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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

#351
post #14

Quite a short sentence for the magnitude of the crime. Financial crimes like these do kill people and destroy countless lives. They deserve maximum pentalties.

What is the goal of the punishment? If it is to harm him and make the rest of the world satisfied with it 25 years behind bars seems enough to me, I don’t care if it is 25, 35 or 155. In five years I will have forgotten about this. If it is stopping others, same thing, I don’t think that if someone is determined to do something similar would care about 25 or more years.

So just slap his wrist and say no no?

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

#352
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been posted a thousand times already, there is no parole for federal sentences.

Not "parole" but his sentence can be reduced. From the article: > There is no possibility of parole in federal criminal cases, but Bankman-Fried can still shave time off his 25-year sentence with good behavior. > "SBF may serve as little as 12.5 years, if he gets all of the jailhouse credit available to him," Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor, told CNN. > Federal prisoners generally can earn up to 54 days o…

> Since 2018, however, nonviolent federal inmates

I’d be in favour of amending the law to expand to cover fraud and corruption. Those are crimes that corrode social trust in a way that is analogous to challenging the state’s monopoly on violence. (And is separate from e.g. theft.)

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

#353

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. I suspect the resulting number of shortened lives amongst all the people who lost $8 billion worth of their money due to the fraud is more than the number caused by a single murder.

I thought the “lost” money was simply due to poor accounting and actually found. > Kaplan said he had found that FTX customers lost $8 billion, FTX's equity investors lost $1.7 billion, and that lenders to the Alameda Research hedge fund Bankman-Fried founded lost $1.3 billion. https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-bankman-fried-be-sent... Clearly the real crime is bilking investors out of their money. It’s also que…

> it’s interesting that by contrast SVB leaders didn’t face any repercussions because they were part of the established ways of doing things

LOL, yeah, no. SFB also did really well established old fashioned tradCrime. It wasn't even DeCrime.

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

#354
post #317

From the article, SBF will likely be out in 2036, at the age of 45. There’s a good chance he’ll get himself into shenanigans again, if not already from inside prison.

Or he could end up like Michael Milken, who went to jail for securities fraud but became known as a philanthropist. As Gandalf once said to Frodo,

   Pity? It's a pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some 
   that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to 
   deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. [0] 
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7374580-frodo-it-s-a-pity-b...

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

#355

It's wild that 99% of the "point" of crypto and a Bahamas-based exchange was to avoid all the laws around securities trading, banking, money transferring (anti-money laundering, taxes, etc), etc and yet when things go south, people still expect the government to come in and enforce a tiny subset of the financial laws they've otherwise been operating outside of. This is a weird form of "privatize the profits, socializ…

I'm sure the people running the Bahamas-based exchanges (such as Sam) wouldn't like this law to be enforced.

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

#356
post #317

From the article, SBF will likely be out in 2036, at the age of 45. There’s a good chance he’ll get himself into shenanigans again, if not already from inside prison.

I do enjoy the idea that he'll create a prison super economy based on promissory notes for ramen packets and cigarettes that are tracked in some sort of hand-written block chain kept under their bunk bed and shared between toilet water pipes.

Or maybe he'll just start making yogurt.

https://www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/magazine/yoghurt-mafia-unexp...

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

#357

10 years is a life sentence, anything more is satisfying bloodlust in voters to keep the magick trick of civilization afloat. This human impulse is why aliens don't visit. We're too barbaric to ourselves! xD

Actions have consequences.

Billions of dollars of fraud that took years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees to prove should have a sentence that is a strong deterrent to future crime probabilities.

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

#359
post #276

Earlier 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.

I'm not familiar with the book but this doesn't sound like it pattern matches with any of the poly I've experienced. Going public is a big deal in poly in particular? Since when? What kind of self respecting tech bro group house doesn't have a graph of all the poly on their whiteboard?

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

#360

For those wondering, prosecutors asked for 50 years in prison, defense asked for 5 years. So this sentence is right down the middle. 50 years in prison would have been way too long IMO.

Stole 1% from the pension fund for Ontario's teachers.

Stole unknown amounts of peoples retirement.

Ruined many peoples lives.

How is 50 years too long? The literal largest fraud case in history doesn't even have a life sentence...

We are sending a clear message, grift and steal your way to the top and then get out just in time to retire with all your stolen goods.

You know when he gets out he is gonna go unlock a dead wallet with 100BTC (or some other coin) in it and become an expat.

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