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Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

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

#531

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…

> > This is a weird form of "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" but with the benefactors being the people intentionally avoiding all the financial laws. It was SBF who put it in the hands of the US by declaring bankruptcy in essentially 3 days instead of playing the long wait game Also SBF who put it in the hands of the US by staying in the Bahamas and essentially waiting to be arrested (and immediately ext…

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

#532
post #519

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…

Are you expecting to recover any money from this? I understood everyone would be made whole at some point.

> I understood everyone would be made whole at some point

That is only true if you define 'made whole' as giving back each customer the amount of money denominated in USD that they deposited with FTX. That is super convenient for FTX, which has benefited from the spike in BTC value, but not for the customer. To really be made whole, they would need to get back exactly what they deposited. 1 BTC in? 1 BTC out.

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

#534
post #398

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?

Incarceration is not only about rehabilitation, it’s also about justice and deterrence

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

#535
post #342

This type of punishment is actually pretty terrible for all parties. I could easily see a different, harsher, but more fair punishment... 1. All assets are sold off to pay victims 2. Prison for a few years. 5? 3. can only work jobs where nobody reports to them (no management, C levels, etc). Also cannot make companies. 4. Cannot own more than 2 properties, one of which is his place of residence. 5. Cannot rent out an…

He's well-connected within the easiest industry ever to launder money in. Realistically, after the 5 years he'd get a job consulting for a buddy at the heart of some other cryptocurrency exchange, and from that position he would find a lot of scummy ways to make sidemoney under the table, none of which would go to his victims, since it would all be hidden. He doesn't need to have his own direct reports if he has the ear of someone else who does.

Even if he does everything above-board, the absolute most he could expect to make legally from a job that's not a grift and has no direct reports would be ~500K/yr. Over 60 years, that would mean his victims get back $30,000,000, or about 0.3% of what he stole.

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

#537

I sincerely wish every centralized exchange had their own SBF to burn them down. The negative impact of "investors" has been terrible for crypto. They've turned what should have been a trustless medium into a caricature of traditional banking with all of its downsides and none of the benefits. Whats the point of computing all the hashes if you end up handing your coins to some guy who pinky promises to pay them back…

Without centralized exchanges, do you think crypto would ever really have become a thing? I like to think it would, and that we don't need exchanges, because I too have a strong dislike for exchanges (if not a hatred), but I'm a fairly technical user and even for me it's not exactly easy to be deep into crypto without exchanges. Particularly when it comes to exchanging dollars for coins.

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

#538

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…

A mugger is less likely to be deterred by fear of punishments. It usually comes from desperation and impulsiveness, it's not like they've carefully weighed their chances of being caught. SBF probably thought "If I get away with this I get a billion dollars and if I don't I just get a slap on the wrist and go back to normal life".

I think not letting anger factor into it is good, but we also have to make sure the deterrence is there to prevent the inevitable future SBF.

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

#540
post #2

Seems low for what prosecutors consider "one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history." https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-bankman-fried-be-sent...

If someone isn't a violent threat to society, there isn't much social benefit to keeping folks locked up longer then 20-ish years. 20-25 (assuming he gets the 15% off for good behavior the feds allow) is plenty.

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