February 2023 - cypherpunks - lists.cpunks.org

FTX Bankruptcy Judge to Rule Today on an Independent Examiner – After 76 Days of Delay
by Gunnar Larson 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/02/ftx-bankruptcy-judge-to-rule-today-o… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 15, 2023 ~ John T. Dorsey (2016 Photo from Internet Archives' Wayback Machine) John T. Dorsey (2016 Photo from Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine) Judge John Dorsey is the presiding judge in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware where Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto exchange, FTX, filed its Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition. The U.S. Trustee, who provides oversight on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice in bankruptcy cases, filed a motion on December 1 of last year requesting the appointment of an independent examiner in the FTX bankruptcy case, reminding the court that the appointment is mandatory under bankruptcy law if requested by the U.S. Trustee and debts exceed $5 million. Today marks the 76th day that this critical issue has been pending before this court. The Big Law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, for whom Judge Dorsey signed an order making it lead counsel in the FTX bankruptcy case, despite a mountain of conflicts of interest, has argued aggressively against the appointment of the independent examiner. Both sides argued their positions at a hearing on February 6. Instead of ruling from the bench on the issue as was expected at the hearing, Judge Dorsey called attorneys for both sides into his chambers and stated that he was taking a recess. But instead of a recess, the hearing was adjourned. Reports later indicated that Judge Dorsey had asked the lawyers on both sides to see if they could come to an agreement, which would have negated his need to issue a bench ruling. Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the federal prosecutor in charge of the criminal case against Sam Bankman-Fried, has called FTX “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.” Testimony to the House Financial Services Committee by John Ray, the new CEO of FTX, acknowledged that $8 billion of customer funds are missing. It might not look too good for a Judge to rule against the appointment of an independent examiner in such a massive fraud case while allowing a viper’s nest of conflicts to swirl around the lead counsel. In addition, 18 states have sided with the U.S. Trustee on the need for an independent examiner in this case. Yesterday, an amended agenda was published for an FTX hearing that will take place this morning in Judge Dorsey’s courtroom on various other matters. The final item on that agenda indicates that the judge “will issue a bench ruling” at this hearing on the U.S. Trustee’s request for an independent examiner. There was something quite odd about the amended agenda, however. Instead of listing all of the related documents pertaining to the U.S. Trustee’s request for an independent examiner, as the agenda has done on other matters, it listed only the initial request dated December 1. It did not list the docket entries for the objections; for the support from various state attorneys general and state securities regulators; and it failed to list the February 1 “Omnibus Reply” by the U.S. Trustee which went to excruciating lengths to parse the statutory language of the relevant bankruptcy law to make clear that the appointment of an independent examiner is “mandatory” in this case. The U.S. Trustee further noted the following: “…the majority of courts that have addressed the issue in published opinions—including the only court of appeals decision and all of the district court decisions—have ruled that the appointment of an examiner is mandatory under section 1104(c)(2).” In the U.S. Trustee’s initial request on December 1, the following was also pointed out: “An investigation by an examiner into the alleged conversion by the FTX Trading arm of the Debtors of $10 billion of customers’ property to lend to its affiliate Alameda [Sam Bankman-Fried’s hedge fund], in violation of the express provisions in FTX’s customer contracts, and into the use of software to conceal such misuse is unquestionably in the interests of the Debtors’ creditors and other interests of the estates. The many instances of what Mr. Ray describes as a ‘complete failure of corporate controls and [] a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here’ (Ray ¶ 5), such as those detailed in paragraph 30 of this Motion, also warrant examination. “An appointment of an examiner would also be in the interests of the Debtors’ creditors and other parties in interest in the Debtors’ estates, consistent with Code section 1104(c)(1), because there is an actual conflict of interest between Debtors FTX Trading Ltd. and Alameda Research. FTX Trading has a claim against Alameda Research in the billions of dollars on behalf of its customers in connection with one or more loans of allegedly converted customer funds that FTX Trading had no right to make in the first instance. Such an immense, out-of-the-ordinary course claim of one Debtor against another, especially one that involves the alleged conversion of customer funds, calls out for independent scrutiny by an independent examiner.” Sullivan & Cromwell is serving as lead counsel in the bankruptcy proceeding for the FTX “Group,” which includes FTX, Alameda Research, and more than 100 opaque affiliates, many of which were registered offshore. In a 2022 Voyager Digital deal, Sullivan & Cromwell was simultaneously representing Alameda Research and FTX, prior to the FTX bankruptcy filing. Further raising eyebrows in legal circles, an email has now surfaced in the Voyager bankruptcy case, written by Sullivan & Cromwell partner, Andrew Dietderich, (who is also active in the FTX bankruptcy case) where he tells lawyers on the other side of the Voyager deal that “FTX is rock solid.” That email came just four days before FTX filed bankruptcy. And as we detailed on Monday, Sullivan & Cromwell’s conflicts in the BlockFi matter are also beyond the pale. (See Sam Bankman-Fried, BlockFi and Sullivan & Cromwell: A Viper’s Nest of Conflicts and Intrigue.) Sullivan & Cromwell is also finding it difficult to finesse its way around how to deal with the fact that its former law partner, Ryne Miller, became General Counsel at FTX US in August of 2021. According to recent documents filed by John Ray, Miller remains on salary at the FTX Group. And, according to the recent detailed compensation request filed with the bankruptcy court by Sullivan & Cromwell for $7.6 million in legal fees for the 19-day span from November 12 through November 30 of last year, various current law partners at Sullivan & Cromwell were including Miller in their phone calls regarding the FTX bankruptcy case. Against that backdrop comes a docket entry yesterday indicating that Gary Wang, the indicted co-founder of FTX who has pleaded guilty, has been subpoenaed to appear at the Manhattan law offices of Sullivan & Cromwell tomorrow at 9:00 a.m. and to produce various documents. One document request asks for “All documents concerning payment by any entity within the FTX Group for any goods or services for the use or benefit of you or any of the following individuals.” One of the persons on the 17-person list is (wait for it) Ryne Miller. Needless to say, there is much legal interest in how Judge Dorsey rules today on the issue of an independent examiner.

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Cryptocurrency: Abolish The NYDFS Bitlicense
by grarpamp 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

I am leading a Bitcoin contingency to fight the Bitlicense in New York inside the political party ran by Zombies. https://www.reddit.com/user/theochino/submitted/ Dear Bitcoiners, I need the maximum of people to watch this documentary and tell their friend in New York City and New York State to signup using this Bitcoin link. https://bitcoin.repmyblock.org/bitcoin/exp/register/movie The mainstream press is not interested in telling the story so we need to create a force to have political influence. The Bitcoiners in Nebraska showed it was possible. We need the press around the world to shame the New York press on keeping their readers in the dark and letting zombies to be elected. If you want more info about what I have done, https://newyork.abolishthebitlicense.com. https://bitcoin.repmyblock.org/bitcoin/exp/register/movie

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Lee Reiners needs killing ( My 2k sats worth )
by professor rat 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

LEE " After fourteen years and innumerable claims that crypto represents the future of money, finance, or something else, we have yet to see crypto’s killer use case.” REINERS I blame this rotten creep for obfuscating APster https://stiffs.com/celebrity/julianassange Any prediction market accepting crypto-currencies is also an assassination market.

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Rat-Scientists ‘switch off’ autism symptoms using $3 epilepsy drug
by professor rat 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

Exit Semich! https://nypost.com/2023/02/14/scientists-switch-off-autism-using-3-epilepsy… Reposts not forced medication for serial pests

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Cryptoanarchy or the USA - choose one
by professor rat 15 Feb '23

15 Feb '23

Lee Reiners, policy director of the Duke Financial Economics Center, said that the crypto world barely resembled anything Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned and “undermined” U.S. national security. https://decrypt.co/121293/lawmakers-continue-to-quarrel-over-crypto-nightma… Liz Warren tries to invoke the Narco-terrorist Fourth Horseman - truth is the USG doesn't care https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico-drug-gangs Page 459, " Too big to fail" by Andy Sorkin "...Goldman had been on Wachovia's payroll as its adviser, and as such, knew every aspect of its internal numbers..." " Government Sachs " knew every aspect of this continuous flow of drug cartel cash. The USG didn't care then - it cares even less now. Protecting children is the only one of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse with any legs. But even that has severe limits - as witness Sandy Hook. TL/DR we young - they old - and that's life. The world chooses cryptoanarchy more every day - USA power declines in proportion. Victory is here - its just not evenly distributed

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Crypto on Tap Today at Senate Banking Hearing: Two of Three Witnesses Will Push Nutty Ideas
by Gunnar Larson 14 Feb '23

14 Feb '23

https://wallstreetonparade.com/2023/02/crypto-on-tap-today-at-senate-bankin… By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 14, 2023 ~ Senator Sherrod Brown Senator Sherrod Brown, Chair of Senate Banking Committee To understand the deteriorating condition of American democracy, one needs to be able to spot corrupt patterns. Let’s take the Senate Banking Committee, for example. We previously explained how the Senate Banking Committee has subpoena power to get at the truth but never uses it, relying on Senator Elizabeth Warren to send out an endless stream of letters demanding information – which typically never comes because the target of those letters knows that a failure to respond will not result in a subpoena. The failure of the Senate Banking Committee to issue subpoenas stems from the fact that, according to the Congressional Research Service, the Senate Banking Committee has adopted a rule that requires a majority vote to issue a subpoena for documents or witnesses. And since this Committee has too many right-wing Republican members who take campaign funds from powerful players who want to keep a lid on the truth, the American people keep getting pablum from Senate Banking hearings, instead of the cold, hard facts. The end results of these failures to issue subpoenas are that the American people have yet to see or hear any investigative findings about what really went down in the Fed’s historic trading scandal, despite the passage of more than 17 months; or what really occurred in the Archegos collapse, where mega banks were giving out 85 percent leverage on billions of dollars in concentrated stock positions via ginned up derivatives; or why the Fed needed to funnel trillions of dollars in repo loan bailouts to Wall Street mega banks in the fourth quarter of 2019, months before there was any COVID-19 pandemic anywhere in the world. (See There’s a News Blackout on the Fed’s Naming of the Banks that Got Its Emergency Repo Loans; Some Journalists Appear to Be Under Gag Orders.) The Chair of the Senate Banking Committee is Senator Sherrod Brown, a decent guy and a progressive from Ohio. But the makeup of the witnesses on tap for today’s hearing on the crypto crisis looks like something a right-winger put together. One witness, Linda Jeng, is the top lawyer for the Crypto Council for Innovation, a lobbying group for crypto interests. She will be shilling today for crypto interests in much the same way that celebrities shilled for FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried in the lead up to $8 billion of FTX customers’ funds going missing. On the website for the Crypto Council for Innovation, it lists its “Alliance” members. These include the following: Andreessen Horowitz – the venture capital firm that is a heavy investor in crypto and would severely suffer if crypto is banned; Coinbase – the publicly-traded crypto exchange that lost 86 percent of its market value last year; Gemini, a crypto exchange created by the Winklevoss twins, Cameron and Tyler, whose customers have been locked out of their interest-bearing “Earn” accounts to the tune of $900 million since November 16 of last year; and others with a vested financial interest in pushing crypto in a positive light to Congress. According to Jeng’s written testimony, which has been posted on the Senate Banking Committee’s website, she plans to push the right-wing mantra that all those crypto frauds and crypto bankruptcies and billions of dollars in looted customer funds are “a failure of people, not technology.” The crypto gang has apparently hired a p.r. firm to script its message because the same refrains are popping out of the mouths of multiple right-wingers in Senate and House hearings on crypto. One of those repeated refrains is this: “…we didn’t eliminate or ban banking after the collapse of Lehman Brothers….” Jeng also included that scripted phrase in her written remarks for today’s hearing. Another nutty idea will be presented today by Yesha Yadav, a law professor at Vanderbilt Law School. Yadav, according to her written remarks, will recommend “self-regulation by cryptocurrency exchanges.” Given what the public knows thus far about what was going on at bankrupt FTX and bankrupt Celsius, that would be like giving Bernie Madoff’s co-conspirators self-regulatory powers after he was charged with the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, has called Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto exchange, FTX, “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.” New York State’s Attorney General, Letitia James, has filed a lawsuit against the co-founder of Celsius, Alex Mashinsky. In announcing the lawsuit, the New York State Attorney General’s office wrote this: “Mashinsky repeatedly claimed that Celsius made safe, low-risk investments and only lent assets to credible and reputable entities. However, investors’ assets were routinely exposed to high-risk counterparties and strategies, many of which resulted in losses that Mashinsky concealed from investors. The collapse of Celsius has left many individuals in financial ruin. One New York resident mortgaged two properties to invest with Celsius. A disabled veteran lost his investment of $36,000, which had taken him nearly a decade to save up. Another disabled citizen, who depended upon government assistance to supplement his $8 per hour income, lost his entire investment.” Three of the bankrupt crypto lenders and exchanges were extensively interconnected to FTX: BlockFi, Celsius, and Voyager Digital. The crypto “industry” is a tightly-wound, layered ball of fraud. The only way to effectively regulate it is to ban it altogether, as veteran investor Charlie Munger recommended in a recent Wall Street Journal OpEd. The only refreshing voice at today’s hearing is Lee Reiners, the Policy Director at Duke University’s Financial Economics Center. Reiners will remind the members of the Senate Banking Committee that despite 14 years of hyped promises about the groundbreaking innovation that crypto was going to deliver, it has failed to materialize. Reiners’ written statement includes the following: “By technology standards, crypto is not new. For comparison, the iPhone was introduced in 2007. Anyone who held a smartphone in their hand for the first time immediately recognized its transformative potential; now, 85% of Americans own a smartphone…After fourteen years and innumerable claims that crypto represents the future of money, finance, or something else, we have yet to see crypto’s killer use case.” Reiners’ statement reminded us of what global economist Nouriel Roubini said about crypto in a Bloomberg TV interview in 2019: “Crypto currencies are not even currencies. They’re a joke…The price of Bitcoin has fallen in a week by how much – 30 percent. It goes up 20 percent one day, collapses the next. It is not a means of payment, nobody, not even this blockchain conference, accepts Bitcoin for paying for conference fees cause you can do only five transactions per second with Bitcoin. With the Visa system you can do 25,000 transactions per second…Crypto’s nonsense. It’s a failure. Nobody’s using it for any transactions. It’s trading one sh*tcoin for another sh*tcoin. That’s the entire trading or currency in the space where’s there’s price manipulation, spoofing, wash trading, pump and dumping, frontrunning. It’s just a big criminal scam and nothing else.” What else strikes us as untoward in what the Senate Banking Committee is doing is it calling academics and a lawyer for a crypto lobbyist to testify when there are more than 1,600 scientists and software engineers who have put their names to a letter sent to the Senate Banking and House Financial Services Committee that explains in detail why both crypto and blockchain are failed experiments in financial innovation. Many of these experts work in the technology field at companies like Google, and Apple and Microsoft. Why not call actual technology people to testify? Why not call those defrauded of their life savings to testify about what they want to see in the way of reform? Why not call the Big Law firm that seems to be entangled with an uncanny number of these collapsed crypto firms – Sullivan & Cromwell — to testify about what they knew and when they knew it. It’s right now billing in the FTX bankruptcy at an annualized rate of $147 million after failing to detect a litany of waving red flags that the business model of FTX was fraud. In other words, the Senate Banking Committee members need to stop feeding pablum to the American people and actually do the job their constituents sent them to Congress to do.

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LexShares' Fourth Quarter 2022 Highlights - Litigation Finance Journal
by Gunnar Larson 14 Feb '23

14 Feb '23

Check out my new article: https://litigationfinancejournal.com/lexshares-fourth-quarter-2022-highligh… As the global litigation investment marketplace continues to mature in meaningful ways, LexShares reflects on the firm’s Q4-2022 success. According to LexShares <https://lexshares.ghost.io/blog/industry-outlook-q4-2022/>, overall financial performance of the industry continues to advance and attract favorable attention from a variety of investors looking to profit from the increasing usage of litigation finance. LexShares forecasts that business owners will embrace creativity in searching for capital lines, and litigation investors are targeting qualified legal funding franchises as a result. As 2022 closed, all signs pointed to legal professionals’ increasing engagement with the services offered by the litigation finance industry. LexShares reflects on the 60 Minutes expose of the industry, which snagged over 11M viewers, many of whom may have discovered litigation finance for the first time. Overall, LexShares suggests that the global litigation investment marketplace is attracting traditional money managers who are seeking to invest in uncorrelated litigation finance instruments.

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Solidarity and support for Andrew Mickel
by professor rat 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

FREE ANDY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Mickel OR ELSE . . .

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Assassinating cops
by professor rat 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

LULZSEC’s La Chinga Migra stand briefly aligned them with 14 years ( an eternity in net years ) standard revolutionary c-punk praxis. A bit like " Raise the Fist " had done nine years previously. Cryptoanarchist assassins continue to hunt down all fascist-pig-cops, Bill Gates and the current POTUS. Welcome to the global revolution. Voluntaryist, agorist carpetbaggers GO FUCK YOURSELF.

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These Are the $439, 000 Missiles the US Is Using to Shoot Down Mystery UFOs
by Gunnar Larson 13 Feb '23

13 Feb '23

Gunnar's Big Blimp Company 🎈 These Are the $439,000 Missiles the US Is Using to Shoot Down Mystery UFOs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-13/us-is-shooting-down-unid…

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