Statistically speaking there's assuredly at least 1 person in this whole fiasco that lost most to all of their life savings, stolen from them, by this guy.

This is an extreme form of violence, not physical but definitely psychological, your whole life of work savings was wiped out and taken by this guy.

Holding the view you hold is why white-collar crimes are viewed so leniently compared to what you'd call violent crimes. Just because the effects of it are more abstracted away doesn't make them lesser, people might commit suicide over this. They might never recover the amount of money lost for the rest of their lifetime. It's a perpetual torture for those who got the shortest end of the stick. How is that non-violent?

It's not my view that he hasn't been charged or convicted for any crimes it is an objective fact.

What is the definition of violence?

> behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.

> What is the definition of violence?

You've already conceded that words can hurt people (Alex Jones), so why are you trying to backpedal that now?

Are you suggesting that if any words can harm people, all words must be considered harmful?

I'm saying Bankman-Fried has hurt a few orders of magnitude more people than Alex Jones, and allowing him to give interviews and flippantly defend himself is going to cause a lot of emotional trauma.

I think some people have different feelings about their murdered children than they do about stolen money. YMMV.

This is where we get into dark, murky questions.

Is 1 murdered person better or worse than the long term impact of two or even one person becoming destitute enough that their movements have long term impact on another?

> words can hurt people (Alex Jones)

Equating money losses with violence dilutes the term, and has a history of slipping into hurt feelings and blasphemy being tantamount to violence. There are crimes which may rise to the severity of violence. That doesn’t make them violence. Alex Jones incited violent. He, himself, was never violent. SBF perpetuated a massive fraud. He has not been connected with any violence.

I don't believe Alex Jones ever incited violence. SBF destroyed the net worth of a lot of people.

Yeah. I see SBF coming up with some sort of self-exculpatory bullshit to a fairly hostile line of questioning.

I don't see him excusing himself by explaining that regulators aren't real, they're just actors playing a role in an evil New World Order conspiracy to take people's guns away, and if he does, I don't see the NYT Dealbook summit attendees being the sort of people that turn up on their doorsteps as a result. And FTX is far too dead for him to harm people's wallets any further by persuading them to park their money in it.

>When he is, his actions weren't violent

If you steal $10 from a local shop (sorry, $1000 in California now) you'll be in jail before the end of the week. Steal $1,000,000,000 eight times over and you.. get to speak at a NYT conference?

I don't know, I just want some consistency from the justice system. That's not too much to ask for, or expect, really.

I believe that stealing from financial systems should be less harshly punished than stealing directly from people, small businesses etc.

Whole point of financial system is risk management, while corner shop owners should not deal with theft risk at all.

I bet more than one corner shop worker had money in FTX.

Sure. If you put your money slightly outside regulated banks, you implicitly accept the risk of losing it.

I mean yes it's true that JP Morgan isn't going to go bankrupt if they cash some bad checks but at the end of the day that's money that could go to opening new branches, hiring employees, paying bonuses or depositors more interest. The cost to society is the same it's just distributed over a larger number of people.

> That's not too much to ask for, or expect, really.

Please tell me what reality you live in and how to get there. Hell, just look across this site to see all the advice that ethics are for those who like staying poor.

It's quite simple, you take a clear eyed look at the problems in the world and you say, "I don't need to accept this, this can and should be fixed." You'll no doubt encounter people saying silly stuff like you cited, because some people operate on the basis of "the most cynical take is the correct one;" you ignore these people and continue to focus on the problems at hand. Similar to how, if you want to start a business, there are likely people in your life who will shoot down every idea that you have; you stop asking those people's advice.

One challenge with that approach is if you're not careful, someone might start identifying you as a threat because of that behavior, and start attacking you using the BS and lies that a great many others are susceptible too (or outright violence).

What we're seeing now is the part of the larger cycle where folks get more and more insistent that they're warped world view is correct (and it wouldn't surprise me if we get more violence than we got on Jan 6th later because of it), since they can't acknowledge that they're wrong and something bad is happening because of it, which will cause more bad things to happen.

It is imperative more people stand up and provide counter-pressure, because otherwise they will win.

He stole billions of dollars in client funds.

That's far more damaging than a delusional rant on some obscure internet radio station.

I personally view financial theft as a form of violence.

Good for you? The law and society at large doesn't.

Violence - behavior involving physical force intended to hurt, damage, or kill someone or something.

I think most understand violence to include things like intimidation, emotional abuse, and imprisonment. The expression "physical violence" is a reflection of this broader understanding - there wouldn't need to be clarification, otherwise.

I think of violence as the use of force or implied force to limit the agency of another. I'm not sure I'd call this violence but I can see where they're coming from.

Maybe ask for clarification instead of being rude and dismissive, or simply leave your sneering judgement unsaid. You may be find this view uninteresting, but I find your snark exhausting. I could just as easily say, "oh you're snarky, good for you?" Additionally GP added to the conversation, and your snark detracts.

Not violent directly perhaps. I agree that letting him speak now won't hurt anyone, physically for sure.. but theft and destruction of wealth is not without consequences, in real life.

If, through my actions, you become financially ruined, I may not have kicked, beaten, or raped you, but is the harm comparable? Is it violence?

It might inspire more fraudsters to follow in his footsteps if he doesn't face consequences.

Honestly I actually doubt he did anything he can be charged with. The whole point of crypto is that you are investing in something ABSOLUTELY NOBODY wants to take responsibility for.

I find it amusing that there is now a call to apply the same rules for crypto exchanges. Didn't everyone hate traditional finance a few months ago?

What would happen if everyone's starbucks phone wallet balance suddenly vanished because starbucks YOLO'd all the funds on Dogecoin? Would that be fraud? Or would they just get away with Oops moneys is gone, all your balances are now zero.

He admitted to using client funds against the stated TOS. Embezzlement, Fraud, whatever - a crime did occur, regardless of if it was crypto, and every country I've run across has laws against that.

Untangling how to charge him, and where, and digging up concrete enough evidence to file an indictment is going to take awhile of course. The post-bankruptcy CEO seems to be finding plenty.

As with a lot of non-violent crime, it takes awhile to arrest someone because there is a lot of paperwork. When the suspect has a lot of cash and lawyers, it takes longer because they need to make sure there isn't an angle they are missing that could get them off.

What he's admitted to are loose financial controls and by the letter of the law it's not illegal to be bad at your job. Obviously no one really believes his "whoopsie poopsie accidentally lost a few billion" story but technically he hasn't yet admitted to a crime.

Nope. Mishandling customer funds yourself against your own stated use of said funds to customers when you gathered those funds is one of those crimes above, depending on specifics.

Bad financial controls is if someone else whoopsie accidentally steals or mishandles the funds. Which at least per a cite provided earlier, he admitted to doing it himself.

To be able to claim a lack of culpability for this requires a degree of plausible ignorance about what the left and right hands were doing. He seems to be working hard to chip away at any sort of plausibility there.

He doesn't have to claim anything because he's presumed innocent. To nail him for wire fraud you need to prove:

>(1) that the defendant voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money;

>(2) that the defendant did so with the intent to defraud

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

Thus far he hasn't admitted to either and so hasn't yet admitted to a crime.

You’re making claims I never did.

Wire fraud != fraud, theft, or embezzlement.

It’s a specific sub-type of fraud, and your link is pointing to a specific list of elements within a certain jurisdiction.

Even then, that vox conversation cited above combined with what we already know is likely to be enough to prove at least embezzlement.

Here is a link to some elements of the crime for that if you’re interested.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/embezzlement

Based on what we’ve seen so far, unless he somehow can convince a Judge or Jury that he didn’t know what was happening, it would be very implausible someone couldn’t get a sizable conviction somewhere on one or more of those charges. But we won’t know for sure until the situation has been analyzed. But he sure isn’t helping himself.

Which is why I said what I said. He could of course have no defense and sit there mute for the entire trial, but I can’t imagine a Jury would be all that convinced by it, if the prosecution provided even the most basic set of evidence that seems to be lying around all over the place.

> As with a lot of non-violent crime, it takes awhile to arrest someone because there is a lot of paperwork. When the suspect has a lot of cash and lawyers, it takes longer because they need to make sure there isn't an angle they are missing that could get them off.

Yes. The investigation has to happen before the arrest. With violent crime, it's usually clear what happened; the question is who did it. With white-collar crime, sorting out what happened is complicated. With FTX, it's really complicated. Prosecutors only get one chance; if they take someone to trial on early evidence and lose, they usually can't come back later and try again.

But it doesn't all have to be figured out. Just enough for a long sentence. Known overt acts, such as buying US$300 million of Bahamas real estate with company funds and putting the real estate in a family name, are probably enough for grand theft.

He signed up customers with documented agreements saying that their funds would be segregated and not lent out, and then he used the U.S. banking system's wire infrastructure to have their money sent directly to his hedge fund Alameda Research instead of the exchange FTX.

Cite? If so, that's amazingly dumb.

This was one of many admissions in his text exchange with Vox. You can see an example wire here https://twitter.com/EventLongShort/status/159346927091841434...

That doesn't really make a lot of sense. Customers sent him dollars to buy crypto. So any dollars that came in were almost immediately turned into crypto. The only way for those crypto assets to be missing is if the crypto was transferred.

The dollars were used to purchase a claim on crypto payable by the exchange FTX. But it is not at all clear at this point that if someone sent money to them ("them" being some kind of quantum superposition of FTX and Alameda Research) and used it to purchase Bitcoin on the exchange, that FTX ever did anything other than update a number in their internal customer-facing ledgers. They had only $639,000 in Bitcoin on their balance sheet in their bankruptcy filing. And obviously the crypto is not all sitting at FTX ready to meet customer withdrawals or they would never have paused them in the first place.

> When he is, his actions weren't violent.

He stole tremendous amounts of people's money. I hope you're as forgiving to him as you are towards to the people who caused the 2008 economic collapse. At least they weren't actively stealing people's money.

It is an alleged massive fraud going on a public relations tour pre-trial, which not every defendant gets. I guess we'll see if NYT allows him to sail through it sympathetically.

He has admitted to the crimes. There's no doubt that he committed a massive fraud. They gambled with customer funds and lost billions of dollars.

Alex Jones isn't dangerous. He's just a weird guy who likes to rant about stuff. Sam Bankman Fried is a thief.