by Joseph P. Farrell, Giza Death Star:
The news of the out-of-control corruption of the uniparty in the Swamp is now reaching new depths. Today, as I compose this blog and listen to the radio, it seems that between the time I reach for my glass of iced tea, and actually raise it to my lips to take a small swig, either a new batch of classified documents has been discovered in Bai Den Jo’s corvette in his locked pagoda, or some new revelation about the extent of FTX’s crypto-corruption has been unearthed. It’s all a blur and becoming difficult to keep up with.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
In this case, it’s the latter, as this article shared by L.G.L.R. drops yet another intriguing tranche of revelations:
FTX says hackers took $415 million in cryptocurrency
Now in case you missed it, thus far FTX has been accused of laundering money, via its crypto-currency blockchain operations, to mostly Democratic but also a few Mitch-McConnell-approved Republican candidates, leaving various investors nothing. Somewhere in that mix, as I recall, the Ukraine was somehow involved, or was that Burisma, or Hunter’s laptop? It’s all so confusing and hard to keep track of. But anyway, I do recall that when the crypto-“currency” phenomenon first began there was a great deal of horn-tooting about the security and nearly unhackable nature of the blockchain and its “distributed ledgers” and so on. At the time all I could think of was the magical armor “impervium”, impenetrable to all projectiles. Impervium was and is, of course, a myth and a fiction, and so is “cyber-security”, which strikes me as more of an oxymoron than a myth. Catherine Fitts has said it best and most succinctly: “There is no such thing as a cyber system that is secure.”
Well, according to this article, yet another blow has been struck against the security of crypto-currencies. Ponder the opening statements of this article:
The scandal-plagued cryptocurrency firm FTX has a new challenge: trying to recover nearly half a billion dollars worth of cryptocurrency that it says hackers stole from its accounts.
The company said it has identified roughly $5.5 billion in assets for recovery, of which roughly $415 million was lost to “unauthorized third-party transfers,” CNBC reported. That sum includes $323 million from FTX.com and $90 million from FTX US. The remaining $2 million in crypto came from FTX’s sister firm, hedge fund Alameda Research.The total value of the assets at the time of the theft was $477 million. That valuation came from analytics firm Elliptic.
FTX suffered a cataclysmic collapse in November when investors simultaneously attempted to withdraw their stakes in the firm, leaving it unable to fully remunerate them. Reports quickly emerged of missing investor assets and suspicious funds transfers to Alameda. The company is attempting to locate its missing assets in order to pass it on to investors who have not yet been fully remunerated….
So, on top of the money laundering in the form of donations to the two branches of the uniparty, we have a supposedly secure technology and a criminal corporation that was hacked to the tune of $477,ooo,ooo. Now, of course, that’s mere pocket change in a world where the derivatives still sloshing around in the system are estimated to be about $14 to $17, 000,000,000,000,000.00, but that’s still a hefty amount of money if you’re on the list of FTX’s investors.
Surely it can’t get any worse.
Au contraire mes amis:
Acting FTX CEO John J. Ray III has decried the company’s prior management, remarking on the extremely poor record keeping.
He has attributed the collapse of the firm to “plain old embezzlement” and described the company’s situation and lack of a paper trail as a form of “paperless bankruptcy.”
“The issue here I was speaking to is I’ve never seen an utter lack of record keeping, absolutely no internal controls whatsoever,” he said. “It’s really unprecedented in terms of the lack of documentation.”
Now, wait just a minute. No record keeping??
“Plain old embezzlement?”
“Lack of a paper trail?” Unprecedented “lack of documentation”?
Is anyone out there as mystified and troubled by these words as I am? I thought the whole point of blockchain technologies, distributed ledgers, and crypto-currencies was precisely the difficulty of forging documentation, not to mention getting rid of documentation, or worse, not having any at all! What is going on here? Is this a way of admitting that the standard features of crypto-currencies were totally lacking and absent in FTX’s case? That the crypto-currency aspect was just a front for – as the Acting FTX CEO John Ray puts it – “plain old embezzlement?” But even embezzlers have to keep some books, even if doctored. If the standard features of crypto-currencies were not totally lacking in FTX’s case, then why are there no records somewhere in cyber-space? To erase such things seems to betoken a heavy hitter in the cyber-security arena, someone with, perhaps, intelligence connections.
The bottom line here is that there appears to be a much deeper rabbit hole to this story than even met the eye on its first iteration. We’re looking at something more than just money laundering via a crypto-“currency.” Now we’re looking either at the complete absence of standard crypto-currency features, or at records that might once have existed, but now have disappeared into thin air. Something is massively wrong, still, in this story.
But one thing we may take away, and it bears repeating. Crypto-“currencies” are manifestly not currencies at all. If this type of thing can occur with them, then any trust reposed in a central bank version of them is massively misplaced, given the record of the financial system itself.
