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Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#211

Post by molsongolden »

The comments here and the entire slant of the story are interesting. None of those messages read without the accompanying article seem particularly damning and they all make sense to some extent. The collapse is terrible, there was mismanagement, etc. but these specific DMs don't really make him seem the monster sociopath other commenters are calling him.

1) He pandered to regulators but doesn't believe regulators (across industries) are able to do any real good

2) He didn't mean to do sketchy stuff, a bunch of small decisions snowballed into a disaster

3) Winning > Ethics when it comes to public perception

4) He didn't have a good handle on what was going on at Alameda and didn't keep the entities separate enough as they grew

5) He lacked visibility into what was going on and missed the complex systems failure mode

--

Looking at the "ethics" messages for example, SBF never really says that he thinks it is okay to act unethically.

* He previously said that that people shouldn't do unethical shit because it'll hurt their reputation

* Now (in the DMs) he said: "it's not true really" -> mentions unknown heros and well-known shams -> gives the example of CZ being hated a month ago for being unethical but now CZ is a hero for winning despite being unethical

He never says that being unethical is okay—he says that in the world today, winning influences your public perception more than whether you were ethical or unethical.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#212

Post by RustyRussell »

lottin wrote: post #171
bogomipz wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't know, it looks like a half-baked idea, like everything surrounding crypto-currencies. Someone probably came up with this proof of reserves idea, and everybody else said yeah let's do this, because it sounded like it does what they wanted to do, except it doesn't.

Yeah, the original Proof of Reserves proposals (and this is probably a decade ago, on the bitcointalk forum) was a merkle scheme IIRC in which each user could verify that their amounts were added into the proven total.

Most people seem to be just using "prove you hold some amount" which is a very poor cousin. However, it is pretty clear that FTX would have failed even that, so maybe we should lower our expectations?

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#213

Post by fleddr »

This man really has to be protected against himself. It's foolish to incriminate yourself publicly, but there's more to it.

When you watch CT (Crypto Twitter), retail getting wrecked in pump and dumps is an every day event. This one is different though. Some very huge accounts/traders each lost many digits of wealth and given their influence in the community, this doesn't really improve moods.

So when a lynch mob is forming, these statements of smug indifference might not exactly calm things down.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#214

Post by HideousKojima »

kgwgk wrote: post #128
vkou wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having two professors as parents isn't exactly 'well connected politically'[1]. Two senators, or two billionaires would be. [1] I can't say I've ever felt that I was well-connected politically...

Did your father work with legislators to try to pass laws? “When I went to California to try to fight into it, I thought, ‘Well, there’s only 120 legislators. I’ll talk to them all one on one,'” Bankman said. “I found that in order to do it, I had to hire a lobbyist because I just couldn’t handle the details or get the meetings. In Congress, when I went there, now there’s 500 plus, and what I found everywhere I went…

His aunt is also a member of the World Economic Forum

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#215

Post by ALittleLight »

alexb_ wrote: post #38
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…

>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"

It's not though, it's just guaranteed failure. The only stable state is that you lose everything and you will reach that stable state in about 2 coin flips. If it's always good to flip, you will eventually (and quickly!) reach nothing.

I'm actually somewhat impressed by someone who articulated a stupid logic about how to live life and then actually followed through.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#217

Post by HDThoreaun »

pessimizer wrote: post #186
HDThoreaun wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why else would anyone give that kind of money to politicians without expecting something in return? Because they think the candidates they support will make the world better either personally for you or in a more general sense? Oil companies give money to manchin because they know he agrees with them and if he wins will fight for their legislation, whether they funded him or not.

> Oil companies give money to manchin because they know he agrees with them and if he wins will fight for their legislation, whether they funded him or not. Neither they or you know that. And nobody but you assumes that Manchin fights for his beliefs, rather than for what benefits him personally. And no, I'm not assuming the opposite. I instead choose not to fantasize about his internal states, or speculate about wha…

Sure, it's just speculation. That's what was being asked for. There are reasons to donate to politicians other than quid pro quo.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#218

Post by molsongolden »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #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 Chapte…

He doesn't say he thinks it is okay to act unethically, he says that in general acting unethically doesn't matter the way he previously said it did because public perception is shaped more by winning than it is by whether the winner was ethical or unethical.

Elsewhere in the DMs he says "I didn't want to do sketchy stuff [...] and I didn't mean to" and "it as never the intention".

None of this reads like bombshell level "Wow this guy is terrible". He comes across as maybe terrible or maybe someone who played a little too fast and loose with an explosively growing business of which he lost control.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#219

Post by threeseed »

burkaman wrote: post #152
expazl wrote: post #124

It this real? Is he really THAT stupid? His defense against "you took user deposits and gambled the money" is "No, I took user deposits, loaned them to myself and then gambled the money". I mean this is like nested layers of stupidity. You'd be stupid to do this, you'd be stupid to think it's not a major crime, you'd be stupid to think that this was in any way acts as a defense of your crime and you'd be stupid to ac…

For FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried, incompetence could be a legal strategy - https://www.axios.com/2022/11/16/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-incom... > Lawyers tell Axios the main criminal risk Bankman-Fried faces is an indictment on charges of fraud — one of the more common charges in white-collar prosecutions. But to convict, prosecutors must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that someone had knowledge or intent to commit fraud, whi…

There are some parallels with Elizabeth Holmes.

And we are yet to see whether they throw the book at her.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#220

Post by SilasX »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #93
wging wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes a lot of sense given the nature of SBF’s charitable donations and the purported rationale(s) behind them. Kelsey Piper is pretty deeply associated with the EA movement, which is heavily interested in picking the right ways to deploy money to solve the world’s problems, and much of SBF’s charitable giving was too.

> In 2018, Vox launched Future Perfect, with the goal of covering the most critical issues of the day through the lens of effective altruism. In this talk, Kelsey Piper discusses how the project worked out, her experience as a Vox staff writer, and her thoughts on the key challenges of EA-focused journalism. I just commented in this thread about how this story magically keeps getting worse, and then it got worse...

Yeah when I saw it was Piper as the journalist, I was expecting to see a massive disclaimer/disclosure on the article. There still isn’t one.

My own disclosure: I have many mutual friends with Piper and participate in the local EA group and contribute to EA causes.

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