Gary Wang, Co-Founder of FTX, Questioning at Trial :

Q. Did you commit financial crimes while working at FTX?

A. Yes.

Q. What types of crimes did you commit?

A. Wire fraud, securities fraud, and commodities fraud.

Q. Did you commit these crimes by yourself or with other people?

A. With other people.

Q. Who were the main people you committed these crimes with?

A. Sam Bankman-Fried, Nishad Singh, and Caroline Ellison.

Q. You're talking about Alameda Research?

A. Yes.

Q. Okay. We'll come back to it in a minute. When you say withdrew unlimited amounts of funds, whose funds are you talking about?

A. Those of customers.

Q. Let's talk about——sorry. And customers of what?

A. Customers of FTX.

Q. Mr. Wang, do you see any of the people you committed those crimes with in the courtroom today? You can stand up if you need to.

A. Yes.

Q. Who do you see?

A. Sam Bankman-Fried.

MR. ROOS: Let the record reflect the witness has identified the defendant.

Q. Mr. Wang, in general terms for now, what did you do with the defendant that was the wire fraud you were referring to?

A. We gave special privileges to Alameda Research on FTX, which allowed it to withdraw unlimited amounts of funds from the platform, and we lied about this to the public.

Q. When you say withdrew unlimited funds from the platform, what are you referring to?

A. It had the ability to, regardless of what was in the account, to withdraw unlimited amounts of money.

Today I learned a lot about Lightning. For example, if you have very old LND channels, it's possible that they won't be of the ANCHOR channel type. These cannot be CPFP fee bumped. It's also possible that older CLN channels are this way too. I have 43 channels and 4 of them are of the STATIC_REMOTE_KEY type. Those 4, if they get force closed, cannot be fee bumped.

My bad luck left me a channel with a lot of sats on my end, of a channel that was remotely opened to me and a non ANCHOR channel. Essentially the worst combination.

This left me with a pending transaction of 1 sat/vbyte. It could take 6 months for the mempool to almost clear again. But, there's also a chance that my transaction never gets through too. Especially with the upcoming bull run next year, we just don't know what it's going to be like.

So, what does a Nostrich do in this situation. Well, for starters, I got annoyed and freaked out. I then spent two days trying to resolve this.

And then I paid F2Pool 147K sats for them to include my transaction in an upcoming block. That may seem like a lot, but I had 6.5M sats on the line here. That's an incredible amount of Bitcoin to me. This gives me peace of mind.

To prevent this from happening, I'm probably going to close the other 3 channels that I have open that are not ANCHOR channels so that this does not happen again. I'll reopen what I can when I can.

At least I can now go to bed a happy Nostrich.

Goodnight!