“When systems require novel accounting methods the reason is usually fraud” | Hacker News Reader

“When systems require novel accounting methods the reason is usually fraud”

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I agree with these examples, but to avoid taking the principle too far: EBIDTA was once a made up metric. Sometimes new views of a system do enrich our understanding.

Check the "John Malone and the Invention of EBITDA" section in this post for the story of how it was created: https://commoncog.com/blog/cash-flow-games/

The timing (1972) of the invention of EBITDA is interesting. It would seem EBITDA was not used for thousands of years and was not useful until the end of the gold standard in 1971 and the beginning of a new era of central bank currency manipulation

Edit: bring on the downvotes without context. Or, engage meaningfully: what conditions existed that enabled EBITDA to emerge as an invention and gain traction?

I choose to believe EBITDA exists because of Bangladesh, which also came into existence in 1971. In fact if you track the prominence of EBITDA and the GDP of Bangladesh, the correlation is crystal clear

In any case crypto is far more manipulated than any normal currency thanks to BitfinexTether.

Can you elaborate? How are these things connected? Why wouldn't EBITDA be a useful financial framing for "growth" companies while the country was on the gold standard? Just because it happened around the same time, doesn't mean there's any causal relationship here.

Wall Street newly accepting EBITDA (cash flows) over DTI or net income, as told in the link above about the cable utility, is logical in an environment of a rapidly expanding money supply driven by unencumbered Federal Reserve.

In the loose/free money era, financing cash flows with more and more debt is incentivized and in some respects the default mode of operation.

Growth over value.

Alternately, when the credit environment tightens, you see moves back to value and away from growth

note that EBITDA isn't directly equivalent to cash flows, and can be wildly different depending on how creative the accounting is. EBIT/EBITDA can be useful is some comparative valuation exercises as an idealized cash flow substitute (especially when comparing companies or time periods under differing tax regimes), but it's not actual cash in minus cash out, as the term "cash flow" implies.

How do you know that Dwayne Johnson didn’t cause EBITDA? He was born in 1972 so the timing fits even better than the ending of the gold standard

I replied with the specific reasoning as it relates to central bank policy.

I was born in 1971, so clearly I'm the answer to "wtfhappenedin1971"

What a lovely demonstration of Occam’s Razor. I’m convinced.

It's annoying how "everything bad happens because we abandoned the gold standard" is being pushed hard. A lot of other things happened around 1970, you know?

It's a lot more plausible to me that "the rise of international finance", from immensely improved communication, caused both the abandoment of the gold standard and novel ways to estimate future profit.

Earlier this morning for some reason Youtube recommended a video that was funny and relevant, called Charlie Munger: 'Every time you hear 'EBITDA' substitute it with 'bull** earnings''

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l82kIjqBtqw

Haha I see your appeal to authority and raise you another: besides Malone (billionaire) the other famous example for EBIDTA is Jeff Bezos (and many others I'm sure).

Jeff Bezos was always criticized because Amazon was 'unprofitable'. He was just playing a similar strategy to Malone's and mocked journalists who didn't understand what he was up to.

Bezos was all about free cash flow.

So was Malone, the point is to maximize cashflow but minimize profits to avoid taxes and compound the growth.

If you care about EBITDA at all, then you must watch the "why have you not sold the bonds yet" video

https://vimeo.com/20109796

I'd go even further. EBITDA is still a made-up metric.

Those pesky expenses always getting in the way.

"Earnings before all the bad stuff".

Have you ever seen an annual report where "adjustments to earnings" made the earnings worse?

All metrics are made up. Some of them are useful.

Some metrics are made up for the purpose of better understanding and some are made up for the purpose of obfuscation and manipulation.

Intent matters. EBITDA intent is not rock solid.

EBITDA was new, but free cash flow was GAAP and everything good about EBITDA is captured in “it’s an easy way to estimate free cash flow”

Everything else about EBITDA is sort of fraud.

One of the best reads ever. The post is worth re-reading every few months.

How to audit a USD stablecoin:

1. Calculate all current circulating supply of said stablecoin across all chains

2. Calculate value of deposits across issuer’s bank accounts in USD.

If both number are equal, congrats, your stablecoin passed the audit.

It really should be that simple.

I’m oversimplifying, of course. But a stablecoin should really not be an investment fund and shouldn’t have its deposits in illiquid assets at all, not even t bills.

The issuer should only charge a small fee when the stablecoin is created or redeemed. Given the sheer volume and scale of stablecoin trades, this fee can easily run into tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

The issue is figuring out which assets they have and are they the true owner. If you have assets distributed across dozens of banks and other parties who are holding them for you, this becomes incredibly difficult and rife for abuse, especially when you have other non-professional/non-traditional intermediaries holding assets for you, or for whom you are exchanging favors with.

Basically compiling the list of the assets they hold and verifying it is the biggest issue here. It is definitely not at all simple -- in fact it may be deliberately obfuscated for "reasons."

I don't understand your point. If a stablecoin issuer has trouble compiling a list of their assets that's a red flag. If a competitor comes out with simpler accounting I'll switch to them.

> If a stablecoin issuer has trouble compiling a list of their assets that's a red flag.

I agree.

>in fact it may be deliberately obfuscated for "reasons."

In accounting/auditing, the words "it's complicated" is generally the first place you look for detailed documentation and process.

If it is not there... Red flag.

Assets don't have value, just because the are on the books.

If the assets are bonds of questionable value, the face value of the bonds may not be meaningful.

No, #2 should be: "Calculate the value of deposits across issuer's bank accounts in USD and subtract any debts that the issuer has."

Debts would be #1 in parent posts example.

Based on the independent audit from earlier this month, they have combined liabilities of ~$82 billion in issued tokens and $75 million in other. Total assets exceed total liabilities by $162 million.

Issued coins aren’t the only possible kind of debt. They might also have taken out loans that wouldn’t show up on the blockchain but enable them to inflate their bank account balances

That is the $75m in "other liabilities."

Step 0: it’s crypto so it’s a pyramid scheme, case closed

that very well might be

some aspects of crypto though are pretty interesting. NFTs do offer a ton of use cases for ownership, licensing, memberships, etc. - if you can look beyond the current dumb trend of monkey pictures.

> NFTs do offer a ton of use cases for ownership, licensing, memberships, etc.

NFTs are claimed to offer a ton of use cases. To date, I'm not aware of any that are both meaningful and actually require NFTs.

To be fair, its a very new tech - the ERC-721 NFT standard was introduced in 2018. Whatever could be built or not on it was lost in the madness of the bullrun.

I remain on the fence, but can't dismiss it entirely.

All these claims fundamentally require trust in some external party, at which point you no longer have trustless distributed consensus.

Also fair criticism. Further, even if they were to one day be widely adopted as membership tokens, coupons, or licenses, the underlying networks are still wildly overvalued.

I also don’t like the idea of living in a world the crypto enthusiasts imagine. The world already feels overly financialized. If everything is “investable” and “fractionalized” and “tradable”, the level of financialization in the world will be nauseatingly high.

Short-term T-bills are essentially risk-free and absolutely should be liquid. In the event of a catastrophic market crash the Federal Reserve has stepped in as the buyer of last resort in every case (2008, 2020 COVID, etc.). Also, generally during a crash Treasuries spike in price because people flock to them for safety. That means there should be a liquid market for stablecoin issuers to dump into.

I understand and would ideally treat them at par with cash.

But the crypto world is highly volatile. Its also pretty small and news spreads rapidly. There is an inherent lack of faith in underlying systems as well, which is why bank runs and catastrophic collapses are so common.

T-bills, as secure as they might be, can’t be immediately redeemed into cash. If you’re a stablecoin issuer and you stop redemption for a day or two until you can refill your coffers, it can easily start off rumors that you’re insolvent. Depending on prevailing market sentiment, it can set off a panic bank run. If the stablecoin is widely used, this can set off a collapse in other associated pairs

Until this space matures enough, T bills present an avoidable risk factor

#2 is really hard when you have 50 billion dollars.

Most Fortune 500 companies don't actually know how much money they have. When I worked for a big one they generally knew within a $100 million margin of error.

Stablecoins or other central banks running their currencies should know better than the average Fortune 500, given that it’s pretty much their only job…?

But if you're in the business of issuing stablecoins, that's precisely what your job is - to know where your (or rather, a client's) money is.

It's a core competency. Not a treasury management issue as with Fortune 500 cos.

What are the variables that contribute to a $100m margin of error?

Thoughts on Tether calling their accounting method “iFAP” of all choices:

There’s a saying amongst investigators that some criminals, as ever more time passes with them not getting caught, start to behave as if they were taunting police to finally catch them.

Academics do this stuff too though. SATAN was a network security tool. Linnaeus himself abused the taxonomy system he invented to name pest species after people he didn't like.

There's a white collar crime investigator who has a sign in his interrogation room: "If you're here, you're not as smart as you thought you were."

> There's a white collar crime investigator who has a sign in his interrogation room: "If you're here, you're not as smart as you thought you were."

Sounds like typical bullshit that you get in a profession where everyone kisses your ass because you can ruin their life on a whim even if they didn't do anything wrong.

I'm sure the boot-licking "everyone accused is probably guilty of something" crowd loves it.

> There's a white collar crime investigator who has a sign in his interrogation room: "If you're here, you're not as smart as you thought you were."

There's a white collar crime investigator who believes that everyone is guilty until proven how guilty.

That's pretty much how investigators work. Obviously you can't discount the fact that someone isn't guilty, but if you have got as far as to get them in front of you then you're onto something.

Just because I can't prove something to the criminal burden of proof doesn't mean that they didn't do it, it just means I can't get the job over the line.

Trolls do that sort of thing to gloat to other trolls.

Trolls who are also scammers, in addition do it to make people think they're in on the joke, when really they're the butt of it.

Did these techbros seriously call their accounting system "iFAP"?

Yeah, my immediate thought was, "You've gotta be jerking me..."

Causality seems backward, but the sentiment holds. Grifters and fraudsters have an eye for recognizing settings and circumstances where their exploits may go unnoticed until they're off with the goods. It's what makes them good at their trades. Novel accounting methods -- and more broadly the financialization of financialization that defines modern speculative finance -- especially obscure and technical ones, are great venues for fraud.

I find it plausible that Tether was forced to create their own accounting system because GAAP would have exposed their lies.

They can't find an accounting firm that "understands" that they need to ignore the lies and only report what Tether wants them to report.

They should consider Friehling & Horowitz. A reliable firm with a lot of auditing experience.

Especially if they have unfortunate names, like iFAP. I about had a stroke or two when I saw that. Either someone dropped the balls on marketing or there's some serious trolling going on for them to be swinging this around in our faces like that.

> iFAP

In a way it's brilliant marketing. I'm sure the true believers love it. The skeptics would not be convinced by this no matter what you called it.

I would like to express appreciation for the innuendo in your post.

IFAP? really? They could not come up with a better acronym?

I tried to google ifap and ifap accounting but no meaningful results. Anyone got a link or two?

That Tether's assets are being questioned in so many places means it's time to get out of USDT. After all, there is zero upside and a huge downside.

I don't even understand what the purpose of USDT is. Why use it over a stablecoin that is backed by your crypto exchange?

Edit: misread. Usdt is the common coin to transfer between exchanges and exchange coins.

Tax avoidance in some countries and bypassing KYC rules.

Think of an exchange issued stablecoin as a gift card, it is issued by one store and only good as long as that store is in business. Tether is more like a dollar or euro and good across multiple stores.

I have USDT that is in my own wallet and not on an exchange that I could send directly to you if I wanted.

Okay, but you already have a business relationship with your exchange. so there are fewer points of failure.

>I have USDT that is in my own wallet and not on an exchange that I could send directly to you if I wanted.

I suppose, but this "Tether" currency is still minted by a centralized entity. It could be worthless tomorrow. I don't see how self-custodialship of this centralized monopoly money matters. You might as well just use a centralized currency if you trust this centralized entity not to inflate the currency.

When I use an exchange-backed currency like BUSD, USDC or Kraken's USD, I don't intend to exchange it peer-to-peer at all. The whole point of exchange in the first place is that you use the cryptocurrencies for peer-to-peer transfers. The only thing a stablecoin has to do is:

1) Accept (cash, bank, CC) deposits

2) Allow (cash, bank, CC) withdrawls

3) Allow me to exchange it for cryptocurrency with others

4) Don't lose my money in the process

If you trust some institution to do #1-3, why would you want to have some other, less credible institution to handle #4 as well?

But the price of tether is still guaranteeled by a single entity.

If that entity is lying or goes bust you are still holding your usdt's but they are worth nothing now.

Why use a stable coin instead of an ACH or wire transfer? I mean, if your goal is 1:1 parity with USD, my bank solved that.

Take a look at Tether's market cap chart.[1] Click on Overview->Market cap-> 1 month. You can see the cashouts. Between 5:09 AM and 5:14 AM on May 27, 2022, the market cap of USDT suddenly dropped by $750 million dollars. Somebody just exited.

There have been five huge cashouts like that since May 13th.

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

IMHO the key is whether the novel accounting is used for forecasting the future (ok) or explaining the past (not ok).

iFAP? Seriously? Are we not doing phrasing anymore?

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