Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 1001 posts

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#501

Post by manonthewall »

Finnucane wrote: post #417
FFP999 wrote: post #393

> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did. The MIT campus has a major public road running through the middle of it, one of the busiest surface streets in the area. You don't have to stand there very long to see a crowd of students almost get hit by a car because they didn't look before they crossed the street. Point is, the old cliche is true, there really is such a thing as a person with a lot…

To be fair, those students are contending with people driving in and out of Boston. The odds are not in their favor.

I've lived in 6 different cities in my lifetime, in every one they claimed they had the worst drivers in the USA.

Edit: well color me an idiot, I just checked and a 2019 usnews report had boston as ranked 3rd on worst drivers, based on whatever set of variable they came up with, so touche.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#503

Post by alsetmusic »

saeranv wrote: post #474

I sure hope all the HN commentators confidently predicting this would never happen because of his large donations to the democrats see this.

He donated to both sides through another FTX exec. What is your real message? (I’m a leftist, not a liberal apologist).

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#504

Post by kylebenzle »

bmitc wrote: post #446
bo1024 wrote: post #122

Anyone know where to get good details? Specifically: do they know where the money went? If not, how did they prove intent (I assume they proved intent)? Edit: another thing I'm wondering is about jurisdiction, since most of this occurred offshore and didn't involve US customers.

Molly White had excellent writeups for the entire trial. She even did excellent multi-hour livestreams going over her notes for the portion of the trial where she was physically present at the courtroom. https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/s/the-ftx-files

Molly has done a poor job covering the cryptocurrency industry in general.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#505

Post by cowsup »

grumblingdev wrote: post #329

What was the exact moment the fraud began? What should he have done instead?

> What was the exact moment the fraud began?

There's not necessarily an "exact moment" that they can pinpoint, nor is that their job to do so.

FTX was promising customers it would hold onto their funds and keep them safe, much like a bank. Then they did not. That's the short of it, tat is what they uncovered. The date it "began" was not in scope of the case, just the end result, and the end result was that there was fraud.

> What should he have done instead?

Again, the short of it is: He should have delivered what he promised to customers, or not make those promises to begin with.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#506

Post by manonthewall »

hintymad wrote: post #382
randycupertino wrote: post #320

I liked the article detailing how poorly he did on the stand: https://www.thefp.com/p/humiliating-cross-examination-sam-ba... “Did you say in private, ‘Fuck regulators?’ ” “Did you call some customers ‘dumb motherfuckers?’ ” “Did you fly to the Super Bowl in a private plane?” “Most FTX customers did not have a line of credit, correct?” “Do you deny that Alameda had a $65 billion line of credit?” And on, and on, and o…

Yeah. And I find it quite contemptuous for SBF to often use "Yup" instead of yes.

as long as the judge allows it, it's unlikely to be "comtemptuous"

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#507

Post by SkyMarshal »

FFP999 wrote: post #393

> You’d think this MIT graduate would wise up, but he never did. The MIT campus has a major public road running through the middle of it, one of the busiest surface streets in the area. You don't have to stand there very long to see a crowd of students almost get hit by a car because they didn't look before they crossed the street. Point is, the old cliche is true, there really is such a thing as a person with a lot…

That's been my impression of SBF since FTX collapsed. Quite book smart, but zero experience in building a major service that custodies billions in other peoples' money.

Raw intelligence is not enough in that context. Ideally you want to have apprenticed for at least a few years at a real exchange or custodial service. Somewhere you learn all the engineering details about how to architect it with proper financial controls, safeguards, and correctness guarantees so that this kind of failure cannot happen, either via human skullduggery, mistakes, or system bugs or security vulnerabilities.

Sam never had any of that. He probably got caught up in the moment, implicitly assumed he was smart enough to compensate and not need it, that money is fungible and free-flowing and he can move it around and always make more, etc. And his investors were all finance guys overly impressed with his trading ability and ignorant of the above. This is the unfortunate but unsurprising result.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#509

Post by manonthewall »

wmf wrote: post #128
gzer0 wrote: post #120

Interestingly, FTX made a $500 million USD investment in Anthropic; supposedly, this was made while Anthropic was valued at $4.6 billion (unconfirmed). Now, Anthropic is nearing $30 billion. Anyone know the latest on this? Is FTX going to sell that stake off to pay back the debts? [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-frieds-anthropic...

It's being debated in the bankruptcy court. Some creditors want to sell it off and others want to let it ride. Because this is crypto, some people want to issue a crypto token that represents claims on the estate.

I'll create a new crypto token for them for 5% of the net worth. Give me a call FTX administrators.
Post reply on HN