ftxbagholder123

I felt really stupid and angry after the collapse of FTX as you know, and truthfully, I could probably have used some professional therapy at the time. But at this point, I'm trying to look forward instead, and to me that is likely having an equally good (and positive) effect on my mental health as therapy would have had. Hopefully you can do the same as you search for the next chapter. Best of luck.

Which contagion though? The average person has between $5-6k in their bank accounts. There was certainly lots of talk on Twitter about this thing spreading -- and it's very possible that it might have -- but it was not a given. The loudest arguments for contagion came from the same people who had the biggest incentives to see SVB "bailed out". Hardly a coincidence. Just look at how vocal otherwise libertarian David Sachs was.

I don't think there is an official definition of bagholder as far as I'm aware.

It seems to me it's a decision that trades off the risk of moral hazard for risk of contagion. To me, the rules were crystal clear -- if you have more than $250k in your account, that excess cash should be seen as "at risk".

Workarounds include depositing money in a brokerage account (and buying risk-free t-bills) or spreading it out across multiple bank accounts. Smart and risk-aware people did that, dumb people didn't (or alternatively, through specific rules that Silicon Valley Bank set, were prevented from taking their money elsewhere).

But as always, system tends to take decisions that increase moral hazards as time goes on. Swift and easy solution in the moment, but bad in the long run.

(Probably not productive to bring crypto into this discussion in my view.)

I assume your views in this case are consistent with the views you expressed in our prior discussion related to FTX. That is, it would have been your responsibility to do due diligence on the bank and properly ensure that your assets are safeguarded, and if you had failed to take such precautions, then the fault would have been yours and yours only. As a result, you would not whine on HackerNews, nor expect sympathy or compensation. Fair?

Interesting. So it may be your view of this constituting an extreme level of greed that drives your sentiment in this case. That makes more sense to me, though we clearly differ in our assessment of "extreme" and "greed".

Out of curiosity, would you then apply the same logic to people investing in SPAC's, growth stocks at extreme valuation levels, triple leveraged ETF's, doubling down on NKLA when their trucks are shown to roll down hills, etc.? Or is it strictly confined to crypto? To me, these are all different manifestations of the same thing -- a decade of easy money, enabled by flawed monetary policy. An investor in my view can still be rational (not greedy) while still taking interest in such opportunities.

Also, what if this were only 5% of my portfolio (I'm not disclosing the actual %'age, but consider the 5% for argument's sake), would you still consider it an extreme level of greed?

I have my own views of what constitutes extreme greed, but that tends to have more to do with how certain individuals (in this case FTX's executives, but can also be applied obvious scams like OneCoin, and many other scenarios) illegally enrich themselves by exploiting regular people. That, to me, is true extreme greed.

Either way, I think your response is interesting and I appreciate the extra color.

Thank you! I'm not very familiar with USDC, though I am familiar with Dai and the MakerDAO ecosystem, and it looks like USDC serves a similar purpose, even though the design between the two looks different (one is centralized, one is not). Perhaps those two assets offer similar order of magnitude tradeoffs in terms of tail risk. In retrospect, putting the money in USDC (or Dai) or similar would have been a good course of action.

I realize this wasn't evident from my initial post, but I actually go back many years with crypto and have run both airgapped computers at home as well as used Trezors without mistake (including using Uniswap), so I'm less worried about losing my keys or committing other such user errors.

Ironically, while I used to worry more about using CEX's (thinking they could hacked, or the founders could run away with the money), over time I gravitated towards worrying more about actually getting my crypto money back into the banking system, without running afoul of AML / KYC hurdles, and I thought CEX's would be the less risky option in this regard.

And in this case specifically, once the money on FTX became sizable, I became even more paranoid about this, and I guess I got set in my own thinking of not wanting the money to leave the exchange for fear of not being able to transfer it back into the banking system.

In retrospect, it's funny (and obviously sad at the same time) how I overly worried about one thing, while completely missing out on what the real risk was.

You all have been extremely helpful, so I thank you very much (and not least for allowing me to put some of my thoughts in writing and reasoning with you about it). We live and learn -- now onto figuring out how to make up for the money lost!

Good point. My experience with moving to and from South America to the US is that it has been doable, but always with the feeling of "will the money get stuck somewhere this time" (and I never tried anything near this amount).

My concern in this specific situation was greater around moving money from crypto -> bank, vs. bank -> bank. My general sense is that once the money is inside of the traditional banking system, it's less likely to face issues.

But coming to the bank with a wad of cash (or crypto), in my view, could trigger all kinds of issues (in theory at least).

Thank you for the comment. I hadn't spent all that much time thinking about this from an AML / KYC perspective up until now, but I recall in years past when I wanted to make a bank transfer from Colombia to the US, it felt like I was holding my breath for the money to eventually arrive (and this was bank <-> bank, without crypto involved), given all the paperwork and questions asked.

The money did arrive successfully by the way, but I just took away from that exercise that banks are really, really strict about money transfers and the origin of monies. This all has me thinking that getting crypto back into the banking system -- to the extent it's easy today -- might only get harder in the future.

Fair enough, and thank you for the response. Reading some of the other responses, it seems people are generally of the view that it probably would have been doable, but perhaps not without some level of hickup, particularly with regards to the US bank. I guess I will never know 100% since this is now in the past.

And the comment around Coinbase also makes sense, though I suppose my exposure to that risk could have been minimized assuming the money would ideally only have been sitting there for a few days. In retrospect, I should have obviously attempted the Coinbase route.

Thank you, that is helpful to know for future reference if I'm ever in a similar situation. I have also moved smaller amounts in the past without much problems (though this was years ago), but you are probably right that this too would have been doable.

I wrote about what I see as the difference between gambling and investing in a prior comment, if of interest.

But I am genuinely much more curious around the human psyche in situations like these, and I'm seeking your thoughts if you would be kind enough to offer them since I think we are on different sides on this on, in this specific instance.

My experience with the human species is that they generally err on the side of compassion, vs. judgement, but less so in this case. If you could share your thoughts on what might drive the latter rather than former in this case, that would be highly appreciated.

On a personal note, and as I was clear to point out in the parent comment, I am not looking for any sympathy here, I'm a grown man and I am adept at handling adversity. But nor am I necessarily looking for vitriol unless there is a good reason for it. Your thoughts on this topic are appreciated.

To me, a gamble is something where you go in with the intention of let's say, a 55% chance of winning, and a 45% chance losing it all; or a 10% chance of massively winning, and a 90% chance of losing it all. Whereas investing in things like equities is less binary (as it's rare for things to go to $0), and if you have good investment skills, investing seems to me to offer much greater ways to exploit inefficiencies in the market than what gambling does, and can create much better returns, no matter the asset class.

Obviously one has to be careful which asset class one invests in. High yield bonds are riskier than investment grade bonds; equities are riskier than high yield bonds; bluechip crypto is riskier than equities, and speculative tokens are riskier than bluechip crypto. I think all that is understood, and I was well aware of that aspect of the risk. But an aggressive choice of asset class doesn't necessarily turn it into a gamble, so I reject the way you framed this as a "gamble".

The one thing I would consider a gamble was my "gamble" that FTX would not go under before I had a chance to take my money out. I think it's probably fair to call that a gamble, if that's what you are referring to.

In either case, it's interesting how humans tend to be a quite a compassionate species in face of adversity, and yet, this specific topic seems to trigger something in the human psyche that elicits vitriol and compassion in roughly equal amounts, even as many people are clearly facing adversity. I'm not judging that reaction, but I'm curious as to why it's happening.

Agreed. Well, live and learn. I tried to steer clear of the obviously shady things (like yield farming, etc.) which to me seemed unsustainable all along, but as it turns out, there are ample ways to lose anyway. Thanks for the comment.

Thank you, I responded to a sibling comment that offered a similar suggestion -- I appreciate any input from you if you are able to opine.

Maybe this is a naive question with regards to how AML / KYC work in crypto, but would Coinbase (and in the extension, my bank) accept an incoming transfer of that size if they didn't know for sure that either 1) the money was coming from "me", or 2) that I had at least obtained it legally?

In my early conversations with my bank, they stated that among other things, they would need to see proof of where the funds had come from (proof of original $ deposit into FTX, FTX trading history, etc.), and I just assumed that sending the crypto to a different exchange would add another layer of complexity that would make that process much harder.

But perhaps I took an overly conservative (and now catastrophic) stance when trying to do everything as cleanly as possible.

I have a sneaking feeling your approach might have worked (or at least it's hard to imagine it being a worse outcome than what actually happened). I'm feeling pretty stupid now for not exploring this further. I guess I never expected FTX would just disappear, and so I didn't explore every option as fully as I should have. I appreciate your suggestion in any case.