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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

The article is scant on details, so its unclear what the money would be used for...

But why should the Government get a $605M payday for appropriating privately held assets? That sets up a dark conflict of interest.

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It's not a payday for the government. This money will be returned to creditors as part of the bankruptcy process.

I think too many people got used to crypto’s “well if the software says it…” mortal/legal/ethical code.

They assume that traditional finance isn’t a thoughtfully designed system with checks and balances because they were blindly railing against it before.

Haven’t FTX’s bankruptcy lawyers already billed $200m? That’s money that isn’t going to FTX’s creditors.

Sure, people have scammed larger sums, but I wouldn’t conclude the traditional financial system is thoughtfully designed with checks and balances while lawyers are making hundreds of millions processing bankruptcy transactions.

There’s gotta be room for improvement along the moral/legal/ethical dimensions for our current system.

It takes a lot of effort to unravel such a huge mess. It's impossible to do cheap.

The corporate structure has more than 100 legal entities around the globe intentionally designed to obfuscate what's going on. So you need domain experts in each country along with experts on unraveling the structure.

In the end, for this particular company, it doesn't matter. The IRS has filed a claim for $30B+ in unpaid taxes. There's nothing left for creditors.

Some of the publicly available billables are outrageous though. 100 entities is pretty common.

Perhaps, but the posted does not say that...

It also doesn't say that the shares were paid for with wire transaction as opposed to physical cash in stacks of $100 bill, but that also is what happened. They're not going to explain the common bit in every story, only the unique bits. Whenever the gov't sells things in a bankruptcy or fraud proceeding, the money goes to the creditors/victims, and then fines.

> Perhaps, but the posted does not say that...

It doesn't say the government is profiting either. You just made that up.

Well, that piece is pretty easy to conclude. They acquired it for essentially nothing.

> Well, that piece is pretty easy to conclude.

It's also an incorrect conclusion.

You are missing a very obvious piece of the puzzle here: assets seized by the government during bankruptcy get used to offset liabilities of the bankrupt company. This doesn't need to be explicitly said; it wouldn't make sense for it to work any other way.

Because they declared bankruptcy - that's how bankruptcy works. You declare bankruptcy, the gov't puts someone in charge of managing the sale of your assets in order to reimburse your creditors.

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