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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

What happened to the theory that he'd never be jailed? The expert analysts were so confident.

The people saying that were presumably making predictions about whether or not he'd be found guilty with a jail sentence (which hasn't yet happened), not that if he does something as stupid as witness tampering he wouldn't have his bail revoked (which is what has happened).

Personally I always thought it extremely likely he would get a prison sentence, but I think you're being premature to act like people who didn't think that have already been proven wrong.

I think you missed the threads they're referencing. I see from your other comments you think there's a lot of hot takes in this thread. The threads around the time he was charged were full of nuclear takes about how the justice system was broken, how every minor development in the case meant he would get off scott free, etc. It also brought the antisemites of HN out of the woodwork to share conspiracy theories (given that SBF is a Jewish person who committed a financial crime). They were the roughest threads on HN I had seen at the time. (There were still good, insightful comments, but they were diamonds in the rough.)

This is more or less an injoke. I completely see where they're coming from.

You're forgetting how "He donated to democrats so he'll get off scott free"

Yeah, stupidest hot-take I ever saw in this case.

No politician will stick their neck out for someone based on past donations if:

1. There is little hope for future money

2. The donor is universally reviled

If anything, that donation history made the recipients even more likely to turn on him. They must distance themselves.

The opinion that I believe s most close to the truth re: favors for donations, is that politicians value constancy and dependability more than short term cash injections. One needs to be playing the game for decades before you can start earning 'get out of jail' type favors.

There is time when you cut your useful idiots loose. And when they have run out of money, or you can make example of them makes perfect sense.

People who were arguing that then probably now would argue that the politicians found a workaround: just having him not charged for bribery and campaign finance crimes. No need to investigate the recipients if the alleged crime is ignored!

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/27/prosecutors-drop-another-cha...

Keeping up to date with the news can be challenging I guess. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/08/08/sam-bankman-fried...

Isn't that limited to the small portion of funding that was via straw payments, as the extradition terms allows money laundering charges?

Both articles seem to be in agreement that the campaign finance charges are being dropped because of the extradition treaty with the Bahamas. The second article indicates that the government intends to work around that limitation by charging it as wire fraud. From my perspective that kind of workaround seems like overzealous prosecution, not deliberate under-prosecution as the GP poster implies. But what do I know.

Staying in the Bahamas after the thing blew up but before institutions started to spin their wheels was not the wisest choice a man could make. If he acted faster he could have pulled a Jho Law.

There is no chance that he doesn't spend a large part of the rest of his life in prison. The crimes and financial amounts mean 30+ in federal jail.

If he really owned the entire judiciary of the US and Bahamas his bail wouldn't have been revoked.

Honestly, it sounds like his influence absolutely helped him get cushy terms of release. It was just after _repeated_ and _willful_ violations of the conditions of bail, that it was revoked. This was not his first run-in with the judge over his bail conditions, it's wild that he was allowed more.

What are you comparing it to? There is witness intimidation going right now on another high profile case and I doubt they’ll revoke bail. I am curious what are the normal thresholds before you get bail revoked.

> There is witness intimidation going right now on another high profile case and I doubt they’ll revoke bail.

The Other Guy has the sense to do vague and diffuse public messaging that (so far, without more of a pattern or additional acts) that has still gotten him warned about continuing it.

Perhaps they meant prison. This jail time is just in-lieu of bail until the actual trial.

I think a lot of people still predict that he will be set free from any wrongdoing after the trial because of his massive donations and money laundering for the political class.

>Perhaps they meant prison. This jail time is just in-lieu of bail until the actual trial.

SBF is going to prison.

What does he have left to exchange? He has no friends but his parents (who will most likely end up indicted as well from the looks of it).

The feds will hang him up high as an example of doing something, while Goldman and BofA get rich on the exact same market.

This is entirely a self-own, because he was trying to intimidate a witness.

If SBF had done the "normal" white collar criminal move of hiring a really expensive team of lawyers and doing what they told him, he'd be free as a bird.

But I guess SBF isn't your "normal" white collar criminal - he's a special kind of stupid.

Your honour, only a truly innocent man, panicking, afraid, would act so absurdly!

He’s Stanford special

He attended MIT.

Same thing that happened with the expert analysis of LK99. It turns out that the real experts tend to be quieter.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about LK99 other than feeling smug for some weird reason?

Maybe I was looking in the wrong place about people discussing LK99, but I've seen a lot of comments/tweets/articles/etc about it, and while there've been lots of optimistic discussions about how amazing a discovery it will be if proven true, and lots of people guessing whether it's more likely to be true, or fraud, or not-fraud but a mistake, I've seen practically nobody confidentially saying "this must be true". Have you? And even if you have, it hasn't yet been proven to not be true.

So... what's the point of your snide comment?

I think this logic works the other way around: very few people were saying SBF was absolutely not going to jail, just that it was unlikely.

As for LK99, I suppose I’m bummed the hype didn’t pan out. It made me more skeptical of that kind of optimism, and it seemed somewhat related.

I mean they weren't quiet, just drowned out.

There's this mindset of trusting dreams/drama/personalities more than verifiable processes, and as communities like HN have shown, even people in fields associated with better logic clearly are willing to discard all the caution they'd normally use because they'd like it to be true and someone is saying it is.

I feel like SBF actually represents this flaw wonderfully. A person who just does what he wants and has mostly been well enough off to dodge any sort of real consequences. He probably still thought he was doing nothing wrong and still does because the idea that he could be wrong is just not possible because he knows so much.

Honestly my already low opinion of groups like WHO/SEC has dropped tremendously with recent events and how they were handled on drama/media reporting rather than actual evidence and science. This rush to the story is hellishly toxic to doing things right, and the vitriol people will spew if you conflict with them on it is gross.

>even people in fields associated with better logic

This is such an HN elitist opinion that needs to go away. Programmers aren't magically better at "logic" ie making good conclusions from messy data. We still have human brains, and are equally prone to the same exact logical fallacies and biases as everyone else. The human brain is an anti-rational system.

Stop pretending we are special little geniuses just because we know advanced math or javascript.

The only filter function for HN is a willingness to read text from people who think they are better than you

I said associated for a reason. Personally I think most "smart" fields have about the same ratio of morons as any other.

In our overly connected times, it can feel like there's always two tribes, ours, and the one with the immoral charlatans & savages.

Buying into that leads to unpleasantly toned one-man morality plays, based on obviously false claims, like there were people claiming to be experts and then they claimed it was guaranteed it was a room temperature superconductor.

Quit frankly, if SBF would keep his darn mouth shut and stop doing completely irrational stupid things - he probably would remain out on bail at least until his trial.

He's become his own worst enemy it seems.

Problem is, the personality traits that lead people to commit crimes in the first place are the same personality traits that lead people to eviscerate their own defense. The unfortunate truth is that most people who have the self-control to engender the best possible outcome for their case don't find themselves in court to begin with.

Running a large fraud for a long time is a pretty stupid thing. He’s just being called stupid instead of a genius now that people have more context into his dealings.

>have more context into his dealings.

More like, now that he isn't making a profit.

He's mostly being called stupid for his activities after his fraud was uncovered.

He just can't seem to shut up.

“Shut the fuck up” is literally the best advice any defense lawyer gives.

It’s embarassing just how often it’s ignored.

if he thought the leak will help his defense then it's not irrational at all, even if he has to pay for it now

It's irrational in that his defense was mostly he was in easy over his head and had no intention of defrauding anyone. His actions are making that angle impossible.

being in over his head while being "manipulated by an evil ex" still sound pretty rational. pretty desperate, but not too inconsistent at least.

The problem is the Court of Public Opinion matters not one bit.

His attorney's could have spun that defense in court. What was there to be gained by his actions? Nothing... in fact, it appears it only served to make his situation worse.

It appears to be an exceedingly myopic decision: Preparing for trial at home instead of in confinement would be far more beneficial to his defense groundwork.

well if they bet the farm on "blaming the ex"... who knows?

That would be an incredibly shortsighted legal strategy given the trial hasn’t begun.

Far more likely is he feels a compulsive need to “clear the air” and has zero clue that it’s extremely damaging to his legal defense.

Some people conflate cynicism with wisdom.

His level of stupidity has been shocking even to people who has a low opinion of his competence. Contrast his case with Do Kwon, and you can see why people thought he would escape imprisonment.

By “expert analysts” did you perhaps mean “random Internet conspiracy theorists”?

if he wasn’t an idiot he wouldn’t have been, cant control stupid

unless the theory was about collusion in the executive branch and white house, then you still have an independent judiciary

To be fair, prosecutors were trying hard to keep him out of it.

It's certainly true that prosecutors love when defendants keep talking publicly about the case. It makes their job much easier.

SBF is just the fall guy. They always catch the one who took it just a little too far in order to placate the masses and pretend that someone is policing the stock markets.

For the record the guy is guilty as sin but so is everyone in crypto.

Do you seriously believe everyone who use’s cryptocurrency is a fraudster? Your claim is ridiculous, in the USA alone over 34 million people own cryptocurrency and approximately zero of them have stolen billion of dollars of assets.

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