https://www.thefp.com/p/humiliating-cross-examination-sam-ba...
“Did you say in private, ‘Fuck regulators?’ ”
“Did you call some customers ‘dumb motherfuckers?’ ”
“Did you fly to the Super Bowl in a private plane?”
“Most FTX customers did not have a line of credit, correct?”
“Do you deny that Alameda had a $65 billion line of credit?”
And on, and on, and on.
Under the circumstances, SBF’s wisest course would have been to just say yes—or yep—to her questions. And sometimes he did that. But just as often, he chose to dance around the question, to quibble about the phrasing, or say that he couldn’t remember the details. And every time he did that—every single time—Sassoon projected an email or video or a spreadsheet onto the screen, showing that he had done exactly what she was accusing him of doing. Which then gave the jurors another look at the evidence while reminding them that SBF was being something less than forthright. You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did.
(He even equivocated on whether he had taken a private plane to the Super Bowl—to which Sassoon responded by presenting a photograph of SBF fast asleep in the embrace of a comfy chair on a private jet. In the overflow room, we burst into laughter.)
And I'm not picking on you, it's just that most of what I read up and down this page is inseparable from normies not understanding, and even more, bullying, autistics.
It is not if its not.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38123997.
Oh, he definitely had people to blame, like the FTX lawyers, it’s just that he got caught lying or dancing around the truth so frequently that nobody would believe him.
1. Binance / CZ (Binance's CEO)
2. Caroline Ellison
3. Sullivan & Cromwell LLP (https://www.sullcrom.com/)
4. John Ray III (FTX's bankruptcy CEO)
At least he wasn’t playing League of Legends on the stand. That’s a small win, I guess?
In that case, it's even funnier because the defense knew the prosecution had all of those things before he was even asked those questions.
But my understanding is, they’re not obligated to turn over evidence that is not part of their case and is only used to rebut a witness’s testimony. Which would cover the stuff they used to contradict SBF’s statements on the stand.
Can someone clarify? (Sorry, “add color”.)
It would have had to have been around 10% if it was in state court in many states, because of the way lots of state bail systems work.
The federal system is very different.
His defense was always fighting a losing battle here, and likely would have recommended he also try to get a plea deal rather than forcing a trial with this probable outcome.
The Feds had no sufficient incentive to agree to a lesser set of charges, and SBF had no incentive to plea guilty to the exact same set of charges he could instead demand that the government prove beyond a reasonable doubt, which at a minimum would delay the process.
[0] https://nitter.net/innercitypress/status/1709208392516923435...
He had good lawyers around and immediately after the FTX collapse; he very publicly fired them because they wanted him to stop tweeting extensive descriptions of his crimes as a coping mechanism.
Which was going to be a problem for him no matter how good of lawyers he got later.
The MIT campus has a major public road running through the middle of it, one of the busiest surface streets in the area. You don't have to stand there very long to see a crowd of students almost get hit by a car because they didn't look before they crossed the street.
Point is, the old cliche is true, there really is such a thing as a person with a lot of book-learning but less common sense than a sea slug. I think we saw one such get convicted today.
It's not like because he made one really bad decision, none of this other bad decisions exist anymore.
After all, it's not difficult to find an effective book teaching one to safely cross a road.
Edit: well color me an idiot, I just checked and a 2019 usnews report had boston as ranked 3rd on worst drivers, based on whatever set of variable they came up with, so touche.
One other thing to note is that two of the _other_ top 10 are also in Mass, Worcester and Springfield. That's the only triplet on the list in the same metro area.
Though I guess, for the point I was making, it doesn't matter if Boston driving is the actual worst in the country or not, as long as it's very bad, which I promise you it is.
But how many MIT students actually get hit by cars? the number would be unusually high if the number of close calls were unusually high, but without looking up any statistics I can assure you it's something nobody ever thinks twice about.
Also Mass Ave which tons of people cross is not the most highly trafficked street by MIT, that would be Memorial Drive, but hardly anybody even has a need to cross Memorial Drive so that part is also hinky.
The end result looks like a lot of people have death wishes, but the pedestrian injury rate isn't actually unusually high.
Contrast to NYC where I do follow that exact process you're describing - act oblivious, make yourself look like you really will let them hit you, that way they won't. Although in NYC you gotta be real careful about that strategy...
Back then, painted crosswalks would have been a waste of paint.
There are also plenty of booksmart nerds with high emotional and practical intelligence. (I like to think I'm one, sure didn't used to be.) On the whole they are fun people to be around.
Mere intelligence is not enough in that context. Ideally you want to have apprenticed for at least a few years at a real exchange or custodial service. Somewhere you learn all the engineering details about how to architect it with proper financial controls, safeguards, and correctness guarantees so that this kind of failure cannot happen, either via human skullduggery, mistakes, or system bugs or security vulnerabilities.
Sam never had any of that. He probably got caught up in the moment, implicitly assumed he was smart enough to compensate and not need it, and his investors were all finance guys overly impressed with his trading ability and ignorant of the above. This is the unfortunate but unsurprising result.
It's important for the business that the insurance fund is safe. If you look closely you will find that it is unsafe. But if people believe it is safe you won't need the insurance fund, so do whatever you need to to inspire confidence in the insurance fund.
(All things SBF may have told himself.)
I feel like justice is being done here, but there's a sense in which SBF and his cohort are the victims here. A world of zero interest rate incentives/people, a trendy money machine in crypto, a general sense that old people/regulations are impoverishing us all with their nervous sclerosis, all created an environment where--in hindsight--this was inevitable. If not FTX then someone else.
I think people are 100% right to call out the press/publications/investors/regulators who flat out encouraged this charade to continue well beyond the point where it was an obvious scam, and I think we really need to examine the VC culture of "find (or create) a young megalomaniac, give them tons of money, ... profit". How do we think these things will turn out? Will we spend billions of dollars building Uber, which at this point is an app that shows you ads and incidentally hails a cab? Will we spend billions of dollars building trash companies that scam people? Will we spend billions of dollars building Airbnb, which was pretty ruinous for cities and at this point not even a good business? Will we spend billions of dollars building e-scooter companies that exist essentially to create tons of e-waste that litters our sidewalks and landfills?
It's nuts. Please just fund day care.
It's undeniable he committed fraud, repeatedly lied to his clients and tried to make them give him money by telling them tales that weren't true.
But it also seems likely he thought he was clever/lucky enough that it would all work out in the end.
That makes the intent different, and culpability is always about intent.
In fact SBF reminds me more of Billy McFarland (of Fyre Festival fame) than of Madoff.
What on earth is the difference between this and Madoff?
>But it also seems likely he thought he was clever/lucky enough that it would all work out in the end.
What on earth is the difference between this and Madoff?
>That makes the intent different
Why do you assume bad intent in one case and none in the other? SBF stole customer money and used it for political donations during one of the most heated, divisive, controversial elections in recent American history. He's the sitting President's largest donator, and he's going to prison for fraud. The potential consequences here are massive.
Those investments were fraudulent because they were made without the consent of the people providing the money, but they were investments nonetheless: SBF was buying assets, not just pissing money away in jets and catering (although he also did that).
In Madoff's case there were no assets at all. It was not possible for Madoff to convince himself he was doing something that may become viable, given enough time. It was possible for SBF.
I think that's a pretty big difference.
(Also, campaign finance violations are not part of the trial that just ended, at all.)
> You cannot apply ordinary arithmetic to numbers in a cell labeled “HIDDEN POORLY INTERNALLY LABELED ACCOUNT.” The result of adding or subtracting those numbers with ordinary numbers is not a number; it is prison.
This wasn’t a case of poor engineering practices or poor internal controls. It wasn’t a mistake. It was all very intentional
Lack of internal controls isn't the reason for why the CEO and owner of FTX is funneling billions of its customer dollars into a company he owns - Alameda.
It's just straight up fraud.
You should probably let some other adult, (and the FBI) know if the owner asks you to do that, but you can't physically stop him. It's his company. He has complete power over it. It's not a democracy, there's no checks and balances on the power of an owner-CEO.
That people just accept that founder CEOs are allowed to do everything with their companies, and their companies money, is troubling. Because, as soon as said company is a seperate legal entity, it is the companies assets and not the founders anymore.
Maybe even CompSci graduates shoupd get some basics of business, legal and ethics during their studies.
That's a bit like:
"The bank robbers' mistake was a lack of internal control and security advisors who could have safeguarded them from robbing banks"
That's a pretty big caveat, though.
The pop psychology term for this is the Dunning-Kruger effect.
> zero experience in building a major service that custodies billions in other peoples' money.
This is exactly what the Dunning-Kruger effect describes. He was incompetent at the task he was doing and didn't know enough to be aware of his incompetence.
What you might be thinking of is the smbc Mt. Stupid diagram [1] which does relate overinflated sense of know-how to a relatively low experience level.
That is distinct from the DK effect in important ways. Of course it doesn't help that if you google images for DK effect 19/20 first results will be a bastardisation of the Mt Stupid comic.
This is a common misconception. Wikipedia has a pretty good write-up. Quoting the first paragraph:
> The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task.
The original paper [1] was explicit that this was domain-dependent.
> The point of the DK effect was even with experience, the disparity between ones competence and awareness of ones relative competence doesn't improve.
I don't think this is consistent with the literature. In the studies I'm familiar with, there is the classic Socrates effect that the people with the most skill are aware of how little they know and tend to underestimate their relative performance. So it improves significantly, but there's a slight over-correction.
Quoting the original paper:
> improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
It’s that “one simple trick (what they don’t want you to know)” kind of predatory advertising that seems to be what ensnares people.
It’s adjacent to the hustle culture you see on social media where people with gleaming white teeth tell you they’ll make you rich
Consider it a VC investment. First, you gave to either understand the underlying technology, or someone you trust have to understand it sufficiently to be able to say "this is bullshit", or "this is a great novel idea that makes a lot of sense".
Then you invest a bit of your really disposable income in it and don't touch it for a couple of years. Eventually you sell once you're happy with the price, or you forget about it and check few years later.
Edit: also, it really is down to luck too. An idea might be great, but the people behind it can be scammers. Etc. Crypto is(or was) a very high reward, very high risk game.
And for God's sake don't invest your life's savings in crypto!
Arguably the entire monetary system is also kind of like that - but it's got the benefit of true utility outside of speculation. It's a shame that most of the interesting crypto-as-money stuff - smart contracts, accessible to everyone financial APIs, pseudo-anonymous payments etc, has been completely dwarfed by the crypto-as-investment situation. Maybe it'll shake itself out long term, but I suspect the fundamental problems of unregulated "money" will be inescapable.
It turns out there's a reason we have financial regulation.
That's about as big as it gets, and pretty well explains the long legs this con continues to have. A lot of marks out there.
The only thing bigger would be an interstellar "galactic-coin". God. I can only imagine the carnage. Seems like a great premise for a sci fi story.
The ones I think are truly scams are the "stablecoins" and "exchange tokens", which are nothing more than a fiat currency offered by an entity smaller than a government with less accountability than a government, and no way to ensure the value/supply/demand of their coin. So yes, I think FTX was a scam to the extent that they traded FTT while printing or consuming it however they liked.
Also I did put investment in quotes. I don't consider it an investment like stocks of a well established company, but if you put money in a security and you can reasonably expect some return at some risk it is an investment.the main difference is that with gambling you play against "a house". A single entity that controls "the market". With crypto, you can take your security and sell it to anyone, or buy stuff with it.
And no, I haven't robbed anyone, I haven't forced anyone into it to buy at gunpoint. I haven't bought in by using secret knowledge. And If you think crypto is both a gamble and a ponzi I wonder what do you think about forex. If anything that looks a lot more like betting as 99% of forex "brokers" don't actually buy/sell for you, but you bet against them.
On Forex I lost £3500 when the UK brexit referendum went the other way than I predicted. Was I "robbed". No, I made a bad "investing" decision.
Have you never lost at a stock market either?
> Then you invest a bit of your really disposable income in it
Sorry, but I find it a bit funny that in your "winning strategy" you seem to invest on the second step regardless if you in the first step ended in the "this is bullshit" or not. (full disclosure, so far, every crypto thing I have seen has fallen to the "this is bullshit" bucket in my opinion. But I guess my "if it looks, walks and smells like bullshit, don't touch it with a ten foot pole" is not a winnig strategy.)
Perhaps this is my failure to express this clearly, but I thought it obvious you don't invest if you think it's bullshit.
> all crypto is a scam
Most people think SBF spent all his customers' deposits on private jets and luxury condos, and blew the rest on shitcoin bets that went bad.
But despite the insinuations of prosecutors, the PJ trips just don't add up to much in the scheme of things, and the real estate is still there and can be sold.
Yes, some shitcoin bets were bad, but they're offset by investments that paid off like the Anthropic stake.
It's likely that the only haircut depositors will have to take is the billion dollars in bankruptcy lawyer billings.
> the bloody Washington Post told you it's either a Ponzi or a pyramid scheme in 2015
If you put in $10K when WaPo told you it was a Ponzi, you'd have $1.6M today.
Maybe next time the bloody Washington Post gives you investment advice, you should do the opposite.
I did and I had significant losses. What does that say about your statement?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/08/bitco...
> The thing is, I don't actually use it. I just hoard it. I'm waiting for some greater fools to push up the price by using theirs.
Holding is about the same thing as buying but with no transaction cost.
This is the fuel that drove crypto. Yes it's a scam; I'm just hoping others will buy in after me and I can cash out with their money.
Obviously there's still investment bubbles - but underlying it all is ownership in a corporation.
Fundamentals define a floor for stock price, but above that it's all vibes. Which is fine, as long as we're on the same page.
On the other hand, buying crypto"currency" becomes ... just that. It sits there until you sell it to someone else.
In other words, if you rolled back all transactions in a stock ever made you'd end up with a positive sum totaling dividends paid out. If you rolled back all Bitcoin transactions you'd end up with a big fat zero. Minus, in both cases, transaction fees but while it's a mere convenience for stocks it's inherent in Bitcoin which makes it a negative sum game and as such a scam.
Yet we didn't conclude only from this all crypto is a ponzi.
That all crypto is a scam clearly comes from the fact it is a negative sum game. When you have a game where you can tell which set of players in total are going to lose and which set of players in total are going to win without knowing the rules of the game -- that's clearly a scam. All you need here is any commodity with baked in transaction fees. The exact same would be true if you traded with plastic poker chips but you needed to pay someone a fee whenever you bought or sold one. Indeed, reviewing the process with such chips makes it more clear, stripped of high tech mumbo jumbo.
Stolfi argues all crypto is a Ponzi because 1) people invest into it because they expect good profits, and 2) that expectation is sustained by such profits being paid to those who choose to cash out. However, 3) there is no external source of revenue for those payoffs. Instead, 4) the payoffs come entirely from new investment money, 5) while the operators take away a portion of this money. Our argument in the previous section was 3-5, you need to add 1 and 2 for it to become a Ponzi. https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon...
> gold has a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry, who take gold out of the market (2/3 of the production) for uses other than re-sale. When one buys 1 oz of gold, one gets a chip of a metal that one can sell to those consumers, and thus obtain some money that does not come from other investors.
The argument for crypto, etc is the same. There are consumers who want to make purchases, use contracts, etc.
There's a seller for every buyer, and the company does not care about it any more than having happy owners is good.
Investment in the form of bonds is another thing entirely, that's purely capital.
In 1999 Harry Markopolos had informed the SEC Madoff was running a fraud. Yet it took until the 2008 financial crisis for Madoff to be exposed. I am sure you've made quite some money if you invested with him in this time period.
Nevertheless not all cryptocurrencies satisfy the above. The prime example being Ether. In the last year it has experienced -0.186% circulating supply inflation (i.e. it's non-dilutive to its holders) [1]. While the network has captured around USD 6.5M per day ~ 2400M per year in fees due to its usage as settlement layer which are paid to its stakers. Basically, it's cash-flow positive and does not rely on greater fools to sustain its economics.
[1] https://ultrasound.money/ [2] https://charts.coinmetrics.io/crypto-data/?config=JTdCJTIybm...
Additionally, the fees of the network can only be paid in ETH, which means that any use of the network implies ETH demand.
Whether people transacting on the network care strongly about the costs vs alternatives to create a proper link with fiat is not so easy to show because there isn't always a direct 1-to-1 correspondence between services (and there are switching costs, too) - so the "inherently priced in fiat" is tough to show, I think. Also, being priced in fiat might still not create demand for Ether from fiat holders - that comes from outside demand as per the above.
Demand to settle a transaction on the network is demand for ETH. Because the base_fee of a transaction is burnt, destroyed, so ETH needs to be acquired to use it as a settlement layer. Much in the same way to how heating your house with a gas boiler is demand for gas. Similarly, when natural gas prices skyrocket (cue Ukraine invasion), alternative forms of heating start to look more attractive, and consumers may change their behaviors lowering the thermostats. In the case of Ethereum, alternative settlement layers will look more attractive or some users may lower their use. The same mechanisms are in place. I agree though that the relationship is not linear, that's not what I implied. Simply that the revenues of the network are priced in fiat, because the price is set by an auction to include your transaction on the scarce blockspace. And given at least some users will be sensitive to the price of the transaction in USD they will, at the margin, set the prices for a transaction in USD and therefore the fee revenues of the network.
By the way I appreciate you engaging rationally on this topic in HN. Not a common sight when discussing anything related to crypto but much appreciated.
I agree that there can be some link based on the utility of the network and with less of a speculative frenzy it might actually be stronger now. Not dissimilar to (other?) commodities, which have some link to economic activity but are not directly producing the activity themselves (and they can also have speculative phases). And commodities also have conceptual issues around their use in long-term investment for that reason (but at the same time they exist and trade).
I don't even think SBF had the book-learning, just intellectual arrogance. "I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post."
"I could go on and on about the failings of Shakespeare ... but I really shouldn't need to: the Bayesian priors are pretty damning. About half the people born since 1600 have been born in the past 100 years, but it gets much worse than that. When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few attended university; few people were even literate—probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren't very favorable." [Going Infinite, p29]
Now I get that Shakespeare doesn't appeal to everyone and is definitely an acquired taste, but to judge his work on probability when the work itself is right there to judge on its own merits is like the joke about an economist who sees a hundred dollar bill on the street and says, "If that were a real bill, someone would already have picked it up."
He also dismisses the "plot twist" in Much Ado About Nothing (when Beatrice asks Benedick to kill Claudio) as "illogical" and the province of characters who are "one-dimensional and unrealistic" because "I mean, come on—kill someone because ... his fiancée is cheating on him?" As if no actual human being had ever killed out of jealousy, when it's usually one of the main motives for murder. It's like he's visiting from another planet or something.
I don't mean to lower the tone, but honestly - what an absolute bell-end!
He's visiting from planet Adderall. If you have $26 in your pocket then you're a tweaker but make it $26B and you're an eccentric genius.
Blame the "mainstream media" all you want but as long as we refuse (for good reason) to give audit power to journalists, mainstream or specialist, you'll keep reading positive pieces about frauds if they stay hidden purposefully.
I'm not sure why you would have wanted to NYT to destroy every company it interviews just for the sake of it. Wouldnt they need proof ? And how do you get them, when they're hidden by a conspiracy ?
Plus, the police in the US, Hong Kong and the Bahamas found nothing and waited for Coindesk to publish a leak by CZ, a competitor, to start looking...
I say that because at the peak of the crypto fever I couldnt distinguish SBF from, say, the CEO of Kraken, and I suspect it's hindsight convincing you something could have been done.
The FT did an impressive investigation of Wirecard, for example. There is a difference between destroying a company and making a couple of common sense questions instead of parroting whatever the interviewee wants. Some basic journalistic practices. It is really not so much to ask.
EDIT: interviewer/interviewee
Again you re asking someth that had been done several times: many people did dig a bit deeper and couldnt find the Alameda hole or the real balance sheets, or the parents siphoning millions and all that stuff that took even time for prosecutors to find.
The role of the media isnt to uncover fraud I think, it's to give you a chance to expose one if you know one. If nobody was willing to talk, what s a journo gonna do?
Carreyrou, a personal hero, had tons of witnesses coming to him for instance.
You don't become a media darling. get billions in investment, and work tirelessly for the greater agenda, by accident.
Someone was in charge of him. Now to him, that might have looked like a range of advisors due to his overinflated ego and lack of intelligence to figure out that he is actually being tightly controlled. In some way he was the perfect puppet, if only he had been a little less of a criminal...
One thing he was used for is to destroy Luna - and I am 100% sure that wasn't his idea either, that attack was extremely sophisticated and done by someone very intelligent. ie, not SBF. But they used FTX and SBF to pull it off.
FTX always seemed like it was set up to control and if necessary destroy crypto.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/bankman-fried-used-customer-fu...
Here's an interview he gave a few months before the FTX collapse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6nAxiym9oc
Now Tether on the other hand.. I would not be surprised if that has a lot to do with it.
Well, what's the difference between an unhinged, drug-addled loony and an eccentric visionary genius?
The difference is having $26 billion.
Why not call him out on what seems like bullshit? That bullshit has convinced "informed" tech investors like Softbank and Sequoia Capital. And elsewhere at the same time, Andreessen Horowitz is investing $450 million in ape jpegs.
This is absolutely gourmet, Grade A, top quality wagyu bullshit.
Not to mention that a big part of investing in start ups is just ape jpegs with extra steps (i.e. "greater fool" theory).
>>Bankman-Fried’s error was an extreme hubris that led him to bite bullets he never should have bitten. He famously told economist Tyler Cowen in a podcast interview that if faced with a game where “51 percent [of the time], you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears,” he’d keep playing the game continually.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23500014/effective-altrui...
One big factor is who your parents are. SBF coming from an upper-class background, that tilts the scales towards eccentric genius. After all, we know that the children of these families are all extremely special.
-- Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper), Speed, 1994
https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo...
Is he just completely incapable of reading the room, or is it a lvl 10 cynical FU?
SBF has an impeccable pedigree, so the thought that he was a Michael Fenne type was never even considered. Why would he lie, when he could live an honest life and be fabulously rich and comfortable (Jane St, wealthy connected parents, etc)
It is not brought up too often, that often one of the most important differences between them and the viewer of mainstream media is, that this person is vastly more ruthless with regards to ethics.
> Musk claims to be self-made; he moved to Canada at age 17 with $2500 and worked his way up from there. For a while he supported himself by cutting logs, Abe Lincoln style. Nobody paid for his college and he took out $100,000 in debt. Musk’s father invested $28,000 in his first company, but Musk dismissed this as a “later round” and claimed he was already successful at that point and would have gotten the money anyway. The total for that round was $200,000, so Musk’s father’s contribution was only about 15%.
> Obviously there’s still some sense where he benefited from a privileged upbringing or whatever, but in a purely business sense he’s mostly self-made.
When confronted with his actions 2 simpler explanations than "booksmart, but not real life smart" are:
- A scammer (unethical, independent of intelligence)
- Not smart at all
I do not understand how someone see his actions and concludes: he is book smart only. Especially since he has expressed anti-intellectual views.
EDIT: expanded
But not so stationary, because then you were not visible enough
and if not why?
Similarly, not for a freeway.
Where some feel the balance is wrong, is at local-level streets. Today the assumption in most places is that cars have total right of way, and pedestrians must keep clear. It doesn't have to be that way. In a residential area, it's quite feasible to say all road users have equal right to use the space. And in that circumstance, put the onus on the car user (wielding a heavy, dangerous weapon) to not hit other road users.
* Trains are not constant, they come more seldom
* Trains are _extremely_ predicable. Cars are the opposite. This is why trams in i busy inner city are more safe than cars. You know exactly where that tram is going and at what speed.
Aha! you say, there is a perfectly good subway right there! Why don't people take that? Because the MBTA, our transit agency, is a notorious disaster. I won't load you down with examples here, but you can google e.g. "MBTA dumpster fire" or "what is wrong with the MBTA" and soon you'll know all you need to know.
I am a little bit hopeful that Philip Eng, the former head of LIRR and new GM of the MBTA, will be able to turn it around. He really seems to mean business, and he's an actual engineer with experience running a railroad. The old GM, Steve Poftak, was mainly qualified by having an MBA, having the right ideological positions, and knowing the old governor. I don't think anyone is going to miss him.
Getting offtopic, but isn't this more an indictment of America's insane car-centric culture? It's ridiculous that you see a major thoroughfare going through a heavily populated zone which is extremely unsafe to cross yet still laugh at students which "almost get hit by cars".
If I was on a jury where the defendant pulled that, I would want to go up and punch him in the face. Tiffany was restrained. Her notes said she only wanted to slap him.
Unless someone is demonstrating their voice for identification, I cannot see why someone can be compelled to just "read stuff".
An example... a presumed murderer is on the stand. You hand them paper. It says "I murdered someone".
Are they expected to read it?!
And further, as a juror, why would it enrage you to not see him comply? You say on a jury, you'd want to attack the defendant, but at that point you should not believe he is guilty, or innocent!
So, would you be upset if an innocent person, refused to read statements maligning himself?
https://www.stimmel-law.com/en/articles/testifying-trial-how... (search for "would you read the first paragraph")
https://law.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/34/2016/09/4... (search for "would you read the part")
https://www.patrickmalonelaw.com/useful-information/legal-re... (search for "would you read")
https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/6141/index... (search for "would you read")
https://archive.epic.org/free_speech//cda/lawsuit/transcript... (search for "would you read")
https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/8/2023/2023-O... (search for "would you read")
You'll also generally find examples of this if you're willing to sit through long cross-examinations such as e.g. the Murdaugh case.
Prior to the 20th century, fewer people could read. And on top of that, you couldn't just copy a sheet of paper easily.
And you wouldn't want jurors to handle evidence much, I suppose.
So I guess in this context it makes more sense. The reading ensures everyone knows what is on the paper, and of couse, since it's been happening for centuries.... it's legit.
Thanks for the urls.
He said in effect, I never said that we would avoid clawbacks, the lawyer made him read a thing HE WROTE that said they would avoid clawbacks.
Theatrical? Maybe.. but also he sat on the stand and lied, they made him tell the truth.
Remember that SBF never had to take the stand at all -- he could have pleaded the fifth and not testified; which is almost always the right thing to do. But once he decides to take the stand, the prosecutor gets to ask him questions about all the evidence they've collected -- which includes asking him to read things that he wrote or approved of.
He must answer questions, I find it bizarre he must read anything aloud, even if he wrote it. This is pure theatrics.
I wonder where his lawyer was.
I could try to come up with reasons that this rule is valid. But I guarantee you, EVERYTHING in the legal system has been litigated and discussed ad nauseum, often over hundreds of years. If lawyers for the defense thought that reading relevant evidence out loud was unfair, they would definitely challenge it; and maybe it has been challenged. If SBF's lawyers think that was unfair, they can still challenge it on appeal, saying that it's illegal or unfair or whatever. Regardless of all that, the current rules allow this behavior, and so the judge allows those kinds of questions.
Within those rules, is the prosecution's use of that rule theatrical? Absolutely -- that's their job: to persuade a bunch of normal people, that the person on the stand is guilty. Persuasion of anybody always requires both rhetoric and logic.
> Weird. I don't believe he even had an obligation to read any of it.
they're very clearly saying that they believe that under the current legal system, the "theatrics" are not allowed.
Here's why it seems reasonable to me. Imagine the counterfactual: If the prosecutor wants to ask him questions about that text without having him read it. If she reads him and asks him a question, he can just say "Is that what it says? I don't remember that." Then she has to hand it to him for him to read, point out where she read from, and give him a chance to read it, and then finally ask her question again. And if there is more than one section, or even more than one question on the same section, then the paper has to go back and forth.
If he reads it, then it establishes several things at once: The jury has heard the text that the question is going to be about, the defendant has read the original text and also has access to the context in order to answer questions, and the defendant has verified that what was read is what was written. It makes the whole trial go more smoothly, it's relevant to the trial, and it's not inherently insulting or humiliating (unlike cartwheels or farting on command), and doesn't fundamentally change the outcome of the testimony.
Maybe a real lawyer (or law historian) would have more to say; but in any case, defense lawyers have had hundreds of years to raise objections, and they haven't, so my "Baysean prior" is that there are probably very good reasons for the rule being the way it is.
I mean, maybe? If you claim you can't be the murderer because you were at a cartwheeling convention, you probably will be asked to show that you can do a cartwheel.
The judge will decide if the request is relevant. Your lawyers will object if it isn't.
he agreed to take the stand, he agreed to everything. what would the lawyer object with "your honor, they're making him read" lmao
This is a criminal trial, a formal procedure society uses to determine the course of someone's life. Dozens of people, including me, are devoting several weeks of their lives to making a careful determination of guilt or innocence. His entire defense appears to be that he acted at all times "in good faith". He just spent a day on the stand testifying to his good faith efforts to run his company. Then he turns around and cannot even follow the simple requests in the process as we try to determine his guilt or innocence. Where the fuck are his good faith efforts in this testimony? Of course I am not going to actually attack the defendant, but now I have to work extra hard to separate this childish behavior from the actual facts of the case, as I deliberate on the charges.
Why did he take the stand at all?
Best case: the situation gets substantially better
If you like to take risks, the answer is obvious.
In fact, even talking to police has the possibility to make you better off for example if you can wrongly lead them to not think you're the suspect.
Lawyers are there to make sure the police do their job
Especially after the disaster that was the evidentiary hearing where he offered some testimony without the jury present. (The judge wanted to see if what he wanted to testify was allowable)
During that testimony (where he was under oath), he rambled, misinterpreted questions, gave evasive answers and generally acted like he did in some interviews.
On the Friday, with the jury present he actually told his life story (to humanize himself) and answered mostly softball questions, before ending his direct with reframing deflections of the evidence and other people's testimony.
It might be easier for you to work from the viewpoint that SBF ran a cult. What sort of person starts and runs one? How do they treat possible recruits? How do they treat unbelievers? How do they treat neutral outsiders? Who is in the "inner circle"?
It is my belief that SBF felt he could negotiate his way out of trouble. That he just had to talk to the outsiders like he talked to his believers and then everything would be fine. The prosecutors kept showing to the jury what he actually said to his inner circle - and that sank SBF's case.
Great interview (available as podcast and on YouTube)
https://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/the-rise-and-fall...
For the book to sell, he had to release it now, while the story is ongoing. But that means he doesn't have time to rewrite the whole thing to get the tone right and pretend he wasn't charmed.
So either he's pretending he was charmed by SBF so that he can pretend the book makes sense, or he really was charmed. Either of these outcomes boosts his book sales.
Lewis believes what he needs to believe to sell his book. Is that a coincidence? Maybe.
to explain this, first I need to give some background, then I'll reply wrt SBF
-----------------------------
I'm "high functioning" autistic, I have testified in a court, and I have been rebuked by the judge for not "doing it right", and I can safely say I was the smartest person in the room, in sole possession of most of the facts, with a more detailed memory than anybody there, and I was not trying to lie or equivocate in any way; Their questions are ridiculous and they exist in a loaded framework that is impossible for a smart detailed person to navigate. I'll give an example or two:
"Did Susie Q. sign this position in your presence?" (and I had just been been rebuked for straying from yes or no)
If I say "no" or "I don't know" then my side of the case is harmed. If I say "yes" my side is maybe helped, but not by much, Susie Q's name is on the lawsuit itself, it's not like there's a question as to her loyalties. And I think, but I don't know because I'm not an attorney, that the question is perfunctory; but I had been completely screwed earlier by a perfunctory question, and I'm not allowed to ask "what is the spirit of this question", it's only yes or no.
But here's the thing: Susie Q signed 7 petitions, 2 of them in my presence, the others not. I know this because I tabulated the petitions. Whether I witnessed them or not, I can't tell this petition apart from any of the others, I retained all of them, but only "petitioned" one of them.
So, should I say "yes" in the spirit of the question? what if the deck is loaded and they know this particular one is not one that I have any knowledge of, and now I'm perjuring myself? Did Susie Q. sign this petition in my presence?
There were dozens of questions like this, questions that normies think are reasonable, but a person who is specific seems as incredibly ambiguous and wants to clarify in order to answer honestly, and clarifying is considered to be derailing justice.
Earlier my own attorney asked me if the whole stack of petitions in front of him were the ones that I submitted. I said no, they are not. The other side moved to end the lawsuit right there. There was no going back, no clarifying.
I said they were not the petitions I submitted because the signatures were collected on a 2 part form, a (top) signed petition, (a cut right here xxxx line) and an independent (bottom) signed separable proxy vote. I sliced the two halves of the sheets apart because the petitions were for one aspect of an upcoming proceeding, and the proxies were for a different aspect; what I was shown were photocopies of all the two part forms intact, but literally not the separated original petitions that I had submitted. Yes or no, are these the petitions? Don't perjure yourself and no do-overs.
Luckily my attorney came up with a way to "get them into evidence" some other way, but "are these the petitions" was "asked and answered".
the system is rigged (in favor of the machine doing whatever it wants) and that I pissed the judge off by trying to tell the truth was beyond enraging, when sitting before me as respondent was an attorney who was actually lying. (respondent is civil defendant, not counsel for defendant)
I explained how giving the short obvious answer screwed me. You have to grasp the story I told in totality if you want to render judgements based on how smart you know everybody is. Every sentence I included was for a reason, it fits together like a puzzle. There were many other facts I left out because they were unnecessary. But for some reason, you simply look for slim reasons to attack. smh
In this case it's likely that the lawyers are the smartest people in the room when it comes to the law, which is all that matters.
You didn't say it because your reasoning is motivated, you're inventing something to say to and about me to indicate your scorn.
But that is why I wrote in the first place, to say that everybody is heaping scorn on SBF and ignoring what it's like to be asked those questions in a trial environment.
So finally we've arrived at a place where you have the beginning of a chance of understanding what I was saying all along. Sorry it took this long, but I was saying "why is everybody tripping over themselves to register their scorn, when the facts of the matter are more interesting. Facts should motivate juries, not scorn."
I don't live in the world of scorn, and your scorn does not make me feel bad. It makes me think less of you, that you can't engage in a discussion with trying to self congratulate and seek group approval for your distaste for people who are different.
and before you say "I didn't say that", I can't write a million replies to a million people (I actually can, but people don't like to read it) so I'm replying at this point in a multi-message thread to the overall tone of the crowd that you are agreeing with.
-----------------------------
>whether he had taken a private plane to the Super Bowl—to which Sassoon responded by presenting a photograph of SBF fast asleep in the embrace of a comfy chair on a private jet
Look, if I, an out of shape nerd with no interest in sports, were travelling to a Super Bowl city, to meet various financial big shots who are all there, to also promote my finance-oriented crypto scheme, when a fair percentage of sports venues are called BITCONNECT STADIUM and a fair percentage of athletes are endorsing crypto schemes, AND, I'm running a multi-billion dollar company in Bermuda and I routinely fly private absolutely everywhere....
did I fly a private plane to the superbowl? literally? no, no I didn't. I went in an Escalade.
But I know you wouldn't like that answer, and I don't want to be accused of lying, so let me figure out the spirit of your question. Any analysis tells me that the spirit of your question is to paint me as a bad person. Why is a public servant (prosecutor) conspiring to make me look bad? How about we focus on the facts and not try to paint ugly pictures. You bet I'd roll my eyes and look helpless at that moment.
Then to have everybody here, supposedly a bastion of analytical people, simply take pleasure in making fun of somebody caught in an unfair process, which is a process they would melt in if they were exposed to it, is discouraging.
SBF was guilty, he should be punished, but all you rabble wanting to throw tomatoes at him as they lead him away? Nah, you're just rabbling bullies.
It sounds like you think he might be trying to be honest and forthright, but his intentions are lost in translation.
Whereas the other commenters think it's more likely that he was being obstructionist?
I'm not thinking it's all one way or the other.
A person who is lying/willing to lie will still take every opportunity to tell the truth if it makes him look good.
Separately, an autistic person has trouble understanding and being understood, and then emotions flare and the autistic person is more disconnected.
His autistic answers to questions can look evasive, but they are not necessarily, especially if the truth is actually on his side. There will be many questions he is trying to answer honestly because the truth is on his side, but his awkwardness looks evasive.
He may simultaneously have a motive and willingness to also be evasive and lie.
And then a layer of he-said-she-said, there are always two sides to a story and how to remember and tell it, and the truth lies in the middle (with the lies? hahaha)
If the defendent is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, I am pointing out that much of what people are making great sport of here can be interpreted as reasonable doubt. But at the same time, I don't doubt that there was a strong case against him overall, and he was guilty.
To use a blunt analogy, to me I'm hearing people saying "look at that lying cheating wop eat spaghetti on his private plane and as his last meal!" (I chose Italian because I am) Well, that lying cheating Italian might be named Ponzi (the other reason I chose Italian) and he deserves to go to jail, but it's this bystander jeering that sounds bad to me, that type of attitude can be turned against any one of us.
When I read the 2nd hand accounts of it, all I see are people making fun of a person who I see as autistic. That has made me not even read up on all the 2nd hand accounts, so I can't draw the more sweeping generalizations that you feel comfortable making. mea culpa
and any person is going to be more uncomfortable when questioned about the illegal parts. I'm simply saying that will exaggerate the autism experience and make him look extra guilty compared to a smooth talking guilty huckster.
I do believe he's guilty.
I'm not a medical professional, but he actually doesn't seem autistic to me. For one, he is rather socially and emotionally manipulative.
One needs to also remember that he is a drug addict. I'm sure it hasn't been easy being in jail becuase of that.
(FWIW, I agree with pretty much the rest of your points.)
This is precisely why you shut up, and plead the fifth. You'll be eviscerated on cross-examination when you don't.
Although in his case, he probably should have pled guilty, and begged for mercy, instead.
Splitting hairs over definitions and genie-like interpretations of what sentences mean isn't smart, it's annoying most of the time.
This is why you never should talk about being "the smartest person in the room". Because if you're that kind of person, you will inevitably try to show your genius work, and it will always be severely lacking.
I'm sorry, but you were not the smartest person in the room. You fail to understand what a prosecutor does and why, and you fail to understand what makes good testimony.
Maybe you had the highest amount of raw brain power in the court room, but with no intellectual curiosity or humility, that's like running the fastest CPU with no cooling on an unstable power supply.
I have no intellectual curiosity? omg you are pathetic. I'm the only person in that situation (including the attorneys) who had read all the of the voluminous bylaws and researched every aspect of the parts that I did not understand because IANAL. And I did all that way before any of this dispute came up, simply because I am intellectually curious. I was the previous President, I knew all the players, I know what they read and did not read.
When the disputes came up, I knew how the rules dictated they be handled. Other shareholders came to me and asked for my help because they knew I knew. Smarter people than you will always outfox you by knowing the rules better than you. It's more gentlemanly for you to take your L than to look for some tiny thing to crow about that is essentially off topic.
- Is the system rigged? Yes. - Are laws written by mediocre people hence full of loopholes? Yes. - Are most people in the Justice system mediocre? Yes, to the best of my knowledge your honor. - Is Justice != Law application? Yes, greatest marketing scam calling it Justice Department. - Is SBF a scammer that had a chip on his shoulder and got rich off other peoples money? All signs point to yes. - Does he deserved to be in jail? In SBF words, “Yep”.
Mate, I don’t question your intellect or memory, surely you are God - even in a forum where there is no lack of bright people - but your emotional intelligence is severely handicapped, so much that the “functional” part of your self description falls into doubt. You come across as the Simpsons comic store guy. Chill.
Guy once told me his job was to write some law in Spain, or for the EU, or somewhere in between. He submits his writings to his bosses, who tell him (paraphrased): "it's too clear, too watertight. Go back and make it more ambiguous." So he did.
It’s like hiring a web design firm and then showing up with a complete mockup - give them room to work.
smart autistic people have trouble communicating with people who are not precise in a venue which pretends to insist on precision, and here's a vivid example showing how innocent things can go wrong
and you think afterward you need to reiterate the attitude people have that triggered me to write in the first place. Yes, I know. Now read my story, it's a response to what you said, with details that can be discussed which you've ignored, details you should quote as a response rather than just telling me what I already know.
I didn't say I was the smartest person in the room to imply that "everybody should listen to me". I said it to ensure the reader that the troubles that ensued in the story were not due to me being unable to follow what was going on. I followed it, it made no sense without context that they were denying me. It would make no sense to anybody paying attention, but clarification was not possible.
But nowhere in your vast and vaunted store of EQ-that-I-am-lacking do you find any empathy for me and my experience. You just have the urge to tell me I'm wrong, it's my fault, etc. I'm submitting your response as further evidence of my point.
Out of curiosity, were you given the option of giving a deposition instead of taking the witness stand?
----
Random boredom-browsing took me to this article: https://www.gu.se/en/gnc/defendants-with-autism-spectrum-dis...
> A defendant with ASD may shift the topic of the court discussions to a topic which is of interest to them and it can be difficult for anyone to interrupt them. The interest may be one of the individual’s preoccupations. Jurors may perceive this behaviour as an indication that the defendant is deliberately being evasive and trying to avoid answering the question that has been asked of them. As mentioned earlier, they may also go into excessive and unnecessary detail (and often at great length) when asked a question. Their responses may, in addition to being detailed and lengthy, it can also be repetitive
----
Like most of us here, I've got ASD too - and I've been in court too, though only once, as a small-claims plaintiff (with a no-show defendent and got a default judgement against someone with a negative net-worth, fun...); and yeah, I remember putting a lot of details into what I said in court - but I thought it was all relevant (still, the judge said I would have won anyway even if it wasn't a default judgement...).
But yeah - if I was was ever a criminal defendent, the prosecution would probably let me talk myself into a trap - or something. Stuff like that makes me think I should intentionally play-up the autism instead of trying to act normal, to clearly demonstrate to the jury that I'm far more of a social-idiot than a cold sociopath.
"Most"?
Sometimes judges will hive off a piece of a case to "a special master" or something like that, to answer a subsidiary question. This was such a thing, the person presiding was a retired judge, and he has "powers" (like kicking me out if I continued to not say "yes or no", which kills my case because I'm the one making the complaint) and his purview was answering the question of whether the petitions had been properly served. All parties to the suit were there, but it was not in a court, and there was no "stand", we all sat around a table. I suppose it was something like a deposition, but the master was there and my attorney was not free to argue directly with their attorney.
This piece of the story is also a big bowl of horribly unfair spaghetti. Wanna hear it?
There is no such thing as "service" or "serving" where a shareholder petition is concerned, there's no standard for it, it's not a thing. You could do it by mail, etc. because the officers are your fiduciaries and they are to look out for your interests.
As it stood, by total coincidence, when I went to the front desk where paperwork like an actual service would be handled, the "mailing address" so to speak, who is standing right there but the president of the board! So I smiled and said "I've got petitions for you", which she was well aware my group had been collecting, they just thought we'd never make it over the hump. She went cold and like wouldn't take the envelope, was holding her hands away, and told me to leave it at the desk, the desk she was standing by. So I did.
Then she started inventing reasons why these petitions had not been served properly (they were served the way she told me to). In her deposition, this event turned into me "lying in wait, angrily physically assaulting her with the envelope". I was not angry: nobody thought we could get enough signatures but we did, I was positively giddy. I wasn't even showing my inner Nelson, "HAA-HAA", that's what I was covering up with my smile.
In any case: to repeat, there is no standard for service, it's not a thing. But the way we delivered them was the way service would be made. She is also my fiduciary who was obligated to look after my shareholder rights. It cost me about $250,000 in attorney fees to just cover this piece of the case. How can an overfull court system claim that this is something that must be looked into? They had to invent reasons to look into it.
All entirely separate from further time and money wasting whether what we were petitioning was something we could petition (it was, to call a shareholder meeting) and what is allowed to come to the floor at a shareholder meeting (you know who decides that, who courts won't override? shareholders, and they'd be at the meeting) and we were explicitly petitioning to remove board members at the meeting, another of our enumerated rights in the by-laws. We did not have the right to call an election, but all board members being removed triggers an election under a separate clause so... if you're going to make up a standard, it's so easy to see this should be thrown to the shareholders.
The board was simply throwing up one implausible excuse after another to avoid calling the meeting. So many legal questions which weren't even legal questions, for this type of corporation there are no standards for any of it, but the court was entertaining far flung notions borrowing ideas from other facets of industry as sort of frontier justice or something.
It should have been a slam dunk, I don't know why the court didn't just order a meeting immediately because meetings are easy to hold, it's not a big deal, and no matter what, the shareholders were both the affected parties and the arbiters, so why not just let them have a meeting?
oh, the attorney lady was an employment law attorney, and I know of another incident where she claimed somebody had assaulted her with documents. I have a feeling that's her modus operandi in employment lawsuits "they were angry, they might have done anything". Disgusting. And equally disgusting to spend a million in shareholder money trying not to have a shareholder meeting.
No you just do what your lawyer says, and perhaps that will form part of the defence. But this was Sam's problem, being so confident he was smarter than the lawyers when in this domain he was half an idiot.
My lawyer did not anticipate that when he showed me photocopies and asked me "are these the petitions" that I would answer "no they are not". I don't know the standards of the law, "photocopy just as good", and it's second nature to him. I actually fear perjuring myself; my opponent, an attorney completely did not.
I've been in several large lawsuits. My attorneys like working with me, I am incredibly diligent, I research everything I can, I come up with ideas they didn't think of, and most importantly, I seek and follow all of their advice and never mention a peep about the case, etc.
my lawyer still got me into hot water by not preparing for these questions becaused they seemed obvious to him, and the system jumped on board.
I have watched a lot of hours of court cases. The adversarial lawyers are very literally trying to get you to screw up verbally. That’s their job. They could hold of a picture of an apple and say “is this an apple, yes or no.” Or even “is this a photograph of an apple yes or no?” And depending on what they mean the answer could be both.
I stopped reading after that
I don't think it's lack of wisdom but rather pathological hubris and a God-Complex. I've met kids like SBF at MIT. Very smart but at some point they think the rules don't apply to them. The've never failed before so why would they start now. After all, he was like the youngest billionaire, rich parents, good grades, top schools. Everything has gone his way so the thought of admitting failure was out of the question. The defense also took this weird strategy of painting SBF as incompetent manger who had no clue what his subordinates were up to. Who knows, maybe that will get softer sentencing.
TBH I wouldn't be surprised if he gets out after 2-3 years on "good behavior". those political donations have to count for something. He very well may have the last laugh.
Let's pretend that Congress legalizes marijuana. The folks still in prison who had been convicted of selling or transporting it would not get released - unless the statute removing it from Schedule 1 also specifically required releasing those already convicted.
0: https://www.kohlerandhart.com/blog/2023/03/15/how-is-good-be...
Which is exactly what representatives from Facebook, Google and Microsoft did on trials and when being questioned by congress
To be exact, they weren't trials; only hearings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRelVFm7iJE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
Personal criminal trials hinge quite a bit more on "is the defendant personally likeable/credible" than a civil trial involving a multinational corporation.
Failed experiment of sorts.
No way he had all this "success" without a helping hand. He was someone else's puppet and I want to know who that was.
In some way he was the perfect guy for the job - not too intelligent but also not too dumb, unscrupulous, easily controlled through huge inflated ego and obvious vices like substance addiction. I imagine the hidden hand looking to its minions and thinking - that guy could work out for us. But if he doesn't - it's all plausible deniability from thereon out.
Giveaway: What 28 year old is quite so perfect at political "donations" aka bribes? I think someone told him what to do.
>What 28 year old is quite so perfect at political "donations" aka bribes?
One, he wasn't "perfect" or even close to it - he mostly gave to crypto positive politicians of both parties, and two, his lawyer mother and his lawyer father helped him
There's persistent rumours that he was set up and backed by Tether/Bitfinex, after the heat got a bit much for Bitfinex in 2017.
Notice how Alameda somehow printed $39 billion "worth" of tethers and only ever sent about $4 billion of actual money/crypto to Tether.
What does such role/job entail? It sounds like being a drill sergeant on a lawyers' boot camp.
The process is known as devilling but, you might expect, this means different things in different parts of the UK:
I think there were potentially two problems. First, for the previous 10 years, lying and taking massive risks actually did work for him: Even if some people became disillusioned and stopped buying what he was selling, he could just walk away from them and start working with people who would.
Secondly -- well, what else could he have done? It's a bit like back when we saw those AIs playing Go or Starcraft or whatever at the point where it was clear they were going to lose: They'd just start making random moves, because terrible moves had as much chance of winning as "minimize loss" moves.
There's an interesting article I read which is half book review, half critique of SBF and "Effective Altruism" (EA), that has some interesting connections[1]. Basically, EA encourages "cost / benefits utilitarian analysis" thinking; every time SBF lied (or committed fraud), he could tell himself that it was actually moral because it maximized some other good towards thinking people somehow. It also encourages poker-type gambling in some circumstances, where it makes sense to take a bet where you lose 75% of the time, as long as the potential payout is larger than 4x.
And if that article's reading is right, FTX actually had a profitable business. All they had to do was sit back and take x% of trades and they would have been fine. But that wouldn't have been a huge massive multiple that SBF was looking for, so he went in for a bunch of poker-style bets with his customer's money -- ultimately in the name of making more money to give that money away. (And he did actually give a load of money away, even when it didn't make financial sense to do so.)
SBF's choices were:
1. Accept that you're going to jail for a long time no matter what, and try to minimize the damage. Maybe you can cut your jail time in half.
2. See if you can weasel your way out of it. Maybe your jail time is a bit worse, but maybe you don't get any at all.
First of all, he'd always been able to do #2 so far, so why would this time be any different?
Secondly, #1 means a huge emotional downside for current SBF; #2 only means a potential downside for future SBF. The attitude he got into, where he screwed everyone else in favor of "current SBF", carries over into screwing "future SBF". So there's a sort of poetic justice to it.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AocXh6gJ9tJC2WyCL/book-revie...
After interacting with professional managers with degrees from supposedly illustrious institutions for years during my career, I don't see a good basis for this expectation. What is more fascinating is how the professional management class, as incompetent as they are, have managed to gain the reputation of wisdom and competence in the collective subconscious.
Have they? It's pretty common to hear people complaining about "clueless MBAs" here and on other parts of the internet.
So... money laundering?
SBF is a dumb criminal, who then screwed over everyone he abused into creating this theft. I honestly can't imagine many easier setups, less sympathetic defendants, or parades of pissed off co-workers willing to put the knife in him before he got it in them.
> SBF did not have any intention of committing a crime.
His fraud started early on, and he used the same tactic over and over again. He lied to his customers about how their funds were held, then abused them whenever any problem involving money came up in his life. Least self aware villan ever created.
At the end of the day, the defense had an unwinnable case. Their defendent is an idiot, and all of his co-conspirators plead guilty to all charges.
> Several of Bankman-Fried's previous defense teams quit on him
I remember SBF told someone at some point during his ill-advised media tour post-collapse, that his lawyers could "go fuck themselves".
But I was wondering what happened then with said lawyer... Is there a list somewhere of the teams that quit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withdrawal_from_representation
Even though this wasn't necessarily a moral issue, it did almost cost him his job and marriage. He didn't get the energy he wanted, but he did get rage issues. I kept trying to point this out, but he just wouldn't listen. He never admitted he was wrong about using T, however he was forced to quit using it.
It feels quite classically narcissist to me. I work for one. I'm not saying that lack of moral compass and narcissist are identical traits, but there are similar issues.
And as someone working for that sort of personality, I go through a simple reassurance process every day: have a lost sight of his true being (narccissist) or am I all the sudden calling him brilliant, drinking the cool-aid, saying I love him.
Luckily, I'm firmly grounded that I know who/what I am getting when I speak with him but talk with folks all over the company that are on the other side. It's amazing to hear it. SBF was that CEO and unfortunately, in my view, most of his folks were in the kool-aid/love-you camp.
To add to the parent post that had this: > It is extremely difficult to represent someone who thinks they did nothing wrong
It's extremely difficult to work with someone who thinks they can do no wrong as well. I try hard NOT to be that person.
No differences were observed between exercising and nonexercising and between placebo and [600mg test-e] treated subjects for any of the 5 subdomains of [Multi-Dimensional Anger Inventory]That’s one of the reason that transgender treatment is so insidious. Give a depressed teen girl testosterone and they will always feel incredible. Regardless of whether it’s actually a medically necessary treatment, it’s a treatment that makes you feel good. Psych meds can’t compete.
What does testosterone have to do with a moral compass?
But two points remain. 1. Had they been able to sustain this Ponzi scheme to IPO, he would be celebrated as a tech-god, as opposed to facing hard time. 2. The VCs aren't required to disclose their sales of crypto. My guess is they made money of this clown, directly at the expense of all the FTC users he fleeced. As long as that keeps happening, this sort of thing will never stop.
I've always felt this was probably the case. Take an idiot that needs to feel important, tell him he's a "boy genius" who can do no wrong and is always going to be misunderstood, and you basically have the perfect patsy. Till the end SBF just could not let go of that idea that he was smarter than everyone else, never realizing that this was always just a marketing gimmick.
At least Caroline Ellison had the sense to realize that she was living a delusion and quickly did what she could to walk away with minimal harm done to herself. In a few years she'll probably find herself making book deals and getting paid outrageous consulting fees once memory fades enough.
Like Jordan Belfort of Wolf of Wall Street infamy, or Andy Fastow of Enron. Why shouldn't she get in on the action? American publishers love a comeback story.
Take an idiot that needs to feel important, tell him he's a "boy genius"
I know very specific reasons people think Musk, Jobs, Gates, Zuck, and others are geniuses even if I don't agree in every case.
But... SBF? What did he even allegedly do (or preside over) that seemed smart or unique? It was... a crypto exchange. They had their own coin. Uh. Those are not unique things. I don't get it.
But your comment made me think. Maybe it was just an empty bubble of perception. VCs pretended he was a genius so they could use him, and told everybody he was a genius, so everybody thought he was a genius even though nobody could point to why they thought that way.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo... (wayback machine is needed because sequoia has taken it down)
He had a pedigree, I guess, and made some... money doing the arbitage thing. But also a lot of people do that? There seems to be no real intrinsic reason why this guy would be seen as a star.
I guess it was just kind of a "right guy right place right time thing" thing.
I'm reminded of the Johnny Carson line after dealing with crazy entertainment types: I'd give my bottom dollar for a regular person right now.
SBF founded FTX in 2019 when he was ~27 years old. At that point he had gone to MIT and done some arbitage stuff. More than I've accomplished but I mean, I'm not really seeing anything that ticketed this guy for stardom.
By age 27, Jobs had founded Apple Computer and was one of the major players in launching the whole personal computing industry.
I don't think highly of Elon Musk but I have zero difficulty understanding why people would think he's a genius sort of guy and give him money. Even I have to admit he's been at the helm for some wild achievements. Also certainly a charismatic guy in some ways. Not going to have a shortage of money thrown at his next venture.
But SBF?
Again... what was anybody seeing in this guy? Must have just been "right place right time" when the crypto hype wave was cresting.
He was also surfing high on his messiah complex with a kind of 2020’s version of white man burden which the public was enamoured with.
To what extent were SBF and Ellison tech though? This trend of labelling more or less any new company that attracts VC funding as tech is bothersome. It's the mental loophole that allowed Adam Neumann to embezzle huge amounts of investor money too (but he did it "right" so gets away with it), by claiming that WeWork wasn't just an office leasing company but a tech platform. None of these people are engineers of any kind, none of them have developed any kind of new tech. They are just ordinary business types who run a business that happens to employ a few coders.
It is fair to call FTX and WeWork tech companies because they built platforms, powered by the internet and apps to modernize legacy offline industries. That's been the definition of a tech company since the 90's dotcom boom.
You can make a cryptocurrency without creating any new tech whatsoever. And you can create a blockchain without creating crypto.
FTX was just an ordinary financial company, AFAICT. It had a bit of software to run the order book, but wasn't run by technical people, had no R&D effort and no obvious reason to develop one, and so on.
WeWork was just a company like any other, I can't see a single factor that could make this be a tech company.
To me, at heart, a tech company must develop some new kind of tech and do so in-house.
You already mentioned WeWork. FTX is another example. Given how few "tech" start-ups and big tech companies actually produce technology as their core product, I guess the sentiment of SBF and FTX being somewhat symptomatic is fair.
But yeah if he hadn't been caught, he'd be doing well now.
And based the infamous Matt Levine interview, it was at best a legit ponzi exchange, according to what Sam himself says about the thigns being traded there.
The famous Matt Levine interview was about yield farming which as far as I know SBF didn't actually do but which he provided a striking explanation of. While that is Ponzi like it's a bit of a disservice to call it a Ponzi as it's actually rather more cunning and was the basis of most of the 'distributed finance' boom and bust.
then the IPO hits, you cash out, take your exit, and drink your mint julip or mojoto in Bermuda while the whole thing burns down 2 years later. whole lotta "not my problem" at that point, and every one would think you're a genius.
I feel like even very, very long into his prison sentence he's still going to try to talk your head off insisting it was all a big misunderstanding. And he's going to be denied parole because he's going to try the same thing with the parole board every time.
I've seen enough people like this in BigCos. Some of the worst offenders are a certain kind of ex-FAANG employee -- the super brash know-it-all who actually doesn't.
[1] There isn't really a clear definition of the term. I mean something like "people who call themselves effective altruists".
> movement exists for people who yearn to hoard obscene wealth to justify their hoarding retroactively
"Actions speak louder than words". "History shows us". Well, what actions and what history show that "effective altruism" exists for people who want to hoard obscene wealth and feel virtuous about it?
The founder of the movement, in so far as that's an identifiable single person, is William MacAskill. He (allegedly, but I've not heard any claims that it's a lie) donates everything he earns above the UK's median income, which is something like £26k/year.
(MacAskill surely deserves some criticism for helping to set SBF on the path he took -- so far as I know he didn't at any stage suggest or endorse lying, cheating, and stealing, but he did suggest something along the lines of "earn as much as you can and give as much as you can" and we know how that ended up. But I think we should distinguish "gave one person advice that ended incredibly badly" from "primarily wants to help rich people feel good about hoarding obscene wealth".)
Another candidate for "founder of effective altruism" is Peter Singer. He works as a philosophy professor, which I can't imagine is an especially well paid job, and I know he gives away a substantial fraction of his income. (He got a $1M prize not so long away and gave away all of it.)
Another is Toby Ord. Like MacAskill, he's set a not-very-high threshold and gives away any income he gets beyond it.
It doesn't seem credible to me that these people's intention was to help people justify hoarding obscene amounts of wealth.
So maybe the claim isn't that that was the original purpose of the movement, but is that that's what today's typical "effective altruists" want. I'm not sure how best to evaluate that. We could take a look at effectivealtruism.org and see what advice it gives -- does it say "you should get into a highly lucrative career and give a bit of money away" or something of the kind? Well, no. They say e.g. "A common misconception is that effective altruism is only about donating money to global health charities or ‘earning to give’. But community members support many causes besides global health, only a minority are prioritizing earning to give, and effective altruism is as much about how to use your time effectively as your money. In fact, the organization 80,000 Hours argues that for many people, their career decisions matter more than their decisions about where to donate."
There's an annual-ish "EA survey" (insert here all the usual caveats about surveys giving you unreliable and biased information) which suggests that between ~15% and ~25% of self-identified "effective altruists" think of themselves as "earning to give", which is what I would expect anyone to say who was in it to hoard obscene amounts of wealth and feel good about it.
Maybe I'm looking in the wrong places. What's your evidence (or callalex's) that EA exists for people who hoard obscene wealth or want to?
I am serious, you cannot make up that @#€&
Effective altruism is just a way for sociopaths to mask their actions while they burn down the world.
If SBF was born to an average family, none of this would have happened and he might even be a normal person, maybe a little cocky. Or he would be constantly struggling to live a basic life between jobs as he keeps being fired or let go for being insufferable.
I highly doubt he would have gotten into Jane street
To be fair, he was clearly quite smart. But...not as smart as he thought he was.
I'm not a doctor or a psychologist, so I'm not making a diagnosis, just offering the possibility that that may be what is at the root of the situation.
His parents are charged too, will they end up in prison?
Have they been criminally charged? As far as I know, they have only been sued by FTX to obtain money back.
I mean, they still have their jobs as law professors at Stanford.
One of the most fascinating takeaways I had from that show was the fact that he used to play the game Diplomacy with a specific strategy: he would intentionally make alliances with other players, then stab them in the back. He would do this over and over. Why nobody figured this out, I don’t know.
So when I go back and view his actions through this lens, it makes perfect sense.
https://grantland.com/features/diplomacy-the-board-game-of-t...
https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-federal-parole-sy...
I’d guess that the defence team knew they’d loose and this was in some way the start of their sentencing reduction plan: “the money was stolen to cover mostly business losses and to keep FTX going rather than for personal gain”.
Fact is, this could have helped him and his company, eventually.
Another two or three years of very sympathetic (bought) politicians on his side and his business could have become legit as a result of those politicians forcing the liquidation/closure of almost all SBF's competitors (certainly Binance would have become bust), and the US "standing behind" FTX as a beloved crypto assed in the fight against China. I.e. very, very similar to what's happening now with AI and with people like Sam Altman.
Which is to say that I'm surprised to see that the defence hasn't pushed more on that "SBF was just a pawn in the hands of very corrupt politicians"-card, that could have worked given a politically divided jury.
For added chances of success also try to find some pro-Palestine social media statuses or anything similar just hinting to that in the past of the district attorneys and federal agency people who had anything to do with this whole trial, and this being the very liberal Southern District of NY of course that there are big chances for that type of content to be found, and in so doing further turning SBF into a political prisoner instead of just a money swindler.
That’s as good a strategy that he could have had given the circumstances, i.e. going for a future presidential pardon and turning his trial into a political case, because, technically, of course that he did all of those things and that by the rules that apply to big money swindlers he should spend the rest of his days mostly in prison, but that’s the whole thing, if he still wants to be free anytime soon his defenders should have turned this trial into something totally different than a big money swindler case.
Of course, that’s also how OJ got out of all the mess he had put himself into the first time around, i.e. because his trial had very rapidly turned into a political case, it was not about a murder case anymore.
> And what if he pulled a trump appointed judge who
Then go for the DAs and the federal agents.
Not saying that this would have worked (almost no-one was on Dreyfus's side at the beginning, apart from close family and friends), but it was one the best chances he could have had (on account of him being guilty).
Take from Tiffany Fong who was at the trial: https://youtu.be/wpKQWJFA3aw?t=850
To be fair to SBF's lawyers, you're going to have a hard time coming up with a good defence when your defendant is bang to rights.
Caroline Ellison pleaded to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
Looking at the Federal Sentencing Guidelines[1], even accepting for her being a cooperating witness, she's very likely going to prison too for a fair amount of time. Just for (probably much) less time than SBF.
[1] Run your own calculations: https://www.sentencing.us
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-03/sbf-s-inn...
"Ellison, Wang and Singh will likely get no or very little prison time for their testimony, several criminal defense lawyers who’ve followed the case said."
Do you realize that those 19 murders likely carried 19 consecutive life sentences as a maximum sentence?
However, all of the expert opinion I have seen on this suggests that there will be no jail time.
But presumably there will be at least some effort to secure a substantial downward departure from the guidelines sentence.
SBF even if he gets a huge sentence will just get eventually pardoned after 6-10 years. Again, soft slush money.
According to you? Because “trust me bro”? What are basing this on?
- they go visit the Saudi rulers. Yes, the most powerful political leader goes TO SAUDI ARABIA to kiss ass. Why?
- they begin planning/fundraising for a "presidential library"
- they plan their "offices", often with donations
- they have the power to pardon people with no restriction
- ye old speech circuit
- in a similar vein, the Trump inauguration exposed the various inauguration slush funds used by presidents over the years when they get elected.
In case you don't get it, all of this involves slush money and backchannels and the like. Granted the pardon power is more visible than most since Clinton pardoned a lot of white collar stuff: https://www.justice.gov/pardon/pardons-granted-president-wil... particularly Marc Rich.
And the old game of announced sentences vs the actual amounts served is often hilarious.
Between "good behavior", connections to get in lower security facilities, reduction on appeal, and of course there are tricks like only having to show up to actual prison months after sentencing (Elizabeth Holmes took 5 months before actually having to report to prison).
Yeah the feds don't do as lenient good behavior, but you can still get 54 days credit per year served.
There's other tricks. SBF might be able to help recover funds if he cooperates after conviction, and that can lead to prison being delayed further.
So sure it seems like SBF is getting his comeuppance, and he's way too famous for reductions, but the news cycle is remarkably fast, and the public will forget about him in a year or two.
Kenneth Lay allegedly died of a heart attack before going to prison. Now, I would like to assume that was above board, but based on a couple of my relatives dying, death is a bunch of forms and a cremation of ... some body.
Well, it was a very big fraud.
If the median prison sentence for nonviolent theft of a $30,000 car is 2 years, why shouldn't the prison sentence for stealing $3 billion be 200,000 years?
Good - she was SBF's girlfriend and was told what to do by him.
Bad - her dad, an MIT economist worked with Gary Gensler, head of the SEC. They probably have connections
I would agree with you that it's a good reason if there were evidence of the coercion. I don't think we can assume it outright.
what does any of that mean?
* She and a few other people were in relationships with SBF and/or each other at the time. A polycule is generally a connected graph of n > 2 people (the nodes) in romantic/sexual relationships (the edges).
* The kimchi arbitrage was a trade where you bought BTC for USD somewhere other than Korea, transferred them from the non-Korean exchange to a private wallet, then sold those BTC for Won in Korea, and then sold those Won for USD (and repeat the cycle). It worked because Korea had strict capital controls for its citizens that meant that the price of bitcoins on native exchanges was substantially higher than outside. It also carried tremendous risk because you had to wait for those bitcoins to settle in your private wallet at each cycle, effectively exposing you to risk associated with fluctuations in the bitcoin price.
Physical movement in and out of South Korea is part of the Kimchi arbitrage, so you have to "run off" to do it.
Is this a real thing, or just a finance joke I just don't understand?
I love a good arbitrage technique, but this one really just reads like an excuse to go to South Korea with your friends (or your polycule).
The risk that you end up getting banned from entering Korea for doing this trade too much was real, but I don't think anyone who tried this trade faced any of the possible consequences.
However, she was the principal co-conspirator, presiding over a bucket shop that drained 7 billion directly out of the accounts of FTX. As a Stanford finance graduate with trading experience, it's ridiculous to claim she was not aware of the "backdoor" source of Alameda's liquidity and the massive loses they accrued gambling with the money of FTX customers.
This is false. She pled guilty to wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The crimes she pled to carry a maximum sentence of 110 years. She was never charged with tax violations. She will receive credit for her testimony but she will certainly do prison time.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23495753-caroline-el...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/united-states-attorney-...
"Moreover, if the defendant fully complies with the understandings specified in this Agreement, the defendant will not be further prosecuted criminally by this Office for any crimes, except for criminal tax violations, related to her participation in [the FTX scandal]."
IIUC, by "further" they mean "in addition to the 7 counts she pled guilty to [and could serve jailtime for]."
The charges she faces before the plea deal carried a maximum sentence of 110 years and no mandatory minimum. According to several experts (*, she will likely walk away with no jail time or, at most, a few years in a minimum security jail. The prosecution against her was basically stayed - again, my conjecture - as we will find out in a few weeks time.
(* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-03/sbf-s-inn...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/united-states-attorney-...
"CAROLINE ELLISON, 28, is charged with and has pled guilty to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, each of which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; two counts of wire fraud, each of which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison; one count of conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison; one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison; and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. ...
"The statutory maximum sentences are prescribed by Congress and are provided here for informational purposes only, as any sentencing of the defendants will be determined by a judge. "
As someone else said, this is factually false on the charges she pled to.
Mainly, though, I don’t know what you mean by “which she’s unlikely to be found guilty of”. When someone pleads guilty, if the judge accepts the plea, there is no other finding of fact. She already is guilty. That’s what pleading is.
She’s already been found guilty (by virtue of her plea). What hasn’t happened is her sentencing.
Such a system would make it nearly impossible to proesecute the higher levels of a criminal enterprise.
It’s easy to prosecute the foot-soldiers of a criminal enterprise with outside evidence. The leadership of it typically requires testimony from others within the enterprise.
So, your approach of eliminating all benefits to criminal defendants for cooperating with the government would *massively* enable organized crime, and would end with a criminal justice system that comes down hard on the low-level members, while giving the organizers and planners a walk.
I don't think that makes someone an incel and it's unnecessary to attack people for hating women because they clearly have not expressed anything of the sort.
like, everyone at FTX was banging each other constantly. And I can't see how the celibacies or lack thereof of the judges and lawyers is a discussion topic.
at this point it's hard to tell if this is shillbot trying to derail a convo, or just abusing words that have become too common to the point of losing meaning.
Inceldom is not about the struggle or loneliness, but about directing that into hate for women as a category.
their POV is that this is net good for society. outcome we want = no crime
how to deter? 1/ big punishment for main actor 2/ get complicit actors to cooperate
and so by giving plea deals the gov shows that cooperation can save you
and she got a sweet deal, but she's not getting away scott-free, and will likely see real prison time and huge fines. yeah she may have another $2 million hidden away as Monero somewhere, but her career is busted -- no one is ever going to trust her after this -- and if the Feds get wind of cash they didn't know about that could end in more charges.
it certainly isn't a get out of jail free card, just a "dont spend 60 years in prison" card.
Don't forget -> book deal. She's still capable of making money off the outcome and transitioning into a career as more of an evangelist for what NOT to do.
The other involved principals pled guilty to multiple federal felonies, and are likely to spend at least some time in prison even if their sentencing gives them large reductions in what their sentence for those crimes otherwise would be for their cooperation.
At some point, every society has to decide where to draw the line at "this much punishment is enough punishment" when the crime is basically setting value on fire. If you don't, you end up with the whole society on trial ("Why aren't we prosecuting the people who gave them the money? Surely had they done their homework, they would have known...").
... and we end up drawing the line slightly on the side of "let the least-powerful guilty go" because there's heavy incentive to get them to turn on their bosses so our society can hold the most powerful (most equipped to hide their bad behavior and understand how to subvert the law) accountable at all. This is very much a problem at the intersection of justice and the realpolitik of enforcement.
(... technically, every German citizen was a Nazi. They didn't end World War II by nuking Germany until it glowed).
The fall guy? Come on.
Some low-level bank executive commits fraud and this place calls for the CEO's head. SBF was in charge an knew everything that was happening. IT sounds like he orchestrated most of it. There was zero element of rogue employees, or anything of the sort.
only two things wrong with this claim:
1. no CROs, CEOs or COOs were judicially punished in any way for the failure of their banks.
2. CROs and CEOs were clearly responsible for those failures. That's literally their whole job for which they were typically paid 7 to 9 figures annually.
This is a very weird argument you're making. They successfully prosecuted the main perpetrator of a massive and very complex fraud in spite of him being (pre collapse) the absolute golden child of the industry. That's a huge win.
Getting time for anyone else is far less important than getting guilty on all charges for the main perpetrator.
Not OP, but as a layperson like myself, what is the compelling proof that "complex fraud" actually happened? Last night I clicked 3 different articles--including Wikipedia's page on the trial--and it was a really long read. I should be able to read somewhere in a single paragraph, what was the main crime, and what was the best/crucial evidence for it. The Wiki page for instance began by listing a litany of alleged crimes--which for lay understanding is the wrong level of detail. I would like a clear, simple, compelling summary but it actually not that easy to find this information written concisely in a neutral article.
Alameda was also allowed to borrow far more money than other borrowers, because they were deeply in debt. Also bad.
Though this arrangement might initially evoke traditional banking practices with eg mortgages, the situation becomes even more problematic as Alameda secured their loans using tokens minted by FTX.
This might be more akin to a real estate mogul using shares of the bank granting their mortgages as collateral instead of the property itself—a clear conflict of interest, wrong way risk, and a shaky foundation for financial stability.
Edit: The bank in this case could play dumb and insist it had no idea that was fiscally irresponsible, which is basically what SBF argued, but at a certain level of incredulity you stop receiving the benefit of the doubt.
The issue that I have is the correct concept and the correct argument. The proof of fraud, I think, requires forensic evidence and proof beyond reasonable doubt. Not the optics and my personal level of credulity.
And I say this as a Marxist leftist, so it's not like I'm any supporter of cryptocurrencies, etc. I might even argue that under capitalism, people's notions of 'responsibility', 'stability', 'fraud' etc. are already so distorted that they don't have a coherent theory of what things are crimes and what things are just morally bad, socially bad, and so on.
Fraud has a specific meaning [1] but you could think about it as being a negligent misrepresentation of some fact for unjust financial enrichment. So if I say to you I'm a billionaire[2] that's just a lie not a fraud. But if I say to you "I'm a billionaire, invest with me and I'll make you a billionaire" and I take your money and just go spend it or whatever, that's a fraud because you were relying on a fact I negligently misrepresented and you were harmed. The complexity comes because there are lots of seperate laws under which fraud is illegal. So if you lie on a loan application that's a different type of crime to if you tell someone they are buying shares in a potato farm and the potato farm doesn't exist and you just spend their money on blow instead. They're both fraud but they are different kinds of fraud.
If I honestly get your cash for an investment, make that investment and lose all your money because it just doesn't work out, that's not a fraud.
Hope that's clear. The meaning of the word fraud doesn't change from a capitalist vs a Marxist perspective. It's just "fancy lieing for financial gain" either way.
[1] Here's a US-specific summary https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fraud
[2] I'm not. As far as I know at least.
Portraying Alameda as a typical borrower, while concurrently implementing a code change that singularly permitted them to maintain a negative account balance, is outright fraud.
Further, it seems like what you’re arguing is that more people should be prosecuted for banking crises, not that SBF shouldn’t be charged. Those two things aren’t mutually exclusive.
1)If you want to know the full facts of what he did and how the court case went you'd need to do more than read the wikipedia page.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/66631291/united-states-... is the full docket of original source materials if you want to find out for yourself.
It was a complex case so there are a lot of documents etc but all the actual facts of what happened in the case are there. IF you want to read who said what, what all the documents to and from the judge were etc, go nuts.
2)If you want a simplified version, it's basically what a sibling said. FTX was an exchange. That's supposed to look after people's assets that they place in custody so they can use those assets for investments. Alameda was a hedge fund. It's supposed to use investor's assets to make investments. Instead, FTX loaned customer assets to Alameda to invest. That in and of itself is no bueno right off the bat. It's a violation of the contract with customers when they deposit and is improper use of customer funds.
Secondly they kind of spent 8bn of the customer assets. On getting celeb endorsement, private jets, parties, conferences with big-wig speakers, real estate and other stuff. That's called stealing, and is also considered a no-no.
Third there were campaign finance violations. He took customer money and improperly used various front individuals and companies to make political donations. That's not legal.
Fourth he seems to have violated money-laundering laws either by part of the third thing or in some other way.
Fifth there was probably also wire fraud because everything is wire fraud and also because they actually had a Telegram Chat channel called "wire fraud" (they say irony is dead).
That's probably not all but it's enough.