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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

#801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn't Madoff's plan the whole time to pocket investor money for himself, whereas Sam's was to arrogantly (and illegally) gamble it with the thought being he could return the principal from Alameda back to FTX in future? Genuine question, I'm not super informed on these.

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

#802

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…

For me, I don't think I feel the same way as you (my loss was small). There have been many cases where white collar crime which has similar (or greater) financial ramifications as the example of mugging you give, but the punishment is generally significantly lower (if at all). Granted a mugging could have differing levels of direct emotional impact, but white collar crime generally ends in lighter sentences. SBF and…

I think “violence” is at times such a silly measuring stick for modern justice.

Instead, we should see it as lost/ruined human potential. What is worse, violently robbing one bank of $10k, or “peacefully” robbing a massive number of people for billions of dollars?

I sure as hell know what I think, and it’s absolutely not in line with SBF’s sentence. He should rot in Ryker’s with people who have, unfortunately, done less harm but still found their way there.

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

#803
post #509

Earlier 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…

Last I checked he’s not going to Treblinka. If you’re feeling sick about this you obviously need to read the court case and look into what low security federal prison is like.

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

#804
post #286

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. The value of a single human life is not infinite. In engineering and public policy, a value like $10 million / life is typically used to make trade-offs. SBF stole funds far in excess of that. Secondly, when funds of this scale are stolen, inevitably people wind up dying early from things like stress,…

> Secondly, when funds of this scale are stolen, inevitably people wind up dying early from things like stress, and suicides. Yep, it was mentioned in sentencing today by one of the victims. At least 3 have already committed suicide after the shit hit the fan.

As fuming as I am, there are I think 30 attempts and 7 successes out of 100k males per year? so we still need to prove that it is above average. And above average of the median cryptocurrency owner, because they may have a risk profile too.

And then, yes, trial SBF for each of them as murder on top of embezzlement.

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

#805

An 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…

I don't think Caroline is a bad person. She was brilliant smart and focused on academics etc. She got pulled into this mess during the crypto mania phase.

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

#806
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I propose the Bankman-Fried number: how many people you personally know who got rekt in the crypto crash of November 2022.

I had somewhere between $10k and $20k in FTX. Took it all out when CZ started tweeting

Are they gonna claw it back in bankruptcy?

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

#808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Median household wealth is about $200k, and 90th percentile is about $1.6 million. That means every tenth person in line at the DMV (a decent cross-section of society) is worth over a million dollars, and if you're in a major metropolitan area, much more.

remove real estate from that equation.

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

#809

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…

> If anything, it's excessive if you consider the nature of the crime relative to the nature of murder or kidnapping. The value of a single human life is not infinite. In engineering and public policy, a value like $10 million / life is typically used to make trade-offs. SBF stole funds far in excess of that. Secondly, when funds of this scale are stolen, inevitably people wind up dying early from things like stress,…

To me it is an absurd comparison.

Someone stealing a billion dollars is committing a far worse crime than someone that murders me.

The problem I have with this is imagine what a statistical poll would be if you posed the question "would you spend 20 years in jail for 1 billion?"

There is a good percentage that absolutely would sign up for that, obviously a much different result than "would you spend life in prison to get a billion dollars".

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

#810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wasn't Madoff's plan the whole time to pocket investor money for himself, whereas Sam's was to arrogantly (and illegally) gamble it with the thought being he could return the principal from Alameda back to FTX in future? Genuine question, I'm not super informed on these.

From what I’ve read, it’s not exactly clear that Madoff had a plan, it seems more like he lied to a few people about being able to make them a lot of money, and that snowballed into him taking a lot of “investments” that he didn’t know what to do with.

From what I’ve seen about SBF, it does seem like he has a very high risk tolerance, was betting big to win big, and thinking the reward was worth the risk.

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