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Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

cnn.com

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

#481

Post by thuuuomas »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #244

I love HN, it's one of the few places you can get reasoned conversation online. But this is one of those subjects where it gets weird. SBF was directly responsible for millions, if not billions, of direct monetary loss to identified individuals. Yet the top comments on HN are all discussing whether incarceration is retribution, spite, deterrence, or rehabilition. The USA incarcerates people for tiny financial damages…

It’s simple - everyone here arguing the merits of a lower sentence identifies with Sam.

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

#482

Post by caturopath »

MichaelRo wrote: post #468

25 years seems excessive. Funk, for murder they get 10 years in Sweden. Yes, fraud is bad but he didn't kill nobody. I think 5 years would have had been enough.

You could also think of it as 11 minutes each for defrauding each of 1.2MM people. I don't know whether either of those sentences are good ones, but there does come a point at which a narrow violent crime should be punished less than a huge non-violent one. FEMA uses about 7.5MM for a human life for certain cost-benefit analyses (much lower values are used in many of the countries where most FTX customers lived): is there a sense in which doing a billion dollars of damage is in certain ways comparable to 130 killings? Surely some people who lost money would have used that money in part to save someone's life.

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

#484

Post by tootie »

gizmo wrote: post #446
tootie wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banality of evil. I'm sure SBF seems like a decent person who just wants to run a cool business and play with technology. He never thought he was a crook.

I don't think the banality of evil applies here. Banality of evil is when cogs in a bureaucratic machine don't think about how their actions hurt others, because they are just processing paperwork or following standard operating procedure. Regular people doing regular people things can do great evil. In this case SBF was the architect and the driving force behind the fraud. He decided to comingle customers funds with…

The phrase was coined in reference to Adolf Eichmann.

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

#485

Post by tombert »

lijok wrote: post #398
tombert wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't even normally believe in "punishment" because I don't actually think it works. I think SBF will spend 20-25 years in prison, continuously blaming every human on earth except himself the entire time. If he thought what he was doing was wrong, he wouldn't have continued to do it for so long.

That said, I also have no reason to think that if he's not locked away, he won't just do the same or similar scam again. He hasn't shown any remorse, and he just pretends to be ignorant of all the crimes. If not put into jail, I suspect he'd just go to a country with difficult extradition laws and do some other cryptocurrency scam from there. Putting him in jail for 20 years at least avoids it for 20 years.

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

#486

Post by KingLancelot »

lijok wrote: post #398
tombert wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[dead]

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

#487

Post by rsoto2 »

publius_0xf3 wrote: post #449

It's funny. I lost tens of thousands of dollars thanks to this individual, yet his sentence brings me no joy or arouses any emotion at all. I'm utterly indifferent to his fate for some reason and I don't know why. Yet if he had been a mugger who stole a much smaller amount of money from me on the street, I think I would've been far more vengeful. Should I feel vindictive? Or is it healthy to forget about it and move…

Mugging is more traumatic short term? In total, white collar wage-theft dwarfs property theft but you may not feel its effects immediately.

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

#488

Post by loeg »

dragontamer wrote: post #261
loeg wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on how FTX's losses were socialized here?

Its the US Government courts who are handling FTX's bankruptcy. So at a minimum, they are expecting the USA Government to figure out how to split the money / clawback what they can and untangle the mess of the balance sheets (rumor has it: a completely non-existent set of documentation in the case of FTX).

That's not really what socializing losses usually means. This isn't an FDIC bailout, for example.

I'm really looking for a response from GP, bodiekane.

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

#489

Post by codedokode »

usefulcat wrote: post #404
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?

If steal $1000 from you, how much time should I serve? A year? If I steal $1000 each from thousands of people, how much time should I serve then?

If you make a scammy-looking cryptoexchange and promise I will get rich if I invest, you won't be able to steal a single cent. Only dumb people can believe that you can buy cryptocurrency and get rich without doing nothing.

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

#490

Post by Vicinity9635 »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #159

To put this into its proper perspective, see table 7 here: https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu... In 2022, the average murderer in the Federal Southern District of New York (N = 58) was sentenced to a median of 231 months, which comes out to 19 years and change. No crime of any type had an mean or median sentence higher than 25 years; most were far less than half. So it should be really hard…

"AUSA Nicolas Roos: Samuel Bankman-Fried stole $8 billion dollars. It was theft, from customers spread all over the world. It was a loss that impacted people significantly and caused damage. I want to address a few of the new victim letters"

"AUSA Roos: They lost their life savings. A man who lives in Portugal - the day before bankruptcy his daughter was born. He was marred by the ominous specter of financial instability and his daughter's future. Then there's the 23 year old from Morocco"

"AUSA Roos: He is the eldest son. He kept money on FTX not to loan it out to the defendant but for family's security. One more - a couple in the later stages of their life, late 60s, they invested with life savings. They were depressed, they had to go back to work"

https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/177336575999912795...

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