millions of Americans lost their homes because they couldn’t pay the mortgage.

There were no bail-outs for the working people. In the wake of this economic tsunami, BlackRock, etc, scooped-up all the apartment rentals, which today means rising rents for workers & families, due to corporate’s never-ending lust for profits. It was this post-2008 era of hedge fund/bank bailouts & QE that spawned bitcoin.

As discussed, federally-backed bailouts went 99+% to the rich, and their ideological inclination was to invest in nothing productive, because that always leads to increased labor costs which the ruling class abhors as a rule. Crypto promised massive returns with very little labor cost, everything is “mined” by offshore computers, this will free mankind financially, etc… That was the pitch and VC went for it.

Crypto-currency became a scam whose time had come. It’s complex math & computer programming on the internet, so old people (politicians) are at a loss. It’s been heavily promoted on all social media platforms since its inception, and it rules the dark web. It technically slants towards the millennials, and thus has created an ideology around such vague concepts as youth & freedom. It needed this to justify it’s existence. All scams do. SBF has now acknowledged that FTX’s “effective altruism” is woke capitalist BS.

To those who never believed and were highly critical early on, the Mt Gox theft (February 2014) was all the proof anyone ever needed to see what crypto is. Mt Gox was the original crypto exchange, set-up & controlled by its creator(s). It collapsed & vanished overnight with everyone’s bitcoin. It was a major bummer for the crypto fanatics, but no worries as an industry, VC was still with them. The stolen crypto from the 2014 Mt Gox theft still remains unsolved & unexplained.

Crypto fanatics claim blockchain protects them by keeping a perpetually untampered digital record of every crypto transaction. The lesson of Mt Gox is that if you don’t have the keys & access to the core code, with extensive knowledge of computer coding, then it’s not really your crypto. It’s only your crypto until the master key-holder vanishes it forever. Blockchain technology can be digitally shredded with a few key strokes if it’s written into the core code. Do you get to see all the core computer code (and know how to read it?) before you click ‘buy’ on bitcoin or any other NFT? If no, then how do you know?

These questions will instill fear, uncertainty & doubt (FUD) which the crypto community ideologically opposes. Anyone who asks questions which instill FUD are queried with hostility, first as to their industry & technical knowledge, and if/when that fails, these libertarian fanatics commence with personal attacks & calls for censorship. The crypto fanatics have basically invested their lives in this worthless industry that is 100% fake. There are many parallels here to MAGA Trump supporters, and also to CIA/woke Democrats in their fanaticism to false & unjust causes.

This 3-hour video is my favorite new movie. The best part is the hosts didn’t even realize they were making a crypto industry classic until about 40 minutes in! The drama strikes and it’s a fascinating portrait of disbelief & denialism. The guest star, then-FTX employee Zane Tackett, spends the first 40 minutes introducing himself as a computer engineer for FTX who has little-to-no inside access.

Zane has just lost an estimated 60-80% of his life savings, which he had invested in FTX. He had been flying back from Portugal as the news of FTX crashing hit the internet. Upon getting back to America, he invested another $750,000 on the FTX exchange in support of the company he worked for & believed in. Zane’s been trying to help angry customers recover their funds, out of altruism, but also to possibly recover his funds. No luck yet, but Zane remains committed to his work. He’s most frustrated about no information from Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) & the rest of FTX’s elite inner circle. Nothing on Twitter or Slack…

Then, around 40 minutes into the podcast which up to this point is nothing more than self-grieving industry babble, one of the hosts jumps in with an industry tweet that $383M in crypto has just been liquidated from FTX’s exchanges, of which there are many around the world, when they are supposedly ‘frozen’ in bankruptcy court!

For background, the Biden administration and the puppet government in the Bahamas, where FTX’s headquarters was located, have been fighting a legal battle for jurisdiction. This disagreement apparently went some ways towards resolution during this live-streamed movie. My guess is Bahamian government officials “persuaded” SBF & Co. to pay them off, presently, or else they risked getting shot in the head and hacked up with machetes and left in a ditch, which is known to happen to those who double-cross these people in that part of the world. This murky, murky online theft while in Bahamian police custody was the beginning of what is known in US legal terms as the “extradition process.”

SBF & Co. prefer being tried in Delaware, where they have powerful allies in the Democratic Party, whom he has paid-off repeatedly. This has the potential to be a Jeffery Epstein type scandal, in that everyone with money is implicated and the ruling class needs to do everything they can to maintain silence and not inform the public. That explains why the list of over one million FTX creditors hasn’t been released.

Most small investors usually pay brokers to invest for them. It’s these brokers who invested heavily in crypto who have a liquidity crunch. This is going to require another massive taxpayer bailout, in order to maintain this fictional economy. We are at a point politically where that’s no longer becoming such a feasible option. There simply isn’t enough money available to cover all these big investor losses, and with inflation the way it is, electronically printing more money only makes things worse. It’s actually the root of the problem. On top of this, people are starting to ask uncomfortable questions…

Back to the movie, it took a few minutes for the hosts to piece together what was happening, and how this was happening, and who (most-likely) was doing it. Watch this segment completely and you will understand what happened. Of course, this event has been described in the fake media as a “hack,” but as the hosts point out, it’s much more likely to have been an inside job as you need to be in control of the keys & core code to do this type of theft. Also, multi-signature technology was used to drain the FTX accounts, which points to an inside job. Apparently, outside hackers never use multi-sig. I did not know that.

During this period of piecing together what’s going on, our guest hero Zane Tackett repeatedly excuses himself to “hop on a call,” none of which are answered or returned. As recently as a few days prior, Zane Tackett had been to SBF’s resort compound in the Bahamas, needing special email permission to gain entry, due to heightened security in the wake of the FTX bankruptcy scandal breaking. A siege mentality had ensued at corporate HQ.

Zane Tackett describes a meeting with SBF that clearly indicated him being blown-off by the boss, even though Zane has trouble admitting it to himself. Clearly SBF was planning something else with his inner circle, and Zane Tackett was told nothing at their meeting. That’s an objective account of Zane Tackett’s last meeting with SBF before this podcast movie was made, which coincides with what we know as of this publication.

Before signing-off the podcast, after almost half-an-hour of apocalyptic bad news, Zane Tackett re-calculates his total losses at 85%. From a Marxist perspective, he lost all his money the moment he invested in crypto, and he still has what he paid for. He paid real money for digits and he still owns those digits.

………<><><><><><><>………