I have no problem with you presenting your point of view, but frequently we still need to take some of these characterizations of motives with considerable grains of salt - even if some angles might be more convincing than others.  

Yesterday, I was listening to The Bitcoin Matrix podcast in which Phil Gibson was proclaiming a kind of conspiratorial theory regarding so many players coordinating to cause the FTX crash - including asserting that CZ was in on the deal because CZ (Binance) was an initial investor into FTX.  I appreciated several of the connections that Gibson was making, but still I thought that he was drawing too many conspiratorial lines for my own comfort levels

And, today I was listening to another podcast (I cannot remember which one) in which I was reminded that FTX had paid back Binance in a combination of FTT token and also in BNB token - which highlighted that some of these off-shore exchanges are using a combination of token to make payments, including frequently using their own coin - which reminded me of a previous post that I had made to defend the BNB token and CZ, in terms of the BNB token being around longer and also my presumption that the BNB token was much better backed than then FTT token - and even though we can see a lot of these games, we cannot really know the extent to which the games are being played until shit really hits the fan.. and sure some of the tokens have BIGGER red flags than other tokens....

I am not sure exactly what my point is - except that I am reluctant to buy into very much of any of these stories - and I am not even suggesting that you, Hueristic, are buying too much into any one story - even though I feel that some of my leanings are slightly different than yours - even though each of us are surely working with incomplete information - and each of us only has so much time to be researching into these matters and trying to figure out for our own comfort levels regarding how much time we want to spend investigating various angles of these stories and how much weight to give to factual, logical and conclusory representations that we come across.

I suppose he needs a gigantic audit team to consolidate his own numbers. Just look at his "corporate structure", if it can even be called "structure". It is absurd that to this date I believe he hasn't clearly stated where the headquarter is. It is not just about where they are registered. It is about how and where any issues could seriously be addressed. He doesn't care. When Malta said Binance has no license, he just moved on.

The fact that Binance now established some headquarter in Paris is really puzzling. I don't know what happened behind the scenes and what guarantees Binance received from the French government, but when the decision between Ireland and France is made in favor of France, something must be going on. Is this where the company seriously pays tax? Or is this term "headquarter" now just the place where the biggest office with real people working there is to be found? What's the deal between the French government and Binance?

I am asking myself whether CZ himself does even know off the top of his head how much in assets his messed up global corporate network even has. But with one thing I totally agree here: it is time to lay the cards on the table. Following the FTX collapse, tens of billions have been withdrawn from all kinds of exchanges. I wonder whether CZ caused a bank run that even he didn't really like. Or Binance is perfectly solvent and played this sneaky he had up his sleeves.

Then again, I also wondered whether causing an exchange like FTX to collapse could also backfire in many regards concerning his own exchange. People withdrawing assets en masse, massive push for harsh regulation, also massive push for innovation in the DEX space etc.