Give it some time, he only got arrested hours ago and the DOJ still haven't unsealed their case.

None of the big fish are getting money back. No one is going get money back. It's gone.

At the same time, I have trouble finding sympathy for anyone involved. SBF is a sociopath, thief and liar.

Those big-name investors should have known better and I'm sure in many cases they did. They probably should start lawyering up too, because they've got investors of their own who have been harmed either through malfeasance of actionable incompetence.

And the 'small time' investors -- mom-and-pop, widows and orphans investing the life savings on the platform -- all crypto is a scam, a Ponzi scheme, at the very best it's a casino or playing the numbers. Always has been. Always will be. All they had to do was open their eyes or maintain critical thinking in the face of promoters trying to bamboozle them.

And yet dumb money says I'm wrong. BTC up 4% on the day....

It wasn't a crypto investment for the mums and dads! That's the whole issue. They were treasuries - holdings that shouldn't have been at risk. SBF and his asshole friends dipped into them to close positions and shore up riskier trades made by another company Alameda.

People rush to simplify here with 'there are no angels" arguments. It doesn't matter that it was crypto. Those funds were stolen.

It is often the case that the victims of scammers were up to no good themselves, and allowed greed to cloud their judgement. People sign up for schemes that are flagrantly pyramid schemes, knowing it's a pyramid scheme, because they think they'll be able to get in and get out before the pyramid collapses. This kind of behavior is the norm in the crypto currency scene.

8% APR from a crypto company was obviously a pyramid scheme. Anybody who put their money into FTX was either unbelievably stupid, or knew they were playing with fire and hoped they wouldn't be the ones to get burnt.

If somehow all the money has been utterly destroyed so nobody involved gets any of it, that would probably be the best outcome. If the cryptobro investors get their money back, they're just going to use it in other scams to hurt more people.

You don't need money going back for it to be the case that the big fish will be fine, have many avenues for recourse, and the small people will be completely and thoroughly burned.

I always find it interesting how in our implementation of capitalism here in the US, wealth is able to insulate and protect itself from many of the very measures capitalism is supposed to peel away and counter (in the interest of society at large).

It's almost like it there are fundamental inherent flaws that need to be fixed to continue on and we can't keep treating things like business is usual if we want to enable continued growth vs stagnation due to power concentration like we've seen in non-capitalist systems in the past.

You're going to see the big players like Sequoia get some retribution here and to a magnitude that's significant enough to be usable and recoverable, meanwhile you're going to see all sorts of others life savings evaporate, resulting in a far less recoverable scenario, with little to nothing recovered--at least that's how this tends to play out, historically. Everyone will of course lose, but you'll see disproportionate losses and disproportionate recoverability. Disproportionate wealth as a proxy to power does this.

It’s the fundamental contradiction of modern capitalism (capitalist ownership of the means of production). On the one hand, it claims itself as privately owned capital, but on the other hand relies on the state to maintain this ownership. At some point this will break either into an ancap privatism or a communist socialism, because one side on the rope will eventually win as technology breaks down the human social control systems that allow this contradiction to persist.