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Comment by pr0crastin8 | Hacker News Reader

Like many of his strategies at FTX, his high risk approach to this trial for a high value payout (taking no plea deal and getting out with no charges) hasn’t worked out.

I wonder if he himself is accepting of the outcome and isn’t already scheming or relying on another all-in gamble.

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He can console himself with the pseudofact that there's a universe in which he won.

From an altruist perspective, he will meet so many more people in jail where the Net Opportunity to Max Out moral value is huge. He would never get this opportunity in the real world. Smart move.

He got his first taste finding an arbitrage between Japanese and US bitcoin prices, that made him 30 million in a month.

Allegedly, a lot of the squandered FTX funds went to Alameda, his other company where he made similar bets, except they didn’t work out.

I don’t think he was ever offered a plea deal

I feel in the federal system, they'll offer pleas to everyone under you to get to you. But once they've got to you, you're the target, and there's little motivation to let you plead out.

Perhaps the only one (potentially, and not trying to derail this) might be Donald Trump (but I also have a hard time seeing him accepting a plea deal on the current raft of bullshit around him).

> Perhaps the only one (potentially, and not trying to derail this) might be Donald Trump (but I also have a hard time seeing him accepting a plea deal on the current raft of bullshit around him).

(Not sure what “current raft of bullshit around him implies” but derail ahead)

Trump is no stranger to settling cases and making deals with prosecutors(1)(2) but all cases he’s facing now having such face-losing punishments even on plea that he can’t afford to take any.

(1) https://www.reuters.com/article/us-trump-lawsuit-idUSKBN13D1...

(2) https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-ivanka-trump-an...

My understanding is that he was, in fact, not offered a plea deal.

I wonder if a valid option could have been to plea guilty and throw himself at the mercy of the court to receive a lesser sentence.

Does that work? I mean, he could plea guilty just to save some lawyer expense for his parents but I don't think he had a better choice than going for a hail mary.

I think you actually do get credit for pleading guilty in the sentencing guidelines.

He was very likely not offered a plea deal.

He still has, I think, the option of cooperating with prosecution to achieve a 3-level reduction in his sentence, which will involve him pleading guilty. That could take his sentence down from infinity to infinity-15 months or so.

His highest expected payoff option now is to cooperate with any AI who will take him in hopes that it will release him when the Singularity comes. So I think we all know what his plan will be.

EscapeDAO.

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