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Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
711–720 of 1001 posts
Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
#712Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps previous exit scams in the crypto space dulled your senses? If anything, I feel like you should share your story to protect others, especially during times when crypto is peaking (like now) and others are tempted to jump in: use exchanges to buy/sell and get out, store your keys on a cold storage device, and transfer out fiat ASAP.
Surely the better takeaway is to just not bet on crypto in general? It's supposed to act like a currency, not a stock. So long as people keep feeding into these pump-and-dump schemes they'll keep happening. Money doesn't come from nowhere. For every dollar you make on crypto, somone loses a dollar. All these BS coins do is shuffle wealth from the unlucky gamblers to the lucky ones. Go spend your money at a casino ins…
Except greed...
Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
#713Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't lose a penny and I'm giddy about it. Justice has been done.
> I didn't lose a penny and I'm giddy about it. Justice has been done. How can you be giddy about a human being locked in a cage for 25 years? Would you be giddy if he were being flogged, or hanged? As long as there has been recording, flogging and hangings were common punishments and usually defended as "justice has been done." Incarceration really isn't far from medieval punishments. I'm by no means suggesting that…
> How can you be giddy about a human being locked in a cage for 25 years?
The guy is a massive fraudster who not only cost thousands of people their savings, but - maybe even worse - he did significant damage to crypto finance reputation.
He was an already wealthy entrepreneur who could’ve at any point chosen not to be a massive fraud. Actions have consequences. Good riddance.
Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
#714Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you deceive people that that demands truth, do you become rich and become enemies?
maybe but you wont get to keep it because the people you fooled will try their best to not let you have it which is what happened to SBF. I'm trying to point at the analogy to crypto here. everybody believed in something that wasn't but badly wanted it to be true. somebody sold them that false reality and the capital moved from people who were living in a false fictional reality to people who never left this reality.
There is a huge difference between demanding something and badly wanting it.
Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
#715Earlier 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 "going public" mean in this context?
Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
#716An 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…
No dog in this race either way, but what is Michael Lewis meant to have done? Is it just that people feel hist treatment of SBF in Going Infinite was too lenient?
Many people feel he whitewashed him and continued to defend him and minimize his misconduct long after his arrest.
Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
#717Earlier 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…
I have not been following any crypto news POST mtgx and pulling all my crypto to local storage. What did this guy actually do? Did he mismanage funds or literally took money from poeple and stashed it away?
He let his private equity / investment company (Alameda) borrow unlimited customer funds via a software backdoor for various investments.
Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
#718I don't understand why we need to put this guy in jail for 25 years. Similarly, Bernie Madoff, whose crimes were far worse, was sentenced to 150 years.
For stealing money! Given that the risk of repeat offense is low, I just don't see the point of these sentences. I think they're mostly about notoriety. Meanwhile murderers and rapists get less time, and they're at high risk for re-offending.
Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
#719To 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…
It would be more accurate to compare this to a mass crime. 25 feels light for perpetrating one of the biggest and notorious frauds in modern history. Did the judge go to the upper range of the punishment spectrum? There are judges out there who would have made an example out of this case.
Re: Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
#720I don't understand why we need to put this guy in jail for 25 years. Similarly, Bernie Madoff, whose crimes were far worse, was sentenced to 150 years. For stealing money! Given that the risk of repeat offense is low, I just don't see the point of these sentences. I think they're mostly about notoriety. Meanwhile murderers and rapists get less time, and they're at high risk for re-offending.
> Given that the risk of repeat offense is low, I just don't see the point of these sentences.
Is it? Did he even admit to criminal wrong doing? The article thinks otherwise:
> Judge Lewis Kaplan, just before announcing Bankman-Fried's 25-year sentence, said there was a risk "that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and it's not a trivial risk."
> Bankman-Fried acknowledged his mistakes and said he was sorry for what happened to customers but "never a word of remorse for the commission of terrible crimes," Judge Kaplan said.
> "He knew it was wrong," he added.