Live data from Hacker News

Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison

cnn.com

661–670 of 1001 posts

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

#661

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…

Are you suggesting corporal punishment for SBF?

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

#663
post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an indirect victim via BlockFi (headed by Zach Prince), which did business with FTX and lost my money as a result. I held 33 ETH in a BlockFi BIA account, and only recently got 4 ETH back. I don't know if I will ever recover the rest of my funds. I don't know what your financial situation is but I'm not rich, and it is extremely painful to look at ETH trading at above $3000 and realizing my rainy day fund has bee…

[flagged]

1. You don’t know at what price they got the ETH

2. Median doesn’t work that well here. They may not live in a median American town. You are probably uber rich in comparison to the median Earthling

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

#664
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I didn't find Lewis's book as bad (or amoral) as it's often made out to be. Yes, he didn't put his judgement in every paragraph, but his description of SBF was: a) absolutely damning! SBF's lack of empathy, his notion that (given that everyone else is stupid) he knew best and should basically ignore the advice of everyone else (particularly his elders), his naive utilitarianism without any deontological/virtue…

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.

What does an IPO (or ICO?) have to to with “polyamorous world?”

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

#665

The difference between opinions in this thread is interesting. I think it's mainly because some see a punishment as revenge and others as correction. But, as user publius_0xf3 is showing, revenge does not work. The victims don't get their money back. If this sentence is used as correction I also think it does not work. Would such a correction really take 25 years? His life is over. I don't see how such a long time is…

I wish society would stop viewing punishment as a tool for the greater good, whether as revenge or as something that will "correct" the criminal.

Treating it as a correction feels like a lie that polite society tells itself in order to absolve itself of the distaste of knowingly harming someone. We shouldn't pretend we can "re-educate" anyone. We can merely provide opportunities for self improvement, but we can't actively "correct" them.

On the other hand, treating punishment as revenge is unhealthy too. It's too easy to get carried away and it's even easier to get carried away by perverse incentives (gestures broadly at US incarceration rates). Two wrongs don't make a right, as they say.

So then how should society decide what punishment is fair? I believe the punishment should be as harsh as an elected judge feels is necessary for the perpetrator to think, "it wasn't worth this"—and not a bit more.

Isn't that using punishment as a deterrent? It's easy to see it that way, but no. That would make punishment impersonal again— unbinding it from the specific person, place, and circumstance that we should elect judges to consider carefully and compassionately. In other words, when one says, "the perpetrator should be punished {this much} to deter the others", then the perpetrator becomes a pawn, not a person.

All that leads me to believe that: the purpose of a punishment should be to inflict a harm equal to the perceived personal benefit of the perpetrator's crime, as an enforcement action of the social contract between the perpetrator and society.

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

#666

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…

Did you get paid back yet? From what I read the ftx estate claimed to be able to make all claimants whole

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

#667
post #317

From the article, SBF will likely be out in 2036, at the age of 45. There’s a good chance he’ll get himself into shenanigans again, if not already from inside prison.

He'll do about 30% or less. Maybe they'll say jails are full again and release most the inmates like they did during covid.

These are federal charges, not state. In the federal prison system, you do almost all your time, with just a small percentage knocked off the end of your sentence if you maintain consistent good behavior. State justice systems do have a tendency to let prisoners out early for various different reasons but when you get a federal sentence, you're serving almost all of it.

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

#669
post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an indirect victim via BlockFi (headed by Zach Prince), which did business with FTX and lost my money as a result. I held 33 ETH in a BlockFi BIA account, and only recently got 4 ETH back. I don't know if I will ever recover the rest of my funds. I don't know what your financial situation is but I'm not rich, and it is extremely painful to look at ETH trading at above $3000 and realizing my rainy day fund has bee…

[flagged]

> The median American in the 45–54 age bracket has merely seven thousand dollars more saved for retirement than you had thrown into crypto.

You should take those headlines with a grain of salt because they grossly misrepresent the studies they are reporting on. Quoting directly from your article:

"The median 401(k) balance is just $35,345."

Most people who have a 401(k) work at more than one company in their career and rarely roll funds over into the new company's 401(k). It's more common to leave it or roll it into an IRA.

All we know is the median 401(k) account balance at Vanguard is $35k. Vanguard doesn't know about these people's other retirement accounts at Fidelity or Schwab or wherever. If their customers hold IRAs at Vanguard, those aren't accounted for. In the case that a person has multiple 401(k) accounts with Vanguard, it wasn't even clear if the account balances are summed together and counted as one account.

tl;dr These reports are always about average and median retirement account balances, which is not at all the same as average and median retirement savings.

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

#670

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…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN