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SBF scheduled to testify tomorrow at US House hearing on FTX collapse

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Re: SBF scheduled to testify tomorrow at US House hearing on FTX collapse

#161

Post by zeven7 »

whimsicalism wrote: post #157
zeven7 wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not so sure he's dead in the water as a future donor. There is $8 billion missing. I think it's likely most of it is gone in the sense of irrecoverable by SBF, but with the amount he was moving around it wouldn't be hard to drop $100 million here, $40 million there. That's not to mention the $300 million he cashed out in the last FTX funding round and the $1 billion personal loan he took from FTX, neither of whic…

He's not going to be donating $100 million here or there to these politicians. They would not accept his donations, he is politically the kiss of death. He likely does not even have the $8 billion.

> They would not accept his donations, he is politically the kiss of death.

I'm not going to address this part, which is the main point of your message. You might be right, I really don't know how political money moves, especially "dark money" and whatnot.

I'll address the other parts to clarify because I think there were a couple minor points of confusion.

> He's not going to be donating $100 million here or there to these politicians.

The $100 million here, $40 million there I spoke of was him dropping money in accounts / crypto wallets controlled by himself. I'm saying I think he still has a lot of money, and from what I understand money can buy influence. You might be right that his money cannot buy influence on Capital Hill anymore. But I do think he still has a lot of money.

> He likely does not even have the $8 billion.

No, I definitely don't think he has $8 billion. Clearly a lot of that was lost. But I do think there's good reason to believe he has access to money in the order of $100 million - $1 billion while he's trying to claim he only has $100k left.

Re: SBF scheduled to testify tomorrow at US House hearing on FTX collapse

#162

Post by xg15 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #104
xg15 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, at least git is easily "re-decentralizable" if you have to: Just add another remote to your working copy and push your state. I also believe there are lots of companies who run their own internal git services to not be dependent on GitHub. I agree though, in theory, git would allow some fully p2p working mode, where each developer just adds the machines of the other developers as remotes and there is no "auth…

> I also believe there are lots of companies who run their own internal git services to not be dependent on GitHub. The same is true of Subversion or CVS or Perforce, which are all very centralized source control systems. Relying on Github.com itself is another level of centralization over and above the near-universal industry pattern of having a centralized repo. > I agree though, in theory, git would allow some ful…

> but with many entities maintaining their own central repos

This sounds more "federated" than p2p though. I imagine each organisation has again a centralized hub for coordinating their own development on the kernel. So the collaboration between those different orgs (and eventually with Linus) is sort of a layer on top of the normal git workflow.

I think you can see "federation" patterns (i.e. where orgs/servers/hubs/etc are p2p but each user belongs to a particular hub) pretty often in decentralised systems - and my subjective impression is that they are a lot more successful than "true" p2p systems (where users themselves are p2p).

Other examples of that pattern would be IRC, Mastodon, email and in a limited sense the web itself (users are bound to a platform but platforms can interface with other platforms via APIs)

Crypto (and git) would be sort of hybrids: It's technically possible to use the system without a hub, but the vast majority of users goes through a hub - for crypto, those would be cloud wallets and the exchanges we're talking about...

Re: SBF scheduled to testify tomorrow at US House hearing on FTX collapse

#163

Post by gamblor956 »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #82

The fact that this guy has not been arrested just goes to show how completely f*cked America is.

Once SBF gets arrested, the clock on trying him in court begins. The "clock" varies by jurisdiction; it can be a short as 30 days or as long as 6 months, and they have to gather all of the evidence they will be using before the trial begins.[1] Once the trial has concluded, he cannot be re-tried on the same or related charges even if new evidence comes to light.

Or IOW: prosecutors get one shot at the apple. They're going to wait until they have a good case and then they will prosecute him, assuming he hasn't been offed by then, and he will spend many years in prison.

[1] Defendants are usually asked to waive this deadline. For less serious charges, or for non-violent felonies where the defendant isn't planning to contest the charges, this is usually a good idea because prosecutors will agree to a better plea deal. For more serious and complex cases like this, it's never a good idea to waive the deadline. The defendant doesn't want to give the prosecution more time to prepare a case because the prosecutor won't agree to a better plea deal if they do. When defendants refuse to waive their right to a speedy trial, conviction rates are usually below 50% (from a standard rate of north of 80%) as the standard criminal investigation takes much longer than the speedy-trial window.

Re: SBF scheduled to testify tomorrow at US House hearing on FTX collapse

#164

Post by dang »

This isn't a substantive story, so the thread is just a repetition of discussions that have already been had many times by now.

Once he does testify, maybe that will be a substantive story, with something new to discuss.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Edit: it looks like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33959557 has some new information? not sure how significant it is

Re: SBF scheduled to testify tomorrow at US House hearing on FTX collapse

#165

Post by zeven7 »

creato wrote: post #140
TotoHorner wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why he would take this approach as opposed to simply cashing out when things started to turn and disappearing Because he wasn't expected their balance sheet to get leaked. He had enough liquidity from FTX customer deposits to cover any Alameda margin calls from losses and Alameda wouldn't get margin called from FTX for any losses (due to their god mode). So, he could keep just keep holding levered losses and wait f…

> Him just disappearing would force his parents/siblings to also have to become fugitives How is that? Are they involved somehow? I’ve been following this somewhat closely and the only time I’ve seen his family mentioned is that he should have known better given his parents’ expertise, but that doesn’t imply they were involved.

Not sure why they would become fugitives or what exactly parent is referring to, but FYI: FTX bought a $16 million house in the Bahamas and put it in SBF's parent's names https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-bahama...

Re: SBF scheduled to testify tomorrow at US House hearing on FTX collapse

#166

Post by TotoHorner »

creato wrote: post #140
TotoHorner wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why he would take this approach as opposed to simply cashing out when things started to turn and disappearing Because he wasn't expected their balance sheet to get leaked. He had enough liquidity from FTX customer deposits to cover any Alameda margin calls from losses and Alameda wouldn't get margin called from FTX for any losses (due to their god mode). So, he could keep just keep holding levered losses and wait f…

> Him just disappearing would force his parents/siblings to also have to become fugitives How is that? Are they involved somehow? I’ve been following this somewhat closely and the only time I’ve seen his family mentioned is that he should have known better given his parents’ expertise, but that doesn’t imply they were involved.

No, I'm saying if he took the route of cashing out and going into hiding. He would never talk to his parents/siblings again. Or, they will be in serious legal trouble if he does.

Helping a fugitive evade governments is illegal everywhere.

And even if he goes with the "never talk to his parents/siblings again" route.

It's basically impossible for you to show your face in public anywhere if your son is on the FBI top 10 most wanted list.

It's slightly more palatable if your son is in prison lol.

Re: SBF scheduled to testify tomorrow at US House hearing on FTX collapse

#167

Post by bmitc »

ESTheComposer wrote: post #10
swellguy wrote: post #6

Does anyone else find it extremely ironical that FTX happened in crypto? Wasn't FTX one of the things crypto was meant to solve?

No, not even remotely. FTX is a centralized exchange, and is the opposite of what crypto’s original philosophy is

It seems to me that without regulated centralization, crypto will never work / take hold and be a little niche that only enthusiasts care about.

Re: SBF scheduled to testify tomorrow at US House hearing on FTX collapse

#168

Post by TechoChamber »

Animats wrote: post #150

The encouraging thing about the FTX collapse is that it didn't affect the rest of the economy. The Washington Post points out that the FTX crash didn't produce any visible change in any major US economic indicator outside crypto.[1] The whole crypto sector is that disconnected from the real world. So, let the prosecutors, courts, and accountants sort this out. Follow the court filings here.[2] Today's updates: the In…

We still don't know that.

> “We note that you own or have issued crypto assets and/or hold crypto assets on behalf of third parties,” one of the questions said. “Explain whether these crypto assets serve as collateral for any loan, margin, rehypothecation or other similar activities to which you or your affiliates are a party.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sec-asks-public-companies-for-m...

I know lots of people in finance who are claiming the big banks used made up coins as collateral for stocks, and the house of cards just hasn't collapsed yet. And if you look through their 13F reports it kinda confirms it.

Re: SBF scheduled to testify tomorrow at US House hearing on FTX collapse

#169

Post by stouset »

stcredzero wrote: post #102
stouset wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It wasn't very complex, he made a bunch of basic mistakes that nobody with even a passing familiarity with finance should have made, and to say that he should have done better is an understatement of almost comical proportions. I just also think that these things were (at least initially) due to absurd levels of hubris and incompetence rather than outright malicious intent. The guy thought his shit didn't st…

I just also think that these things were (at least initially) due to absurd levels of hubris and incompetence rather than outright malicious intent. Is there really that much of a difference between these two in this financial context?

I don't think it matters from a justice perspective.

From the perspective of someone watching the crypto world discover failure by failure why the modern banking system is the way it is this particular situation is amazing to witness. Everyone believes they're a genius when line goes up. Line goes down and everything falls apart.

Re: SBF scheduled to testify tomorrow at US House hearing on FTX collapse

#170

Post by stingrae »

throwthere wrote: post #50

Having followed a lot of the SBF discussion since he keeps giving interviews, here's the FAQ-- 1) How did you lose $5ish billion of customer deposits? - They were deposited to Alameda, a totally independent hedge fund run by an unrelated party (my ex-girlfriend who lives with me). We credited Alameda without properly debiting Alameda on FTX. 2) Why didn't you track them? - There was a bug in the dashboard. I made a b…

A key thing seems to be that Alameda couldn't have been a totally independent hedge fund because my understanding is that SBF owned 90% of Alameda.
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