At the same time he violated laws meant to protect investor from losses. But if they didn't actually lose something, it would make sense to have a modest sentence. Not knowing what his reckless behavior actually caused would make the sentencing frivolous in my opinion.
That's not how it works. "No one got hurt" is a facile exoneration, and untrue at that. He didn't break the law "less" because by twist of fortune money showed up in the account sometime down the line.
Loss causation is described here [1] as the major factor influencing the sentencing range, so if all investors are made whole then a modest sentencing could be possible. It was also discussed in a recent Matt Levine newsletter.
Especially when a lot of the "lack of loss" is due to the speculatory appreciation of cryptos as a whole, not due to anything on SBF's behalf. If crypto had crashed, they could equally be looking at almost nothing.
The filing said that Bankman-Fried's Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) would make him "uniquely vulnerable" in prison, noting that he "has an exceptional IQ, but difficulty with conventional styles of communication, especially around emotion."
Do lawyers get embarrassed when writing stuff like this? He made no shortage of public appearances. He is also going to most likely serve in a lower security facility.
No, I think they actually are proud of this. It's like a creative exercise.
It's the equivalent of getting DOOM to run on stuff that barely counts as a computer. It's an exercise of bending the law as much as logically possible without being outright illegal.
Prisons across the US are filled with inmates with varying degrees of mental health concerns. (That's a larger discussion, but for this single case, we have to limit our conversation to the status quo) If he's vulnerable, there are a variety of protective custody options available in an incarcerated setting.
Lawyers are obligated to do whatever they can for their clients. I really don't understand why people get mad about this stuff or about defense lawyers who defend people like murderers. Even if we know someone 100% did it, giving people fair representation and trial is part of the moral framework we use to put these monsters in prison.
What "we" think we know isn't really relevant here, it's the court that decides the sentence with a process a lot more convoluted than 'this sounds like bs to me'.
ASD just does justify harsher sentences. It does not justify lesser sentences either. It should have no effect at all. For example, psycopaths who cannot feel empathy do not receive harsher or lesser sentences because of it.
The 100-year recommendation is appropriate, IMO. It gives Kaplan more support to set the number wherever he pleases. Whether it's 5 years or 50 years.
Perhaps 100 is grotesque, but his sentence should be long enough to prevent from having any access to the markets he abused. 5 years is barely one boom and bust cycle. Should be more like 20.
Oh sure - that's the point of a long sentence. Unfortunately, federal prisons don't tend to grant parole, but a 10-year prison sentence coupled with a 10-year no-computer-access parole might be fair.
> his sentence should be long enough to prevent from having any access to the markets he abused
You don’t need to put someone behind bars to deny them access to markets - you just need to give sentencing judges the power to ban them from engaging in certain activities (e.g. owning stock, being a corporate director or officer, trading on financial markets, etc)
Maybe sentencing judges don’t have that power - in which case, why doesn’t the legislative branch give it to them?
We are talking here about the US federal system, which has probation as a sentencing option, and I believe judges already have pretty wide latitude to set custom probation conditions.
I suppose the problem is the sentencing guidelines and societal expectations are for custodial sentences. But I think many people who oppose lengthy prison terms for nonviolent offenders when the offender is the neighbourhood drug dealer or some petty thief are suddenly no longer opposed when it is a (formerly wealthy) white collar criminal
As much as I despise the guy I agree that 100 years for stealing some money, even a lot of it, is grotesque. Particularly considering that people who routinely pilfer orders of magnitude more never see the inside of a jail cell in this country. Give him a tenner and ban him from trading for life.
SBF defrauded his investors/gamblers to the tune of billions. Bigger than Madoff. He intentionally tried to evade regulators by splitting his business into a dozen shell corporations and by operating from Hong Kong and the Bahamas. He intended to break the law from day 1.
Up to 7 years is what people get for grand larceny, for instance stealing a $1200 TV. 5 to 15 years you get for grand larceny in the second degree, for instance stealing a $50,000 car.
I don't know what the right punishment for SBF is, but I'm pretty sure what he did is worse than stealing a car, by several orders of magnitude.
What is the correct maximum time for stealing a $1200 TV? Say the large screen shared by all the orphans so your friends can video you sniffing coke off and then running it over it in your truck, before you got arrested at the next orphanage, and abused the judge at trial rather than show remorse?
Mandatory sentencing is grotesque, as would judges be who unjustifiably hand out maximums because they are having a bad day. But the ranges are there for a reason, allowing a judge to apply judgement.
Most convicted murders don’t even get a 100 year sentence.
I agree that 5 years is soft but regardless of the scale of the finances involved 100 years is an incredibly severe sentence for what is ultimately a nonviolent crime.
Most people who have actually killed a human being with their own hands get a chance at parole after 20-35 years.
Oh absolutely, but I realized another way to think about SBF's sentence:
Imagine this scenario:
1. Scammer defrauds a person for $$$
2. Scammer is caught
3. Scammer goes to jail
4. Scammer gets out
5. Scammer goes back to step 1
vs
1. Scammer defrauds 5 people
<repeat the same sequence as above and then return to defrauding 5 people>
vs
1. Scammer defrauds 50 people
until you get to thousands of people and companies a la SBF
The first case of one scam at a time will end up spending more time in jail than SBF despite defrauding far fewer people. Is that fair/just? We have plenty of other crimes where we consider the penalty for many crimes at once to be the same (if not worse) than count * penalty, so it's not just.
Financial crimes destroy lives as well. I think there is a double standard here where people want to go easy on highly educated people who destroy lives with computers. Violent criminals on the other hand are seen as monsters beyond redemption.
I'm in favor of a criminal justice system that is less about retribution and more about rehabilitation. But SBF isn't anywhere near the top of the list of people who got unfairly harsh punishments, not even if he gets that 100 year sentence. In a different -- and better -- criminal justice system SBF wouldn't have to spend the rest of his life behind bars. But in the current system he should, or it would be yet another exception for a rich and highly connected guy, which is also a type of injustice.
We frame SBF's crime as "just non violent fraud", but his fraud was targeted at people's retirement funds and life savings, so for many victims in the best case they lost any hope for the future - it's literally the difference between retiring and being forced to work for the rest of your life (that's what happened to many teachers post enron), and at worst it's a well established pattern that kind of loss results in suicide.
To me I feel you could make a strong argument for that being at least manslaughter if not murder (as I understand it, any death that occurs as the result of a criminal act is considered murder, and suicide as a result of fraud seems to fit that bill to me).
Framing this kind of crime as "non-violent" and so not deserving of a severe penalty is not far removed from "saying stealing that cars brake lines was non-violent so it's unfair to severely penalize the criminal just because of the later outcome"
Stealing that amount of money must have affected a ton of people, I imagine it's possible some committed suicided, ruined their relationships, lost other important things in their life etc.
It's not just stealing some money and the other people who steal even more should also get similar sentences.
“Imagine/possible” is insufficient reason for an effective life sentence even for a person as repugnant as SBF. I’d hope that if I end up in court, “imagining” things about me won’t be enough and hard evidence would be required.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty much the opposite of an SBF sympathizer, but still, it is my opinion that stealing money should not get one a life sentence.
Money represents the time out of people's lives that they spent to earn that money. He didn't steal just money - people worked and sacrificed time out of their lives to earn that money.
We should continue to try and catch and give consequences to the people we can, else how many more people will join the ranks of those who already do pilfer.
> The $10 billion loss asserted in the PSR is "illusory" because the "victims are poised to recover—were always poised to recover—a hundred cents on the dollar" in bankruptcy proceedings, SBF's filing said
Can someone explain how this would be? Didn't they loose billions of dollars through Alameda?
From the article it looks like the 500mm investment is now around 1.5B (if they could sell their block at the 18B valuation). Thats a lot less than they lost.
They are paying out dollarized claims, and the crypto prices they used to calculate the dollar value of claims were way lower than the crypto prices when they actually sold FTX's crypto holdings.
So if you had 1 BTC on ftx, your claim is for $16,871.63. The team responsible to managing the FTX bankruptcy sold at some higher price, and today BTC is trading at $61,766.40.
Understandably people are not thrilled about "being made whole" under these circumstances.
And not to mention, a large part of SBF's claims of being able to make people whole is in large part because of this appreciation, not because of any "non-predatory" behavior on his part.
For comparison, Martin Shrkeli [1] got 7 years. While SBF claims that there's a chance his victims will recover their money, Shrekeli's victims did actually recover everything. The scale of Shrkeli's affairs was in the millions (maybe tens of millions), certainly not in the billions.
Why is it not comparable? They both committed financial crimes. Shkreli got 7 years. SBF's crime vastly surpasses Shkreli's one (for example he was also convicted for money laudering). Why does SBF think 5 years is appropriate? Because his victims might one day recover their money? Well, Shkreli's victims did recover 100% of their money, but he still did his time.
Constance nevertheless sensed that he didn't really register the damage hed caused to other people in the way that, say, she might have. He has absolutely zero empathy, she said. That's what I learned that I didn't know. He can't feel anything.
Sam didn't care about real animals. It had been an expected value calculation, rather than emotion, that had led him to go vegan.
Other people felt emotions; he did not.
Maybe most alarmingly, more than a few Jane Streeters were disturbed by Sam's indifference to other peoples feelings. As an example, the Jane Street executives cited what Sam had done to a fellow intern, here called Asher Mellman.
He'd long since realized that his inability to convey emotion created a distance between himself and others. Just because he didn't feel the emotion didn't mean he couldn't convey it. He'd started with his facial expressions. He practiced forcing his mouth and eyes to move in ways they didn't naturally. It's not totally trivial to fake things, he said. It was physically painful. It felt unnatural. And I wasn't good at it. It didnt look right.
I don't feel pleasure, he wrote one day, late in his Jane Street career. I don't feel happiness. Somehow my reward system never clicked. My highest highs, my proudest moments, come and pass and I feel nothing but the aching hole in my brain where happiness should be.
To truly be thankful, you have to have felt it in your heart, in your stomach, in your head the rush of pleasure, of kinship, of gratitude, he wrote. And I don't feel those things. But I don't feel anything, or at least anything good. I don't feel pleasure, or love, or pride, or devotion. I feel the awkwardness of the moment enclosing on me. The pressure to react appropriately, to show that I love them back. And I don't, because I can't.
He thought of himself as a thinking machine rather than a feeling one. He thought of himself as a person who thought his way to action.
And yet somehow Sam had committed his life to maximizing happiness on earth without feeling any of his own. [Somehow indeed. Why would there be any reason to believe these unhappy "EA" proponents would know anything about how to manage the happiness of others.]
Even if the VCs didn't all realize that Sam was playing a video game at the same time that he was talking to them, most sensed that he didn't care what they had to say. Ramnik came to think that Sam's indifference to their feelings actually heightened their interest in him.
In a lot of ways I don't really have a soul. This is a lot more obvious in some contexts than others. But in the end there's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake. I don't feel happiness.
As a group, they eased a worry George [FTX's psychiatrist] had about himself: the limits to his powers of empathy. When ordinary people came to him with their ordinary feelings, he often found himself faking an understanding. [Sam and other EA followers at FTX used a shrink who himself could not feel emotions.]
What he liked about George was that George simply took him as he was and actually didn't seem all that interested in engaging in pointless conversations about his feelings.
One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to future children in another galaxy. They didn't, not really, which tells you something about the role of ordinary human feeling in the movement. It didn't matter. What mattered was the math. Effective altruism never got its emotional charge from the places that charged ordinary philan...
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 79.1 ms ] thread[1] https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10...
Do lawyers get embarrassed when writing stuff like this? He made no shortage of public appearances. He is also going to most likely serve in a lower security facility.
It's the equivalent of getting DOOM to run on stuff that barely counts as a computer. It's an exercise of bending the law as much as logically possible without being outright illegal.
What "we" think we know isn't really relevant here, it's the court that decides the sentence with a process a lot more convoluted than 'this sounds like bs to me'.
The 100-year recommendation is appropriate, IMO. It gives Kaplan more support to set the number wherever he pleases. Whether it's 5 years or 50 years.
You don’t need to put someone behind bars to deny them access to markets - you just need to give sentencing judges the power to ban them from engaging in certain activities (e.g. owning stock, being a corporate director or officer, trading on financial markets, etc)
Maybe sentencing judges don’t have that power - in which case, why doesn’t the legislative branch give it to them?
Not sure granting the judiciary carte blanche to make up their own punishments is the best idea.
I suppose the problem is the sentencing guidelines and societal expectations are for custodial sentences. But I think many people who oppose lengthy prison terms for nonviolent offenders when the offender is the neighbourhood drug dealer or some petty thief are suddenly no longer opposed when it is a (formerly wealthy) white collar criminal
Up to 7 years is what people get for grand larceny, for instance stealing a $1200 TV. 5 to 15 years you get for grand larceny in the second degree, for instance stealing a $50,000 car.
I don't know what the right punishment for SBF is, but I'm pretty sure what he did is worse than stealing a car, by several orders of magnitude.
Mandatory sentencing is grotesque, as would judges be who unjustifiably hand out maximums because they are having a bad day. But the ranges are there for a reason, allowing a judge to apply judgement.
I agree that 5 years is soft but regardless of the scale of the finances involved 100 years is an incredibly severe sentence for what is ultimately a nonviolent crime.
Most people who have actually killed a human being with their own hands get a chance at parole after 20-35 years.
Imagine this scenario:
vs vs until you get to thousands of people and companies a la SBFThe first case of one scam at a time will end up spending more time in jail than SBF despite defrauding far fewer people. Is that fair/just? We have plenty of other crimes where we consider the penalty for many crimes at once to be the same (if not worse) than count * penalty, so it's not just.
I'm in favor of a criminal justice system that is less about retribution and more about rehabilitation. But SBF isn't anywhere near the top of the list of people who got unfairly harsh punishments, not even if he gets that 100 year sentence. In a different -- and better -- criminal justice system SBF wouldn't have to spend the rest of his life behind bars. But in the current system he should, or it would be yet another exception for a rich and highly connected guy, which is also a type of injustice.
To me I feel you could make a strong argument for that being at least manslaughter if not murder (as I understand it, any death that occurs as the result of a criminal act is considered murder, and suicide as a result of fraud seems to fit that bill to me).
Framing this kind of crime as "non-violent" and so not deserving of a severe penalty is not far removed from "saying stealing that cars brake lines was non-violent so it's unfair to severely penalize the criminal just because of the later outcome"
It's not just stealing some money and the other people who steal even more should also get similar sentences.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty much the opposite of an SBF sympathizer, but still, it is my opinion that stealing money should not get one a life sentence.
We should continue to try and catch and give consequences to the people we can, else how many more people will join the ranks of those who already do pilfer.
Can someone explain how this would be? Didn't they loose billions of dollars through Alameda?
So if you had 1 BTC on ftx, your claim is for $16,871.63. The team responsible to managing the FTX bankruptcy sold at some higher price, and today BTC is trading at $61,766.40.
Understandably people are not thrilled about "being made whole" under these circumstances.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli
Also, Shkreli should have gotten far longer.
E- context->comparable
For defrauding investors who got their money back?
Constance nevertheless sensed that he didn't really register the damage hed caused to other people in the way that, say, she might have. He has absolutely zero empathy, she said. That's what I learned that I didn't know. He can't feel anything.
Sam didn't care about real animals. It had been an expected value calculation, rather than emotion, that had led him to go vegan.
Other people felt emotions; he did not.
Maybe most alarmingly, more than a few Jane Streeters were disturbed by Sam's indifference to other peoples feelings. As an example, the Jane Street executives cited what Sam had done to a fellow intern, here called Asher Mellman.
He'd long since realized that his inability to convey emotion created a distance between himself and others. Just because he didn't feel the emotion didn't mean he couldn't convey it. He'd started with his facial expressions. He practiced forcing his mouth and eyes to move in ways they didn't naturally. It's not totally trivial to fake things, he said. It was physically painful. It felt unnatural. And I wasn't good at it. It didnt look right.
I don't feel pleasure, he wrote one day, late in his Jane Street career. I don't feel happiness. Somehow my reward system never clicked. My highest highs, my proudest moments, come and pass and I feel nothing but the aching hole in my brain where happiness should be.
To truly be thankful, you have to have felt it in your heart, in your stomach, in your head the rush of pleasure, of kinship, of gratitude, he wrote. And I don't feel those things. But I don't feel anything, or at least anything good. I don't feel pleasure, or love, or pride, or devotion. I feel the awkwardness of the moment enclosing on me. The pressure to react appropriately, to show that I love them back. And I don't, because I can't.
He thought of himself as a thinking machine rather than a feeling one. He thought of himself as a person who thought his way to action.
And yet somehow Sam had committed his life to maximizing happiness on earth without feeling any of his own. [Somehow indeed. Why would there be any reason to believe these unhappy "EA" proponents would know anything about how to manage the happiness of others.]
Even if the VCs didn't all realize that Sam was playing a video game at the same time that he was talking to them, most sensed that he didn't care what they had to say. Ramnik came to think that Sam's indifference to their feelings actually heightened their interest in him.
In a lot of ways I don't really have a soul. This is a lot more obvious in some contexts than others. But in the end there's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake, my feelings are fake, my facial reactions are fake. I don't feel happiness.
As a group, they eased a worry George [FTX's psychiatrist] had about himself: the limits to his powers of empathy. When ordinary people came to him with their ordinary feelings, he often found himself faking an understanding. [Sam and other EA followers at FTX used a shrink who himself could not feel emotions.]
What he liked about George was that George simply took him as he was and actually didn't seem all that interested in engaging in pointless conversations about his feelings.
One day some historian of effective altruism will marvel at how easily it transformed itself. It turned its back on living people without bloodshed or even, really, much shouting. You might think that people who had sacrificed fame and fortune to save poor children in Africa would rebel at the idea of moving on from poor children in Africa to future children in another galaxy. They didn't, not really, which tells you something about the role of ordinary human feeling in the movement. It didn't matter. What mattered was the math. Effective altruism never got its emotional charge from the places that charged ordinary philan...