Liquidity has value too. Many FTX customers needed immediate liquidity. If you need immediate liquidity the value proposition years later is meaningless for most people because most people can’t get any bridge financing to cover the gap.

Mt. Gox also ran a fractional exchange for a long time until the bottom fell out. The trouble is that you simply can’t run an unannounced fractional exchange.

Isn't the bigger issue with the parent's argument that its comparing apples and oranges?

Like the customers were largely owed _not_ USD and so compared the USD value owed _4 years ago_ to the _current day_ USD value of something else that wasn't owed is just not correct.

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To do some of the math, assuming all the funds owed were bitcoin then 9 Billion / $17,000 ~= 47 thousand BTC owed.

At current $64k/BTC prices that's roughly $30 Billion. Which while still lower than $75B is much higher than just $9B and doesn't excuse SBF from fraudulently and very publicly claiming that all the money invested as backed 1:1 when it wasn't.

I also don't know how much more FTX's stake would be diluted as well and another commentator talked about nearly half so then it might not cover the "actual" owed value.

A fractional bank is one that doesn't have liquidity to cover all obligations, but has enough non-liquid assets to cover all obligations. They can get the money if all customers withdraw, it just might take them a few days.

A fraudulent bank is one that doesn't have enough liquidity or assets to cover all their obligations. Mt Gox and FTX were perfect examples of this.

The fact that some of their assets went up in the years or decades since is irrelevant. Madoff would probably be in the green now, too, simply thanks to asset inflation.

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