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Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#291

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

molsongolden wrote: post #277
encryptluks2 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that states recognize ignoring the risk means that person was intentional and they are convicted of murder? Anything can be seen as a poor choice. By your logic Hitler made really poor decisions and ended up ruining a lot of lives.

It's possible for SBF to be both guilty of a variety of crimes and also not an intentionally terrible human. I don't know if he is or isn't a sociopath who lied to everyone while stealing billions. I just find the "wow, this guy is a monster" outrage interesting as the source DMs here don't really uphold that portrayal.

You could argue there’s no such thing as a “terrible person”, we are all at the mercy of our sensory inputs and the innate properties of our neurons. In order to keep society functional we need to enforce boundaries on human behavior, and in some cases label people as untrustworthy and possibly lock them up to stop them from doing more damage. If “terrible person” is the wrong label, we could pick a different one.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#292

Post by gizmo »

molsongolden wrote: post #246
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most non-sociopaths would experience a huge amount of shame/stress from stealing billions of dollars from trusting people and losing it. SBF shows none of that.

He says in the DMs that the most important thing in his life now is making customers whole and returning their funds. "that's basically all that matters for the rest of my life"

For HIS life, meaning he’s likely to go to prison if he fails to make his depositors whole. He doesn’t care about his customers which is why he embezzled the money, didn’t do any accounting, created a backdoor in the finance software, and tried to keep the charade going for as long as he could.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#293

Post by FireBeyond »

ceejayoz wrote: post #233
threeseed wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some parallels with Elizabeth Holmes. And we are yet to see whether they throw the book at her.

She didn't immediately publicly confess to a reporter, though, right?

Hell, to this day she still (publicly) claims that they were thiiiiiiis close and all the naysayers who lead to this point are "hurting humanity" far more than they are hurting her.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#295

Post by lazide »

tshaddox wrote: post #270
lazide wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A large class (but not all!) of crime requires ‘mens rea’ or a guilty mind. If you can plausibly convince everyone, for instance, that you legitimately thought that the car you got into and drove away was your car, then you didn’t commit car theft. Good luck with that 99.9% of the time of course. This is in comparison to strict liability crimes, like drug possession or statutory rape that don’t require knowledge or i…

I'm no legal expert, but surely this requirement of mens rea doesn't actually require the defendant to know the specific law that they are violating. Surely it just requires that the defendant knows the basic facts of their actions that cause their actions to qualify as illegal under the law. In other words, if it's illegal to loan user deposits to yourself and gamble the money, and he knew that he was loaning user d…

Correct.

It doesn’t requiring knowing what you’re doing is against some law.

It requires knowing what you’re doing (which is against a law).

If what you did is very different from what you thought you were doing because of a legitimate mistake of fact (aka you thought it was your car, but it was not), then you’re not guilty of the crime, because you didn’t realize what you were doing was the thing that was a crime.

It’s roughy why not guilty by reason of insanity is a legitimate defense in some cases.

If someone is so insane they can’t understand what they were actually doing, or the thing they legitimately thought they were doing isn’t a crime, they weren’t committing the crime. That does mean they are probably such a danger to themselves or others they need to be locked up somewhere though.

As with the car defense, it is a very difficult thing to prove in most cases, and for good reasons

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#296

Post by superfrank »

expazl wrote: post #269
superfrank wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes, I get what you're saying. At our old startup we didn't setup a bank account either, why bother, we just had investors deposit the money into our CEOs trading account, seemed easier that way.

You're laughing, but I was an early employee at a start up run by 20-somethings that's now grown into a company worth over a billion dollars and there were plenty of WTF moments like that until they started hiring adults.

No one was doing things like that intentionally, but as the company started to grow, so did peoples' egos and they people begin to confuse being reckless with being innovative.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#297

Post by FireBeyond »

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…

And "more careful accounting". Not accurate/right accounting. Just "be more careful".

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#298

Post by superfrank »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #254
superfrank wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One minor clarification: "lent" should be "stole" Not a lawyer, but I think the correct term is "embezzled". > The crime of embezzlement is defined as the fraudulent appropriation of property of another by someone who has been entrusted with its possession. Unlike theft where the property is taken unlawfully, in embezzlement the property comes lawfully into the possession of the embezzler who then fraudulently or u…

Agreed that this is embezzlement, but in all the definitions I've seen (including plain old Webster's), embezzlement is a form of theft, e.g. https://ryanbeasleylaw.com/2019/07/theft-embezzlement-and-fr...

True. That's fair

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#299

Post by FireBeyond »

SilverBirch wrote: post #178
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 very critical of SBF and what went on here, but let's not over sentimentalise this, they gambled billions of dollars of peoples deposits, not savings. Which clearly is a crime, but you don't store your savings on a crypto exchange, BTC arguably the most reliable of the crypto-currencies is down 70% in the last year. Moves that happen once in a lifetime in real markets happened multiple times in crypto. No one rea…

> but you don't store your savings on a crypto exchange... No one reasonable has their savings in crypto exchanges.

Many, many, many people have absolutely bought into the crypto dream, put their savings on an exchange and absolutely ended up entirely destitute. There are swathes of evidence of exactly this.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#300

Post by misiti3780 »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #276
dragontamer wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I imagine my question would be "hey, where'd all the deposits go?" But we know where they went. To Alameda Research. Then Alameda Research sent them somewhere else. The money isn't coming back, and Alameda Research's collateral of FTT tokens is worthless. So that's that, its done. Its actually quite a simple story here. FTX lent the money to someone else (even if Alameda Research is also owned by SBF), and that oth…

> So that's that, its done. Not at all. If Alameda really lost billions or tens in billions in trades, who was on the other side to collect the money? To random people who sold BTC at $64K and then all the way down? Or were the losing trades a way to syphon billions somewhere else? Seen the amount involved, the policital donations, the articles in the media portraying the guy as an altruistic genius and seen that tet…

Your hypothesis is a small cabal of insiders at FTX/Alameda purposely blew up the hedge fund and exchange to siphon off billions (hiding it in the losses) to enrich themselves while simultaneously making themselves some of the most hated people in the world, and also rolling the dice on going to prison for decades.

Seems very thin to me....

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