The idiot (Sam) took billions of peoples hard saved assets and let a 27 year old twit day trade gamble it down the tube.
IMHO, 100% of all the assets are "Stolen or Missing". Sam stole them. That's where they went. He did it. That was the guy. He's right there. Just look at him. Where are the assets? Sam stole them. And then spent them and snorted them and then spent some more. And yeah, he probably didn't secure them very well either, so once crypto hackers knew he was a thief they just dove right in and helped themselves.
I suspect this will be an unpopular opinion - but I respect Bernie Madoff more than Sam Bankman Fried. Bernie knew he was a fraud. When he was busted, the only question he had was what took them so long. There is an honesty of guilt there. This guy just thinks "he made mistakes". Bullshit. You don't transfer custodial assets to a losing gambling routine and "it's just a mistake". That's like Achmed calling it "just a flesh wound".
From your tone, were you caught up in this? If so my condolences.
I, like many people, don't do crypto as I don't believe in the fundamental economics (no value creation). So we kind of want to see it fail as we would want a MLM business to fail.
But that's really not the same as having been burned. That really really sucks
I didn't lose anything in FTX (nor do I have any crypto invested beyond some BTC change from a long time ago) and I agree with OP 100% (except the "life, or worse," I'm firmly against the death penalty but totally fine with letting him sit in a cell in Terre Haute for the rest of his life).
> (except the "life, or worse," I'm firmly against the death penalty but totally fine with letting him sit in a cell in Terre Haute for the rest of his life).
Can I ask why you think this is better? I just did some quick math, and based on the average yearly cost of incarceration for an Adult Male in Indiana at $19,202[1], assuming SBF lives for another 50 years, that's $960,250 of tax payer dollars being used to store someonne that contributes nothing to society. So after he's stolen billions of dollars, we'll spend another million keeping him alive for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It doesn't make sense to me economically or socially. It doesn't even make sense to me as an individual, as I'd much rather just bite the bullet than spend the next few decades looking at concrete walls.
Somewhat surprisingly, it is actually cheaper to just throw them in prison for the rest of their life then use the death penalty. Like 50% more to a whopping 1000% for California [0].
It takes millions of dollars to go through the legal process necessary to execute somebody with any confidence in the judgment. It is vastly more expensive than life imprisonment.
It also costs a lot to go through that process and determine that execution is not justified, at which point we're still on the hook for imprisonment.
Putting somebody in jail for life is a bargain in comparison.
Whelp, that answered my question! Seems like there's a lot of cost cutting to do across the entire board. I saw an article the other day on here talking about Riker's and it said that 1 inmate costs something like $550,000 annually.
Of all the reasons to be in favor of the state calmly killing people, to argue for it because saves money over the alternatives is truly chillingly terrifying to me.
execution should be only for the "lost losers" of society, like school shooters & similia; rich and powerful people who value their own life, time & status would suffer immensily from being demeaned as "simple prisoners"
FTX failing is not crypto failing. FTX failing just proves the fundament of crypto to be right - don't use centralized finance (yes, FTX is centralized finance).
It's perfectly possible to use crypto without centralized exchanges and many people do so. As "centralized crypto" continues to fail, people will use it in a decentralized way more and more. I don't see how the conclusion is "don't use crypto". People seeked simplicity, found out there is no free lunch - that doesn't mean they will throw the baby out with the bathwater.
All finance is centralized. De-centralized finance really doesn't exist --- crypto is just the latest example of this.
Before any crypto transaction who do the buyer and seller both turn to for a "fair market value" ? A *centralized* exchange.
The crypto market is controlled by companies like FTX. This still holds true even if you don't deal directly with these companies. Money equates to influence and control and crypto is no exception.
> Before any crypto transaction who do the buyer and seller both turn to for a "fair market value" ? A centralized exchange.
That's the simplest way today - but definitely not a requirement, and doesn't make it centralized in any way. The centralized exchanges don't set the price (if anything, they suggest it) and they can't control transactions nor wallets. Who doesn't know the private key can't do anything with the funds on a wallet.
> The crypto market is controlled by companies like FTX. This still holds true even if you deal directly with these companies.
The "crypto market" - maybe. But they don't control the cryptocurrencies themselves in any way. This is like saying that because NASDAQ controls the $MSFT market they control Microsoft - of course they don't.
But they don't control the cryptocurrencies themselves in any way.
Binance and Bitfinex have control over the one thing that matters most about Bitcoin --- the price. They exercise this control in the same way a central bank does --- they have access to an unlimited supply of "stablecoins" they can mint at will and use to buy/sell bitcoin as they see fit.
The price isn't the thing that matters the most about Bitcoin...
What matters the most is that nobody can take my coins from my wallet if I don't want them to and that I can send the coins to anybody I want, however much I want and whenever I want.
That’s it’s utility as a currency. But the only reason you care about it being a currency in the first place is because of its purchasing power — value. Once it has value, then those properties are meaningful.
Can you turn US dollars or Euros into crypto in decentralized exchanges? As far as I remember you could only trade crypto; one token for another.
That's useful if you have crypto, but how do you get into the field in the first place? As long as people aren't being paid in crypto and can't buy and sell things in crypto there is no way to get into the system without going through someone willing to exchange crypto for fiat. And this someone tends to be a centralized exchange.
No. Did you miss the fact that centralized exchanges set the "market" price of crypto --- even for trades on decentralized exchanges?
Yes, you can set your own asking price for crypto --- but the reality is it's unlikely you can sell for significantly more than the "market" price set by centralized exchanges. And good luck finding someone who will sell to you for significantly less.
Most people won't surrender value just for the sake of "decentralization".
>So we kind of want to see it fail as we would want a MLM business to fail.
Do "we" really? I like you don't see any value creation when it comes to coins, NFTs and what else is out there. But the idea of a crypto _currency_ is great. I just want the speculation to end and for people to use it as it was intended: As an alternative to government provided funny money.
I’m not involved - and own no crypto - but just as angry as the gp.
Why? I’m tired of these cryptobro idiots being held up on some sort of bullshit pedestal while people who truly get shit done have zero recognition and toil away in obscurity. It’s sickening - and 1000x more when that person is not just an idiot, but a malicious one to boot. Throw the book at them.
I enjoyed tbray’s blog post yesterday - one sentence in particular which I’ve oft repeated with crypto enthusiasts. Civilization is built on trust. You can’t “code” that away.
> The idiot (Sam) took billions of peoples hard saved assets and let a 27 year old twit day trade gamble it down the tube.
That's the same story those who portrayed SBF as a hero now try to sell you.
Go back and read the explanation of the scam from those who explained the scam while it was ongoing (months and even years it blew up). From independent journalists to traders to even people testifying against FTX in front of congress: several saw SBF was a nobody and that he was full of shit (some junior trader who successfully executed three minor arbitrage at Jane Street on some minor market or something: nobody knew his name in the finance world, he was a complete no-name).
These people who sniffed him for the fraud he was have got a different story.
Here are a few interesting facts:
- top lawyer at FTX, Dan Friedberg, is an ex- colleague of the top lawyer at BitFinex, Stuart Hoegner... What did they both work on as colleagues? Biggest online poker scam, where a company wrote a poker server with a "god mode" to defraud players. Coincidence right? I mean... FTX / BitFinex, just a coincidence.
- SBF said he was fed up with the usual crypto exchanges that couldn't be trusted
- first thing SBF does is send $$$ to tether (through 100+ fake companies/banks like Moonstone banks and the like) in exchange for USDTs
So he doesn't trust exchange, but sends over the years billions of his customers' real USD to the most shady of them all to get, in exchange, counterfeited money (tether/USDT)? And the top FTX lawyer happens to have been involved in both a fraud and a coverup with the top lawyer at BitFinex.
BTW it's the Panama papers that revealed that the gang between tether and BitFinex where the exact same people.
Every single Bitcoin pump is linked to insane volume on the BTC/USDT trading pair. Even the last one, done through FTX/Alameda, when Coinbase and USDC were already big.
So everything circles around tether / Bitfinex (who are still in the game, compared to SBF / FTX / Alameda).
And that official story: "The 27 years old lost it all to bad leveraged trades that had no stop-losses".
OK, sure. Fine. Maybe.
But tell me... Wasn't it Bitfinex or Bitfinex's Alameda on the other side of that trade? (for Bitfinex also has the same structure with their own "independent" trading arm, whose name I currently forgot).
I mean... Let's not talk about the petty $40 m in donations to grease politicians (mostly democrats but also republicans). That's petty money. Just like the rumours about $120m in real estate that SBF's parents acquired (which may or may not be true). Even if true, that's still cheap kickbacks for the money mule / fuse / useful idiots.
Would you please not fulminate on HN? No one's saying you owe billionaire fraudster wunderkinds better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here, regardless of how strongly you feel.
Oh God. Thanks for the flag.
I was not fulminating though, I was pointing out factual matter that no one else wants to say outright: SBF is, was, and forever shall be a thief.
35 others upvoted my comment, it appears the community liked it just fine.
It was fulminating in the sense that the HN guidelines mean the word: intense, low-information venting. Far from "no one else wanting to say it", it was interchangeable with hundreds if not thousands of similar comments that have been posted so far. That's a clear sign that there's nothing new in such a post, therefore nothing to learn from it, and therefore that it is not related to intellectual curiosity, which is what we're optimizing for here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
I'm not saying your feelings aren't justified - just that that sort of comment is obviously against the mandate of this site.
As for upvotes, fulminating and other indignant comments routinely get upvoted—this is a weakness of the voting system, and is why HN is regulated not just by upvotes but also by flags, various software mechanisms, and moderation. Past explanations about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
Certainly you don't owe me anything—but every commenter here owes some things to the community, and this is one.
FTX was deliberately set up to enable this by insiders and to make it hard to immediately attribute to any single actor. From the bankruptcy filing by the CEO brought in when SBF was moved out, their practices included “the use of an unsecured group email account as the root user to access confidential private keys and critically sensitive data for the FTX Group companies around the world,”
I've seen multiple references to this "unsecured group email account" - could anyone shine some light into what exactly that might mean: Is that an email account with no 2-factor auth or non-encrypted or something?
Basically, an account where multiple people know the credentials. It's the Spartacus effect.
One way to avoid a criminal conviction in the United States is to ensure the existence of reasonable doubt. Part of the reason people are told to never share passwords is that auth credentials are recognized as a form of self-repudiation. If only a limited number of people know the credentials, one of them has to be the perpetrator, if it's essentially common onowledge though we return to our technical, trivially auditable digital paper trail tracing back to a user-agent at best.
This is a move that a layman in the legal system would probably not have pursued. It is however, a great way to create plausible deniability. This'll probably backfire in the long run though. Judges and juries are touchy on that sort of thing.
SBF is despicable but I have no sympathy for his victims. 99.9% of FTX users were motivated by greed: speculation, tax evasion or illicit deals.
Greedy people stolen by a greedier one: I don't care but I appreciate the irony.
Life savings? Well, you lost them at an online casino. I'd prefer that you get it back but I won't weep if you don't. Greed leads to terrible situations.
Frankly, there are good people who are every day true victims to care for. Greedy gamblers, tax evaders and traffickers are not among them.
I don't think you really appreciate the scale at which this con occurred. Around this time last year, crypto was literally all everyone ever talked about. My brother, my cousins, their friends, a random bartender, every other attractive woman on Tinder who ended up pushing the pig butchering scam, hell even here on HN crypto was promoted like every other day. Not sure a blame the victim mentality is ideal here when practically EVERYONE got conned somehow. I only lost $1200 due to a pig butchering scam, but I learned from my mistakes and didn't invest any more. Others were not so lucky. Let's maybe have a little more sympathy given how widespread this contagion ended up being.
Out of curiosity are you a native Chinese speaker? I ask because I’ve only heard pig butchering scam in Chinese and I’ve never had anyone refer to it as such in English
No, but the majority of those who tried it on me had pictures of attractive Chinese women as their profile pic. Whenever I match with one now I just wait for them to bring up something about the "crypto market" and immediately un-match. Only learned about the specifics of it after reading up on eth liquidity mining scam on reddit.
"The term “pig butchering” refers to a time-tested, heavily scripted, and human-intensive process of using fake profiles on dating apps and social media to lure people into investing in elaborate scams. In a more visceral sense, pig butchering means fattening up a prey before the slaughter." - https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/07/massive-losses-define-ep...
I appreciate the scale of it, greed has no upper limit.
I didn't buy any, because the whole thing smelled like a scam to me.
There is nothing behind crypto. It's all smoke and mirrors, and playing not potato. The dollar is backed up by the strongest country in the world and by 330 million Americans who use the dollar. Nothing is 100% secure but the dollar has to be in the top most secure.
There are very limited uses for crypto.
You can't use it at stores, you can't use it anywhere.
I foresaw the collapse of all the crypto a long time ago. I'm not a sage, it just was obvious to me. Many others said the same - Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger of Berkshire, for example, said crypto is horrible. Munger famously compared it to rat poison.
“To me, it’s just dementia,” Munger said Saturday during Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. “It’s like somebody else is trading turds, and you decide you can’t be left out.”
People are greedy and fall for this type of thing all the time.
It was the same in the housing market crash in 2009. I forsaw that also, I read at the time that people were getting loans who had no job, only put 2% down, I knew people who did it, it was no secret. I thought that was crazy and new we were in a housing bubble then, or at least very scary. And again, I was not the only one. And all these people who bought homes and then lost them...it is the same thing. Greed and lying on the buyer's part.
I pretty much caught on when I heard that I should "enjoy being poor" if I didn't want the easy money of crypto. But then again, I started hearing about cryptocurrencies in my late 30s, so this cat has caught some battle scars even before that.
Those of is who have been around knew this was a scam from the early days, but the particular arrogance of the crypto bros really gave the game away.
63 comments
[ 19.1 ms ] story [ 838 ms ] threadIMHO, 100% of all the assets are "Stolen or Missing". Sam stole them. That's where they went. He did it. That was the guy. He's right there. Just look at him. Where are the assets? Sam stole them. And then spent them and snorted them and then spent some more. And yeah, he probably didn't secure them very well either, so once crypto hackers knew he was a thief they just dove right in and helped themselves.
I suspect this will be an unpopular opinion - but I respect Bernie Madoff more than Sam Bankman Fried. Bernie knew he was a fraud. When he was busted, the only question he had was what took them so long. There is an honesty of guilt there. This guy just thinks "he made mistakes". Bullshit. You don't transfer custodial assets to a losing gambling routine and "it's just a mistake". That's like Achmed calling it "just a flesh wound".
I hope Sam gets life in prison or worse.
I, like many people, don't do crypto as I don't believe in the fundamental economics (no value creation). So we kind of want to see it fail as we would want a MLM business to fail.
But that's really not the same as having been burned. That really really sucks
Can I ask why you think this is better? I just did some quick math, and based on the average yearly cost of incarceration for an Adult Male in Indiana at $19,202[1], assuming SBF lives for another 50 years, that's $960,250 of tax payer dollars being used to store someonne that contributes nothing to society. So after he's stolen billions of dollars, we'll spend another million keeping him alive for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It doesn't make sense to me economically or socially. It doesn't even make sense to me as an individual, as I'd much rather just bite the bullet than spend the next few decades looking at concrete walls.
[1] https://faqs.in.gov/hc/en-us/articles/115005238288-How-much-...
[0]: https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalt...
It also costs a lot to go through that process and determine that execution is not justified, at which point we're still on the hook for imprisonment.
Putting somebody in jail for life is a bargain in comparison.
[1] https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/76th2011/ExhibitDo...
Others are discussing whether your math is correct, but the fact remains: it's murder, we shouldn't be killing people, period.
All finance is centralized. De-centralized finance really doesn't exist --- crypto is just the latest example of this.
Before any crypto transaction who do the buyer and seller both turn to for a "fair market value" ? A *centralized* exchange.
The crypto market is controlled by companies like FTX. This still holds true even if you don't deal directly with these companies. Money equates to influence and control and crypto is no exception.
> Before any crypto transaction who do the buyer and seller both turn to for a "fair market value" ? A centralized exchange.
That's the simplest way today - but definitely not a requirement, and doesn't make it centralized in any way. The centralized exchanges don't set the price (if anything, they suggest it) and they can't control transactions nor wallets. Who doesn't know the private key can't do anything with the funds on a wallet.
> The crypto market is controlled by companies like FTX. This still holds true even if you deal directly with these companies.
The "crypto market" - maybe. But they don't control the cryptocurrencies themselves in any way. This is like saying that because NASDAQ controls the $MSFT market they control Microsoft - of course they don't.
Binance and Bitfinex have control over the one thing that matters most about Bitcoin --- the price. They exercise this control in the same way a central bank does --- they have access to an unlimited supply of "stablecoins" they can mint at will and use to buy/sell bitcoin as they see fit.
What matters the most is that nobody can take my coins from my wallet if I don't want them to and that I can send the coins to anybody I want, however much I want and whenever I want.
Really? So it doesn't matter that the bitcoins in your wallet are now worth about 1/4 of what they were a few months ago?
Where did all that value go? My guess is a lot of it is sitting in fiat bank accounts someplace under the control of Binance and Bitfinex.
The numbers in your wallet may be the same but 3/4's of the value has been removed. You've been robbed and you don't even know it.
No way to steal funds doing that, hmmm....
That's useful if you have crypto, but how do you get into the field in the first place? As long as people aren't being paid in crypto and can't buy and sell things in crypto there is no way to get into the system without going through someone willing to exchange crypto for fiat. And this someone tends to be a centralized exchange.
Yes, you can set your own asking price for crypto --- but the reality is it's unlikely you can sell for significantly more than the "market" price set by centralized exchanges. And good luck finding someone who will sell to you for significantly less.
Most people won't surrender value just for the sake of "decentralization".
Do "we" really? I like you don't see any value creation when it comes to coins, NFTs and what else is out there. But the idea of a crypto _currency_ is great. I just want the speculation to end and for people to use it as it was intended: As an alternative to government provided funny money.
Why? I’m tired of these cryptobro idiots being held up on some sort of bullshit pedestal while people who truly get shit done have zero recognition and toil away in obscurity. It’s sickening - and 1000x more when that person is not just an idiot, but a malicious one to boot. Throw the book at them.
I enjoyed tbray’s blog post yesterday - one sentence in particular which I’ve oft repeated with crypto enthusiasts. Civilization is built on trust. You can’t “code” that away.
Do you know how Seigniorage works?
That caricature propagates the stereotype that all Brown people are terrorists.
In 2022 America, I thought we were well past that stereotype.
This wikipedia page details a lot of the criticisms around the Achmed racist stereotype.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dunham
Thank you.
A fatal boating accident is simply a foregone conclusion.
That's the same story those who portrayed SBF as a hero now try to sell you.
Go back and read the explanation of the scam from those who explained the scam while it was ongoing (months and even years it blew up). From independent journalists to traders to even people testifying against FTX in front of congress: several saw SBF was a nobody and that he was full of shit (some junior trader who successfully executed three minor arbitrage at Jane Street on some minor market or something: nobody knew his name in the finance world, he was a complete no-name).
These people who sniffed him for the fraud he was have got a different story.
Here are a few interesting facts:
- top lawyer at FTX, Dan Friedberg, is an ex- colleague of the top lawyer at BitFinex, Stuart Hoegner... What did they both work on as colleagues? Biggest online poker scam, where a company wrote a poker server with a "god mode" to defraud players. Coincidence right? I mean... FTX / BitFinex, just a coincidence.
- SBF said he was fed up with the usual crypto exchanges that couldn't be trusted
- first thing SBF does is send $$$ to tether (through 100+ fake companies/banks like Moonstone banks and the like) in exchange for USDTs
So he doesn't trust exchange, but sends over the years billions of his customers' real USD to the most shady of them all to get, in exchange, counterfeited money (tether/USDT)? And the top FTX lawyer happens to have been involved in both a fraud and a coverup with the top lawyer at BitFinex.
BTW it's the Panama papers that revealed that the gang between tether and BitFinex where the exact same people.
Every single Bitcoin pump is linked to insane volume on the BTC/USDT trading pair. Even the last one, done through FTX/Alameda, when Coinbase and USDC were already big.
So everything circles around tether / Bitfinex (who are still in the game, compared to SBF / FTX / Alameda).
And that official story: "The 27 years old lost it all to bad leveraged trades that had no stop-losses".
OK, sure. Fine. Maybe.
But tell me... Wasn't it Bitfinex or Bitfinex's Alameda on the other side of that trade? (for Bitfinex also has the same structure with their own "independent" trading arm, whose name I currently forgot).
I mean... Let's not talk about the petty $40 m in donations to grease politicians (mostly democrats but also republicans). That's petty money. Just like the rumours about $120m in real estate that SBF's parents acquired (which may or may not be true). Even if true, that's still cheap kickbacks for the money mule / fuse / useful idiots.
WHERE ARE THE FUCKING TENS OF BILLIONS?
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
He CLAIMS that he thinks he made mistakes. Probably lying even there.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
35 others upvoted my comment, it appears the community liked it just fine.
I owe you nothing. You owe me an apologie.
I'm not saying your feelings aren't justified - just that that sort of comment is obviously against the mandate of this site.
As for upvotes, fulminating and other indignant comments routinely get upvoted—this is a weakness of the voting system, and is why HN is regulated not just by upvotes but also by flags, various software mechanisms, and moderation. Past explanations about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
Certainly you don't owe me anything—but every commenter here owes some things to the community, and this is one.
One way to avoid a criminal conviction in the United States is to ensure the existence of reasonable doubt. Part of the reason people are told to never share passwords is that auth credentials are recognized as a form of self-repudiation. If only a limited number of people know the credentials, one of them has to be the perpetrator, if it's essentially common onowledge though we return to our technical, trivially auditable digital paper trail tracing back to a user-agent at best.
This is a move that a layman in the legal system would probably not have pursued. It is however, a great way to create plausible deniability. This'll probably backfire in the long run though. Judges and juries are touchy on that sort of thing.
I didn't buy any, because the whole thing smelled like a scam to me.
There is nothing behind crypto. It's all smoke and mirrors, and playing not potato. The dollar is backed up by the strongest country in the world and by 330 million Americans who use the dollar. Nothing is 100% secure but the dollar has to be in the top most secure.
There are very limited uses for crypto.
You can't use it at stores, you can't use it anywhere.
I foresaw the collapse of all the crypto a long time ago. I'm not a sage, it just was obvious to me. Many others said the same - Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger of Berkshire, for example, said crypto is horrible. Munger famously compared it to rat poison.
“To me, it’s just dementia,” Munger said Saturday during Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholders meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. “It’s like somebody else is trading turds, and you decide you can’t be left out.”
People are greedy and fall for this type of thing all the time.
It was the same in the housing market crash in 2009. I forsaw that also, I read at the time that people were getting loans who had no job, only put 2% down, I knew people who did it, it was no secret. I thought that was crazy and new we were in a housing bubble then, or at least very scary. And again, I was not the only one. And all these people who bought homes and then lost them...it is the same thing. Greed and lying on the buyer's part.
Those of is who have been around knew this was a scam from the early days, but the particular arrogance of the crypto bros really gave the game away.