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That's the crypto community delusion about how fractional reserve banking works. The way fractional reserve banking actually works is that banks lend out money, and the loans are their major assets. This only works if there's heavy regulation on how sound the loans have to be. Without regulation of loan quality, there's a banking panic every few years.

All the US banking crises since the 1920s have involved some form of deregulation.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_banking_crises




The same could be said for FTX. There just needs to be regulation about how sound the self-created coin backing your margin needs to be. Without regulation of the soundness of the economic value of your self-created coin you get a crypto crash.

Am I crazy? Are we not describing 2 identical problems and classifying 1 of them as fraud?

The soundness of loans in a deregulated environment is no better than the soundness of a self-invented currency.


Here's a tutorial on how to analyze a bank's balance sheet.[1]

Few of the crypto clowns publish their balance sheet. FTX, we now know, didn't even have a balance sheet.

[1] https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/banks-balance-sheet/


What, the big banks don't have "internal, poorly labeled fiat account" on their spreadsheet tracking their finances?


Thanks for this, so far that's 2 points of difference stated:

1) Regulatory oversight. 2) Relative transparency.

Legit differences between Crypto exchanges and traditional finance. Keep em' coming, I'm learning :)


Your original response was an insinuation that banking systems in general are based on fraud, and that gold should be the basis of monetary value. In fact, the case has been proven that gold is a poor basis of monetary value and that banking systems, when properly regulated, are not fraudulent, or are very rarely fraudulent.

The reply to that was to explain that regulation was the key to maintaining a stable banking system.

You then ignore all that an conflate unregulated banking and regulated banking as equal.

I hope you understand that this makes your argument dishonest, and that you attempt to avoid this in the future.


Please understand I am not trying to be dishonest or make arguments in bad faith. Maybe I need to be further educated.

I understand that the level of fraud committed specifically by FTX goes far beyond simply misleading lenders and regulators about their collateral which consisted mostly of their own crypto. In general, however, this seems to be the root of the issue and the systemic problem across all centralized crypto exchanges.

From the start and well prior to this conversation I have had the belief that Crypto "scams" like this bear a striking resemblance to the world of traditional finance and specifically the securities market and MBS.

I'm not trying to argue in bad faith or use any kind of argumentative tactic or fallacy (at least not intentionally).


these nakedly fraudulent scams are nothing like real finance, its night and day. you need to get educated and then come back with better-informed opinions


The key problem is that crypto only has value in the absence of a regulatory authority. If users have a 3rd party they both trust (the government), all of the waste in crypto is unnecessary. However, it turns out for crypto to be used, it has to be centralized. Without centralization, it's too complicated for the masses.


Soundness of loans can't really be regulated. Everybody who makes loans thinks that they're sound. They just turn out to be wrong sometimes. e.g the mortgages in 2008 we're thought to be solid because they were covered by collateral. But as it turns out that collateral wasn't worth what it was assumed to be.

This is not to say the space shouldn't be regulated, but all regulation on the soundness of loans suffers from this. e.g bank leverage limits rest on the same type of assumptions about the value and liquidity of different types of collateral. And if those assumptions are wrong they will fail no matter how solid the regulatory model says the bank is.


An exchange and a bank are in two completely different businesses. An exchange isn’t supposed to be lending money at all.




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