Coinbase CEO slams media for treating Sam Bankman-Fried with ‘kid gloves’ | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase CEO slams media for treating Sam Bankman-Fried with ‘kid gloves’

nypost.com

60 pointsmikece32 comments

It is odd how in past fraud cases (Enron, Bernie Madoff, others) the media focused on the victims and how much they lost.

But this case the focus has been on philanthropy, effective altruism, and things other than fraud. Just about zero mention of average people who lost out as a result.

I've seen comments here on HN that some people committed suicide because of the losses. But media don't care.

It's not unexpected, though. Hyper-capitalism and democracy are clearly incompatible. People already treat others arrogantly if they gain 10x more money. 100x more and you're in a different caste. 1000x more and you're just dust.

An average Joe should work for more than 10000 years to make a billion. Crypto fraudsters can collect it in years, while producing nothing good.

The referenced comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33743424

I've yet to hear from a real person who lost money on FTX and I'm going to continue believing the entire exchange was a fraudulent money laundering operation with an engineered collapse.

I know someone who put the bulk of their savings into Blockfi and Gemini. Last I heard their money was stuck because withdrawals were paused after the FTX collapse.

> It is odd how in past fraud cases (Enron, Bernie Madoff, others) the media focused on the victims and how much they lost.

Seems the highest portion lost were from institutional investors making long shot bets. They may not want to be candid about their lack of due diligence with investor funds. It might be such a small portion of an overall portfolio they can write it off and move on.

There are so many people losing money in crypto these days due to exchange collapses and rug pulls perhaps there may be too little signal relative to the noise. Just search "victims of crypto scam" in a news search engine and there are tens of thousands of results. Many with hundreds or thousands of victims per scam.

This article just pulls quotes the Ben Thompson interview from yesterday.

direct link to the interview: https://stratechery.com/2022/an-interview-with-coinbase-foun...

Is Brian much better himself? he used to piggyback on the whole cypherpunk thing and now auto-reports people to the IRS and surveils your TXs after you withdraw from Coinbase. Also was on the whole NFT bandwagon which is a good test to find people who are just looking to make a buck. I've never used Coinbase but apparently you can't top up without logging into Plaid and leaking all your financial data, further showing a lack of care for consumer privacy.

Regardless, Brian is right in this case.

None of these things--which are all so common you might as well have been talking about Google--are anywhere near as bad as either actively defrauding people out of their money or even passively doing so by (if you wanted to believe SBF) being so incompetent that you "accidentally" just lost peoples' money (while spending it all on stuff and people you want). Trying to paint Brian with the same brush as SBF is frankly kind of ridiculous.

> Is Brian much better himself?

Yes.

Considering the MSM and the White House are close friends this should come as little surprise.

"So which politicians got money from the founder and former CEO of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX?

MarketWatch has compiled an interactive list below of the candidates and committees who received funds from Bankman-Fried based on the latest disclosures to the Federal Election Commission.

Overall, he gave almost all of the $40 million to Democratic politicians or groups, and just over $200,000 to Republicans, according to the disclosures."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/interactive-here-are...

Coincidentally, Lex Fridman's interview with Coffeezilla just dropped.

Also quite a contrast to the handling of the Theranos CEO.

Could almost get the impression that white rich men get some kind of preferential treatment.

Fyre Festival guy went to prison.

Trevor Milton (of Nikola Corp, with the fake hydrogen trucks) was convicted of fraud and will likely spend some time in prison.

Could almost get the impression of anything if you cherry pick a single example.

Seems like a bad bet to call for everyone to come down harder on someone doing basically the same thing you yourself is doing.

I'm kind of weirded out by this. It really feels like super rich VC's and investors are trying to force a narrative of a LOT of outrage with this from everyone else.

Talking to some acquaintances, most know about the story and think the guy probably committed fraud but otherwise don't care THAT much.

Reasons

1: Most of the money lost was from VC's and rich people, so we don't care that much

2: Crypto shit seems pretty separated from the rest of the economy so it doesn't seem like 2008 where the failures of these companies caused massive issues for everyone else.

So /shrug, people were told that crypto was unregulated and anything could happen, people considered that a feature because $$$, and lost their money when the unregulated shit failed. The magic beans and monopoly money that rich people were playing with were worthless. Who knew except everyone who wasn't trying to be the last sucker out.

Should SBF go to jail for fraud? Probably. Does most normal people care that much? I don't think so

> Most of the money lost was from VC's and rich people, so we don't care that much

A lot of normal people had money on FTX.

> A lot of normal people had money on FTX.

and

> Most of the money lost was from VC's and rich people

Are not contradictory statements

While true, the following context remains important: if you exclude prosumers/day traders and institutional investors (both of whom were taking advantage of FTX's stale quotes), FTX was not even a top 10 exchange in terms of user count or volume traded. That's part of why it is odd they were so highly regarded by VCs.

> people were told that crypto was unregulated and anything could happen, people considered that a feature because $$$

Actually no, FTX promised customers that they would keep their assets 1 to 1 and not invest them in risky schemes. And then FTX did it anyway, completely contrary to the existing laws and regulations that are on the books. So even people not chasing "2000% return guaranteed" lost their stuff.

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