Yes, but how much real money is the question. I'm not doubting that real money was lost, just wondering if $16B of actual customer dollars ever flowed into the exchange.

Exactly, I always wondered what the real numbers looked like. It's so easy to mint 100 coins, get a friend to buy one at $100, and say you "have" $9,900.

I wouldn't be surprised if the number of actual dollars was less than $100 million.

It’s more than 100M. I know someone who moved 2-300M of btc/eth to ftx and lost all of it

That’s gotta sting. Hopefully only a small portion of their portfolio?

It's easy to see how FTX's assets could be "worth" $16B in the absence of any real money coming into play, but I don't see how they could get to $16B in liabilities that way. The most obvious possibility would be if their liabilities were also denominated in thinly-traded shitcoins, but at this point it seems clear that that wasn't the case.

I think his point is that while it was bought with real money, it couldn't be sold for real money.

If I buy 50 RandoCoins for $1 today, tomorrow it shows that it's now valued at $2, and then the next day RandoCoin is hacked and all the coins are stolen, I didn't really lose $100, I only lost $50.

So he's wondering if the value of loss is being expressed as the money used the purchase the coins or the perceived value of the coins.

Fair enough, that makes sense.