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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

When the fishy balance sheets leaked I wondered who the CFO was who signed off on them. There was no CFO.

Beyond any regulation or regulatory failure it’s shocking the investors let this happen. You shouldn’t give someone billions of dollars without an adult in the room ensuring there are adequate processes in place to track and manage that money.

The GPs at the various VCs investing in this should honestly be fired.

But as story goes on the story just gets so much worse. This is theft of company and customer assets pure and simple. SBF and his cohorts are about to discover just how far reaching the long dick of the US government really is.

Like how can anyone think blindly spending customer assets wasn’t going to end in spending the rest of your life in prison or on the run? Because that’s where this is going.

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This is effective altruism at its finest. They will finally give Congress and the SEC the egregious case they need to craft (and enforce) new laws governing DeFi. The industry as a whole will become safer due to their malfeasance. If that's not altruism, I don't know what is!

How is FTX related to DeFi in any way?

Well, clients believed their money was centralized at FTX. They now realize it has been decentralized to many other places.

The FTX business model was to initiate regulatory capture, spend a flood of money on the usual DC insiders to make all competitors DeFi illegal in the USA, then they just happen to soak up all the profits.

It would have worked out fine if they had just held it together until after they hired the US Gov to put all their competitors out of business. They would have been too big to fail and these smaller numbers could all be swept under the rug by larger numbers. Well, startups lose money until they make money of course.

One of the guys who's company was about to get shut down by the legislation FTX was purchasing, decided to out FTX's questionable balance sheet (if he's taking us out, then we're taking him out first...), and the rest is history.

If you pay the right people, the us government strongly supports anticompetitive policies. That side of the story was going to be very profitable.

Guilt by association. No, seriously. Do you expect Congress or the SEC or the DoJ to understand (and, perhaps more importantly, care) about the difference? I'm quite serious: all they're going to hear is "crypto".

The Adrian Veidt theory of FTX. I like it!

> will finally give Congress and the SEC the egregious case they need to craft (and enforce) new laws governing DeFi

Lumis and Gillibrand's proposals went from being considered for omnibus insertion to DOA. The people who write the coming rules are not going to be friendly towards industry.

>the rest of your life in prison or on the run

Suicide is also possible.

Most of the perpetrators are in early thirties; they will do 10 years and be out by their 40th birthday. Once they are out, they will dig out the millions of dollars worth of bitcoins they have probably hidden away in thumbdrives or CDs.

I know nothing of Crypto or law but I did watch Shawshank Redemption.

Over one million creditors say “Nope.”

_Parker Conrad has entered the chat._

Just kidding, he didn't spend a day in prison.

Just a bunch of settlements for shit like this:

> In the fall of 2015, Zenefits came under scrutiny for allegedly failing to comply with state health insurance regulations; the company was subject to an investigation by the website BuzzFeed. On 8 February 2016, Conrad resigned from Zenefits after it was discovered the company used unlicensed brokers to sell health insurance in multiple states. In the aftermath of the investigation, Conrad's replacement as CEO, former COO David O. Sacks—who was cleared of wrongdoing in the same investigation—announced that the valuation of the company would be halved and investors' positions "trued up" in an effort at rectification, while 10% of employees accepted an offer of a two-month separation package.

Now he's the head of Rippling and in full golden child mode.

I think the sons/daughter of the elite (like law school professors) get used to getting away with anything for their small crimes that they forget when they fuck up in a big and public way it becomes a lot more difficult to just sweep it under the rug. My guess is law professor daddy/mommy have bailed him out before and he never got the talk that when he does these things he needs to do it in a way where authorities can at least pretend they didn't see anything.

If you observe SBF behavior it's clear he has an almost kid-like understanding of the world, which speaks of a pretty sheltered existence that can nourish sociopaths.

No that’s insane. Professor’s children are all secretly elite criminals? What planet do you live on?

Sadly I live on earth. I've got my thumb out for the nearest habitable planet.

To be clear, you want to move off of earth to another planet because you think all children of law professors are sociopaths? Do you think there's any irony in accusing other people of having a child like view of the world?

I want to move off of earth for the alien orgies. Avoiding loaded questions is an incidental perk.

Judging from the transcript of SBF's conversation with the reporter from Vox, I wouldn't say he has a kid-like understanding of the world. Rather, his understanding of the world is a mixture of pure cynicism and total Machiavellianism. He explains that he thinks everyone, everywhere is constantly running a fake persona motivated by social gains. That's not a child's worldview.

It is interesting to think about whether certain aspects of his upbringing might have contributed to this type of person though.

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