Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 1001 posts

Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

#451

Post by mrb »

daveguy wrote: post #168
toastgrave wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hasn't that been apparent for years now though? It's a cool idea but really no real use that doesn't boil down to some sort of crime

Yeah, I don't think the dominos will fall until the next flash crash when people realize it takes $100+ just to withdraw (because 7 transactions per second isn't many). As soon as confidence is lost, the reaction will be full blown tulip market. We just haven't seen the first bank run yet. And there is literally no backstop for a crypto bank run.

It doesn't take $100 to transfer. Fees are currently around $1. You are off by a factor 100!

Also, Bitcoin can process far more than 7 tps through the Lighting network.

I wonder where your misconceptions come from?

Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

#452

Post by IAmGraydon »

kbd wrote: post #233

The pardon power has been so abused these past few administrations that it's clear there should be constitutional changes in the pardon power, either congressional review, or strip it altogether.

The power to pardon needs to be removed all together. All it does is show that the President overrides the department of justice. How anyone ever thought this should be a thing, I have no idea.

Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

#453

Post by charles_f »

Alifatisk wrote: post #188

I cannot comprehend how half of Americans are fine with this corrupt leader? He even does this bizarre maffia like deals out in the open for his own interest, that's how confident he is no one will say anything The message is clear from his circus administration, you can do anything as long as you bribe them

It is disconcerting. Having discussed openly with people who were supportive of similar politicians, their logic is often in the line of "all of them are corrupt, but at least his politics are different". Now when you point that certainly corruption exists, but this is another level, they're getting into non-logical territory. People perceive times as grim and will take whomever offers something else than the status-quo baseline politician I guess. Even if they grift throughout and everyone's worse off in the end.

On a baser level, if you go on twitter, there's a whole slew of delusional people who either don't believe this because of "fake news", another portion that's in the same "Clinton/Obama/Biden were even worse", and the rest just doesn't even care so long as "the libs are owned".

Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

#455

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

Alifatisk wrote: post #188

I cannot comprehend how half of Americans are fine with this corrupt leader? He even does this bizarre maffia like deals out in the open for his own interest, that's how confident he is no one will say anything The message is clear from his circus administration, you can do anything as long as you bribe them

The thing is, most won't hear about this at all. It's always amazing to talk to a Trump voter and realize they don't actually hear about most of this stuff

And if it does break through the right info bubbles, right-wing media pundits and influencers will be on-the-ready to quickly rationalize or what-about it away and coax their audiences back to their "happy" places, where they can nurse their favorite grievances about the left, the media, the trans people, etc

Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

#456

Post by odo1242 »

Animats wrote: post #89

I wonder if civil forfeiture will work against Trump once he's out of office. Trump's net worth before becoming President was under US$1 billion. Now it's over 6 billion. A civil claim for the difference based on the Emoluments Acts. "The Foreign Emoluments Clause bars the president and other federal officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or fo…

It would work in a situation involving Supreme Court-packing, and that’s about it

Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

#457

Post by Calavar »

rts_cts wrote: post #336

I'm not sure it will be a problem for Changpeng Zhao but let's say I was convicted of a felony in the US, served time in prison and then was pardoned by the president. What would my employment prospects be in comparison to someone who didn't receive a pardon?

Likely bad because the conviction will still show up in background checks. (A pardon doesn't entail expungement.) As you said, this won't be an issue for CZ because he's not going to be looking for the kinds of positions where HR screens the resumes

Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

#458

Post by adrr »

returningfory2 wrote: post #279
adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Nope, Biden pardoning his son was also widely condemned across the political spectrum as an abuse of the pardon power.

Because he was prosecuted for doing drugs and owning a gun? There's literal video of Joe Rogan smoking pot and he talks about his concealed weapons permit. It would be a slam dump case, some how i don't think he's getting prosecuted because its selective law open to abuse. Seems perfectly good use of pardon.

Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

#459

Post by drak0n1c »

dc396 wrote: post #282
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prosecution was not political lol, he went out of his way to support money laundering on the Binance platform. The reason he complied with the prosecution and pled guilty rather than try to fight it out in court was that they were able to produce a ton of evidence that he deliberately ignored regulators and regulations designed to prevent money laundering in order to make money off sanctioned groups and criminal…

It must really suck and be incredibly disheartening to be one of the folks who pursued this to a conviction.

Those prosecutors were deeply embarrassed by missing FTX at the time, so they then had the SEC and IRS harass and threaten innocent US citizens in Japan and the US as they fished for charges merely because they happened to once work for or hung out with CZ or employees at Binance.

CZ is the first and only known first-time offender in U.S. history to receive a prison sentence for this single, non-fraud-related charge of improper platform AML KYC implementation. Big banks routinely pay a fine for this, and never face imprisonment. The judge found no evidence that he knew of any illicit transactions and that it was reasonable for him to believe there were no illicit funds on the platform. Credit where it's due, they somehow pulled off a 4 month sentence for this unprecedented charge. And now it's all for naught.

Re: Trump pardons convicted Binance founder

#460

Post by godelski »

Alifatisk wrote: post #188

I cannot comprehend how half of Americans are fine with this corrupt leader? He even does this bizarre maffia like deals out in the open for his own interest, that's how confident he is no one will say anything The message is clear from his circus administration, you can do anything as long as you bribe them

Because it isn't about actions, it is about sides. Tribalism.

It is the loss of complexity. Many cannot understand that by choosing the lesser of two evils does not mean you support evil. It means your choices are limited. We have turned the political issues into good and evil, rather than disagreements in how to achieve our mostly shared goals. We can no longer see the other side as friends and family, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Anyone countering this can just proclaim "both sides" and in some sense they will be right, they have evidence and people do abuse that framework. But at the same time that destroys the bridge between us. The abuse of calling both sides evil along with the accusation that all use cases are instances of abuse. It binarizes the environment, creating a simple world where there are only two choices. Which is easy to do when everything is so complex, as we're so tired and don't want to think.

It's also why this administration's strategy is so effective: overload the opposition. After all, Brandolini's Law states: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." They've weaponized it. It's an effective strategy, and hard to defend against. I'm sure someone will offer a solution, "it's so simple, you just..." and we perpetuate the game.

Post reply on HN