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Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#221

Post by zach_garwood »

c7DJTLrn wrote: post #173
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…

I'm wondering if there is some kind of mass insanity occurring in the world right now with this and the behaviour of numerous influential figures.

Money is a helluva drug!

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#222

Post by expazl »

Imnimo wrote: post #203

The obvious conclusion here is that SBF is just a cynical but skilled manipulator. But then why send these DMs at all - surely a skilled manipulator would know better, or could at least present himself in a positive light? Maybe all those stimulants have taken their toll. Or he's totally given up.

> surely a skilled manipulator would know better, or could at least present himself in a positive light?

My bet is that he lost his back country. He was until recently the front-person for a hugely successful enterprise who donated money extremely broadly. Back then he could have yelled "I run a goddamn ponzi scheme" into the loudspeaker of huge credible news outlets and they would have edited to "Master genius is going to revolutionize everything through revolutionary crypto". He's speaking into the same loudspeaker because he still thinks the message that got through back then was due to his skills as a communicator and not because... they where all on the receiving end of the cash flow he was throwing around every which direction. But obviously anyone who was receiving money back and writing favorable about him back then will do their best to distance themselves now.

Case in point, quote from article: (Disclosure: This August, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause.)

Which basically says they where on the payroll. Obviously they aren't going to pay the money back. You have to wonder what great articles about SBF they would have printed in a completely unbiased fashion if not for the implosion.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#223

Post by superfrank »

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…

This text resonates with me a bit:

> 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'

I'm not trying to defend his actions him and I think he should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but honestly, I kind of get what he's saying. I've worked at enough start ups where everything is always chaos and speed and scrappiness are valued above all else, that I feel like I've seen this multiple times. It's like, someone makes a dumb choice and everyone goes, "we'll that's not great, but it's working and it's not that bad, so I don't want to make it my problem" and eventually that dumb decision is just how things are. Eventually, new people join the company and don't realize things aren't this way intentionally and eventually one of them adds another dumb decision on top of that and the same cycle plays out again.

After a few years, you end up with multiple of your processes or parts of your infrastructure based on these chains of bad choices and the one of them collapses. When you're close to the problem, each of the decisions on their own don't look too bad, but when you step back and summarize it in one sentence, it's clear how fucked up things are.

It's funny because he smugly spends the start of this article arguing about how pointless regulators are, but I feel like if there was actually regulation in the space, there's a good chance they would have slowed things down enough to catch these bad decision chains.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#224

Post by twelve40 »

roywiggins wrote: post #15

> 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…

yeah i find it hilarious how all these articles are trying to get to his inner philosophical self. But, at least based on this particular exchange, it seems that he was just trying to make a buck or two, and treated everything else as PR/BS.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#225

Post by encryptluks2 »

moralestapia wrote: post #164
burkaman wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Judges won't side with him, like, at all. >The point is to argue that he was sloppy or inattentive, not a fraudster. If that's going to be his strategy there's still a lot of laughs to have at his expense. If only it were that easy, "oh I didn't knew I was crossing the border with a hundred pounds of cocaine in my car", like, how come they never thought of THAT? LOL

I imagine for him it is going to be something more like, "I didn't know she wasn't 18."

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#228

Post by Gigachad »

bboylen wrote: 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

I’m not sure why people are surprised. He was a crypto guy, of _course_ he was a scammer. It’s so obvious.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#229

Post by NelsonMinar »

baxtr wrote: post #172

Unlike many here, I think he has a point. The entire finance industry is corrupt. People have been trying to make more money by being over leveraged for some time now. Anyone remember 2008? Regulation helps, but not most obviously people find ways to get around that. It doesn’t, by any means, excuse what he has done. Yet the conversation delivers a very authentic insight into how people at the top of financial instit…

The entire finance industry isn't corrupt. It might want to be, but then it's tightly monitored and regulated so it can't be this corrupt. "Oops we misplaced over half our customer deposits" is just not a thing that happens in real banking or financial exchanges. In crypto companies though, it's business as usual.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#230

Post by luckylion »

anonymoushn wrote: post #187
memish wrote: post #163

From the CEO of NuGenesis network and Metalabs global: - Someone was dumping our coin - We found out it was Alameda - We asked them to stop market making, yet they continued dumping, all on Liquid - We have a lot of proof showing the above - We've known about the FTX scam months and months ago & contacted the SEC - Media did not listen to us - No one was listening because no one wanted to believe FTX & SBF was a scam…

This Mario person is a charlatan who recently deleted the entire contents of his web site because it was publicly advertising that his career is the sale of fake engagement to pump shitcoins

It's so weird, I had seen that profile a few days ago. Everything about him screams charlatan. The profile images, the "thoughtful" pose, his "I'm getting interviewed", "I'm a speaker" and his "I have an audience watching me dance", it just screams it. Then I went to his website and it ups the volume to 11. He even has a corny motto "Do good - Do it consistently - Be patient".

I'm sure lots of people fall for it and think he's legit. Is that just an age thing or are some people just that gullible and when you have global reach via Twitter and Instagram, you'll find them all?

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