You mean the use of the crypto word gives it away?

Not everything in crypto is a scam. It's easy to tell with eg tokens by checking the contract: if the organization behind the tokens can issue arbitrary numbers of new tokens or replace the contract then it's a scam. The FTX token would have failed this test if anyone involved had cared to look.

This is something you can't do with securities and it's why I'm not convinced regulators really need to be as closely involved.

Uh? Companies issues new shares all the time.

In any case your username makes me strongly suspect you are not arguing in good faith, but merely propagandizing/shilling.

Tokens aren't shares (if they wanted to issue shares they would have just done an IPO) and if you follow my rule you're extremely unlikely to get scammed.

I don't know what to tell you if you're going to assume the other side isn't arguing in good faith although I feel the same way about most of the anti-crypto people here.

> Not everything in crypto is a scam

but if you assume it is, you'll basically be correct

If it just took an hour of research to meaningfully know that FTX had stolen customer funds, there wouldn’t have been 8bn stolen.

This argument keeps getting trotted out yet people keep getting hit with more and more sophisticated scams, on and off chain, not to mention hacks which you won’t discover with just an hour of research.

FTX was really obvious. I saw it before and lumped it in with the half dozen other scams I see every time I mess with crypto. The people scammed fall into two categories:

1) People who shouldn't have been using crypto at all because they can't handle it.

2) People deliberately misusing other people's money who did actually know better.

I think a large amount of the stolen funds fall into the second category.

Why was it so obvious? Loads of institutions had their money there, what did they not notice that you saw?

See my other comment. Their token was a scam and failed the standard test that tells you if a token is a scam.