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Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

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141–150 of 401 posts

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#141

The guy's lawyers need to get him to shut up.

Oh my god, I upvoted you before reading the DMs. I... wow, yeah, they need duct tape.

EDIT: Okay I just cannot get over this, obviously I'm exaggerating but it's pretty much "I didn't want to do bad stuff because that would be bad, and then after I had personally done all of the bad things, I realized that I had, in fact, done something very bad."

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#143
post #80
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. This logic is literally "You either win the lotto or you don't, 50/50 chance"

Not quite. The question is defined in a way that the EV of bet is positive, even though repeatedly doing it gets you an arbitrarily high chance of (moral) bankruptcy. The original thing being referenced is St. Petersburg lottery, and each round of that is 50/50: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox

I'm more talking about "well it could work out" reasoning as to why ignoring the St Petersburg Paradox is somehow justified.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#144

> I was trying to make sense of what, behind the PR and the charitable donations and the lobbying, Bankman-Fried actually believes about what’s right and what’s wrong — and especially the ethics of what he did and the industry he worked in. This seems like a weird thing to worry about right now, I imagine my question would be "hey, where'd all the deposits go?" Like, I'm sure it's all interesting in a psychological a…

> what did he do?

FTX loaned money to Alameda, the crypto hedge-fund made a series of bets and probably put some cash in illiquid assets too, but mostly irresponsible bets. Crypto market collapsed, bets that were worth billions with a decent liquidity now became worth millions with not so much liquidity.

They turned to their most harsh competitor hoping for a bailout kinda like how Microsoft saved Apple in the 90s . All that didn't happen, it was the the straw that broke the camel's back.

That's about it, when you are leveraged adverse market events can literally put any company out of business, no matter how giant it is. Chapter 11 is not the end of the world for old companies making real stuff that people will always want (say General Motors or Hertz), but in crypto where everything is about reputation there is no way FTX will ever be heard of ever again.

In the case of the crypto market adverse events of massive proportions repeat themselves every 5 years or so. It happened this year , together with inflation. It was due, at some point the chickens had to come home to roost.....whatever the fuck that means lol.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#145
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah after the NYT interview I'm a bit shocked at how bad these messages look. He looks stupid, brazen, delusional, and lacking in compassion. If his texts are normally similar to this, how did anyone serious think this guy was brilliant?

Maybe I'm out of the loop but I'd never heard of him til the FTX implosion.

I saw parts of an interview where he openly states,in substance, that a Ponzi scheme is a valid investment, the new way of doing things. I was puzzled and took a mental note to check on how he fares I once in a while.

I had no idea the sums involved were this big, and the operation this much amateurish.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#147
post #129
post #91

Not seeing much remorse here, but what can you expect from a guy that gambled with billions of dollars worth of people's savings. Don't buy that he didn't realize what they were doing until it was too late. He admits in this interview to lying about previous public positions, so wouldn't trust anything he says here either. I just hope crypto learns from this and normalizes Proof of Reserves

Proof of reserves only proves (for the sake of the argument let's assume it's an actual proof) the exchange has some amount of reserves, which is mostly meaningless. The quantity of interest is the share of deposits that are backed with reserves, not the absolute amount of reserves.

Interesting, is this intentional then? Or is there some other reason why showing the absolute amount of reserves would not be feasible?

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#148
Author: "so the ethics stuff - mostly a front?"

SBF: "yeah"

Absolutely gobsmacked.

I saw these screenshots on Twitter and I thought they were fake until I read the article. The rest of the messages from him are pretty terrible as well.

I thought he just fucked up, but no. He was wilfully unethical and maintains he did nothing wrong: "Sometimes life creeps up on you".

And the thing he regrets most is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy...

What a cruel fucking joke for all the people who invested with/in FTX.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#149
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?

Sorry but the "wildest conspiracy theory" is that Democrats sent money to Ukraine, Ukraine deposited the money at FTX, and SBF donated the money to Democratic congressional campaigns. Nothing about what we know today lends any credence to that theory.

That some guy with access to a lot of cash tried to buy influence is not a "conspiracy theory" because it is unilateral. And, if that's what he was trying to do, it seems like a really poor strategy since you cannot really buy influence over law enforcement that way.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#150

OMG. "The dog ate my homework" would have been a better excuse. > like, "oh FTX doesn't have a bank account, I guess people can wire to Alameda's to get money on FTX" > ....3 years later... > 'oh fuck it looks like people wired $8b to Alameda and oh god we basically forgot about the stub account that corresponded to that and so it was never delivered to FTX' So they "basically" forgot about $8B not transferred to FTX…

Since more than one thing can be true at the same time, why not a combination of a) total lack of internal controls, understanding of basic accounting and book keeoing, b) total lack of competence when it comes to manage these amounts of money and c) actively defrauding customers by stealing their deposits?
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