FTX Future Fund(ftxfuturefund.org) |
FTX Future Fund(ftxfuturefund.org) |
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org
https://www.effectivealtruism.org
If you're thinking about how you can contribute more than you currently are but don't want to leave a comfy FAANG job, I highly recommend reading a little about giving what we can. Disclaimer: I pledged with GWWC and am involved in some EA groups.
One idea I see expressed in Effective Altruism circles a lot is that a life overseas in some poor country is worth as much as a life here (in NYC where I live). Wondering how giving in NYC is more impactful than giving to unsexy causes like malaria nets abroad, given how expensive everything is in NYC.
I'm always skeptical of company's philanthropic arms because it's so easy to give to causes that make the company looks good instead of giving to causes based the most good you can do.
Although, I thank my direct parent for sharing that link, don't mean to come across as argumentative.
Update: I assume the majority of SBF's net worth is from FTX not Alameda, so my question is where does FTX's money come from. I assume it's from wrecking retail traders.
But I'm wary of the crypto space in general. A lot of bad faith actors.
https://corporate.exxonmobil.com/Sustainability/Environmenta...
Totally False: "fake tech breakthrough called "crypto""
For a very young guy in this scene you'd expect expensive watches and cars, but instead he drives a budget car, is giving away a great majority of his wealth, and seems to truly care.
The reason he's keeping FTX open is to earn more money to give away to environmental, socioeconomic, and health organizations and research. His track record speaks for itself.
What.
... We'd be excited and grateful to see rigorous criticisms of our priorities and concerns.
Ok, how do we contact you about this? None of the forms here seem appropriate
I've been procrastinating investment talks due to exhaustion by the state of ethics in the space; Sam's one of the few people I think I'd want to be involved in seeding my business.
There is no way you posted that with a straight face.
FTX pushes Solana, a PoS coin, very hard. Blockchain doesn’t need to use PoW.
Solana has other issues around scalability, reliability, and decentralization, but it isn’t “planet incinerating”.
Is your stance on the environment what led you to leave the auto industry?
Exactly this - it's not a perfect science but it is also a little more complex taking into account QALYs which are quality adjusted life years. Given two options for your $100 donation where one would give 100 QALYs in a poorer country, that is give 100 years of good quality life in total, verses 1 QALY in the West EA argues you should go for the former. It's hard though because people like charity they can see (local) and feel an obligation to donate to their own areas first (which I totally get and feel myself).
I view it the same way I view my stock investments - how do I get the most bang for my dollar, how do I get the most QALYs for my charitable giving. There is huge room for error here but the differences tend to be in orders of magnitude so you can be fairly certain the option is 'better' when you compare, but it gets really complex when you start to speculate on what that person might then do (for example thought experiments like wether you should save the lives of 10 children or one old philantrophist who is about to make a huge donation that will save 10,000 children but whose family won't make that donation if he dies).
Similar methodology, perhaps, not philosophy.
Both seek to objectively measure impact across multiple causes e.g. healthcare, education and other disparate philanthropic domains.
The scoping is, however, as you note, different. Robinhood holds that a life nearby is more valuable to the people near it than one faraway. (There is also an institutional component to this argument. A life elevated in New York has a higher chance of producing multi-generational change than one in an intermittent war zone. Though the war zone is in part a product of that depression.) So helping one person in the Bronx at the cost of five in Sub-Saharan Africa is okay, but helping one person in Manhattan over two in Queens is not. (Drastically oversimplifying, but you get the point.)
> company's philanthropic arms
The Foundation has nothing to do with Robinhood, the company.
Your criticism is he isn't giving away his money fast enough? Get a grip.
https://funds.effectivealtruism.org
https://www.givewell.org/maximum-impact-fund
The common argument is that the best way to try and make an impact on climate change is to fund lobbyists to make change at governmental levels https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2021/12/most...
However causes like malaria prevention are pretty unsexy and don't get much love even though it's cheap, easily preventable.
Also, not talked about != not a worthy cause area to pursue.
The idea is to spend each marginal dollar in a high impact way, and a marginal dollar into a cause area that is already flush with cash won't make a big difference.
Getting more talent (instead of money) into the field is a different kind of intervention, but the energy field fails a different metric here which is "tractability," in the sense that EA people don't have any particular expertise or advantage in recruiting or training game-changing talent for the field, so it's not "tractable" even though it would hypothetically be nice if more top talent were in the field.
Sam's primary motivation to generate money is to fund Effective Altruism.
I haven't seen Bill's bank statements, but I believe he does donate for the same reasons I believe Sam does.
Coinbase did a direct listing of its shares at a $100bn valuation, with extremely low revenue numbers, which are still great numbers.
Anyone that:
A) Has similar volume
B) Has similar growth
C) Offers more ways of accruing value - such as perpetuals
D) Retains greater ownership of their own company
is simply going to have a lot of money. Its not that mysterious. Keeping a few $billion in crypto provides many opportunities for the same price appreciation as everyone else.
Alameda is also known as being quite a shark when it comes to deal making, if you don't get something in writing they are going to do the most profitable thing at you/your community's expense as soon as the opportunity arises.
Their OTC desk also likely has more volume than their lit exchange exchange, and OTC desks enjoy wider spreads in the trades.
And remember, they have nonstop trading sessions, 24/7, so more than 3x as many sessions as a stock or options exchange, and slightly more than futures and currency exchanges.
Basically what happens is that they grow soooo fast that they arent able to handle customer support, cant list new assets that customers want fast enough, that even institutions want.
So then the next startup crypto exchange lists the newly desired assets and attracts the whole network and people fearing missing out.
And it keeps going. Thats the primary way they compete. There is a bunch of stuff behind the scenes for market depth and liquidity, but it reduces the need for exchanges to compete with each other on liquidity so its not really a factor just like trading commissions are really how they compete.
Boom town.
Liquidations, not margin calls, are where the money is. And they definitely do have their own special fees.
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2021/03/16/80m-deal-gone-w...
Most others do not because voicing anything means no exchange listing, no potential of support from Alameda/FTX and their partners
Many token founders are fine with it for the payday (like in Ren/Republic protocol) while all the tokens get dumped on their community
It is very common in the crypto exchange/advisor space for contractual arrangements to go “I’ll buy your illiquid treasury and wont immediately sell, trust me bro” and then they sell once the partnership announcement creates a bunch of fomo and liquidity to sell into, Alameda has the reputation of being that way. And then when confronted they say “it wasnt in the contract and there was no vesting smart contract to prevent selling either, we’re not in the wrong”
Not the most community collaborative to say the least, its very lucrative for them
[Edit: Typo]
You hang out in the muck, folks are going to assume you have some on you.
I'm not saying they do necessarily, just that that's where the assumption more than likely comes from.
Liquidations absolutely have implicit fees, as you don't have control over execution. There's a reason why every major exchange OWNS a market making unit...and it's for liquidations.
Your smug attitude in every thread towards everyone is really tiresome. I feel sorry for someone who has drank so much koolaid.
"We're reallocating surplus speculator dollars towards AI safety?"
Probably helps that many token founders don't seem too virtuous when many are just looking to make a quick buck through copycat apps. But sounds like some earnest people are getting burned, too.
This perception is exacerbated because this kind of stuff has been happening behind the scenes for half a decade
Many founders do want to collaborate with their community, a community that expects and begs for exchange listings, which the founders cant talk about in advance and the exchanges know that and basically extort them and dump on the community, making the founder look bad and radioactive from then on.
Many/most want their project to organically grow and get help from large whales along the way, but it's more likely that tokens which have high value and many coveted exchange listings have nothing organic about them at all and cannot be emulated. Any founder trying to emulate it get into these token crashing toxic arrangements leaving many community bagholders.
It is nearly impossible to tell the difference between founders, the best thing that has occurred is that nobody needs these exchanges anymore. liquidity went onchain.