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…
> - There was a bug in the dashboard. I made a boneheaded mistake. Oopsies. Will this hold up in court? Can you go to jail for bugs in dashboards?
Normally, to burn billions of dollars, you need to be an executive in a big, established corporation that has controls in place to avoid that sort of thing from happening. It's much harder to claim negligence if you conveniently found a way to sidestep all of that in some sophisticated manner.
FTX is kinda different. With crypto in general, you have relatively new, private companies operating in a space with almost no regulation, getting millions/billions of dollars thrown at them by VCs and customers in a short period of time. It would be possible for a software bug to burn money at an unprecedented rate in a crypto company when compared to a big established bank or something.
Even though that is possible, I can't imagine that argument holding up for SBF. I think it'll be tough to buy SBF claim he's a simple startup founder who got in over his head when lawyers present stuff like FTX's corporate structure. But IANAL and all that, so it'll be interesting to see how this plays out.