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I love how the crypto community has decided that SBF is "not a crypto guy" now that he's done crimes.

And he's somehow "establishment" because he gave to political parties, and Democrat because we're ignoring the GOP contributions.

SBF was more of a crypto guy than 99% of crypto. And he was way more crypto than he was establishment.

And the problems in crypto that his actions highlighted (centralization, fraud, lack of consumer protections) cannot be waved away with "no true scotsman" arguments.

He's your boy. Own it or the industry will not correct its own deep, ongoing mistakes, currently being made by entities like Binance.

> And he was way more crypto than he was establishment.

Not sure about that. He was meeting with the chairman of the SEC and was a top donor personally to the Democratic Party.

That screams "establishment".

How many crypto bros can meet with the chairman of the SEC?

Historically, at least one cryptobro could.

Unless you hold that meeting with the chairman of the SEC disqualifies you from being a cryptobro. In which case it's tautologically zero.

> Historically, at least one cryptobro could.

And that is out of how many cryptobros in existence?

Does Elon's deliberately influencing coin prices by Tweeting make him a cryptobro?

I'm pretty sure he'll end up meeting the SEC a few times.

This entire thread is just denial that SBF is in bed with the establishment just because the current establishment happens to be some folks favorite team.

Um, okay. If he was in "bed with the establishment", it didn't do him any good, did it?

I love people who portray his willingness to engage with regulators as a form of selling out, as opposed to what it was, knowing that regulation was coming, so engaging to try to influence it to his advantage.

Which is what every other industry does when the regulatory hammer comes down.

But so many crypto believers seem to think that crypto is different to all that's come before it, it's really not. It's very sadly humorous how crypto has speedrun the entire history of why financial institutions are regulated.

Lol, it would be more appropriate saying being in bed with the establishment did him waaaaaay to much 'good'.

So much so he began to think he was above it all.

It's an old story that repeats over and over again, long before crypto and long after it.

> Um, okay. If he was in "bed with the establishment", it didn't do him any good, did it?

Yes, it allowed him to steal billions till someone with non zero morals leaked info about it.

> I love people who portray his willingness to engage with regulators as a form of selling out, as opposed to what it was, knowing that regulation was coming, so engaging to try to influence it to his advantage.

I didn't say that. You are reading too much.

> I love people who portray his willingness to engage with regulators as a form of selling out, as opposed to what it was, knowing that regulation was coming, so engaging to try to influence it to his advantage.

No one said that. The point is SBF is in bed with the establishment and the establishment deserves some blame.

I thought this entire thread was denial of the fact that cryptobros could be part of the establishment. "No, it's not a Ponzi scheme. We're taking down the old order. Buy my coins."

I'm fine with saying he's establishment. I just don't agree that makes him not a cryptobro

> I'm fine with saying he's establishment.

And I am fine with saying he's a cryptobro.

> I just don't agree that makes him not a cryptobro

No one said that.

The point is that he is not an ordinary cryptobro. He rose in status in the crypto world due to being in bed with the establishment.

> just because the current establishment happens to be some folks favorite team.

I don't think anyone here but you thinks this is that type of "political" or otherwise meaningful in this conversation.

Ditto the "centralization" purity test. No decentralized system can fail ergo if it failed it wasn't decentralized. This doesn't apply to FTX of course which was more centralized than a black hole and never claimed otherwise - but it's another instance I've seen tossed around in the collapse. The truth is nothing in crypto is really decentralized, though, and decentralization isn't in and of itself a useful end. It's a means to an end nobody's discovered yet.

Money laundering, black market money transfers, tax evasion.

> Ditto the "centralization" purity test. No decentralized system can fail ergo if it failed it wasn't decentralized.

It's a trick: Nothing in crypto is decentralized. Decentralization (ipfs, orbitdb) is dying on the vine because you can make vastly more money in crypto - because it's centralized.

But he isn't, that's the core problem.

He was a Ringer that was clearly parachuted in. The NYTimes puff piece absolutely confirmed that.

Sam's not the first and he won't be the last.

I got over the hype back in 2014, once you take the rose colored glasses off guys like Sam are easier to identify.

See cf No True Scotsman fallacy, of which this would be a perfect example.

No. The entire purpose of cryptocurrency is to enable holding assets without intermediaries having custody of the assets. Whether or not you think this is valuable is another question, but it is undeniable that this is the technical ability that cryptocurrencies enable.

SBF created a giant custodial casino where one could bet on cryptocurrency prices, and people lost money that they gave him custody over. If they had held it in their own wallets, they would not have lost it. Many people in the cryptocurrency community spoke out against him for a long time. This is like if SBF had a penchant for kilts, the media was asking “what does this mean for Scotland?”, actual Scottish people were saying “this has nothing to do with Scotland”, and you come in with the comment “nO tRuE ScOtSmAn”

Well said, this is clearly the case here.

Tell that to the vast majority of crypto holders who cannot master the underlying technology of crypto and therefore rely on the exchanges. Crypto is not contiguous with your highly selective, normative definition. Crypto is everything done by everybody buying, selling and building tech for crypto.

The NYT interview confirmed nothing. People who argue that the NYT piece confirmed anything simply do not understand journalism. That was an interview-based piece that gave SBF a lot of room to talk. The *same* reporter published this piece today, based on Ray's court filing:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/17/business/ftx-bankruptcy.h...

And I quote:

> "John Jay Ray III helped manage the aftermath of some of the largest corporate failures in history, including the implosion of the energy trading firm Enron after an accounting fraud scandal in 2001.

> But the corporate dysfunction at FTX, the collapsed cryptocurrency exchange that he took over last week, is the worst he has ever seen.

> In a blistering court filing on Thursday, Mr. Ray described an astonishing level of disarray and said he had never seen “such a complete failure of corporate control.” He listed a series of “unacceptable management practices,” including the use of an unsecured group email to access sensitive data, and said the financial information maintained by FTX was deeply untrustworthy.

> “From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented,” he wrote in the filing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware."

The evidence against SBF is damning. The NYT will continue to report that. You can cherrypick their pieces if you want to.

But what you should be doing is looking at the 10,000 ways that crypto made SBF and FTX what they were, through your credulity and greed. The NYT had nothing to do with that.

I think a generalist summation of the situation could be:

Fraudsters will find any way to fraud, no matter the economics or tech.

Enabling a fraudster to build and control something around a fig leaf will result in the same no matter the controls.

Edit: this sounds defeatist on a second reading, but that is not my intent. I’m not saying there’s a futility here. I do think it’s futile to believe we could rid any field of fraudsters and con artists, but I don’t think anyone here has argued we can.

>he's only been in cryptocurrencies five years or so

Crypto has only seriously been around for 10-15 years. This is somewhat like saying “he’s only been a react dev for 5 years”

>SBF was treated as the king of crypto by the mainstream for whatever reason.

I think the reason is getting more and more obvious with every passing day.

His father and mother are professors of Law (and Business) at Stanford. (The mother is also one of two founders of Mind The Gap.) His aunt is a dean of Columbia University's School of Public Health.

https://showbizcorner.com/sam-bankman-fried-parents

His brother was running a lobby group called Guarding Against Pandemics. FTX's head of policy and regulatory strategy was a Commodity Futures Trading Commission commissioner under Obama.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/14/former-ftx-ceo-sam-bankman-f...

And that's not the end of it all, there are many more interesting connections.

The reason was actually marketing and he was the first to admit it. During the invite only Chicago money trade show he explicitly said he spending all his money on brand awareness and marketing, basketball teams, stadiums, TV ads, the sponsorships were relentless and shaped public opinion that he was trustworthy. He' main spokesperson (and investor) was pretty much the most trusted athlete in the last decade. He knows how to build trust through marketing and politics.

The best video I've seen is SBF basically admitting it was a ponzi scheme:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=131&v=C6nAxiym9o...

Selling something with no value other than the attention it gets on Twitter and the reputation it gets via reputable investors.

What gets 'reputable investors' to invest in the scheme is the most interesting part of this story, if you at all care about stopping it. Something that has existed long before crypto.

> The best video I've seen is SBF basically admitting it was a ponzi scheme: [link omitted]

> Selling something with no value other than the attention it gets on Twitter and the reputation it gets via reputable investors.

But that is clearly not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme involves an obligation to pay people returns on their fake investment. Here, the pitch was "I don't know why people want these things, but they do. Want one?", and that pitch was honest and accurate. There was no pretense that you'd be getting any special returns.

By your standard, all trading in any commodity or stock is a Ponzi scheme, unless you're planning to consume the stuff yourself. Did you buy 300,000 pork bellies? Ponzi scheme. Do you have a bar of gold? Ponzi scheme. Do you have a share of Tesla? Ponzi scheme.

Compare Charles Ponzi, whose investment thesis was "guaranteed returns of 50% in 45 days", who specified the exact trade he was making (buying American stamps in Italy, where they were cheap, and selling them in America, where they weren't), and who never actually performed that trade. A Ponzi scheme is defined by paying off people who have invested in you with funds from other people who have invested in you.

Obviously he was part of the Deep State!

/s

[flagged]

Now that would be like thinking USD can never fail.

> SBF is not a crypto guy despite being presented as such in the mainstream. He's a trader

I'd say to run a successful trading shop you need to be a good trader. Doesn't matter whether you trade potatoes, pork belly futures, or crypto. Do you think Jump Trading cares (or even necessarily knows) anything about the tokens they successfully trade?

What constitutes a 'good trader' is different for every market. Often (always?) it entails an understanding of that particular market that cannot be translated to other markets.