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FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

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Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#151

Post by Arainach »

tedmiston wrote: post #137
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, USA makes some effort to stop ripoffs of unwitting "unaccredited" investors within the USA. Because this cannot stop ripoffs outside the USA, you propose ditching the within-borders effort?

> So, USA makes some effort to stop ripoffs of unwitting "unaccredited" investors within the USA. The problem is that it's a dubious premise to begin with to assume that someone's knowledge or competence is tied to their salary or net worth. It's just baseless gatekeeping.

It's not baseless. Those who are least able to tolerate loss and have the least time to do due diligence are precisely those most attracted to get rich quick schemes and most susceptible to deceptive practices.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#152

Post by gruez »

rglover wrote: post #103
Tenoke wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not really an accurate characterization. The most promoted cause by EA has been the Against Malaria Foundation because it saves the most money per $ spent. If you donate to GiveWell (a basic recommended way to donate in EA) they mostly donate to Malaria and similar causes. Obviously, some members do a lot more but Political causes aren't the standard, that stuff is.

Most-promoted, but is it the most funded? For example, their landing page just links to the AMF's donors list page while claiming EA provided "significant support" with the only mentions of EA being people they've inspired to donate in relatively small amounts (relative to the billions moving through FTX). I'd imagine they're buried in there somewhere but if they're a major supporter I'd assume they'd be plastering t…

>Most-promoted, but is it the most funded? For example, their landing page just links to the AMF's donors list page while claiming EA provided "significant support" with the only mentions of EA being people they've inspired to donate in relatively small amounts

This seems totally expected if you think of effective altruism as a movement focused on figuring out where your money would be best spent, rather than as some sort of organization that wants your money. This is reflected in what SBF did. He didn't donate all his money to effective altruism like it's a cult or whatever, he set up a charity and hired various people to decide which worthy projects should be funded.

>(relative to the billions moving through FTX).

And why would you compare that to "the billions moving through FTX"? FTX isn't EA, nor does FTX operate as some sort of non-profit. FTX does have a charitable arm, but they only issued $160 million worth of grants, nowhere near "the billions" you speak of. You can see their grant list here: https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-grants/

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#153

Post by 0xy »

threeseed wrote: post #124
doesnotexist wrote: post #45

> The amount raised contained numerical references to marijuana and oral sex: $420.69 million raised from 69 investors. An article published by one of FTX’s investors, Sequoia, called that fundraising a “meme round,” referring to the embedded jokes. Is Sequoia going to need to rebrand itself after this? Sure does raise some questions about their judgement and professionalism. Hey Investors, we're raising a round of a…

Sequoia was also backing Musk's takeover of Twitter. Not sure if they ended up investing. If they did then their record is looking pretty poor right now.

Twitter is at peak MAUs and according to previous financial statements should be cash flow positive after personnel changes. Seems like they invested in a business which was almost immediately switched into a profitable enterprise on an upward trajectory.

What am I missing? Or are you making a prediction that is the opposite of available evidence?

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#154

Post by shapefrog »

thepasswordis wrote: post #144
shapefrog wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said "I'm doing EA" - the EA community said "He is amazing he is doing the best EA" What makes you think that he wasn't doing effective altruism

The part where it turned out that he was just robbing people.

A modern day robinhood - stealing from the rich and giving to the poor

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#155

Post by ehzy »

tedmiston wrote: post #137
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, USA makes some effort to stop ripoffs of unwitting "unaccredited" investors within the USA. Because this cannot stop ripoffs outside the USA, you propose ditching the within-borders effort?

> So, USA makes some effort to stop ripoffs of unwitting "unaccredited" investors within the USA. The problem is that it's a dubious premise to begin with to assume that someone's knowledge or competence is tied to their salary or net worth. It's just baseless gatekeeping.

It's also about their ability to withstand losses.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#156

Post by drowsspa »

gruez wrote: post #148
drowsspa wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back during the Brazilian dictatorship, they used to say "we have to grow the cake to split it afterwards". What actually surprises me is that EA was apparently taken seriously. It does explain a lot of the fake goodness Silicon Valley is well known for.

>What actually surprises me is that EA was apparently taken seriously. It does explain a lot of the fake goodness Silicon Valley is well known for. What's the appropriate level of seriousness to take stuff like effective altruism or other charitable endeavors? Should we go full nihilist and assume that everyone is greedy and only donating for selfish reasons?

Filthy rich people looking for a framework in which they can get to enjoy being rich, not advocating for any real change in the system, and feel morally superior because they're donating some meaningless amount to charities? Yeah, some cynicism is very much warranted for.

And before you say it, it's meaningless to donate even 90% of your fortune to someone like them. Specially to those glorified PR operations that are the charities they tend to support.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#157

Post by jancsika »

gruez wrote: post #126
abhv wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) Any theory that encourages people to suspect working directly on important local causes that are meaningful to them, but instead, seek out the highest paying jobs in order to donate to EA causes is just hiding a special kind of ponzi scheme ("get more people in to fund the good work of the current people"). (2) EA creates an excuse to act outrageously evil "for the good of the longterm"

1. The underlying logic behind earning to give is sound. You flying over to Africa or whatever to do charitable activities (digging a well?) is obviously going to be less impactful than you working at some high paid white collar job and then donating the money to pay some local laborers to do the same job. 2. Contrary to what you think, there's nothing about effective altruism that requires/wants you to donate to eff…

> 1. The underlying logic behind earning to give is sound. You flying over to Africa or whatever to do charitable activities (digging a well?) is obviously going to be less impactful than you working at some high paid white collar job and then donating the money to pay some local laborers to do the same job.

It isn't obvious, and I'm skeptical both by cases like this and by the lack of domain expertise of a white-collar worker to be able to judge the veracity of charitable activities.

I mean, maybe if we had flush teams of water quality experts in every state with the time and expertise to judge whether water supplies are safe. But as it is, a team from Virginia Tech had to high tail it to Flint during their water crisis based on the reports they heard about lead levels there.

If there are too few domain experts or even too weak a web of trust to connect them to white collar donors, what you describe doesn't sound like an effective strategy. (Not to mention whatever it is that causes you to think that the approach is obviously superior to drilling down in some domain.)

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#158

Post by hgsgm »

wslh wrote: post #131
slibhb wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an indictment of EA because many prominent EA people were associated with FTX/Sam. That shows poor judgement and, on some level, EA is about smart people making judgements about long-term good. How can we trust them to make those judgements when they decide to hitch their wagon to FTX?

I will tell three stories: A friend of mine is part of a Mensa (top 2% IQ people) local chapter. He did that mainly for fun and no pedantic reasons. He always tells me story of the problems they have organizing basic activities and governance for the chapter... Even when all participants have a very high IQ. Beyond the validity of IQ, people do crazy things when trusted people, or in power positions give recommendati…

No post body was provided.

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#159

Post by Bubble_Pop_22 »

gruez wrote: post #126
abhv wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) Any theory that encourages people to suspect working directly on important local causes that are meaningful to them, but instead, seek out the highest paying jobs in order to donate to EA causes is just hiding a special kind of ponzi scheme ("get more people in to fund the good work of the current people"). (2) EA creates an excuse to act outrageously evil "for the good of the longterm"

1. The underlying logic behind earning to give is sound. You flying over to Africa or whatever to do charitable activities (digging a well?) is obviously going to be less impactful than you working at some high paid white collar job and then donating the money to pay some local laborers to do the same job. 2. Contrary to what you think, there's nothing about effective altruism that requires/wants you to donate to eff…

> 1. The underlying logic behind earning to give is sound. You flying over to Africa or whatever to do charitable activities (digging a well?) is obviously going to be less impactful than you working at some high paid white collar job and then donating the money to pay some local laborers to do the same job.

Bill Gates has been trying to do this ever since the year 2000. Transfering quality of life from Seattle or Pasadena to a slum in Lagos or Nairobi is the hardest thing you could possibly do.

Humans are selfish so the moment the decision is made to allocate an X amount of money Piranhas start to attack the loot, both at home and abroad.

The dynamics of negotiations, pricing power, elasticity of supply and demand don't go out of the window just because a sum of money is destined to Africa or has "philantropy" stamped across.

At the end of the day you need people who do it for their own satisfaction, not for the money

Re: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried cashed out $300M during funding spree

#160

Post by bhawks »

thepasswordis wrote: post #42

Just a general statement on people commenting on this saga: Sam wasn't doing effective altruism. He was lying about doing effective altruism. It's weird to me that people talk about this as an indictment of EA...but this rings similar to me as claiming that this is an indictment of DeFi or cryptocurrency generally. Sam/Caroline weren't doing DeFi, and neither were they really doing anything related to cryptocurrency.…

First and foremost a huge number of people saw their savings and investment wiped out by sociopaths that defrauded them and continuously lied to everyone's face as the charade came crumbling down. SBF and his cadre seem likely to escape any form of justice. Indeed there is a chance they'll be able to keep a portion of their ill-gotten gains.

Those directly effected and their friends and family are hurt and angry. Those are the normal feelings to have. They will express them. Now is the time for listening and supporting, not correcting details.

There are other parties that have long standing disagreements with both the EA and crypto communities. Many of them are taking this moment to dogpile and dump on those movements to prove their point. I believe the right response is to reflect and self improve. The crypto community is drastically embracing self custody and defi. Moving transactions on chain will help prevent this type of fraud (and it's the core point of crypto to begin with). This is a reasonable path forward. I'm not plugged into EA but I hope there are similar efforts being made to learn and rebuild.

The best parts of both communities is focused on changing core primitives of human society at a scale never attempted before. If they're going to succeed they will have to overcome much bigger challenges than what this recent disaster caused. It will take time, openness and dedication.

I think both communities really need to realize and prepare for the fact that they're challenging areas that are extremely attractive to sociopaths and psychopaths - money, morality and ultimately power. The community must be able to identify, contain and limit the damage caused by bad actors.

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