The crypto industry is rooting for a Sam Bankman-Fried conviction | Hacker News Reader

The crypto industry is rooting for a Sam Bankman-Fried conviction

nytimes.com

37 pointsbirriel16 comments

For sure. Crypto people hate Sam.

A lot of crypto people knew he was unscrupulous and opposed him before FTX blew up. There were a lot of signs he was a bad person and the effective altruism thing was B.S.

But, pretty much nobody in crypto expected him to be the wholesale incompetent fraud he ended up being. We thought he was a bad guy, not a blood-chillingly evil moron.

It's nice to see the NYT shift to offer some reasonable coverage on Sam. One of the NYT reporters, David Yaffe-Bellany, is a good friend of Sam, spoke with him regularly even after he was apprehended, and routinely provided rose-colored puff pieces throughout his fall.

Well, it did reinforce the idea that you should never put your money in a company headquartered in the Bahamas.

Yeah I noticed 60 minutes was running some sort of SBF puff piece yesterday and immediately turned it off. Was trying to eat dinner. I know his ill gotten wealth will be paying for a massive character laundering campaign and so none of this is unexpected. But it’s not going to be filtered out so easily by the naive and largely ignorant public. The news is bought and paid for.

This is still a semi-puff piece. Makes it seem like he is being turned into a scapegoat for the industry and drums up sympathy for him.

Even the way the title was written. When I first read it, I missed the last word and it seemed to be saying that the crypto community was rooting for the guy

It would be much clearer if it said something like The crypto community calls for SBF’s conviction

That's what the NYT is for: buddy-buddy with the financeers of Wall Street and carrying their water as much as they plausibly can while maintaining the facade as "the paper of record".

It feels like every time a fraud is uncovered we hear "this is good for crypto", with the implication that, but for this one last fraudster, the industry is clean and trustworthy.

I would like to believe:

1. In a fair justice system.

2. That no one is above the law.

3. That crypto, despite not being "my thing," is a tool useful for more things than money laundering and fraud.

I don't think I'm alone or the minority here.

On #3: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/why-im-less-than-infinitely...

Wow, NYT is really trying to prop up SBF any way they can. Disgusting.

You wouldn't be surprised if RT went on the defence for a disgraced Russian. Don't be so surprised that the NYT, too, does so for one of their own.

It's weird because I thought if SBF "belonged" to anyone it was the Effective Altruism and (Internet) rationalist communities that he funded. Those are the folks who seemed most tightly linked to him before the crash, anyway.

An article about how most of the people in his industry want to see him convicted is propping him up?

Precisely. "Oh poor guy, he's not so bad with the bs altruism, it's just all the evil cryptos who want him to take the fall"

> “The FTX fraud failure was a huge setback for the industry,” said David Pakman, an investor at CoinFund, a crypto investment firm. “That has tainted the market and made it harder to raise capital.”

So the crypto industry want their public image restored to make room for the next FTX, I guess. Makes sense.

> Mr. Kling’s firm, Ikigai, lost $65 million in FTX’s bankruptcy. In group chats, he has tried reminding other debtors that it’s unhealthy to hold on to their hatred. He has dealt with it by hitting the gym.

Almost reads like satire.

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