Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?

BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually.

COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.

BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical.

COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?

BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/sam-bankman-frie...

(See the first paragraph of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BZ6XaCwN4QGgH9CxF/the-kelly-... for the outline of an explanation of why his reasoning was not applicable to most real-life scenarios. This is pretty subtle; >95% of the explanations on the Internet I've seen over the past week as to why SBF is "obviously wrong" don't actually work.)

Maybe I'm speaking too soon, but he does seem ready to accept that he lost this flip. It would obviously be insane to trust with him anything big at this point, but I'm optimistic that he won't fight to the bitter end.

- he lent his own hedge fund $8b collateralized by tokens he controlled issuance of (FTT, SRM, MAPS, OXY). At full size, the liquidation price of these tokens was 0 (he also purchased billions worth of FTT off the market when he could print them himself for free?).

- Sensing alameda was insolvent and customer funds were misappropriated, customers withdrew until they ran out of liquidity.

- Withdrawals were suspended

- Citing Bahamian authorities requests to unfreeze assets of bahamian residents, withdrawals were opened back up for bahamian residents. Hundreds of millions were withdrawn. Bahamian authorities have since made statements that no such requests were made (so this was just insiders stealing even more).

- Approx $500m of assets were drained from FTX wallets at the same time as FTX databse records were cleared (obviously not a hack, just insiders stealing even more).

- SBF goes on twitter to make new one-letter tweets while simultaneously deleting incriminating tweets so as to not trigger deletion bots picking up that he deleted said tweets.

Ongoing theft and destruction of evidence out in the open after stealing 10 billion dollars from over 1 million depositors. SBF has still not been arrested. This all but confirms the wildest of conspiracy theories.