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SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

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Re: SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

#631

Post by siftrics »

maxbond wrote: post #606
siftrics wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The utilitarian slant is interesting. I can understand why some people think crypto is a net negative at the moment. The set of businesses adjacent to true, on-chain applications is rife with fraud. Thousands of people have died, maybe even millions have lost life savings. But I ask you an analogous question: what do you say to the people suffering any crime that was aided by free, encrypted communications on the int…

The Internet is supplying those same people with obvious, immediate benefits. They're not being asked to endure hardship for a hypothetical benefit to hypothetical people. So to people who are victims of online fraud I would say, I'm sorry that happened, let's improve the Internet so that it doesn't happen again (eg by writing more secure software). To be clear I'm not a utilitarian per say, I just look at cryptoasse…

Thank you for the charitable take and insightful response.

Re: SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

#632

Post by Semaphor »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #617
tru3_power wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why were they so obsessed with keeping alameda afloat? Was it because if it died there would be no market maker big enough for FTX to run smoothly?

I posted a Twitter thread about this in an early story that I can look up that was super informative with a lot of detail, but the short of it is that it was all a house of cards based on FTT. If Alameda died, it would have tanked the value of FTT, which would have in turn killed FTX, because they were assigning huge value to FTT on their balance sheet (which is, in and of itself, insane because FTT worked more like…

Sidebar

> which is, in and of itself, insane because FTT worked more like a stock of FTX itself - a company doesn't put its own stock on the asset side of the balance sheet

Thinking about it, it makes sense. But I never did before. So where does a company’s own stock normally end up at, balance-wise?

Re: SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

#633

Post by maxbond »

siftrics wrote: post #631
maxbond wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet is supplying those same people with obvious, immediate benefits. They're not being asked to endure hardship for a hypothetical benefit to hypothetical people. So to people who are victims of online fraud I would say, I'm sorry that happened, let's improve the Internet so that it doesn't happen again (eg by writing more secure software). To be clear I'm not a utilitarian per say, I just look at cryptoasse…

Thank you for the charitable take and insightful response.

You as well!

Re: SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

#634

Post by yabatopia »

dereg wrote: post #104
rjbwork wrote: post #4

Much sooner than I expected. Figured it'd be a couple of years before the AG was secure enough in their case to bring charges. This is MUCH faster than Madoff or Holmes. Then again, he's been much more out in the open about everything. He pretty much laid the prosecution's case out to the public for them.

It's clear Caroline Ellison has turned against him. Stephanie Avakian, former SEC enforcement chief, is representing her in NY. I'm guessing they wouldn't have been able to file charges this quickly without Caroline becoming a cooperating witness.

Maybe they don't need a cooprerating witness or special deals. Apparently the companies were really badly run, with lots of clear-cut violations, making it very easy to file charges.

From The Verge article about the arrest of Bankman-Fried ( https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23506483/sam-bankman-fri... ) :

John J. Ray III, who has taken over for Bankman-Fried as CEO of FTX and whose credentials include supervising the corporate cleanup after Enron imploded, has already said, 'Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.'

Re: SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

#635

Post by lvass »

notch656a wrote: post #547
notdonspaulding wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Justice is what happens when people are held accountable for the wrong things they've done. Nothing about justice requires that punishment be meted out in strict accordance with the demographic breakdown of a population except insofar as wrong things are done in strict accordance with the same demographic categories. Maybe you're assuming that to be the case, but I don't think you'll find any evidence to support such…

Exactly. If black people disproportionately are in prison, maybe that's just justice.

It's not justice, but the same phenomenon. If certain group has a larger tendency to commit crimes, and you have limited time and resource to look for crimes, it's overall more effective (arrest more people and perhaps prevent more crime) to disproportionately target that certain group. Men and blacks do in fact proportionally commit more crime than women and other races, but less so than the rate of incarceration suggests. There are only two ways to prevent this: being super effective and checking everything (police state), or being less effective and arrest less criminals for taking extra steps to arrest in just proportion (there are legit reasons to want this, e.g. it'd be terrible for society if for example white women had the sensation they could commit any crime without punishment. But to what degree is that extra effort worth it?).

Re: SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

#636

Post by notch656a »

alvah wrote: post #627
CydeWeys wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plus, prosecuting her may not even look all that good, for identity politics reasons. Strongly disagree with this. Look at how they threw the book at Elizabeth Holmes (vs, say, Adam Neumann, or any other male founder from the last decade plus). If anything women have been getting it harder.

What an awful take. Holmes' (male) co-founder got a longer sentence than she did, just for a start.

No post body was provided.

Re: SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

#637

Post by wombatpm »

yucky wrote: post #500
tomp wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm... does that mean she gets away scot-free? Not sure that's fair, she seems very complicit.

93% of prisoners are men[1], so it's pretty common that women do not face justice. [1] https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_gende...

As more and more women break the glass ceiling, we’ll see a higher percentage of white collar crimes being committed by women

Re: SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

#638

Post by jahewson »

ffggvv wrote: post #465
jasonhansel wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a lot of people strongly believed that SBF would never get in trouble because he was a Democratic donor, and that this was all part of some vast corruption scandal. It turns out not everything is a conspiracy.

well he has no more money to give, so of course they are happy to arrest him now. they just didnt bother investigating the fraud until after it collapsed for some reason..

> they just didnt bother investigating the fraud until after it collapsed

Nope. The investigation was opened months before FTX collapsed. It’s not like they’re going to announce it in advance!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-21/us-prosec...

Re: SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

#639

Post by propter_hoc »

Semaphor wrote: post #632
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I posted a Twitter thread about this in an early story that I can look up that was super informative with a lot of detail, but the short of it is that it was all a house of cards based on FTT. If Alameda died, it would have tanked the value of FTT, which would have in turn killed FTX, because they were assigning huge value to FTT on their balance sheet (which is, in and of itself, insane because FTT worked more like…

Sidebar > which is, in and of itself, insane because FTT worked more like a stock of FTX itself - a company doesn't put its own stock on the asset side of the balance sheet Thinking about it, it makes sense. But I never did before. So where does a company’s own stock normally end up at, balance-wise?

By definition the equity of a business is its assets less its liabilities.

Re: SBF Arrested by Bahamian Authorities

#640

Post by mbreese »

iudqnolq wrote: post #599
mbreese wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But DOJ would have needed someone who had the receipts (who could also explain it all) to be able to act this quickly. So, in this case, I think it's a reasonable theory (but not the only viable one). Maybe part of the urgency was also the planned congressional testimony.

> But DOJ would have needed someone who had the receipts (who could also explain it all) to be able to act this quickly. Citation needed? I'm not a lawyer, but it seems plausible to me that SBF's public admissions of crimes, plus the full records of his company, are sufficient.

Where would they have gotten the full records? Or been able to know where to look in the records? Forensic accounting takes time (even if the records are as bad as alleged). To me, this suggests someone on the inside helping to build a case. Federal cases can take years to build because they are usually very thorough. Going from collapse of the company to extradition request in the course of weeks seems really fast to me from a historical perspective (but IANAL either).

But this, like most of the thread, is all speculation. We’ll find out more in due course.

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