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Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

vox.com

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#101

Post by sailplease »

jaywalk wrote: post #44
SevenNation wrote: post #23

> Bankman-Fried has maintained that FTX has never invested the deposits of crypto account holders on the exchange. I pressed him on that point via Twitter, and while he continued to insist that FTX did not directly use account money in this way, he said that Alameda — which he also owns — had borrowed far more money from FTX’s balance sheet for investments than he had realized, which ultimately left FTX vulnerable to…

FTX loaned the deposits to Alameda, and Alameda invested them. It's totally different from FTX making the investments themselves! /s

A loan is an investment.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#102

Post by TremendousJudge »

arcticbull wrote: post #61
monero-xmr wrote: post #22

A programmer who helped create Tornado Cash rots in a Dutch jail cell (not charged, might I add) while SBF, Do Kwan, Elizabeth Holmes, and Trevor Milton still remain free. SBF is actually in a $30 million penthouse playing League of Legends. Clown world

They should all be in prison bud and they’ll get their turn - the wheels of justice grind slow but they grind exceedingly fine. To avoid bringing them in without a charge yet, which is one of your main objections, the authorities are preparing their cases before arrest. And coordinating with many different parties, governments and police forces can take a long time. There’s no one “international police” and each nati…

They grind at different speeds depending on who you are. Have the wrong skin color at the wrong time and the wheels of justice will sentence you to execution you on the spot, no evidence, case, or trial necessary.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#103

Post by tsimionescu »

kranke155 wrote: post #56

SBF, his foundation and his family are well connected politically. NYT already did a bizarro puff piece on him, now Vox does this (which apparently directly received FTX foundation money). It’s absurd as he is essentially a well connected criminal. edit I do want to correct one thing - this is not a puff piece like the NYT one, actually it implicates him.

I wouldn't exactly call this a puff piece, unlike the NYT one.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#104

Post by data_maan »

monero-xmr wrote: post #49
delusional wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather have an FTX scandal than Tornado Cash. I'd rather someone does some fraud than actual funneling of money to terrorists, druglords, gangs, and other problematic organizations.

Encrypted messaging also helps terrorists, child sex abusers, arms dealers, and all manner of crime. It would be 100% safer if all messages were funneled through government servers for scanning. However, as a society a choice we made was to enable individuals to message secretly with each other over encrypted communications, even if there are significant and documented harms to society. Tornado Cash did not rob from…

> It would be 100% safer if all messages were funneled through government servers for scanning.

Uh... what?!

You do know that if you break encryption for gov't you break it for the bad guys as well?...

You do know that there are all kinds of nations that will throw you in prison if you hold the "wrong" opinions, which those opinions become known when they are funneled through the gov't servers?...

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#105

Post by ben_w »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #35
chrchang523 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is further evidence that he was thinking of this in terms of all-or-nothing coin flips. In case you haven't seen it: 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, w…

SBF talks about money like a prop trader who thinks that blowing your account is just a thing that happens to everyone in their lifetime, crossed with an extreme Rationalist (of the self-described "Rationalist" community) who thinks everything can be reduced to choosing between Column A and Column B based on which column has more utils .

Quite a lot of Rationalists aren't Utilitarians, for various reasons.

Most of the ones I hang out with seem to agree with my characterisation of Utilitarianism as what happens when philosophers discovered basic arithmetic and then just stopped there. Most recently:

"""I remember in secondary school, with nobody to teach me more than basic trigonometry and algebra, I spent 6 months figuring out what I later learned were the two ways 3D rendering can be done: ray tracing, and turning points in 3D space into points in 2D (screen) space and drawing those as 2D primitives.

Utilitarianism feels like even less than that, to me. It's the foundation of algebra upon which more can be built, saying that utility is a thing that can be combined, but it doesn't really say how to combine utility, and all the weird things that happen in extreme hypotheticals are because it's naively summing the potential utility of unbounded agents."""

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#106

Post by guelo »

kranke155 wrote: post #56

SBF, his foundation and his family are well connected politically. NYT already did a bizarro puff piece on him, now Vox does this (which apparently directly received FTX foundation money). It’s absurd as he is essentially a well connected criminal. edit I do want to correct one thing - this is not a puff piece like the NYT one, actually it implicates him.

People obviously want to hear what he has to say. Are you saying that an ethical media would refuse to interview him? Why?

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#107

Post by Barrin92 »

that's one of the wildest things I've ever read. So the guy faces criminal investigations and may owe people billions and he DMs a reporter and tells her literally, "yeah most of the ethics stuff I did was PR"..?

I don't pride myself on having a lot of criminal energy or anthing but I don't understand how he even got to this point. Is this his last act of effective altruism for whoever sues him in a court?

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#108

Post by CuriousCosmic »

delusional wrote: post #33
monero-xmr wrote: post #22

A programmer who helped create Tornado Cash rots in a Dutch jail cell (not charged, might I add) while SBF, Do Kwan, Elizabeth Holmes, and Trevor Milton still remain free. SBF is actually in a $30 million penthouse playing League of Legends. Clown world

I'd rather have an FTX scandal than Tornado Cash. I'd rather someone does some fraud than actual funneling of money to terrorists, druglords, gangs, and other problematic organizations.

> I'd rather someone does some fraud than actual funneling of money to terrorists, druglords, gangs, and other problematic organizations.

Considering that Tornado Cash implemented OFAC compliance and they were still banned would suggest to me that this isn't a fair take. Tornado Cash had long since blacklisted known accounts from sanctioned organisations and tried to be overwhelmingly transparent about the fact that the project was focused on providing privacy for normal people and complying with regulations and sanctions to the best of their ability.

One of the major issues with the US in particular is that regulatory and enforcement agencies refuse to establish well defined guidelines that are compatible with digital ledger tech. You can have privacy preservation and regulatory compliance all at once via zero knowledge proofs (as an example solution) however regulatory agencies insist that organisations operate within a system that provides significantly weaker compliance guarantees while also eliminating any means for privacy. Tornado Cash tried to operate within that weaker system to the best of their ability and repeatedly reached out to officials in good faith to properly implement compliance. Despite that they were still sanctioned.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#109

Post by [deleted] »

leesalminen wrote: post #63
jeffbee wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kind of went off the rails there in the final sentence. Are you saying that any of this adds credence to the silly idea that Democrats are beholden to SBF campaign money?

It’s a silly idea that being the second largest donor to a political party in the US buys you special favors? Why else would anyone give that kind of money to politicians without expecting something in return?

[deleted]

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#110

Post by soco »

jeffbee wrote: post #45
cliftonk wrote: post #26

to be clear: - 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 we…

You kind of went off the rails there in the final sentence. Are you saying that any of this adds credence to the silly idea that Democrats are beholden to SBF campaign money?

Democrats have received exactly double the SBF money received by Republicans. All exits were oiled here, just in different amounts.
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