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Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

nytimes.com

751–760 of 1001 posts

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#751

A reddit post called out SBF as a fraud 2 years ago and no one on the Bitcoin subreddit believed them! https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/p1oqqu/the_ceo_of_...

Good find, but worth noting that this is accusing him of front-running when what he actually did was dumber and more criminal: using FTX customer deposits to cover losses on the Alameda side.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#752

I always wondered whether the American guilty / not guilty system isn't obviously too binary.

What is the alternative here and where do they use it? The audience has voted and you've been declared.. 4% guilty! You will now serve 4% of the statutory 25 year sentence!

Many countries do not have this "guilty/not guilty" system the US is using.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#753
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…

Occam‘s razor suggests simpler explanations than book smart, stupid at common sense. For a person openly opposed to reading books, and proud of it.

"Book smart" is an idiom. Doesn't mean they're necessarily a big reader.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#754

Sequoia invested $200M in this guy. Has anyone looked at whether SBF could've done as much damage without that investment? Has anyone looked at if Sequoia did their due diligence? Seems like Sequoia could've seen red flags just from knowing Alameda existed. The potential abuse there was completely obvious.

The whole Sequoia thing is so interesting. Here is an excerpt from their (now taken down) profile of SBF, highlighting the moment he convinced them to invest: > That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a ban…

There is this weird thing in venture investing:

the line between "crazy, brilliant founders who will build world changing companies" and "crazy, lunatic founders who will lie and cheat and be awful" is very hard to distinguish, especially at the series seed/series A level.

It can lead to false positives and false negatives all the time.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#755
BTW, no more Adderall for SBF once he is "remanded to the custody of the Attorney General." Once he gets out of US Marshals' custody and is transferred to the BoP, he can kiss Adderall goodbye. Amphetamines of any kind are not allowed by the BoP, unless he is undergoing a surgical procedure which requires its use (don't know of any, but can't say there are none).

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#756
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…

Oh come on, you’re just using a stereotype here and hurling it at MIT students as a whole it’s almost as if the remark is just supposed to make you feel better about yourself. What you said isn’t even relevant to the FTX case and it’s highly unlikely that someone who’s “just book-smart” will have SBF’s connections to commit a crime of this scale.

I stand by what I said.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#757
post #260

I always wondered whether the American guilty / not guilty system isn't obviously too binary.

Of course it's not. Where there are gradients, there are different charges. Murder I, Murder II, (voluntary/involuntary) Manslaughter, etc. To the extent grey areas exist, they are accounted for in a gradient of crimes, each of which has a binary degree of guilt.

A "binary degree of guilt" sounds like a contradiction in terms.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#758

Sequoia invested $200M in this guy. Has anyone looked at whether SBF could've done as much damage without that investment? Has anyone looked at if Sequoia did their due diligence? Seems like Sequoia could've seen red flags just from knowing Alameda existed. The potential abuse there was completely obvious.

The whole Sequoia thing is so interesting. Here is an excerpt from their (now taken down) profile of SBF, highlighting the moment he convinced them to invest: > That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a ban…

I don't know. To the extent that Musk had a plan at all with his $44B Twitter purchase, a big part of his idea seems to be that he wants X to be the next banking app/Venmo.

Venmo is valuated at something like 40 billion dollars, and a huge amount of its use is people making $10 payments to each other.

I'd hate to live in a world where I conducted all my business on FTX, but you can see why it might be appealing to investors.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#759
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The defense really had no option. Several of Bankman-Fried's previous defense teams quit on him due to his behavior. Even in this trial, during a session with just the judge, the defense made an objection to a question, the judge sustained it, but Bankman-Fried answered anyways. His own defense team asked him where had he been this entire trial because the objection was sustained, you didn't have to answer that. Bank…

This says something of culture of hubris that is so easily elevated to leadership positions in America's tech culture. It's nice to see one of these fail-bros get taken down. But two points remain. 1. Had they been able to sustain this Ponzi scheme to IPO, he would be celebrated as a tech-god, as opposed to facing hard time. 2. The VCs aren't required to disclose their sales of crypto. My guess is they made money of…

> My guess is they made money of this clown

I've always felt this was probably the case. Take an idiot that needs to feel important, tell him he's a "boy genius" who can do no wrong and is always going to be misunderstood, and you basically have the perfect patsy. Till the end SBF just could not let go of that idea that he was smarter than everyone else, never realizing that this was always just a marketing gimmick.

At least Caroline Ellison had the sense to realize that she was living a delusion and quickly did what she could to walk away with minimal harm done to herself. In a few years she'll probably find herself making book deals and getting paid outrageous consulting fees once memory fades enough.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried Convicted

#760

Sequoia invested $200M in this guy. Has anyone looked at whether SBF could've done as much damage without that investment? Has anyone looked at if Sequoia did their due diligence? Seems like Sequoia could've seen red flags just from knowing Alameda existed. The potential abuse there was completely obvious.

The whole Sequoia thing is so interesting. Here is an excerpt from their (now taken down) profile of SBF, highlighting the moment he convinced them to invest: > That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a ban…

Let's not forget the league of legends incident. https://www.businessinsider.com/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-league...
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