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Comment by csunbird | Hacker News Reader

Any sane person who realizes that their job is to be thrown under the bus has two options: Either go along with it and be a conspirator, secure your means of getting away, or start talking to the law enforcement to cover your ass.

The people running Binance should have realized that the first option did not happen and they should have prepared for the second option. Although it is good that this didn’t happen, SEC now has an easier case because of this.

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I suspect it's very hard for people to realize that. Thinking back on my career, there were jobs I stayed at too long because I was hoping things would turn around, that I could make more of a difference than I ultimately did.

That was hard enough for me to realize as a low-level worker. It has to be a fair bit harder if you've got a fancy title and a fancy salary. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Learning how to code fizzbuzz is hard for most people, it isn't for us.

Learning basic corporate politics is hard for most people, not for prospective CEOs.

True, but I think that hurts them here. Corporate politics is about fitting into a status hierarchy and working your way up it. You exchange your own identity and concerns for that of the organization, and are rewarded with status and money.

A fake CEO like Zhao appeared to want here would be doing exactly the same thing he's been doing on the way up: rolling over for whatever the more powerful person wants. It's just that the stakes have quietly changed, with a sudden downside of "5-10 in a federal prison". As people like Caroline Ellison have recently realized.

I think this guy can probably easily find an equivalent position, so had less reason to put blinders on.

I suspect Binance is prepared and they will simply not comply. Nothing is physically in the US to be seized (except maybe the binance.us domain).

Do Kwan and Sam Bankman-Fried also tried evading arrest by not being in the US. Didn't work so well.

Worked for Snowden.

He realized just in the nick of time that the list of countries that will not cooperate with the US is quite small.

Not in the way he would have liked. He leaked information on compromised Chinese systems to China, hoping to gain asylum in the then relatively free Hong Kong, but China told him to take a hike. He then got on a Russian airline to try to get to Ecuador, but Russia detained him on pretense of invalid travel documents, which China didn't care a whit about. "Lucky" for Snowden that he didn't reach Ecuador, as Moreno would have given him up like he did Assange.

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