Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison • Hacker News Board

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#391

Post by ecommerceguy » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

aftbit wrote: post #301

bodiekane wrote: post #181

It's wild that 99% of the "point" of crypto and a Bahamas-based exchange was to avoid all the laws around securities trading, banking, money transferring (anti-money laundering, taxes, etc), etc and yet when things go south, people still expect the government to come in and enforce a tiny subset of the financial laws they've otherwise been operating outside of. This is a weird form of "privatize the profits, socializ…

Let me just provide a counter-point. As an early crypto advocate, and someone who has lost thousands of USD to hackers and scammers, I did not ever expect the government to bail me out. As you said, the whole point of crypto was to free ourselves from these regulations, which means high risk high reward investments, and the opportunity to create truly innovative products. High risk means sometimes you lose your money…

As a former eth miner and now crypto un-enthusiast, i was attracted to the idea of contract disruption and value transfers utilizing blockchain but ever since the entire industry has become scams, wall street and *bros, yeah I'd love to see it all crash and burn. Exposing tether would be a great start.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#392

Post by usefulcat » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:11 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #233

marcinzm wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything, it's excessive if you consider the nature of the crime relative to the nature of murder or kidnapping. I suspect the resulting number of shortened lives amongst all the people who lost $8 billion worth of their money due to the fraud is more than the number caused by a single murder.

I thought the “lost” money was simply due to poor accounting and actually found. > Kaplan said he had found that FTX customers lost $8 billion, FTX's equity investors lost $1.7 billion, and that lenders to the Alameda Research hedge fund Bankman-Fried founded lost $1.3 billion. https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-bankman-fried-be-sent... Clearly the real crime is bilking investors out of their money. It’s also que…

> even though that ended up being very costly for the government.

Did it? The FDIC is funded by banks, not the government.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#393

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:12 PM UTC

dvektor wrote: post #374

"Wow jeez! 'Only' ten years! That's not so bad, I think I could live with that, now I think I'm gonna go pull a huge scam! But damn, if he would have got 20 or 25 years, then I'd have to reconsider my carefully thought out decision to commit fraud" -- Nobody, Ever. To most people, just the act of losing everything you have, losing your ability to provide for your family or yourself. Losing your reputation, your caree…

[deleted]

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#394

Post by petertodd » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:12 PM UTC

fasthands9 wrote: post #336

petertodd wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything, it's excessive if you consider the nature of the crime relative to the nature of murder or kidnapping. The value of a single human life is not infinite. In engineering and public policy, a value like $10 million / life is typically used to make trade-offs. SBF stole funds far in excess of that. Secondly, when funds of this scale are stolen, inevitably people wind up dying early from things like stress,…

One especially hard thing for sentencing public policy is when every crime is compared to every other crime. It is impossible, I think, to come up with a "ranking" of crimes that everyone can agree on. And because that's impossible, anyone can always point to a sentence of someone else who received too little or too much in comparison. I understand the desire to scale sentences by impact. But, I personally think it w…

An often forgotten aspect of sentencing is that once a criminal has done something evil, we still want there to be incentives for them to not do further evil things, as well as to co-operate with authorities.

That can play out into, say, giving both a murderer and a scammer 25 years in prison, provided that they turn themselves in and otherwise co-operate with the legal process.

I'm sure police officers would rather go into houses to arrest people knowing that whatever the suspect has done, they're going to get another 25 years in jail if they fight back. Arresting someone who has no hope at all, regardless of what they do, is simply more dangerous.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#395

Post by nabla9 » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:13 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #16

He will have to serve 21 years before early release. There is no parole in federal prison. I heard 5 years are concurrent making it 20 actual years. If that’s the case he can get out in 17 years. He wasted a good part of his life.

The article says different. Tell me why it's wrong.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#396

Post by kstrauser » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:13 PM UTC

codedokode wrote: post #375

To be honest, isn't 25 years too much? He didn't beat or kill anyone, he simply found dumb people and took little of their money. It is not like he was robbing poor people by increasing their utilities bill every year or raising rent. Why is such a small, non-violent crime so severely punished? Of course he deserves a punishment but maybe not that much?

"Stole" is the word you're looking for. He stole their money. Lots of it.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#397

Post by red-iron-pine » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:13 PM UTC

geraldwhen wrote: post #384

setgree wrote: post #176

An uncle once commented about a cousin of ours that he demonstrated how it's possible to screw things up so badly that you can't possibly recover. I think that's true for Sam. I hope it's not true for the people in his orbit; I hope they can get out from under this and try to find meaning, ideally from repairing the harm they've done. As Rick Heicklen writes, "We are not ever going to be Sam. But we could be Caroline…

[flagged]

put another way, you're engaged in sexual, financial, and managerial relationships with an epic fraudster, and continue that pattern well after it's become clear that they're, at best, kind of dubious.

most people will never be anywhere near that, not on that scale and scope, and not with that kind of insight.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#398

Post by lijok » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:13 PM UTC

tombert wrote: post #344

bambax wrote: post #62

I think that's about fair and reasonable. It's been said in Europe he would not have gotten more than years and it's probably true. 25 years is a really long time and even if he does only 20, still super long. Here's a live tweeting of the sentencing hearing; some of Judge Kaplan's remarks are really interesting. https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/177334004374401064...

If I broke into a person's house and stole $1000, even if I didn't directly hurt that person, I could expect to get several years in prison, basically regardless of the state. Lets say three years to be conservative on this? Sam Bankman Fried stole billions of dollars [1], probably often around $1000 at a time from tens of thousands of people. If going with my logic, he should be getting a lot longer than 25 years, u…

Why do you think SBF requires 20-25 years to rehabilitate?

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#399

Post by EasyMark » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:14 PM UTC

bearjaws wrote: post #360

segasaturn wrote: post #31

For those wondering, prosecutors asked for 50 years in prison, defense asked for 5 years. So this sentence is right down the middle. 50 years in prison would have been way too long IMO.

Stole 1% from the pension fund for Ontario's teachers. Stole unknown amounts of peoples retirement. Ruined many peoples lives. How is 50 years too long? The literal largest fraud case in history doesn't even have a life sentence... We are sending a clear message, grift and steal your way to the top and then get out just in time to retire with all your stolen goods. You know when he gets out he is gonna go unlock a de…

I think like all these white collar crime cases it's as much about emotion and appearance as actual damage. SBF wasn't a career criminal with multiple past grifts, and he didn't have any violent acts associated with the grift. So he got a lighter sentence. If he had been a part of a crime family, it would have been much longer. I'm not sure that the prosecutors are allowed to bring in tangential loss of life like multiple suicides (bankruptcy, financial destruction) that were no doubt triggered by SBF's efforts to defraud people.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

#400

Post by mrbonner » Thu, Mar 28, 2024, 5:14 PM UTC

I really don't understand the severity of criminal justice system punishment. SBF got sentenced to 25 years for a white collar financial crime while a guy in my hometown hit and killed 2 people, while DUI and ran over 100mph on a local street with 35mph limit got 26 months sentence forb2 vehicular homicide.