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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

#601

Post by freedomben »

ragebol wrote: post #580
freedomben wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exchanges or centralized exchanges?

Good point, although can an exchange really exist that is decentralized? What would that look like? Basically just a neutral broker between two individuals? That is a very interesting idea

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

#602

Post by dragonwriter »

dheera wrote: post #571
PhilipRoman wrote: post #525

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…

Actually, I wish we could burn down the IRS instead. I have to pay $1 of taxes to the US government for every $1 of Bitcoin I want to spend, because when I pull it out of my Bitcoin wallet (hardware, software, exchange, it doesn't matter) they consider it a "taxable event" and I have to pay taxes according to it's USD value, which ultimately makes its ecosystem still tied to USD, and makes me reluctant to spend crypt…

> I have to pay $1 of taxes to the US government for every $1 of Bitcoin I want to spend

AIUI, if the basis price of your Bitcoin was $0 and your marginal income tax rate was 50% and it was a short-term gain, that would be correct, but:

(1) Your basis value shouldn't usually be 0 or close to it,

(2) Where (1) does not hold, because you got Bitcoin when the price was near 0, it should usually be a long-term gain, on which you pay the lower LTCG rate, and

(3) The top marginal income tax rate that you would have to pay to the US government is well below 50% to start with.

> Singapore doesn't tax this, you can spend crypto and transact crypto and none of that is taxable.

Singapore is, then, tax subsidizing crypto speculation, which seems like a phenomenally bad policy (but orobably sustainable, as long as the crowd that can afford to engage in it locally is small enough that the effective subsidy can be absorbed), but, I mean, you should absolutely feel free to emigrate to Singapore if they’ll let you if this is important to you.

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

#603

Post by j0hnyl »

rgbrenner wrote: post #338
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…

FTX was one of the biggest frauds in history.. and you're showing us averages. Madoff received a 150 year sentence, and that was with leniency for pleading guilty.

Propotional to the size of Madoff's ponzi, SBFs sentence is heavy.

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

#604

Post by ametrau »

thot_experiment wrote: post #359
compiler-guy wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lewis also soft-sells the polyamorous relationships and complications that caused around SBF's relationship with Caroline Ellison. Caroline wants to go public, and why that would be a much bigger deal in the polyamorous world they were living in. It's similar in many of Lewis's other analysis of SBF's relationships. Lewis avoids context that makes SBF look much worse.

I'm not familiar with the book but this doesn't sound like it pattern matches with any of the poly I've experienced. Going public is a big deal in poly in particular? Since when? What kind of self respecting tech bro group house doesn't have a graph of all the poly on their whiteboard?

Gross

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

#606

Post by madsbuch »

Dalewyn wrote: post #542
Vicinity9635 wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 instabi…

[flagged]

this is a common sentiment, but extremely flawed.

if look into any pension scheme you will see that money are invested all they way up to payout.

the question is the risk of your investment.

as other people called out. this case was fraud.

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

#607

Post by jgeada »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #586
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 believe that, as a matter of public policy, there ought to be an important distinction between violent and non-violent crimes. The rationale behind prison, as opposed to corporal punishment without incarceration, is to remove dangerous people from society, so that they don't further victimize the public. A violent murderer -- of really any type of murder, e.g. of a random stranger, of one's spouse, or a murderer-fo…

We measure the worth of a life, for insurance and actuarial purposes, at about $10m (and frequently less). Stealing someone's savings is stealing their life, their time, and in some cases their ability to survive (as we have very few safety nets in the US)

Please stop defending white collar crime as somehow more palatable, as somehow a better class of criminal.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/11/upshot/virus-price-human-...

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

#608

Post by mondrian »

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…

Btw is that money irretrievably gone? Are those people getting their money back based on the recovered price of crypto? Or did those assets get liquidated long ago into actualized losses?

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

#609

Post by CobrastanJorji »

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.

I feel like going right down the middle between what the prosecution wants (50 years) and what the defense wants (put the king's robes and crown on him, then parade him on the king's horse in the city square and announce before him, 'So shall be done to the man whom the king wishes to honor!') is maybe not the right way to pick.

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

#610

Post by n2d4 »

dboreham wrote: post #505
bearjaws wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wait...why did a public pension fund invest in crypto-related ? (I still don't know what FTXes product was, but clearly it wasn't bare BTC or ETH, implying it was a risky derivative of a risky underlying asset).

FTX was just an exchange. If you invest money into Bitcoin, you will have to do it on some (centralized or decentralized) exchange. You'd expect that FTX would keep your Bitcoins safe in a digital vault somewhere, but SBF did not and instead used customer assets to gamble with Alameda Research.

There are totally good reasons for a pension fund to invest minority assets into BTC, mostly diversification (check out Modern Portfolio Theory [1]). You may calculate the risk that BTC goes up or down, but most people probably didn't expect the exchange to lose the money.

It's not the first time it happened (see Mt Gox), but FTX prided itself on being the most risk-averse. Yet it turned out all of that was based on fraud and fake numbers, fraudulent enough to even fool pension funds.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_portfolio_theory

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