SBF's Korean Arbitrage Lie

A story about how Sam Bankman-Fried's (SBF) claimed origin story about making billions through crypto arbitrage may have been fabricated.

"The legend is basically that at the time bitcoin was trading at say $10 in America, but in other countries where it was harder to access bitcoin, there was a slight premium. People were willing to pay more for bitcoin because it was hard to access due to government restrictions on exchanges.

In Japan and Korea, bitcoin would be $10,000 here and $11,000 or $12,000 there. The origin story for FTX is that Sam saw this and was one of the people that exploited this arbitrage opportunity. He supposedly hustled, went to Korea and set up this logistics chain where they could buy $1 million of bitcoin here, sell it for a premium there, wire the money back and do it again the next day, just keep recycling the money.

They claimed they made tons of money but nobody really understood exactly how - there were plot holes. Like how did you make a billion dollars doing this? That sounds unreasonable. You might have made hundreds of millions, but where did you get the seed capital for this? You weren't rich, so how much initial money went into this? There was never clarity there.

Now it appears the answer might be that it just never even happened - that might have been a complete fabrication, or they might have done it at a much smaller scale. Nobody still knows the answer because this guy's on the run now."