Oh my god, I upvoted you before reading the DMs. I... wow, yeah, they need duct tape.
EDIT: Okay I just cannot get over this, obviously I'm exaggerating but it's pretty much "I didn't want to do bad stuff because that would be bad, and then after I had personally done all of the bad things, I realized that I had, in fact, done something very bad."
SBF is monumentally stupid for sending these messages. Straight up admitting that any "ethics" was for reputation only. And not only that, but saying that the mistake was not doubling down again.
> how did anyone serious think this guy was brilliant?
He made a lot of money by bucking norms. Hacker news of all places should recognize that people are drawn to those who project an appearance of improbable success through skill despite a lack of underlying competence (see also: Elon Musk)
I had, once, in a HN comment a couple of months ago. It said that he was lobbying on some political race, which is something he was doing because he believed in "Effective Altruism". This was presented as a good thing, as though billionaires giving money to politicians was a novel idea. I guess this is the type of person who found him worthy of mention.
I saw parts of an interview where he openly states,in substance, that a Ponzi scheme is a valid investment, the new way of doing things. I was puzzled and took a mental note to check on how he fares I once in a while.
I had no idea the sums involved were this big, and the operation this much amateurish.
I wonder if it's an attempt to disassociate himself with EA. The general consensus on EA forums is anger and shame at how generally good ideas like treating charitable donations as an investment based on impact have been essentially hijacked and longtermism pushed front and center too.
The "lament about how corrupt the system is and that we are forced to partake in it" excuse has been popular in recent years, not surprised he's going for it. Let's see how that plays out
>Disclosure: This August, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause.
I am 30 years old and I am laughing at anyone who has trusted these kids with anything. His balance sheet shows just how childish and out of depth he and his possie of "execs" are.
This is further evidence that he was thinking of this in terms of all-or-nothing coin flips. In case you haven't seen it:
COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?
BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually.
COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.
BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical.
COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?
BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.
(See the first paragraph of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BZ6XaCwN4QGgH9CxF/the-kelly-... for the outline of an explanation of why his reasoning was not applicable to most real-life scenarios. This is pretty subtle; >95% of the explanations on the Internet I've seen over the past week as to why SBF is "obviously wrong" don't actually work.)
Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but he does seem ready to accept that he lost this flip. It would obviously be insane to trust with him anything big at this point, but I'm optimistic that he won't fight to the bitter end.
SBF talks about money like a prop trader who thinks that blowing your account is just a thing that happens to everyone in their lifetime, crossed with an extreme Rationalist (of the self-described "Rationalist" community) who thinks everything can be reduced to choosing between Column A and Column B based on which column has more utils.
Is he wrong? I suspect that even if he does jail time for fraud etc. then he will come out of it famous, and with plenty of deep-pocketed investors lined up to ride another wave. What are the actual consequences to the big guys?
Quite a lot of Rationalists aren't Utilitarians, for various reasons.
Most of the ones I hang out with seem to agree with my characterisation of Utilitarianism as what happens when philosophers discovered basic arithmetic and then just stopped there. Most recently:
"""I remember in secondary school, with nobody to teach me more than basic trigonometry and algebra, I spent 6 months figuring out what I later learned were the two ways 3D rendering can be done: ray tracing, and turning points in 3D space into points in 2D (screen) space and drawing those as 2D primitives.
Utilitarianism feels like even less than that, to me. It's the foundation of algebra upon which more can be built, saying that utility is a thing that can be combined, but it doesn't really say how to combine utility, and all the weird things that happen in extreme hypotheticals are because it's naively summing the potential utility of unbounded agents."""
Not quite. The question is defined in a way that the EV of bet is positive, even though repeatedly doing it gets you an arbitrarily high chance of (moral) bankruptcy.
It's not though, it's just guaranteed failure. The only stable state is that you lose everything and you will reach that stable state in about 2 coin flips. If it's always good to flip, you will eventually (and quickly!) reach nothing.
I'm actually somewhat impressed by someone who articulated a stupid logic about how to live life and then actually followed through.
The whole point of the paradox is that if you keep playing it’s impossible to end with anything but nothing. Sam laid out no exit point, not sure how he comes to the conclusion that he can end with an enormously valuable existence.
This is not true. The probability of ending up with nothing is only one in the limit. The probability for any finite tries is close to one, but not one. The EV keeps growing exponentially, as the rewards are growing even faster than the probability of ruin.
It is extremely risky and ill-advised, but as SBF said, it’s possible to end up in a very (very!) good position. The crux is that infinity doesn’t exist. You will place the bet at most a finite number of times.
I feel like the next question is, "the tortoise lies there, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over, but it cannot do so without your help. You are not helping. Why?"
> I was trying to make sense of what, behind the PR and the charitable donations and the lobbying, Bankman-Fried actually believes about what’s right and what’s wrong — and especially the ethics of what he did and the industry he worked in.
This seems like a weird thing to worry about right now, I imagine my question would be "hey, where'd all the deposits go?" Like, I'm sure it's all interesting in a psychological and sociological way, but "what does SBF really believe" feels like it should take a back seat to what did he do. That's much more interesting! It's easy for someone like SBF to just say stuff about what's going on in his head, whether it's true or not. But, we're talking about real (and, okay, a lot of fake) money here.
There's this weird assumption in a lot of reporting that a rich person must have interesting things to say, or beliefs that are worth getting to the bottom of. Sometimes that's true, but sometimes they're just not very interesting people. Which is fine! Lots of people aren't very interesting, but really rich people get to be treated as interesting even if they're actually boring.
It makes a lot of sense given the nature of SBF’s charitable donations and the purported rationale(s) behind them. Kelsey Piper is pretty deeply associated with the EA movement, which is heavily interested in picking the right ways to deploy money to solve the world’s problems, and much of SBF’s charitable giving was too.
> In 2018, Vox launched Future Perfect, with the goal of covering the most critical issues of the day through the lens of effective altruism. In this talk, Kelsey Piper discusses how the project worked out, her experience as a Vox staff writer, and her thoughts on the key challenges of EA-focused journalism.
I just commented in this thread about how this story magically keeps getting worse, and then it got worse...
There's a disclosure that SBF actually gave Vox money as part of a journalism grant. This business of billionaires buying journalists outright by calling payments philanthropic grants is way out of control. It's bad enough when Gates does it.
Piper's journalistic duty was to disclose her ties to EA much more fully in that piece, or recuse herself from writing it. I'm curious about the ties that she and other prominent Bay Area EAs have to SBF as well. Everyone is in a rush to distance themselves from they guy who bankrolled them.
And to be clear, Piper and Ellison go way way back. I think there is a very good chance that SBF did not know that that chat was on the record. So Piper may have failed to disclose in two directions, to both her source and her audience.
It does seem like the (some now erstwhile) EA billionaires supposed that buying professional, high-tier take-havers/explanatory-journalists was going to be an effective way to mainline their ideology. SBF had his eye on Matt Yglesias, for example.
Alameda got long on crypto, crypto crash, billions lost. Funds from FTX was covering Alameda's losses. My guess there, was never a distinct point in which money was moved from FTX to Almeda. I felt they always ran both as two hands belonging to the same body.
> I imagine my question would be "hey, where'd all the deposits go?"
But we know where they went. To Alameda Research. Then Alameda Research sent them somewhere else. The money isn't coming back, and Alameda Research's collateral of FTT tokens is worthless. So that's that, its done.
Its actually quite a simple story here. FTX lent the money to someone else (even if Alameda Research is also owned by SBF), and that other group lost the money.
> FTX lent the money to someone else (even if Alameda Research is also owned by SBF), and that other group lost the money
One minor clarification: "lent" should be "stole". If I can't pay my mortgage, I'm not allowed to go break in to my neighbor's house to steal some cash that I'll "borrow" in the hopes of paying back later.
FTX's Ts&Cs we're very clear - customer deposits were not FTX's to lend.
This is a simple, straightforward case of fraud and theft. No additional "crypto-specific regulations" are needed to reach that conclusion.
Not to mention, he literally tweeted a week ago that "We don't invest client assets (even in Treasuries)." FTX is not bank. It's not supposed to be susceptible to a bank run.
This entire line of tweets makes no sense. SBF is a lying fraud that deserves prison.
> One minor clarification: "lent" should be "stole"
Not a lawyer, but I think the correct term is "embezzled".
> The crime of embezzlement is defined as the fraudulent appropriation of property of another by someone who has been entrusted with its possession. Unlike theft where the property is taken unlawfully, in embezzlement the property comes lawfully into the possession of the embezzler who then fraudulently or unlawfully appropriates it. The key aspect of embezzlement is the fiduciary relationship that exists between the embezzler and the victim of the embezzlement as embezzlement requires that the property be appropriated by a person who was entrusted with its possession. A senior executive who uses company funds to pay for his personal yacht is guilty of embezzlement even if he intended to return the funds or had the means to do so.
As I said yesterday, there's a guy (Irving Picard, AFAICR) who's clawed back most of the money that Bernie Madoff stole from his clients. In that case, Bernie took one person's deposits and gave the money to the previous sucker, so Irving unwound all that.
In this case, apparently some people's money was fraudulently given to charities, so do they have to give it back? And what if they can't?
There's a job almost no one would want to undertake.
If Alameda really lost billions or tens in billions in trades, who was on the other side to collect the money? To random people who sold BTC at $64K and then all the way down?
Or were the losing trades a way to syphon billions somewhere else?
Seen the amount involved, the policital donations, the articles in the media portraying the guy as an altruistic genius and seen that tether/USDT/Bitfinex/Deltec are also in the Bahamas, it looks like, maybe, fucking maybe, it's time for actual journalism, actual research, actual congress hearings (at least one is coming in december btw), etc. about what's going on.
Do you really believe it's just a few trades gone wrong?
> Its actually quite a simple story here. FTX lent the money to someone else (even if Alameda Research is also owned by SBF), and that other group lost the money.
For a start you're forgetting the part where FTX was also pumping and then dumping tokens on their customers. Some tokens they created themselves. They're also somehow tied to hundreds of million of USDs getting frozen by authorities, where FTX then quickly raised money. That's fraud, too.
It's much more than "simple". There's serious shit going on.
Your hypothesis is a small cabal of insiders at FTX/Alameda purposely blew up the hedge fund and exchange to siphon off billions (hiding it in the losses) to enrich themselves while simultaneously making themselves some of the most hated people in the world, and also rolling the dice on going to prison for decades.
We have a lot of info on where the money went: A stadium name deal, F1 sponsorship, penthouse in a Bahamas resort, political donations, several DeFi ponzis that fell apart, acquisitions of BS companies, and similarly, bailing out numerous failed crypto projects over several years.
With such a large sum gone, the tougher question is "where didn't he piss the money away?"
We haven't seen as much commentary from him post-incident to reconcile who he appeared to be before the collapse, with who he apparently is. I think that angle is actually pretty interesting, but ultimately he sounds like just another deranged sociopath. No surprise there. Still interesting.
FTX loaned money to Alameda, the crypto hedge-fund made a series of bets and probably put some cash in illiquid assets too, but mostly irresponsible bets. Crypto market collapsed, bets that were worth billions with a decent liquidity now became worth millions with not so much liquidity.
They turned to their most harsh competitor hoping for a bailout kinda like how Microsoft saved Apple in the 90s . All that didn't happen, it was the the straw that broke the camel's back.
That's about it, when you are leveraged adverse market events can literally put any company out of business, no matter how giant it is. Chapter 11 is not the end of the world for old companies making real stuff that people will always want (say General Motors or Hertz), but in crypto where everything is about reputation there is no way FTX will ever be heard of ever again.
In the case of the crypto market adverse events of massive proportions repeat themselves every 5 years or so. It happened this year , together with inflation. It was due, at some point the chickens had to come home to roost.....whatever the fuck that means lol.
> FTX loaned money to Alameda ... [it was a bad bet] ... That's about it
He took money from an exchange, client money, and without permission used their money ("t" "h" "e" "i" "r" " " "m" "o" "n" "e" "y" -- channeling the genius' tweets here) and put it in his own company, the "hedge fund" called Alameda.
So that is fraud and not a bad bet.
A 'good bet' is that an organization (which merely includes FSB) who due to circumstances was exposed red handed in fraud involving billions of dollars and famous people, which then benefits from "f" "r" "e" "e" PR by established media, starting with "The New York Times", is a protected outfit of some sort, and that the playful sociopaths in FTX/Almada know it full well.
You can't text a fraudster in the bahamas and say "Hey, why are you so shit". You have to text "Hey, you're a precious flower with a special story" and then they tell you why they're shit. There's very clearly a level where SBF feels safe to talk honestly, in a self-incriminating way to a friend, where that friend is actually a reporter working for Vox.
Oh absolutely, it's just weird when that tone leaks into the text of the article. A sort of winking style that expects the reader to read between the lines, which is fine as far as it goes! But imagine beginning an article about Bernie Madoff in the weeks after his Ponzi's collapse pretending that you just wanted to learn more about his ethical principles.
I think its more akin to asking a religious leader who turns out to be a con artist what his true beliefs are. SBF's beliefs were integral to his success and the only reason some like me had every heard of him. Madoff actually did raise a lot of money by appealing to Judaism (hence the large investment by Brandeis) and I'm sure Jewish publications covered that angle of it right after it happened.
A lot of people (including myself) had listened to him talk (on Sam Harris, on Odd Lots, on Conversations with Tyler) because of his interesting beliefs. I had no idea who CZ was until this week because I am not interested in the minutiae of crypto. But SBF leveraged his image for this.
Ultimately it seemed the amount of actual money of other people he lost was a few billion? Which is extremely awful but less interesting than the media landscape which lead to it, imo, especially if you are not a finance reporter.
It’s an earnest attempt at staying as unbiased as possible. If you go into an interview believing one thing and structuring all of you questions with that supposition you are far more likely to get the answer you want as oppose to whatever the reality is.
I'm not complaining about the interview technique- which clearly worked great here!- just the framing. I guess it's a nitpick really considering the rest of the content of the piece.
yeah i find it hilarious how all these articles are trying to get to his inner philosophical self. But, at least based on this particular exchange, it seems that he was just trying to make a buck or two, and treated everything else as PR/BS.
Selegiline metabolizes to the inactive isomer of meth: l-methamphetamine. Which is very much not trucker crank—it’s an over-the-counter decongestant.
Was he on good ol’ non-meth-amphetamine, in the form of Adderall? Sure. But rather a lot of people are on Adderall, and most of them haven’t created a market-shattering boondoggle.
A programmer who helped create Tornado Cash rots in a Dutch jail cell (not charged, might I add) while SBF, Do Kwan, Elizabeth Holmes, and Trevor Milton still remain free. SBF is actually in a $30 million penthouse playing League of Legends. Clown world
AFAIK, Milton managed to cash out a lot of money, and even with a conviction, he will have a very comfortable "economic" life irrespective of what he will do next.
I'd rather have an FTX scandal than Tornado Cash. I'd rather someone does some fraud than actual funneling of money to terrorists, druglords, gangs, and other problematic organizations.
He wasn't arrested for "writing the code", but for direct involvements (and making large sums of profit) for money laundering. Whether he is guilty of that: we'll see what comes up in the trail, but he certainly wasn't arrested "for writing code".
Encrypted messaging also helps terrorists, child sex abusers, arms dealers, and all manner of crime. It would be 100% safer if all messages were funneled through government servers for scanning.
However, as a society a choice we made was to enable individuals to message secretly with each other over encrypted communications, even if there are significant and documented harms to society.
Tornado Cash did not rob from 1 million retail customers, while FTX did. I think your argument is far too simple.
> It would be 100% safer if all messages were funneled through government servers for scanning.
Uh... what?!
You do know that if you break encryption for gov't you break it for the bad guys as well?...
You do know that there are all kinds of nations that will throw you in prison if you hold the "wrong" opinions, which those opinions become known when they are funneled through the gov't servers?...
You might want to re-read that. The comment was comparing privacy preserving transactions against privacy preserving messages to illustrate the point that both are essential technologies for society.
> I'd rather someone does some fraud than actual funneling of money to terrorists, druglords, gangs, and other problematic organizations.
Considering that Tornado Cash implemented OFAC compliance and they were still banned would suggest to me that this isn't a fair take. Tornado Cash had long since blacklisted known accounts from sanctioned organisations and tried to be overwhelmingly transparent about the fact that the project was focused on providing privacy for normal people and complying with regulations and sanctions to the best of their ability.
One of the major issues with the US in particular is that regulatory and enforcement agencies refuse to establish well defined guidelines that are compatible with digital ledger tech. You can have privacy preservation and regulatory compliance all at once via zero knowledge proofs (as an example solution) however regulatory agencies insist that organisations operate within a system that provides significantly weaker compliance guarantees while also eliminating any means for privacy. Tornado Cash tried to operate within that weaker system to the best of their ability and repeatedly reached out to officials in good faith to properly implement compliance. Despite that they were still sanctioned.
What isn't going to happen overnight, justice? A fairer world?
I don't think a fairer world is on its way, I wish it was but the powerful won't be held accountable because people simply don't have the power to hold them accountable. We simply don't live in a just world.
One person is a threat to multinational regal order and the other benefits it. That's the difference. Not clown world so much as the world isn't what the 20th century told us it was.
They should all be in prison bud and they’ll get their turn - the wheels of justice grind slow but they grind exceedingly fine. To avoid bringing them in without a charge yet, which is one of your main objections, the authorities are preparing their cases before arrest. And coordinating with many different parties, governments and police forces can take a long time.
There’s no one “international police” and each nation has to coordinate - and acts at its own cadence.
They grind at different speeds depending on who you are. Have the wrong skin color at the wrong time and the wheels of justice will sentence you to execution you on the spot, no evidence, case, or trial necessary.
About the programmer in a dutch cell: that is not true, he is in "voorarrest" which is in an arrest house not in a jail cell. Maximum time for that is a 110 days(depending on the complexity of the case).
And yes he is not charged but he has seen a judge who has heard both sides and decided there was a strong enough case to hold him there( which is quite rare i might add and generally only happens for severe cases).
we would laugh at this kind of dissembling gobbledegook if it came from a nonwestern country. the dutch need to charge him with something or release him. 110 days is preposterous.
> Bankman-Fried has maintained that FTX has never invested the deposits of crypto account holders on the exchange. I pressed him on that point via Twitter, and while he continued to insist that FTX did not directly use account money in this way, he said that Alameda — which he also owns — had borrowed far more money from FTX’s balance sheet for investments than he had realized, which ultimately left FTX vulnerable to the crypto equivalent of a bank run.
> Why didn’t Bankman-Fried realize what was happening until it was too late? “Sometimes life creeps up on you,” he said.
This is the central issue of the case. There aren't many paths for an exchange to experience a run unless it's acting like a fractional reserve bank.
So here's an admission that Alameda borrowed from the FTX balance sheet. There's also a denial that FTX invested deposits. There's no way for both statements to be true.
It's somehow even worse given that according to SBF, they didn't even loan all the deposits. Something like $8B of them were being deposited to Alameda directly from users without their knowledge.
- he lent his own hedge fund $8b collateralized by tokens he controlled issuance of (FTT, SRM, MAPS, OXY). At full size, the liquidation price of these tokens was 0 (he also purchased billions worth of FTT off the market when he could print them himself for free?).
- Sensing alameda was insolvent and customer funds were misappropriated, customers withdrew until they ran out of liquidity.
- Withdrawals were suspended
- Citing Bahamian authorities requests to unfreeze assets of bahamian residents, withdrawals were opened back up for bahamian residents. Hundreds of millions were withdrawn. Bahamian authorities have since made statements that no such requests were made (so this was just insiders stealing even more).
- Approx $500m of assets were drained from FTX wallets at the same time as FTX databse records were cleared (obviously not a hack, just insiders stealing even more).
- SBF goes on twitter to make new one-letter tweets while simultaneously deleting incriminating tweets so as to not trigger deletion bots picking up that he deleted said tweets.
Ongoing theft and destruction of evidence out in the open after stealing 10 billion dollars from over 1 million depositors. SBF has still not been arrested. This all but confirms the wildest of conspiracy theories.
You kind of went off the rails there in the final sentence. Are you saying that any of this adds credence to the silly idea that Democrats are beholden to SBF campaign money?
It’s a silly idea that being the second largest donor to a political party in the US buys you special favors? Why else would anyone give that kind of money to politicians without expecting something in return?
>Why else would anyone give that kind of money to politicians without expecting something in return?
There's a polite theory it is done for altruistic reasons to make the country a better place for all and that it is the exercise of free speech and you are also free to give Trump, Biden, Pelosi & McConnell vast amounts of cash.
I'd expect that the something in return buys you a king's seat at the regulatory table, not quite a get-out-of-jail-scott-free-for-stealing-billions card.
I'm sure that in a few years, once the courts get everything sorted out, we'll learn which of our prejudices is closer to reality. As of today, though, we're both just speculating.
Bingo, and the line from electoral politics -> regulation is straight, legal, and requires one step. While filtering political donations through judicial + investigative bodies with egads of separate oversight & career employees & little to no electoral influence would be impossible to manage. Not for 28 million, you would have to buy a loooooot of people off and get extremely lucky. That’s why it doesn’t happen. The get out of jail free card, that is.
It’s unclear to me how that affects anything? If anything it lends credence to the idea that he was making these donations solely for special favors and not for altruistic reasons.
> Why else would anyone give that kind of money to politicians without expecting something in return?
Because they think the candidates they support will make the world better either personally for you or in a more general sense? Oil companies give money to manchin because they know he agrees with them and if he wins will fight for their legislation, whether they funded him or not.
> Oil companies give money to manchin because they know he agrees with them and if he wins will fight for their legislation, whether they funded him or not.
Neither they or you know that. And nobody but you assumes that Manchin fights for his beliefs, rather than for what benefits him personally. And no, I'm not assuming the opposite. I instead choose not to fantasize about his internal states, or speculate about what he would do if an industry that has always supported him ceased to support him.
Sorry but the "wildest conspiracy theory" is that Democrats sent money to Ukraine, Ukraine deposited the money at FTX, and SBF donated the money to Democratic congressional campaigns. Nothing about what we know today lends any credence to that theory.
That some guy with access to a lot of cash tried to buy influence is not a "conspiracy theory" because it is unilateral. And, if that's what he was trying to do, it seems like a really poor strategy since you cannot really buy influence over law enforcement that way.
I've heard a lot of wild conspiracy theories, but that one is new to me. To be fair, I do not believe the conspiracy theories, just that the inaction we're seeing is feeding credibility to the people peddling them.
> Nothing about what we know today lends any credence to that theory.
I'm personally much more interested in the billions or the tens of billions that disappeared (in the bank account of tether/Deltec?) than in the petty amount that went to the democrats but... It's a fact that media were posting articles explaining how crypto was helping Ukraine (and there was a government ran website in Ukraine accepting crypto donation).
SBF's very mom was running a political fundraising thinggy.
It's also a fact that at least one US congressman is saying Gary Gensler was allegedly working hand in hand with FTX to allow SBF/FTX regulatory capture of crypto exchanges.
I'm not saying they did: I'm saying a US congressman says he has records indicating that.
These are facts. Now did these donations to Ukraine found their way back to FTX? (and if that's the case there's at least some truth to the conspiracy for it's a fact that SBF was donating stolen money to her mommy's fundraise)
I think it's a bit early to dismiss with the back of the hand the information people are digging out.
The one thing that seems certain is that if we were to depend on the journalists from the New York Times to investigate on that we wouldn't go very far.
The usual angle is also going to be used for sure: "The wildest conspiracy theories are false, hence nobody besides SBF did anything wrong".
People are trying to connect the dots. And with 130 companies, blinded journalists, a political party receiving $40m in donation, etc. there are certainly dots that do need connecting.
Congress hearings in december for a start. Should be interesting (even if I don't have high hopes).
I could see Ukraine donations that hadn't been withdrawn getting caught up in all of this, but I'm highly doubtful there was some weird shell game going on. Not because it wasn't possible, but because it wasn't necessary. SBF was openly throwing cash around to buy political and media influence. There wasn't any need to skim government cash when he could use ~$8b of customer's deposits as his slush fund.
Donations buy you access, not specific outcomes. Just the ability to get a hearing for whatever kinda-reasonable-ish parts of the stuff you want there might be is really, really valuable.
And yes, both are corrupt, but one is business as usual and the other is a serious federal crime that prudent members of congress avoid.
"This tax credit gets extended" is an outcome. "30 minutes with the Member and their chief of staff to discuss the vital importance of this tax credit to industry X" is not an outcome. You can problematize and subvert any scheme of categorization if you like, so go wild if it makes you happy, but honestly who has the time?
I think that donating money one time buys you a photo. I think donating every cycle and especially anticipated into the future buys you access - which is correlated but not the same as outcomes.
Not just the democrats. Republicans, Bahamian officials, members of the media, regulators, etc. The most recent New York Times piece did not mention fraud or criminality a single time, painting SBF as someone who simply got in over his head.
> - SBF goes on twitter to make new one-letter tweets while simultaneously deleting incriminating tweets so as to not trigger deletion bots picking up that he deleted said tweets.
This part seems to have been mostly speculation. He deleted 118 tweets & retweets, so his one letter tweets did little to cover his tracks[1]. I have no idea why he did the one-letter thing. Maybe to get attention?
I dont think he didnt delete any tweets. The counts were off because people like Tom Brady and other famous people associated him where deleting re-tweets.
Anyone with a couple weeks of legal education, never mind the caliber lawyers this guy should be able to afford, would immediately tell him to s t o p t a l k i n g.
OMG. "The dog ate my homework" would have been a better excuse.
> like, "oh FTX doesn't have a bank account, I guess people can wire to Alameda's to get money on FTX"
> ....3 years later...
> 'oh fuck it looks like people wired $8b to Alameda and oh god we basically forgot about the stub account that corresponded to that and so it was never delivered to FTX'
So they "basically" forgot about $8B not transferred to FTX.
But somehow FTX customers saw the funds deposited in their accounts, otherwise they would have complained.
Since more than one thing can be true at the same time, why not a combination of a) total lack of internal controls, understanding of basic accounting and book keeoing, b) total lack of competence when it comes to manage these amounts of money and c) actively defrauding customers by stealing their deposits?
It doesn't make sense and could all be lies, but to try to interpret it: they saw that the money arrived in the "poorly labelled account" and increased the customer's balance. But in some sense, the money never got to FTX and was still with Alameda. Or alternatively, FTX and Alameda commingled funds using the "poorly labelled account" and it was used for whatever payments either company needed to make, like withdrawals. This lack of separation means the balances were never really backed and it was a Ponzi all along.
SBF, his foundation and his family are well connected politically. NYT already did a bizarro puff piece on him, now Vox does this (which apparently directly received FTX foundation money).
It’s absurd as he is essentially a well connected criminal.
edit I do want to correct one thing - this is not a puff piece like the NYT one, actually it implicates him.
Did your father work with legislators to try to pass laws?
“When I went to California to try to fight into it, I thought, ‘Well, there’s only 120 legislators. I’ll talk to them all one on one,'” Bankman said. “I found that in order to do it, I had to hire a lobbyist because I just couldn’t handle the details or get the meetings. In Congress, when I went there, now there’s 500 plus, and what I found everywhere I went is that Intuit had already preceded me. They’d already met every representative I was going to meet.”
Did your mother create a political fundraising organization?
“In 2018, the secretive Stanford-connected Democratic fundraising group Mind the Gap (MTG) funneled over $20 million toward competitive U.S. House of Representative elections and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) organizations. In 2020, MTG wants to increase that number to $140 million.
“MTG is led by Barbara Fried, the William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law; Paul Brest, an emeritus professor of law and director of the Law and Policy Lab; and Graham Gottlieb, a Stanford research affiliate. Of the three, Gottlieb has the most direct policy experience, having formerly served in junior roles in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and in Obama’s White House.”
It's so weird to me how these ideas become widespread so quickly and accepted as fact. I read the NYT piece and it was fine, the interviewer mostly let SBF talk.
How is this a puff piece? Just posting these chat transcripts is damaging to his reputation and probably his chances in court. He does not come off looking good here.
His father is a lawyer so I’m confused about his behaviour. Does he think this will help him somehow, to appear like he’s terribly sorry about what happened ? Surely his behaviour is criminal?
Maybe you’re right. Actually wrote this before reading the article (typical!) and the article is not friendly to him at all, weirdly he seems to confess his activity. This is super weird because my impression is his father is a lawyer, so is it possible he actually doesn’t think / knows he won’t be convicted of anything?
> Not sure what what the people pushing this narrative aren’t understanding
They are clouded by anger and frustration, I’d wager, many folks lost money in this fraud. Some maybe caught up in the mob mentality and excitement around taking SBF down.
Anything short of absolute demonization is not good enough when you’re mad, I suppose.
I didn't lose anything, maybe I had 10$ in dust on FTX. But yeah I'm pretty mad and I'm even more mad because I believe CZ/Binance are also a super shady time bomb.
> Not sure what what the people pushing this narrative aren’t understanding.
From the other day, it seems, they're angry that the NYT isn't saying, in exact words, "SBF is a massive criminal who committed massive fraud".
And when you respond and say "That's because their lawyers understand the concept of defamation", they say "well, then they just need to talk to people and have them say it so everyone knows he's a criminal and committed fraud".
>I actually posted before I read the article (typical!)
I'm not sure whether you're saying "I did something bad, repeatedly, but it's ok because I'm admitting it" (while arguing someone else who did something bad shouldn't be let off the hook for admitting they did something bad), or whether instead you're taking pride in routinely acting in a way that subtracts value from the community (while arguing someone else who acted in ways detrimental to the community should receive harsher judgements than you feel he's received).
Either reading suggests an opportunity for productive self reflection.
Posting criticisms of articles you haven't read isn't the scale of damage that SBF caused, but the belief that "I'm not intending to cause harm so the harm I'm causing isn't real" appears to be at the root of both sets of outcomes. The impact of SBF's actions was higher simply because one day he found himself holding a larger lever than most of us have the occasion to hold. It's good to be in practice, should that day come.
Somewhat unrelated to this article, but could someone clear up a point of confusion for me?
There are people blaming the CTFC and Congress and the Democrats that SBF donated to for not regulating this.
But was FTX (the Bahamian entity) even under their purview?
AFAIK, you weren't even allowed to access FTX from a USA IP address, you had to use a VPN. You could access FTX US which was a different thing and offered a much smaller subset of the products FTX did (and that business seems solvent?)
Like what jurisdiction does the USA have over a crypto exchange elsewhere? I know anything that touches a US dollar can be tried in a Manhattan court and maybe he gets convicted of a crime and extradited here. But like Japanese banks touch US dollars as well, but the USA doesn't get to regulate them, right?
tfw you forget the old friend you're dming on twitter about your life problems is now working as a reporter for vox and is going to post your whole dm thread as an article
I'd never heard of the guy until now so maybe it's obvious but you do wonder in these situations, he must have realised that the questions were leading to an article but did he expect the transcript to be published verbatim?
400 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] thread> by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us
Woke washing pays off, that is why everyone does it.
But luckily BTC is there to take the blame.
Matthias: "Worse?! How could it get any worse?"
--Monty Python's Life of Brian
https://montypython.gifglobe.com/scene/?id=2ZrhmRltHUEk
EDIT: Okay I just cannot get over this, obviously I'm exaggerating but it's pretty much "I didn't want to do bad stuff because that would be bad, and then after I had personally done all of the bad things, I realized that I had, in fact, done something very bad."
If his texts are normally similar to this, how did anyone serious think this guy was brilliant?
He made a lot of money by bucking norms. Hacker news of all places should recognize that people are drawn to those who project an appearance of improbable success through skill despite a lack of underlying competence (see also: Elon Musk)
I had no idea the sums involved were this big, and the operation this much amateurish.
There’s a few, like less wrong, but this is the main one to many
Ugh.
And for another linked CEO they'd been a trader for three years, and then were made CEO at Alameda?
COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?
BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually.
COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.
BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical.
COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?
BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-frie...
(See the first paragraph of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BZ6XaCwN4QGgH9CxF/the-kelly-... for the outline of an explanation of why his reasoning was not applicable to most real-life scenarios. This is pretty subtle; >95% of the explanations on the Internet I've seen over the past week as to why SBF is "obviously wrong" don't actually work.)
Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but he does seem ready to accept that he lost this flip. It would obviously be insane to trust with him anything big at this point, but I'm optimistic that he won't fight to the bitter end.
Most of the ones I hang out with seem to agree with my characterisation of Utilitarianism as what happens when philosophers discovered basic arithmetic and then just stopped there. Most recently:
"""I remember in secondary school, with nobody to teach me more than basic trigonometry and algebra, I spent 6 months figuring out what I later learned were the two ways 3D rendering can be done: ray tracing, and turning points in 3D space into points in 2D (screen) space and drawing those as 2D primitives.
Utilitarianism feels like even less than that, to me. It's the foundation of algebra upon which more can be built, saying that utility is a thing that can be combined, but it doesn't really say how to combine utility, and all the weird things that happen in extreme hypotheticals are because it's naively summing the potential utility of unbounded agents."""
>BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.
This logic is literally "You either win the lotto or you don't, 50/50 chance"
The original thing being referenced is St. Petersburg lottery, and each round of that is 50/50: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
I'm actually somewhat impressed by someone who articulated a stupid logic about how to live life and then actually followed through.
I was quite frankly shocked that I didn't see more people questioning his judgement/ethics after this and other strange statements
It is extremely risky and ill-advised, but as SBF said, it’s possible to end up in a very (very!) good position. The crux is that infinity doesn’t exist. You will place the bet at most a finite number of times.
You know, "Sometimes life creeps up on you" and then the customer deposits you stole are gone!
He's clearly innocent, so he has nothing to worry about.
This seems like a weird thing to worry about right now, I imagine my question would be "hey, where'd all the deposits go?" Like, I'm sure it's all interesting in a psychological and sociological way, but "what does SBF really believe" feels like it should take a back seat to what did he do. That's much more interesting! It's easy for someone like SBF to just say stuff about what's going on in his head, whether it's true or not. But, we're talking about real (and, okay, a lot of fake) money here.
There's this weird assumption in a lot of reporting that a rich person must have interesting things to say, or beliefs that are worth getting to the bottom of. Sometimes that's true, but sometimes they're just not very interesting people. Which is fine! Lots of people aren't very interesting, but really rich people get to be treated as interesting even if they're actually boring.
I just commented in this thread about how this story magically keeps getting worse, and then it got worse...
My own disclosure: I have many mutual friends with Piper and participate in the local EA group and contribute to EA causes.
But we know where they went. To Alameda Research. Then Alameda Research sent them somewhere else. The money isn't coming back, and Alameda Research's collateral of FTT tokens is worthless. So that's that, its done.
Its actually quite a simple story here. FTX lent the money to someone else (even if Alameda Research is also owned by SBF), and that other group lost the money.
One minor clarification: "lent" should be "stole". If I can't pay my mortgage, I'm not allowed to go break in to my neighbor's house to steal some cash that I'll "borrow" in the hopes of paying back later.
FTX's Ts&Cs we're very clear - customer deposits were not FTX's to lend.
This is a simple, straightforward case of fraud and theft. No additional "crypto-specific regulations" are needed to reach that conclusion.
This entire line of tweets makes no sense. SBF is a lying fraud that deserves prison.
Not a lawyer, but I think the correct term is "embezzled".
> The crime of embezzlement is defined as the fraudulent appropriation of property of another by someone who has been entrusted with its possession. Unlike theft where the property is taken unlawfully, in embezzlement the property comes lawfully into the possession of the embezzler who then fraudulently or unlawfully appropriates it. The key aspect of embezzlement is the fiduciary relationship that exists between the embezzler and the victim of the embezzlement as embezzlement requires that the property be appropriated by a person who was entrusted with its possession. A senior executive who uses company funds to pay for his personal yacht is guilty of embezzlement even if he intended to return the funds or had the means to do so.
Source: https://www.bayarea-attorney.com/CM/Articles/Theft-Offenses-...
In this case, apparently some people's money was fraudulently given to charities, so do they have to give it back? And what if they can't?
There's a job almost no one would want to undertake.
Not at all.
If Alameda really lost billions or tens in billions in trades, who was on the other side to collect the money? To random people who sold BTC at $64K and then all the way down?
Or were the losing trades a way to syphon billions somewhere else?
Seen the amount involved, the policital donations, the articles in the media portraying the guy as an altruistic genius and seen that tether/USDT/Bitfinex/Deltec are also in the Bahamas, it looks like, maybe, fucking maybe, it's time for actual journalism, actual research, actual congress hearings (at least one is coming in december btw), etc. about what's going on.
Do you really believe it's just a few trades gone wrong?
> Its actually quite a simple story here. FTX lent the money to someone else (even if Alameda Research is also owned by SBF), and that other group lost the money.
For a start you're forgetting the part where FTX was also pumping and then dumping tokens on their customers. Some tokens they created themselves. They're also somehow tied to hundreds of million of USDs getting frozen by authorities, where FTX then quickly raised money. That's fraud, too.
It's much more than "simple". There's serious shit going on.
Seems very thin to me....
With such a large sum gone, the tougher question is "where didn't he piss the money away?"
We haven't seen as much commentary from him post-incident to reconcile who he appeared to be before the collapse, with who he apparently is. I think that angle is actually pretty interesting, but ultimately he sounds like just another deranged sociopath. No surprise there. Still interesting.
FTX loaned money to Alameda, the crypto hedge-fund made a series of bets and probably put some cash in illiquid assets too, but mostly irresponsible bets. Crypto market collapsed, bets that were worth billions with a decent liquidity now became worth millions with not so much liquidity.
They turned to their most harsh competitor hoping for a bailout kinda like how Microsoft saved Apple in the 90s . All that didn't happen, it was the the straw that broke the camel's back.
That's about it, when you are leveraged adverse market events can literally put any company out of business, no matter how giant it is. Chapter 11 is not the end of the world for old companies making real stuff that people will always want (say General Motors or Hertz), but in crypto where everything is about reputation there is no way FTX will ever be heard of ever again.
In the case of the crypto market adverse events of massive proportions repeat themselves every 5 years or so. It happened this year , together with inflation. It was due, at some point the chickens had to come home to roost.....whatever the fuck that means lol.
He took money from an exchange, client money, and without permission used their money ("t" "h" "e" "i" "r" " " "m" "o" "n" "e" "y" -- channeling the genius' tweets here) and put it in his own company, the "hedge fund" called Alameda.
So that is fraud and not a bad bet.
A 'good bet' is that an organization (which merely includes FSB) who due to circumstances was exposed red handed in fraud involving billions of dollars and famous people, which then benefits from "f" "r" "e" "e" PR by established media, starting with "The New York Times", is a protected outfit of some sort, and that the playful sociopaths in FTX/Almada know it full well.
You can't text a fraudster in the bahamas and say "Hey, why are you so shit". You have to text "Hey, you're a precious flower with a special story" and then they tell you why they're shit. There's very clearly a level where SBF feels safe to talk honestly, in a self-incriminating way to a friend, where that friend is actually a reporter working for Vox.
A lot of people (including myself) had listened to him talk (on Sam Harris, on Odd Lots, on Conversations with Tyler) because of his interesting beliefs. I had no idea who CZ was until this week because I am not interested in the minutiae of crypto. But SBF leveraged his image for this.
Ultimately it seemed the amount of actual money of other people he lost was a few billion? Which is extremely awful but less interesting than the media landscape which lead to it, imo, especially if you are not a finance reporter.
Affinity fraud, one of the oldest and truest tools in the conman's toolbox.
[0] https://milkyeggs.com/?p=175
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-psychopharmacology...
Selegiline metabolizes to the inactive isomer of meth: l-methamphetamine. Which is very much not trucker crank—it’s an over-the-counter decongestant.
Was he on good ol’ non-meth-amphetamine, in the form of Adderall? Sure. But rather a lot of people are on Adderall, and most of them haven’t created a market-shattering boondoggle.
Also, privacy should be a human right.
If you disagree with the above, you might be a fascist.
Code for an Arduino that moves a robotic arm is legal. Using it to pull a trigger and kill someone isn't.
The police statement is https://www.fiod.nl/arrest-of-suspected-developer-of-tornado... - it seems to say he facilitated money laundering. Which could mean simply writing code or could mean doing more.
More info on https://www.notion.so/FreeAlex-campaign-1f8db0a2fdfc48b3b86a... which is a horrible notion site with a strange and awful UI.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/exclusive-crypto-ex...
I suspect they're smart enough not to.
However, as a society a choice we made was to enable individuals to message secretly with each other over encrypted communications, even if there are significant and documented harms to society.
Tornado Cash did not rob from 1 million retail customers, while FTX did. I think your argument is far too simple.
Uh... what?!
You do know that if you break encryption for gov't you break it for the bad guys as well?...
You do know that there are all kinds of nations that will throw you in prison if you hold the "wrong" opinions, which those opinions become known when they are funneled through the gov't servers?...
Considering that Tornado Cash implemented OFAC compliance and they were still banned would suggest to me that this isn't a fair take. Tornado Cash had long since blacklisted known accounts from sanctioned organisations and tried to be overwhelmingly transparent about the fact that the project was focused on providing privacy for normal people and complying with regulations and sanctions to the best of their ability.
One of the major issues with the US in particular is that regulatory and enforcement agencies refuse to establish well defined guidelines that are compatible with digital ledger tech. You can have privacy preservation and regulatory compliance all at once via zero knowledge proofs (as an example solution) however regulatory agencies insist that organisations operate within a system that provides significantly weaker compliance guarantees while also eliminating any means for privacy. Tornado Cash tried to operate within that weaker system to the best of their ability and repeatedly reached out to officials in good faith to properly implement compliance. Despite that they were still sanctioned.
What isn't going to happen overnight, justice? A fairer world?
I don't think a fairer world is on its way, I wish it was but the powerful won't be held accountable because people simply don't have the power to hold them accountable. We simply don't live in a just world.
Holmes is probably going to prison. Idk what's going to happen with SBF, but to prosecute you need evidence and there's a process.
I am lucky enough to live in New York, so even when tempted, I couldn't partake in this charade without trying to find a bunch of shady loopholes.
But as for the others, I guess you just can't win.
There’s no one “international police” and each nation has to coordinate - and acts at its own cadence.
And yes he is not charged but he has seen a judge who has heard both sides and decided there was a strong enough case to hold him there( which is quite rare i might add and generally only happens for severe cases).
Holmes will see real prison soon.
Do Kwan is on the lam. When he's caught, he will do time.
SBF will almost certainly do time. FTX only imploded this week.
> Why didn’t Bankman-Fried realize what was happening until it was too late? “Sometimes life creeps up on you,” he said.
This is the central issue of the case. There aren't many paths for an exchange to experience a run unless it's acting like a fractional reserve bank.
So here's an admission that Alameda borrowed from the FTX balance sheet. There's also a denial that FTX invested deposits. There's no way for both statements to be true.
/s
https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24202784/S...
- he lent his own hedge fund $8b collateralized by tokens he controlled issuance of (FTT, SRM, MAPS, OXY). At full size, the liquidation price of these tokens was 0 (he also purchased billions worth of FTT off the market when he could print them himself for free?).
- Sensing alameda was insolvent and customer funds were misappropriated, customers withdrew until they ran out of liquidity.
- Withdrawals were suspended
- Citing Bahamian authorities requests to unfreeze assets of bahamian residents, withdrawals were opened back up for bahamian residents. Hundreds of millions were withdrawn. Bahamian authorities have since made statements that no such requests were made (so this was just insiders stealing even more).
- Approx $500m of assets were drained from FTX wallets at the same time as FTX databse records were cleared (obviously not a hack, just insiders stealing even more).
- SBF goes on twitter to make new one-letter tweets while simultaneously deleting incriminating tweets so as to not trigger deletion bots picking up that he deleted said tweets.
Ongoing theft and destruction of evidence out in the open after stealing 10 billion dollars from over 1 million depositors. SBF has still not been arrested. This all but confirms the wildest of conspiracy theories.
There's a polite theory it is done for altruistic reasons to make the country a better place for all and that it is the exercise of free speech and you are also free to give Trump, Biden, Pelosi & McConnell vast amounts of cash.
But yes we're all adults here.
I'm sure that in a few years, once the courts get everything sorted out, we'll learn which of our prejudices is closer to reality. As of today, though, we're both just speculating.
Because they think the candidates they support will make the world better either personally for you or in a more general sense? Oil companies give money to manchin because they know he agrees with them and if he wins will fight for their legislation, whether they funded him or not.
Neither they or you know that. And nobody but you assumes that Manchin fights for his beliefs, rather than for what benefits him personally. And no, I'm not assuming the opposite. I instead choose not to fantasize about his internal states, or speculate about what he would do if an industry that has always supported him ceased to support him.
That some guy with access to a lot of cash tried to buy influence is not a "conspiracy theory" because it is unilateral. And, if that's what he was trying to do, it seems like a really poor strategy since you cannot really buy influence over law enforcement that way.
I'm personally much more interested in the billions or the tens of billions that disappeared (in the bank account of tether/Deltec?) than in the petty amount that went to the democrats but... It's a fact that media were posting articles explaining how crypto was helping Ukraine (and there was a government ran website in Ukraine accepting crypto donation).
SBF's very mom was running a political fundraising thinggy.
It's also a fact that at least one US congressman is saying Gary Gensler was allegedly working hand in hand with FTX to allow SBF/FTX regulatory capture of crypto exchanges.
I'm not saying they did: I'm saying a US congressman says he has records indicating that.
These are facts. Now did these donations to Ukraine found their way back to FTX? (and if that's the case there's at least some truth to the conspiracy for it's a fact that SBF was donating stolen money to her mommy's fundraise)
I think it's a bit early to dismiss with the back of the hand the information people are digging out.
The one thing that seems certain is that if we were to depend on the journalists from the New York Times to investigate on that we wouldn't go very far.
The usual angle is also going to be used for sure: "The wildest conspiracy theories are false, hence nobody besides SBF did anything wrong".
People are trying to connect the dots. And with 130 companies, blinded journalists, a political party receiving $40m in donation, etc. there are certainly dots that do need connecting.
Congress hearings in december for a start. Should be interesting (even if I don't have high hopes).
And yes, both are corrupt, but one is business as usual and the other is a serious federal crime that prudent members of congress avoid.
This part seems to have been mostly speculation. He deleted 118 tweets & retweets, so his one letter tweets did little to cover his tracks[1]. I have no idea why he did the one-letter thing. Maybe to get attention?
[1] https://www.cryptonews.net/news/other/16170687/
....that is what I read and it makes sense.
"Under supervision".[1] Rumors that he planned to escape to Dubai. But Dubai signed an extradition treaty with the US a few months back.
Extradition to the US may be pending.[2]
This is the sort of situation where, if there is an arrest, the perp gets held as a flight risk.
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/sam-bankman-fried-is-under-su...
[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11433541/FBI-planni...
But that does not mean you can play innocent when you lose it.
On a related note: https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE
> like, "oh FTX doesn't have a bank account, I guess people can wire to Alameda's to get money on FTX"
> ....3 years later...
> 'oh fuck it looks like people wired $8b to Alameda and oh god we basically forgot about the stub account that corresponded to that and so it was never delivered to FTX'
So they "basically" forgot about $8B not transferred to FTX.
But somehow FTX customers saw the funds deposited in their accounts, otherwise they would have complained.
Alameda Research was clearly in the top of the worst hedge funds ever, and clearly they had terrible controls and accounting.
However, without (c) you don't get this epic disaster. From SBF's tweets it is clear that they were aware they had to keep customer funds segregated.
Remember the time they tried to pretend that USD is protected by the FDIC?
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/19/crypto-firm-ftx-receives-cea...
Well, actually it was protected by the FDIC, but not from FTX.
It’s absurd as he is essentially a well connected criminal.
edit I do want to correct one thing - this is not a puff piece like the NYT one, actually it implicates him.
[1] I can't say I've ever felt that I was well-connected politically...
“When I went to California to try to fight into it, I thought, ‘Well, there’s only 120 legislators. I’ll talk to them all one on one,'” Bankman said. “I found that in order to do it, I had to hire a lobbyist because I just couldn’t handle the details or get the meetings. In Congress, when I went there, now there’s 500 plus, and what I found everywhere I went is that Intuit had already preceded me. They’d already met every representative I was going to meet.”
Did your mother create a political fundraising organization?
“In 2018, the secretive Stanford-connected Democratic fundraising group Mind the Gap (MTG) funneled over $20 million toward competitive U.S. House of Representative elections and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) organizations. In 2020, MTG wants to increase that number to $140 million.
“MTG is led by Barbara Fried, the William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law; Paul Brest, an emeritus professor of law and director of the Law and Policy Lab; and Graham Gottlieb, a Stanford research affiliate. Of the three, Gottlieb has the most direct policy experience, having formerly served in junior roles in former President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and in Obama’s White House.”
He would have done better with a street smart criminal lawyer.
Not sure what what the people pushing this narrative aren’t understanding.
If they wanted to protect him they would refuse to interview him and try to convince him not to speak to anyone but counsel about this.
They are clouded by anger and frustration, I’d wager, many folks lost money in this fraud. Some maybe caught up in the mob mentality and excitement around taking SBF down.
Anything short of absolute demonization is not good enough when you’re mad, I suppose.
From the other day, it seems, they're angry that the NYT isn't saying, in exact words, "SBF is a massive criminal who committed massive fraud".
And when you respond and say "That's because their lawyers understand the concept of defamation", they say "well, then they just need to talk to people and have them say it so everyone knows he's a criminal and committed fraud".
I'm not sure whether you're saying "I did something bad, repeatedly, but it's ok because I'm admitting it" (while arguing someone else who did something bad shouldn't be let off the hook for admitting they did something bad), or whether instead you're taking pride in routinely acting in a way that subtracts value from the community (while arguing someone else who acted in ways detrimental to the community should receive harsher judgements than you feel he's received).
Either reading suggests an opportunity for productive self reflection.
Posting criticisms of articles you haven't read isn't the scale of damage that SBF caused, but the belief that "I'm not intending to cause harm so the harm I'm causing isn't real" appears to be at the root of both sets of outcomes. The impact of SBF's actions was higher simply because one day he found himself holding a larger lever than most of us have the occasion to hold. It's good to be in practice, should that day come.
There are people blaming the CTFC and Congress and the Democrats that SBF donated to for not regulating this.
But was FTX (the Bahamian entity) even under their purview?
AFAIK, you weren't even allowed to access FTX from a USA IP address, you had to use a VPN. You could access FTX US which was a different thing and offered a much smaller subset of the products FTX did (and that business seems solvent?)
Like what jurisdiction does the USA have over a crypto exchange elsewhere? I know anything that touches a US dollar can be tried in a Manhattan court and maybe he gets convicted of a crime and extradited here. But like Japanese banks touch US dollars as well, but the USA doesn't get to regulate them, right?
https://nitter.net/SBF_FTX/status/1593014934207881218#m
> Nov 16
> 25) Last night I talked to a friend of mine.
> They published my messages. Those were not intended to be public, but I guess they are now.
theunitofcaring responded at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vjyWBnCmXjErAN6sZ/...
journalists are not your friend