How could anyone believe this? “Average” people fall for bullshit all the time.

Besides, it is a paraphrase of a well-known George Carlin quote.

Because like he said, the average person is not so smart, I guess including themselves haha.

Average people fall for bullshit all the time when the charismatic bullshit artist is able to spin the setting, facts, and narrative.

The rules around a criminal trial are designed in such a way to give prosecutors plenty of opportunity to shut that down. And prosecutors are very, very experienced at playing in that arena - far moreso than even a serial bullshitter is.

Also, there's a lot of selection bias that goes into being a victim of fraud. It's true that some kind of fraud will work on just about anybody, but no particular kind of fraud is guaranteed to work on a particular person. Jury selection is semi-random, it's not pulled from the pool of people who respond affirmatively to Nigerian Prince spam-emails.

Everyone falls for bullshit. Not all fall for the same flavor, but everyone has a flavor they'll fall for.

Security exploitations are oversold in the tech community. Probably out of a desire to be cool and hacker-like. If you wanted hundreds of millions it was there for the taking.

How do you know that, on top of whatever SBF, etc., ran off with, embezzled, misdirected, and stole, someone else didn't?

AFAIK, there is clear accounting of misuse of some amount of the funds, but it there's no complete balanced accounting overall, and the whole structure of the FTX network of conpanies was designed to make that impossible.

"I research and write critically about the cryptocurrency industry, blockchains, the idea known as "web3", and the tech industry more broadly. I'm a fellow at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and an affiliate of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society.

I run the website Web3 is Going Just Great , where I highlight examples of how cryptocurrencies, web3 projects, and the industry surrounding them are failing to live up to their promises. I also publish a regular newsletter, and have written a series of essays about blockchains."

lying

Sounds like a tall order for SBF

I'm guessing this is largely just an ass-covering strategy to avoid giving the opposing side an upper hand. If you say "yes" to anything you might give them verbal grounds to convict you of more than they can directly find and show external evidence for.

I'd suggest they do NOT see a doctor because it would be an evolutionary advantage in court, as well as lots of other places.

It's also just all-around generally good practice to live in the present, not the past.

Maybe not when you're testifying under oath.

So is saying you don't recall. Which is why people don't take the stand in their own defense. But scammers like SBF make their living off of being in front of people in hopeless situations, and finding a way to convince them. So of course they want to roll the dice. Which he did.

Unfortunately for scammers like SBF, courtrooms and lawyers are well-equipped to handle most of the tricks that scammers use. So the result of their testifying is like a street tough entering a BJJ gym and learning the hard way that chokeholds actually work.

At some point does the judge tell you to GTFO and strike all your testimony? Can they instruct the jury in some manner harmful to you as a result of your obvious malign intent? Etc..

The judge doesn't need to do anything, the jury should have no problem putting two and two together on their own.

Someone who makes up an elaborate story, but can't recall any of the details when cross-examined looks guilty as sin.

If SBF doesn't go down & spend time behind bars, its going to open the gates to a lot more fraud.

SBF did things that would make even the worst Wall St actors from the GFC blush. No arcane accounting/valuation rules, risk models, capital requirement arb, regulatory capture, misaligned incentives, loose prop trading rules.. letter of law vs spirit of law stuff, etc.

SBF committed the most open, direct, simple to understand version of all the fraud people imagined behind the GFC. Primarily he moved a substantial portion of customer deposits into prop trading accounts and then lost the money by trading poorly.

He literally lied about things like having insurance, seemingly didn't keep any true books & records (and asked for 7 variations of a balance sheet to find one that looked least bad).

You have emails where his dad that he hired as legal is approving transfers of customers money for uses like buying his parents a condo, lol.

He's taking the stand (which is a risk) because his lawyer asks him questions that are favorable to him. The risk comes in because the prosecutor gets to cross examine the witness, which is where all this recall stuff came from.

Did you say X? (Yes/no/maybe) Well here’s an interview you have where you said the opposite.

Now a magazine article is part of the court record and can be weighed along with the other evidence.

He is going to get dragged through the mud having to respond "I dont recall" to a litany of embarrassing questions.. both because the lawyer is good and because he did lots of embarrassing things, openly..

>He is going to get dragged through the mud having to respond "I dont recall" to a litany of embarrassing questions..

Yes, but he isn't admitting to anything, confirming anything for the prosecution, or saying anything incriminating either and that's the trap of the cross examination when taking the stand.

However, you know he has gone through hours of very recent prep with his defense lawyers about the specific questions he'll be asked by the team. So, it's not exactly fair to accuse him of having perfect recall for his defense lawyer's questions and not as much for the prosecution.

Is this really a crime?

It is, but it looks really, really bad to the jury.

The government needs to convince the jury of a particular version of events, in order to convict you. If you plead the fifth, and just poke holes at that version of events, you might convince the jury that the government failed to meet the standard of conviction.

If you talk and talk, and spin your own version of events (thus giving the prosecution an opportunity to poke holes in it, and show you a liar), but as soon as you're asked about something damaging to you, you clam up, it's not exactly a ringing endorsement of your innocence.

In his case, his guilt is a foregone conclusion, we have him dead to rights. His best bet is just fishing for sympathy to turn a life-time sentence into a 25-year one. His parents' best bet is to have the money that they stole from FTX not get clawed back from them.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/19/sbfs-parents-sued-by-ftx-for...

As in once you waive your right to the 5th and take the stand, you have to answer all of the opposing side's questions truthfully.

(Not a lawyer.)

What if you don't know the answer, are only probabilistically sure of the answer, or the answer isn't a simple yes or no?

I see lots of courtroom videos and congress videos where the idiot keeps pressing for a "yes or no" but the reality of the universe is that lots of things are more nuisanced than just a yes or no.

Theoretically, if on the stand they asked SBF if he stole candy from the baby next door, I think he could take the fifth with regards to that questioning because it is for a different crime?

And yet our bimodal justice system spends huge amount of resources giving this 31yo fraudster every possible chance to escape the consequences, simply because he is a member of the elite.

Millions of Americans aren't afforded such luxuries; they can't afford adequate legal resources, maybe they get manipulated into a bad plea deal. Hence we have a clearly bimodal justice system.

I would actually like to know what SBF said on the stand that caused the reactions in the gallery/jury and not the author's personal reaction.

ChatGPT can't do that because the author left out information.

Perhaps you want the full transcript.

For example,

> To each of those questions, Bankman-Fried replied, “No, but I might have.”

> And then Sassoon played a clip from FTX’s official podcast. You are never going to guess what he said on the pod.

I'm not here to guess. Give us a direct quote. (The questions were also not quoted, so they don't provide a direct quote either).

> Still, he hadn’t made any of those statements under legal oath, had he? Well… that remained true until we reached his Congressional testimony. Bankman-Fried read aloud testimony he’d submitted to Congress: that trading platforms’ obligations included maintaining sufficient liquid assets that customers could withdraw on request. That platforms should ensure appropriate bookkeeping to prevent misuse of customer assets. Ensuring appropriate management of risks. Avoiding conflicts of interest.

> Sassoon immediately followed this with direct messages Bankman-Fried had sent to Kelsey Piper, in which he said this was all just public relations, and “fuck regulators.”

> At this point, my notes simply read “Jesus fucking Christ” in all caps.

    as prosecutor Danielle Sassoon went through a brutal line of questioning like a hot buzzsaw through a butter cow

https://www.iowastatefair.org/about/butter-cow

“If you don’t understand metaphors, please, just don’t use them.”

> I do not care

Stop trying to make the author's article about yourself

New Journalism has been around since the 1960s at least, with Norman Mailer's work. The term originates from Tom Wolfe, around 1972/1973 https://nymag.com/article/tom-wolfe-birth-of-new-journalism-..., but Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jimmy Breslin said there was nothing "new" about the style, that story-telling had been around as long as language.

I get it: it's not to everyone's taste. That doesn't mean it's not a legitimate and respected form of journalism. There are plenty of sources out there that stick to the "just the facts" form of writing. Whether or not that's more "real story" is debatable.

It does make a difference, because the length of your sentence is one of the factors used to determine when you're eligible for parole. That's why you sometimes see people handed ridiculous sentences, like 100+ years.