Sam Bankman-Fried sentenced to 25 years in prison
cnn.com
cnn.com
As Rick Heicklen writes, "We are not ever going to be Sam. But we could be Caroline, or Nishad, or Natalie. Or even Michael Lewis. We could easily make the same mistakes they do." [0]
[0] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/michael-lewis-s-blind-side, posted previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39118124
a) absolutely damning! SBF's lack of empathy, his notion that (given that everyone else is stupid) he knew best and should basically ignore the advice of everyone else (particularly his elders), his naive utilitarianism without any deontological/virtue temperance, his reckless "many-worlds" risk-neutrality in gambling - that was all described in detail in the book, even if it was not explicitly condemned. Lewis didn't bother to show why these traits are bad. (I don't know what Lewis himself thought about them, but who cares? Show, don't tell.)
b) empathetic, eliciting compassion. Sure, the kid was screwed up, but here's why. And, btw, you might well have turned out the same way under similar circumstances, but for the grace of god.
My conclusion: 1) Lewis's book was good and insightful, and it's unfair to describe it as an apologia. 2) SBF has severe moral deficiencies and belongs in prison for a long time, but not because he is "evil". 3) Let's have some damn humility.
It's similar in many of Lewis's other analysis of SBF's relationships. Lewis avoids context that makes SBF look much worse.
Worse, he spends barely a chapter on how the polyamory which pervaded the highest levels of both Alameda and FTX might have clouded everyone's judgement and ability to say no. Mostly just limiting himself to: "It was a bunch of young adults all living together and who slept with whom changed rather fluidly. It wasn't a sex or orgy den, and the lurid tales about sex parties and all that aren't accurate."
Which I guess is probably true as far as it goes.
But not spending any time at all about how those relationships may have affected the corporate governance shows a strange lack of curiosity and unwillingness to think about conflicts of interest any relationship between business partners creates.
[I have no problem with polyamory itself--as long as everyone is consenting it's not really any of my business.]
https://paulgraham.com/ycstart.html
YC is a success, PG/JL's relationship survived, and nobody got indicted. They're role models. If YC failed or PG got divorced, people might view it differently.
I guess what I'm saying is... I wouldn't read too much into SBF's sex life, and I wouldn't berate Lewis for not prying, especially with uncooperative subjects.
That's not a tiny little startup hoping to make it big. Your investors and board want you to follow proper corporate governance, especially around conflicts of interest. Your users would like you to follow proper corporate governance rules so they don't lose their money. And do little things like following the express rules you told them you would follow (like FTX not loaning customer deposits to Alameda).
Playing fast and loose with the rules is what got him into trouble. The fact that Lewis doesn't pursue this angle just shows how big the pass Lewis gave him. It didn't have to be all about the lurid details, but the lack of best practices here was pretty bad.
SBF lost+stole billions and you are angry with Lewis because he didn't pry into the guy's sex life? Which might not even be all that interesting, we're just assuming it. I like a good tabloid story too but come on.
Romantic relationships within a business, especially within the executive suite, cause conflicts of interest. Webs of romantic relationships create webs of conflicts of interest. If the executive suite commits a multi billion dollar fraud, not inquiring into what role the conflicts of interest played in that fraud ignores an important piece of the story.
The conflicts of interest almost certainly made the financial crimes much worse in the form of less oversight and less ability to look at what and was doing objectively.
Would he have to torture puppies for fun to check all the boxes? Because if so, Hitler loved dogs.
Which is where it’s bullshit arising out of the incentives of access journalism.
The Heinlen quote is more meaningful: you won’t be Sam. (If you’re in the set of people who could be Sam, the conversation is different.) But you might fall into his orbit.
Yes, Lewis was (and probably still is) sympathetic to SBF. But that's also how he got him to talk! The book wouldn't have been possible had Lewis behaved as a skeptical investigative journalist. Lewis gave SBF all the rope he needed to hang himself with, and that was all he needed to do.
Very nicely put.
Book recommendations: Faux Number go up is beautifully reported, in particular on the many scam and trafficking victims, the culture (Bored Ape parties), some of the players (eg SBF, the Tether people, etc.), and the underlying anarcho-capitalist mindset.
On the impact on the underprivileged (that the "check your financial privilege" and "banking the unbanked" predatory inclusion crypto crowd purports to care so much for), the green-washing of Bitcoin, the crypto philanthropy "bad samaritans", Metaverse and Web3, check Peter Howson's Let Them Eat Crypto.
Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman's Easy Money is another non-technical examination of fraud in crypto, El Salvador, and the severe consequences for victims.
This describes most bankers? They’re generally smarter in that they work for an organization that dillutes responsibility for their crimes.
For example, charging 17% on a credit card bill when the interest rate is 5.25%
and that's on excellent credit like mine where I haven't missed a payment in almost 20 years
otherwise I wouldn't have this credit rating and the bank wouldn't trust me with over $100,000 credit limit combined over all of my credit cards
the reason I agree to this rate is because I never pay it, I loan from my broker instead where I pay like a few bips over LIBOR
> For example, charging 17% on a credit card bill when the interest rate is 5.25%
That's not fraud or a financial crime though, since the interest rate is prominently shown on the front page of every credit card bill.
If they're telling you it is 6% and then charge you 17% without explanation, that would be fraud.
It's not a crime either, but it's predatory
The other one I didn't have enough proof, apparently someone else did tip the authorities and the shady payday loan company is getting a slap in the wrist. Not exactly something to instill confidence in our justice (and my country is one of the least corrupt ones!)
In this case SBF was the architect and the driving force behind the fraud. He decided to comingle customers funds with business funds. He decided to trick banks into processing client money. He decided to split FTX into dozens of shell corporations to make effective oversight impossible. He decided to operate from Hong Kong and the Bahama's.
Banality of evil might apply to a junior engineer at FTX. It doesn't apply to SBF who masterminded the whole criminal enterprise.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2016-10-12/ty-article/th...
(Eichmann was a Nazi through and through, fiercely antisemitic, knew exactly what was going on, and liked it. He didn't just "go along with it" in the banal sense, he chose evil knowingly.)
One axis about decorum and appearance. Those who look and act like "good and decent upper middle class people" always get the benefit of the doubt where others do not, even when that appearance, like with Eichmann, completely falls apart on closer inspection.
The other axis distinguishes between people who have a highly ideological agenda and execute on it (evil) and those who are mostly unthinking cogs in a machine of destruction (banal evil).
He was a dumbass though. He got caught up in it all and you bend, bend, bend until the next thing you know...
This denies him agency. Probably a better hypothesis is that he was a raging narcissist who thought he could swindle everyone with none the wiser, without realizing how transparent his fraud was.
Lewis also spends lots of time explaining how the whole thing that led to the collapse could have been avoided, they didn't need to be 'lent' money from clients coffers. They had money they could draw on and had in the past to finance market bets. SBF was just not very detail oriented, certain of his success and sure the rules didn't matter much.
He literally had meetings where he told people to buy other crypto companies with the criteria "Don't stop until you hit a billion dollars spent".
One of his supporters was certain he didn't do anything wrong, when the collapse happened, because he thought it would be insane to risk a golden goose like FTX, where you are the house in a giant gambling frenzy.
A special kind of non-chalant, non-selfaware hubris.
my big takeaway from that is that the books, when they existed, were a complete shitshow. the money ended up all being there, but it was so scattered that it's taken all this time to find it. an investment here, a forgotten wallet there. they lost billions the way normal people lose dollar bills or car keys.
ofc that doesn't mean there wasn't fraud happening. the fact that they intentionally faked reserve balances and treated alameda like a piggy bank and did gymnastics to hide it can't be ignored. but even that still smacks of hubris to me more than a Bernie Madoff type scam.
it was like sbf didn't think it would be an issue because he genuinely believed that it would never be an issue. eg "people just want to believe there's a reserve, so let's show them one. we don't actually need it tho because we're actual geniuses." or maybe "no one will ever look because we're in the Bahamas and the Bahamas loves us, needs us." or it could be simply "money solves all problems and we have infinite money".
tldr: gambling addict gambled to the end and the house always wins.
That could paper over any problems until the problems became big enough to sink them.
He also made and then lost a crazy amount of money at Jane Street during election night before he started all this. He was a gambler.
This is explicitly not the case. The new management has not found hundreds of millions (billions) in cryptocurrency assets. Some other assets have surged in value and that may allow FTX to make some customers "whole" (meaning, they will not lose much money in an environment where otherwise maybe they would have strongly profited), but this isn't the same thing.
That isn't to say that 'all the money was there' or that the conduct wasn't deeply criminal and unethical, but a huge part of the shortfall was really just terrible books.
https://d1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net/production/7ab64a3b-6c...
This is even from the article you reference: "FTX has benefited from a recent rise in crypto prices, Dietderich said. Its total recovery would be valued at $6.2 billion based on crypto prices from November 2022, when it filed for bankruptcy after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal."
> Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.
which seems likely to be an understatement.
Someone associated with the case said that just because it was possible to recover most of the money he stole doesn't mean he didn't steal it. Crooks routinely go to jail even when the cops recover the money or goods.
To be clear, they also gambled with normal FTX customer funds. People who were just buying cryptocurrency through ordinary means and not trying to do sophisticated trading. It was simple theft. You can say they thought they'd make the money back plus some, but I think a lot of Ponzi scheme heads think the exact same way.
anybody well versed with human personalities will know those 2 things overlap and might as well be the same thing (details and rules). Thats who SBF is by nature. And he created a company with similar culture. Thats's a recipe for disaster. That's where his lack of emotional intelligence shows up. not realizing the absolutely necessary need for the other opposite of his personality (people who need details and follow rules diligently). SBF was always going to end up where he ended unless he had found ways to make up for his lack of details and disdain for rules. Yes it helps him take risks others wouldn't take, make money quicker than others couuld, but it also came with the risks of losing money faster than others and ending up way afoul of the society. As someone with a similar personality style (fast rough estimate calculator with little regards for deails and rules), I have no sympathy for him. He lacks the most important dimension of intelligence - emotional intelligence. His arrogance in his own intelligence wouldn't even let him see that he did.
He's a 32 year old man.
This infantilizing is disgusting propaganda in and of itself.
A few of us wear suit jackets now, but I think that's just to stand out from the crowds of jeans and t-shirts that became my generation's accidental dress code.
(Though perhaps I'm just projecting; on the rare occasions I wear a suit jacket, that's what I'm thinking).
1) blazers, specifically, are awesome, they’re wearable purses that also make you look sharper. They’re a superior version of the open button-up shirt I’d wear in high school because it was trendy back then and which also had (less well-realized) utility and useful-in-a-pinch value, and
2) loafers are the best shoe for everyday not-very-active stuff, and it’s not a close call. Slip on! It’s insane that they’re considered even a little dressy. A small miracle.
Look at Indy’s suit early in Crusaders for an example.
"Kid" is meant to be derogatory, highlighting the absurdity of traditional investors trusting openly irresponsible people with such little experience in such a heavily experience and regulation dependent field like finance. They behaved like spoiled children, with all the drugs and sex going around within the company, gaming while talking to investors etc. It doesn't make SBF look better.
Yet at the same time finance is a big industry, there's plenty of honest, hardworking people that do their 9 to 5 (or more realistically 8 to 7) and go home to their kids. Finance has bad apples (just like tech) but I don't think we should write off the entire industry for that.
Friedman is many things, but ‘grown up’ is not something that I think applies.
Calling him a kid implies that he wasn't fully in control of his actions and shouldn't be held accountable to the same level as an adult would, and that's ridiculous.
Yes, but I think this reflects more on the people that trusted him/them.
The whole crypto world is one gigantic ponzi scheme. Stealing the money is only worse because it can be proven.
> The students were also shown photographs alongside descriptions of various crimes and asked to assess the age and innocence of white, black or Latino boys ages 10 to 17. The students overestimated the age of blacks by an average of 4.5 years and found them more culpable than whites or Latinos, particularly when the boys were matched with serious crimes, the study found
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2014/03/black-boys-o...
Seeing those tarnished my whole opinion on Lewis, and I cannot disassociate it from the book at this point. Not because I am “not able to separate the art from the artist”, but because Lews was talking about the exact subject matter of the book in those interviews. All while providing enough clarifying extra detail to fully affirm to me that he is either seriously delusional or is just on the grift of caring more about writing an exciting story (instead of actually having a more factual take on things).
I had already got burned by one of his books before[0], but i took it as a one-off. The SBF one, and especially those interviews, sold me on the idea that this is how he just is. Which is sad, because his writing and plots and stories are genuinely good, but the problem is that they pretend to be almost journalism. I really hope he considers going all in on grounded-in-the-real-world fiction genre officially.
[0] That was with one of his earlier books, Flash Boys. It was kind of embarrassing to reread it years later, once I actually gained some literacy in what the markets actually were and the high level mechanisms of how they operate. The framing of characters and events in the book was not only extremely biased, the whole premise and the problem statement were hanging on the absolute worst bad faith takes that were a almost a foot into “this is not a straight up lie only on the most technical level” territory.
For example, the whole premise of the book was that banks would see 10,000 shares offered on 5 different exchanges. They'd go to buy 10,000, but only get filled on 2,000, and then cry foul. But people don't normally think like this. For example, if I wanted to sell my bike. I list it on Craigslist, Facebook and Next Door. If someone simultaneously contacted me through all three platforms, no one would expect that I was responsible for selling three bikes. Now, replace "bike" with "2,000 shares."
All this means is that crime and violence are a systemic problem. Thinking about free will as the cause of crime isn't useful compared to thinking about how we might support and treat abused children and help them take a different path.
That said, it makes a case for being aware of your blindspots (read: weaknesses). And if you think you have none... Well that's a blind spot. Fucking deal with it.
It's almost like a realtime version of "Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises" or "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly".
It’s an interesting story but it’s basically a cliffhanger with no sequel. He cut out right at the point where we learn the gritty details.
Wow, I can’t fathom how one could believe everyone else is stupid. Yeah, SBF went to MIT, but really the best students in each descent university likely fall into the same percentile of academic talent. Or, as Bezos used to say, people can be smart in a thousand ways.
that criteria is applicable to literally any criminal, ever. It's effectively useless as a statement about crime and punishment, although it serves as a useful reminder to those not condemned.
>2) SBF has severe moral deficiencies and belongs in prison for a long time, but not because he is "evil".
moral standpoint doesn't put you in shackles, poor judgement when comparing your morality with that of society is what does that.
finance is one of the most amoral industries to ever exist. They sit next to weapons and land-mine manufacturers, as far as i'm concerned.
Amorality is a benefit to the financier, the trick is finding someone that is amorale while also retaining a powerful enough understanding of the law and governing society that they can get away with enacting their deviousness without fear of prosecution.
SBFs morality doesn't matter -- what broke him was his poor judgement and overzealous confidence. We're not condemning him for his morality, that just speaks better to the court; he's in trouble because his plans backfired and money was lost for important people.
(p.s. we don't imprison people for being 'amorale', whatever that might mean from whoever is saying it.)
Uber and WeWork come to mind.
Enough SBF talk. Let’s hear some cousin stories!
You mean the other people at FTX or Alameda who knew it was a scam?
Lol they're all very well off. Why tf are you worried about them, of all people in the world?
The Dick Tracey movie came out in 1990 and now we've got smart watches which are literally a cell phone on your wrist.
Imagine going into jail when AIM/MSN/ICQ were the hotness and coming out to tiktok and snapchat.
That's someone who went into jail in the 90's. Imagine someone who went into jail in the early 80's or 70's. Coming out to the modern world would be like time traveling.
A lot of inmates coming out of multi-decade imprisonment are completely overwhelmed by how far society has advanced.
I'm being a bit facetious, but lets be real, most of the interactions people have with technological advancement create negative value for themselves and everyone around them.
The only thing that's arguably neutral is basic chat, and maybe HN which is marginally more sophisticated than it would have been then. Being able to take high quality photo and video at any time is quite a lot more commodified, but I feel like a former prisoner could handle that.
Maybe video calls would do it, that's another big one, but people born in the 30s can deal with it.
He's cheeky and a chancer. He is a victim of your uncles idiom. But that's not the crime, the crime is getting there.
Isaac Newton is an example of an actual genius, someone whose work changed the world. Sam Bankman-Fried is an epically hubristic confidence man who stole/lost eight billion dollars and will as a consequence be spending a long time in jail.
Could we really all watch a friend spend hundreds of millions of dollars, getting into a questionable business, and not ask a single question about what’s going on?
Because I’m really, really confident I would never find myself in that situation.
It’s like comparing helping a serial killer bury 25 bodies to being a wingman to your buddy in a bar and backing him up when he claims to be 6’ when you know he’s really 5’10”.
Only one of these situations I can picture myself in.
After they do their time, of course.
People in his orbit knew very well what they were doing and looks that they will get mostly slapped on their wrists, since most fault was attributed to SBF only.
beyond me why this irrelevant uncle comment is at the top but let me tell you this ... you can always recover. the only thing you don't recover from is death.
How exactly would they do this? Have you read the victim impact statements?
Mistakes are errors. Like typing "Rick Heicklen" instead of "Ricki Heicklen".
But intentionally breaking the law in order to profit, is that a "mistake"?
A error in judgment perhaps.
SBF claimed he made "mistakes" but he never admitted guilt and he never apologised for breaking the law. He perjured himself while expecting the audience to believe he was "brilliant", competent and trustworthy to handle other peoples' money.
If what Heicklen calls "smart people" can work for a company with no organizational chart, no board of directors, no CFO, no need to use more than QuickBooks for handling millions of dollars in customer deposits, then perhaps these people are not "smart".
And it would be a "mistake" to believe otherwise. (Heicklen may still be disillusioned.)
We are living in a time when it is not safe to assume that because there is large amounts of money behind something that this something is in fact legitimate.
These people named in the comment all come from privileged backgrounds. Many of the victims of the FTX collapse, the ones who wrote to Judge Kaplan before the trial and the ones who submitted impact statements before sentencing, do not. Call me cynical but I do not forsee any of those named in Heicklen's blog post going to work to serve (cf. exploit) people from non-privileged backgrounds.
Should I feel vindictive? Or is it healthy to forget about it and move on? I'm not sure.
If anything, I feel like you should share your story to protect others, especially during times when crypto is peaking (like now) and others are tempted to jump in: use exchanges to buy/sell and get out, store your keys on a cold storage device, and transfer out fiat ASAP.
Money doesn't come from nowhere. For every dollar you make on crypto, somone loses a dollar. All these BS coins do is shuffle wealth from the unlucky gamblers to the lucky ones. Go spend your money at a casino instead.
If that's not true of the stock market, why would that be true of crypto?
There is no company behind crypto currencies that holders get ownership of. There is no product or service to drive profits. There are no dividends, voting power, or anything that gives inherent value to the coins. It's all pure speculation. Just money getting shifted around among the holders - with exchanges taking a cut off the top of each transaction.
In this case though, FTX had their own token FTT that gave people that owned it voting rights in FTX and "staking rewards" aka dividends. It's not worth anything today due to the fraud that SBF perpetrated, but that sure smells a awful lot like a stock to me.
That's a bit of a straw man, as no one claimed they are. "Gambling" is often not a nondeterministic game of chance, either. For example, when I go to a casino and play poker, I'm still gambling, even though there's plenty of determinism and strategy to go along with the elements of chance.
Day traders are gamblers.
Cryptocurrencies will _never_ pay dividends, because they are based purely on speculation. These things are absolutely not the same. Cryptocurrencies only provide gambling.
(Or I did until the SEC said they weren't allowed to do that anymore because they didn't give me enough disclaimer that they might lose my money.)
You're locking up your crypto for this for some period of time, which means you lose liquidity to get gains. During that period of time the coin can crash and you're out of that money.
For stocks, you don't need to lose liquidity to get dividends. For companies generating profit, they don't necessarily need to be parasitic to generate those profits. It's possible to generate profits while also providing value for users.
Take for instance Venmo and the ability to get funds from your wallet into your bank instantly. Venmo is taking risk by doing so, the banks are taking risk to do so. They charge you a fee for this risk. You want your money faster, and they want their risk covered. They're going to eat some amount of fraud by providing this service, but the cost of providing it should cover the fraud cost and offer a small profit. It's mutually beneficial and optional (regular bank transfers are slower, but free).
Lots of SaaS products are similar. They offer a product businesses need, at a lower cost than the businesses would have to pay to build/run it themselves.
Those are profitable things that are just services, like crypto, but businesses also build things that have physical value, like houses, undersea communication cables, etc.
If people stop trading crypto, all value is immediately gone.
really? how can that be true?
In general, the only times a company gets money when you buy shares are if you participate in an IPO, or if an already-public company decides to offer more shares for sale in order to raise some money, and you buy some of those shares. (There are exceptions, but retail investors like you and me usually don't get invited to participate in those deals, though.) The vast majority of shares that trade hands on the markets every day are not owned by the company whose name is next to the ticker symbol.
Companies IPO and sell shares. The company gets paid by people who want to own shares. The company IPOs and sells 1000 shares at $50 each, gaining them $50k which they can then use to buy a new whatever. Then, in a market like NYSE, other people can buy and sell stock. If I think the stock is undervalued I offer to buy 1 from someone at $55. that person gives me 1 stock, I give them $55, netting them $5. The company is not involved in this transaction and does not get anything from that specific transaction.
Now that the price is at $55, the company could decide to sell additional stock, now at $55 instead of $50, but that's a separate event from the transaction that happened previously. So the company does benefit from the stock price being high, but not directly off each transaction.
I've omitted all the details, but I think that's enough to get the gist of it.
HN/VC is NOT the traditional way for companies to raise money.
Buying outside a IPO is called the secondary market. If nobody could buy a share in the secondary market, the stock is almost worthless. Just like your private company with one round of funding and shares. If you can't sell them, they aren't worth much.
You buying the stock raised the price of the stock. Google uses the stock as compensation. The higher the price, the easier they can hire, and the less cash they need to offer to employees while still being attractive.
Network effect, security, are some of the reasons.
And sometimes some people just need the cash, and are willing to sell at a discount.
Because the inherent value includes things we know about such as the assets the company has, but it also includes the speculative future earnings which we can't be sure about.
Yes, and in doing so you've managed to blissfully ignore all the speculation and outright gambling that goes on in the stock market.
I'm not a crypto defender; I think it's mostly useless and a waste of people's time and money. But let's not paint a big rosy picture of the rest of our financial system. That's just not where the truth lies.
Take Apple or Coca Cola for example: They have well established lines of products and lines of business. You know people will keep buying iPhones and MacBooks and AirPods and whatever else Apple makes. You know people will keep buying Coca Cola drinks forever and ever.
The popular blockchains do not create any intrinsic value (Looking at Bitcoin and Ethereum). They are heavy and cumbersome and can't handle planetary scale. Some blockchain solutions promise secure, fee-less transfers (for example IOTA and NANO). In my opinion, those blockchains at least partially implement the true promise of Crypto that, if successful, would be able to replace the existing financial system which is extremely wasteful.
Just think about how much money it costs to implement FIAT: You have to print it, which is very expensive (both notes and coins). You then have to move it around using heavy armored vehicles. You have to secure it in extremely expensive vaults. You then need to keep securing it across the entire vertical: Every business that takes cash has to deal with theft, securing the cash, fake notes, etc. Even credit cards are very expensive to maintain. Cards have to be printed & mailed out all the time. It's all plastic, and it all ends up in landfills. The inks are toxic, as are the metals in the chips. The equipment required to process cards is expensive, breaks and needs to be replaced, is annoying, slow, ridden with fraud and theft and chargebacks and a host of other issues.
I implemented EMV and 3D-Secure for card processing, a few years ago. I also implemented cash processing equipment. It ALL sucks. You have no idea how Crypto is a breath of fresh air compared to those crappy standards and mechanisms that take an insane amount of time and money and bureaucracy to implement and maintain.
A really good blockchain that does secure, fee-less transactions in less than a second and can handle planetary scale, now that is the holy grail! You don't need equipment, you already have a phone. The merchants get their money instantly, and they are done, that's it. They have their money. Done. They need to pay their vendors? They pay them, done! They could even instantly pay their vendors at the moment of sale. Can you imagine how revolutionary that is? how this completely changes the game for commerce?
The entire crypto world has been held back by greedy assholes, tens of thousands of scammers (how many ICOs and rug pulls have screwed countless users?!), governments, government bodies and banks, and unregulated companies that behave irresponsibly with customer funds (for example FTX and BlockFi). Leadership that lacks vision and initiative (Any 1st world country that accepts crypto and leads with it, would make its citizens rich, by definition, on a planetary scale).
-Money laundering becomes impossible to prevent when no entity has control over identity verification of the users.
-All transactions are public, so normal users who won't be trying to lie about their identity lose all financial privacy.
-Undoing transactions due to fraud or simple error becomes extremely cumbersome and ultimately requires re-centralization of authority that crypto supposedly was created to avoid.
But their stock price is (mostly) independent of that. It is indeed true that at least with short-term trading, your gain is someone's loss, and vice versa. There is a difference between cryptocurrency and companies, but there is little difference between trading in cryptocurrency, and trading in traditional company stocks.
What's your opinion of Solana?
In the other, you could be left for dead in an alley in Oakland.
That is very crass. Tell that to someone who lost a big chunk of their savings. "Just numbers in a database" indeed.
It’s the next level of risk up from people who buy stocks because the price is going up without checking the fundamentals. If all you do is hang around with other people hyping the same thing, it’s really easy to focus on the “number goes up” part and not want to be the person spoiling the party by asking about value.
Would you say the same if a pension fund ran with your retirement, since it is invested in some stock index, most likely in previous metals, and probably a slice in crypto?
I doubt those who think that in the end victims are partly responsible as there are things they could have done differently, would change their mind.
Remember, the claim isn’t that the traditional finance world is without problems but rather that people who deliberately seek out high-risk investments do share some responsibility when those fail. Someone who trusted Enron’s public audit reports was more comprehensively failed than someone who sought out a company specifically incorporated in the Bahamas to avoid compliance with US regulations!
Who were these hypothetical savers putting their money in a safe place?
Few people should have been unaware of the risks they were taking by investing in crypto.
Certainly not saying they deserve to be defrauded, but I am saying they took obvious risks and then got burned by those risks.
"The very first Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, collapsed in 2014". Different reason, similar outcome.
And Bitcoin was down 2/3 from peak when FTX collapsed. Close to losing it all. And enough doomsayers to know any gambler was running that risk.
And countless prior examples in lots of markets showing that speculation in risky assets is very risky!
You often don't know the specifics of why something is risky, so even if a particular outcome was unlikely, that doesn't mean an investment was "savings".
Granted, I haven’t seen any scientific evidence to suggest that a lack of money causes a lack of ability to reason (and thus a lack of responsibility for one’s own actions) but my own anecdotal experience does suggest it
so, yes, someone who is hungry and stealing bread is the same as someone who is full and stealing bread should get the same punishment.
Definitely move on, this case had some external closure where most hurts in life don't.
Evolutionarily, the emergence of an economy with capital at modern-day scales are so new that we haven't had time to really adjust emotionally. It kind of reminds me of the various birds on previously untouched-by-humanity islands that had no fear of humans and would just sit there and allow a human to club them to death, until their species went extinct. They had no time evolutionarily to develop an innate (emotional) fear of humans.
Physical violence/robbery on the other hand is a long-standing human tradition, and something we are hardwired to react to emotionally (Amygdala vs. PFC, etc). We can of course override our Amygdalas with our PFCs to some extent (in the medium to long-term), but the "gut reaction" core is still there.
Another possible reason (for me at least) is that ethically I have a lot of inner turmoil over violent punishments (which physical incarceration absolutely is IMHO) for nonviolent crimes. Of course reality is much more grayscale than that given that crimes like SBFs could leave a family destitute and starving, which is violence-adjacent if not outrightly violent. A violent sentence for a violent crime intuitively feels a lot more "let the punishment fit the crime" than a violent sentence for a nonviolent crime.
Anyway, I don't have answers, but throwing some speculation onto the pile.
I'm also pretty distant from a mugging that might happen today, but I find myself getting angry about it, so that also seems to contradict the theory that it's about distance (though to be clear, I largely agree with you and I suspect distance is going to be a factor for most or maybe the vast majority of people).
However, I do know that people can feel very ashamed from scams like phishing attacks and caller scams.
Versus someone calling you specifically to cause harm, especially when they can comprehend the harm they are intending to inflict, in your example.
Maybe that's not really "anger," but it kind of feels and seems like it
For me the deep insult that causes anger is if this is intentional, this is a person, they willfully did this of sound mind. Perhaps why a Madoff might make someone angry, but not SBF. In my view, SBF was a step or two removed from a big "too big too fail" 2008 bank that offered an interest rate to account holders by making investments with some risk. It seems to me SBF was operating along similar lines, 8% interest rate if I recall, but his intent wasn't to steal so much as illegally hide risk and hope for the best - and in his case, he was small enough to fail.
I think we adjusted, but we just apply broader context. No one would recommend going all-in on FTX with your life savings. Likely no one involved is really poor and this affected his life strongly. People lost money for their retirement retro vehicle, it's fairly easy to adjust to that.
This not saying it's ok, but its annoyance in effects mostly or should be(I think likely there are may be people, who put too much money, but then again internet financial advisory board all appears and says: HA! Told ya not to do it!).
How can you be giddy about a human being locked in a cage for 25 years? Would you be giddy if he were being flogged, or hanged? As long as there has been recording, flogging and hangings were common punishments and usually defended as "justice has been done." Incarceration really isn't far from medieval punishments.
I'm by no means suggesting that nothing should be done, and maybe 25 years in prison is a just sentence (that's debatable, but for moving forward let's assume it is), but it still leaves me with a sick feeling. I just can't relate whatsoever with feeling "giddy" over it.
Said human is responsible for the financial ruin of thousands of people. It's entirely likely that some small portion of those people committed suicide.
White collar criminals, especially those as pedigreed as SBF, are rarely held accountable for their actions. The maximum sentence was 110 years so he got off pretty lightly here and it's entirely possible he serves less than 25 years for good behavior.
So yeah, I'm excited to see an at least somewhat positive outcome here. A criminal was held accountable for their actions.
Where do you see GP arguing that we should treat petty criminals as badly as we do?
How many hours, days, weeks, months, and years did he steal from the people who bought crypto in FTX? Most of them were workers, using their wages (which means trading their working hours for money) to buy crypto. How many years of their time did he lose?
If there was real justice in the world, they'd take the amount of money he lost, divide it by the average hourly rate of the account holders, convert that to years, and then make him serve each and every single one.
Eg, Andy Bernstein got charged $200, scaled down to FAANG engineer salary for insider trading. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838351
that's a pretty extreme strawman of my position. Don't you think there's some spectrum between 25 years of prison time and no punishment? And if you don't, then how would you feel about flogging or hanging as I mentioned above? Does it seem odd to you for someone to feel sick about a public hanging in the town square, even if the person is guilty of the crime?
That isn’t the range at hand. SBF got something between what prosecutor and defender asked and much lower than theoretical max.
Max: 110y
Procecutor: 40-50y
Defender: 6.5y
Actual: 25yI think the kind of person who would see this sentence and think "eh, no big deal if that happens to me" would probably still not be fazed if he got a significantly longer sentence.
And he's almost guaranteed to serve a smaller portion of that time for "good behavior".
Sincere question: in your ideal world, what would be done in this case?
I, too, am dubious that 25 entire years serves justice. On the other hand, many victims' entire life savings wiped out, hard-working people impoverished. How do we deter or redeem, here?
To answer my own question, in an ideal world, SBF would voluntarily work every day to pay everyone back.
Great question, and very hard. I don't really have a concrete answer, but generally speaking in my ideal world justice would focus on restoration to the victims. I concede that we may need some aspect of "punishment" to serve as a deterrent, but I think that punishment should benefit the victims, not the state. For example, stole $10k from somebody? Pay them back $25k. There should be no victimless crimes IMHO, and if "society" is the "victim" we should approach that one very skeptically and there should be very clear causation. For example, a dad who takes a few hits on a cannabis joint before bed is not "harming society" even though that has been the justification for draconian drug laws for decades.
I also fully concede that real life is going to be a lot messier and more nuanced than what I've captured, and that such a system would require a large mindshift from society in addition to just systemic reform. It may take a while to get there.
Disclaimer: If I actually had any ability to influence this I would want to spend a lot more time stuyding it and examining current research/science, and it's quite possible my opinion would adjust based on evidence.
I'm conflicted on whether incapacitation should continue only until rehabilitation is achieved, or also until restoration is completed.
Prison is just a really blunt instrument for incapacitation, and sentences are a really blunt way to predict how long it would take to be rehabilitated.
This is pretty interesting. If a person could be anesthetized for the entire sentence and then revived at the end of their period of incapacity, would that be acceptable?
I don’t think they were meaning incapacitation as in rendered unconscious.
What types of rehabilitation activities would you suggest for SBF during incapacitation? Would it include job training for an alternative career since he is unlikely to be allowed a fiduciary role in the future? As I understood it, he had a great talent in video gaming.
I don't know enough about SBF's crime, which is very complex. But for white collar crime in general that isn't wanton indiscriminate violence, imprisonment seems like it is inherently punitive and thus wasteful, unless it's in a place that is highly focused on rehabilitation (education, therapy, etc).
Like having to stay in a special room without other people who might be victimized? That seems more humane than wearing restraints all the time.
At worst, he works for the rest of his life with his wages heavily garnished. If he holds investments, he'd be required to liquidate and surrender some percentage of them periodically.
Of course, someone in his position could just live off his parents and not play ball. So you'd need a contingency for that. Maybe prison still does have a place, but only for people who refuse to even try to make amends for what they did?
The guy is a massive fraudster who not only cost thousands of people their savings, but - maybe even worse - he did significant damage to crypto finance reputation.
He was an already wealthy entrepreneur who could’ve at any point chosen not to be a massive fraud. Actions have consequences. Good riddance.
I think it's awful to have positive, happy feelings when bad things happen to other people, even when those people deserve it. I'm not saying I'm totally immune to feelings like that, but I try to work on my attitude. These sorts of feelings are a stain on one's soul (for lack of a better word, as I'm not religious).
That is only true if you define 'made whole' as giving back each customer the amount of money denominated in USD that they deposited with FTX. That is super convenient for FTX, which has benefited from the spike in BTC value, but not for the customer. To really be made whole, they would need to get back exactly what they deposited. 1 BTC in? 1 BTC out.
Fiduciary amounts are in $. Yes if you deposited 1 BTC expect the equivalent value at the time of your deposit
You might expect to only get the USD equivalent back, but not for one minute does that make you whole. A lot of money was in fact stolen.
It seems like the government is interested in all the benefits of treating it as a security and none of the protections that people deserve
Ignoring bitcoin entirely for a second, I might deposit $1000 in an (unregulated, let's say) investment account. Later that amount -- unrealized, of course -- goes up to $2000. But it turns out it was all a scam and the investment manager ran away with the money. I might think I'm entitled to the full $2000, even though that may have just been a number the fraudster typed into a database, not representing anything real. Or I might argue that making me whole means also compensating me for the lost opportunity cost of keeping the money somewhere else where I could have made, say, 10% in that time. Or I might just recognize that I was duped, there was no investment, my $1000 never actually grew, and that's all I'm entitled to getting back.
It doesn't make SBF less of a criminal but it does make the victims less victimised.
Is that not just victim blaming? This was not an investment gone bad, this was stolen funds. It would be one thing if they lost all their money because BTC value dropped to zero. But SBF stole the money.
If I run about in the road and someone runs me down, I may be the victim of driver, but also my own stupidity.
Suffering the consequences of one's own decisions doesn't automatically infer victim hood by someone else entirely.
They ran about in the road.
Often a victim of a crime could have taken different actions that would have prevented their victimization. That doesn't necessarily make it their fault, or even assign some portion of the blame to them. It's just a fact of circumstance.
A decade or so ago I was mugged by three men while walking home from a bar on a deserted, poorly-lit stretch of street at 2am on a Tuesday morning. It wasn't my fault that it happened, but I could have made other -- better -- choices leading up to that which would have prevented it from happening to me. We can argue whether or not it would have been reasonable to expect me to make those better decisions given my circumstances before getting mugged, but those are still the facts on the ground. I did not need to be walking home; I could have called a car or taken a bus instead. I did not need to be there, at that time, with my judgment, reaction time, and situational awareness impaired. This is about outcomes, not blame.
If I were looking to make some money and had a choice between buying conventional stocks or buying crypto, I'd hopefully consider the risks beforehand. By now I think it's fair to assume that most people who might buy crypto should have heard about a variety of scams, fraud, and outright theft that have occurred in the crypto space. All other things being equal (they're not, but let's say they are), a decision to buy stocks vs. crypto should take into account the expectation that there's a higher risk of losing the money to a scam when buying crypto. Again, that doesn't make it the crypto-buyer's fault when the person/company holding the crypto wallet for them steals it. But it's true that the crypto-buyer could have made different -- better -- decisions up front to avoid the possibility of that outcome.
And the very next reply says these are unregulated schemes. So what does the USG's opinion on BTC have to do with FTX's obligation to return the assets deposited with it, or whether their renumeration constitutes 'making customers whole'?
Given that the USG is the only entity that could legally require these customers be made whole, it has everything to do with it. Depositing US dollars into a FTX account is easy: the government believes in the value of the dollar and will want customers to get back the same number of dollars they put in. A court can and might order FTX's current custodians to do their best to make that happen.
But if a customer didn't give FTX any dollars, but gave them BTC? The USG has no obligation to recognize those Bitcoins as having any particular value, or even any value whatsoever. In fact the government may be incentivized to value BTC deposited at zero, because doing so might free up more dollars to compensate people who deposited dollars, assuming there isn't enough to compensate everyone fully.
I don't know what your financial situation is but I'm not rich, and it is extremely painful to look at ETH trading at above $3000 and realizing my rainy day fund has been stolen by criminal nincompoops.
My personal values dictate that I be significantly more careful with money when it is someone else's money. Even if you gave me $20 to get you a Burrito, I'll get you the best deal, tip the minimum, and give you your exact change. I'd even give you a few cents more just in case because I don't want to be owing you anything.
So when a group of people behaves irresponsibly with people's money it boils my blood. He deserves every jail year he got, just on the hubris alone.
I don't want to rub on your wound but you need to take some responsibility as well. You knew crypto was risky. You knew many exchanges have scammed and went under, taking their customer's funds with them. It's arguable that every crypto exchange is shady and it's inevitable that every single one them will fall.
You should also blame the laws because exchanges and most crypto are clearly securities. But our law makers have been slow to respond and have probably been paid off by crypto money.
In fact, the same crypto bros argue that they should NOT be regulated.
I think not letting anger factor into it is good, but we also have to make sure the deterrence is there to prevent the inevitable future SBF.
However you feel about it is the right way to feel about it. Everyone copes with things differently. Regardless, it would appear some type of justice has been done in this case.
From your link: "Victims may help decide on the punishment for the person who harm them. They often get answers and an apology. Offenders might receive reduced sentences." -- how about increased sentences because of how the victim feels? No, it's all about going easier on offenders. All the authorities involved are pushing victims to "go easy" on offenders aka bullying, victimizing them once again.
Someone, not a thief, hopefully filled the seat in the master's program Donovan was eligible for.
* That HiddenBrain story was about a VA conviction for felony grand larceny for stealing a bike whose value exceeded the grand larceny threshold ($1000). In that case the victim (an English guy who supported the UK equivalent) emphatically did consent to restorative justice approach and expected a non-custodial conviction could be quickly expunged, but the VA system doesn't work that way. So all his intervention effectively did was spare jail time to the thief, but not all the other consequences.
* Compare to the 2021 Oakland, CA gang-related freeway shooting death of 23mo toddler Jasper Wu [0] in a rolling gunbattle between two rival gangs (one of them using an AR-15) on highway I-880 at 2:07pm in the afternoon, Wu was hit in the head by a stray 7.62mm rifle bullet in the rear of his mother's car. Three accused were charged with murder (one since had charges dropped), but then 4/2023 [1], new incoming DA Pamela Price, in the name of restorative justice, wrote an internal memo of her intention to "bring balance back to sentencing and reduce recidivism"- by not allowing prosecutors to "file or require defendants plead to sentencing enhancements." Not adding the special circumstances charge would drastically reduce any likely sentences, and exclude a life sentence (Price points out that she did add the gang-enhancer, but not the special circumstances charge) [3]. The victim's family were not consulted before Price's decision, and objected. [2] Price sent a series of emails to members of the Asian American community and county supervisors. In one, she claims "certain vocal members of the local Chinese community and media including reporter Dion Lim... misled the public." In another email one week later, Price addresses "Chinese communities" calling many "misinformed" and blamed [them] for "spreading misinformation."
The matter is pretty politically divisive in the East Bay [3]. DA Price refuses to budge on this and there is currently in 2024 a major recall effort against her [4].
These two cases are pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum to each other. They also show how politicized the actions of an elected DA can be, depending on the mood of the electorate that put them in office. They also show that DAs can completely disregard the victim's/family's wishes.
[0]: ABC7News 12/2022: Jasper Wu case timeline: A 13-month investigation into Oakland freeway shooting death of toddler https://abc7news.com/jasper-wu-oakland-freeway-shooting-todd...
[1]: 3/2023 Jasper Wu's family voices concerns over murder suspects' possible shorter sentences https://abc7news.com/jasper-wu-alameda-county-district-attor...
[2]: 4/2023 After meeting with DA Price, Jasper Wu's family is still worried they won't get 'justice' https://abc7news.com/alameda-county-district-attorney-pamela...
[3]: 6/2023 Jasper Wu case: murder suspects appear in court, charges reduced in toddler's slaying https://www.ktvu.com/news/jasper-wu-case-murder-suspects-app...
[4[: Alameda County DA Pamela Price https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamela_Price
And yet, the damage is done. Feels of anger and vengeance are withdrawals from your balance of available happiness and they don’t actually affect the end result. The money’s gone. Mourn it, accept it, and move on.
I’d totally forgive anyone for wishing bad things on him if he destroyed their investment. It’s better to forgive, but sometimes that’s asking a bit much.
Hilariously with crypto, that's not necessarily true, for better or worse. The change in valuation of underlying crypto assets means that customers can sometimes be made "whole" - meaning they get back the value in USD they put in, but not including inflation and interest, so they're still poorer than they would be, but at least not out the whole amount. It's still not resolved, but it's possible creditors in Mt Gox will be made whole. 1 BTC was worth $760 when Mt Gox went down. Today 1 BTC is around $70k, meaning they have almost $10 billion in BTC with which to pay back creditors.
SBF's crime is a lot smaller in comparison.
SBF and Elizabeth Holmes deserve their sentences.
Instead, we should see it as lost/ruined human potential. What is worse, violently robbing one bank of $10k, or “peacefully” robbing a massive number of people for billions of dollars?
I sure as hell know what I think, and it’s absolutely not in line with SBF’s sentence. He should rot in Ryker’s with people who have, unfortunately, done less harm but still found their way there.
Many people are in prison for doing less harm and for longer sentences than many white collar criminals.
Scammers deal many times the damage economically than shady car sales man
It's no surprise. After all, these politicians and the owners of such outlets are likely to be a little guilty of ripping people off a few thousand here and there as well...
When you get mugged you have no choice on what is happening. The actions are being forced physically on you. With FTX We chose to go that way so it somehow feels like we are as much to blame as SBF (and to be honest, we are).
Not literally true - completely innocent people do get victimized - but there’s certainly a reason for the expression.
I'm starting to think that these organizations need to be regulated as banks, stat.
Banks have steadily become less and less fraudulent over the last century.
Crypto exchanges have also steadily become less fraudulent, but still carry a much larger risk than the financial institutions to which people have become accustomed.
That is what a lot of people have been saying for a very long time now!
I don't mean this in a way to blame the victims of the crypto fraudsters, merely to explain the somewhat exasperated responses by people who feel like they've been trying to warn people who have been ignoring them.
> I'm starting to think that these organizations need to be regulated as banks, stat.
I mean, why do you think they don't want to be regulated and brag that they aren't? To make you more money?
Especially when prior to FTX's collapse, numerous other crypto exchanges were turning out to be scams or going under, and even back then there was plenty of evidence that crypto was being used and manipulated by nation-states and criminal organizations? And it was practically a meme that crypto was full of shysters and scams?
Comparing putting your money into a too-good-to-be-true crypto hedge fund is nothing like "a bank manager stealing money to pay off his gambling debts." I won't name a culpability breakdown but there is no way you have 0% responsibility here.
US ones are. Shady ass casinos in the Bahamas like what SBF was running aren't though. Exchanges like Coinbase have been operating in the US under heavy US regulations for over a decade, and have never had anything close to a solvency issue. It's absolutely ridiculous that SBF was getting invited to basically write US policy despite FTX not even being a US based exchange.
If I invested it in crypto? I would value it at zero for the rest of eternity.
What is strange about it? Losing money through investment risk is part of the deal when you invest, losing money because the fund manager decides to steal it is not part of the deal.
But there is still a difference between risk and fraud.
Risk would be if joe random tells you he'll "invest" your money in lottery tickets and then give you a 10% return if he wins or nothing if the "investment" goes bad.
Fraud is when he tells you that, but takes your money and buys himself some stuff.
Either way you lost all your money but in the second case you can sue the guy for fraud. In the first case he did as promised and lost the money but you only have yourself to blame for doing a dumb investment.
That's not the whole picture though. If I invest in some risky stock (or even what I thought was not a risky one) and it tanks, sure I feel bad but it's part of the deal so it's ok.
But if I invest in something risky and I lose the money not through investment risk but simply because the fund manager outright stole my money, I'd be very angry.
I'm actually surprised the sentence is this low. This is Bernie Madoff territory.
This doesn't get you your money back. It doesn't even necessarily make you feel better so what's the point? This gets into the philosophy of a criminal justice system.
The noble idea behind the criminal justice system is to be restorative. The offender is to be reformed so they don't repeat their crimes and can become productive members of society. This is why we push for things like education in prison, access to mental health treatment and so on. It's for our collective good. Unfortunately, the criminal justice system in the US is predominantly retributive. We punish to make ourselves feel better. There is a ton of evidence of this and it lays bare other societal issues (eg racial disparity in sentencing).
One big argument is whether heavy sentences prevent others from committing crimes. This has been used to justify, for example, three strikes laws and 10+ year sentences for mere drug possession at the height of the war on drugs. None of this works. Such crimes are the result of over-policing, up-charging by prosecutors and material conditions.
But where it actually works is with rich people. Why? Because you fine a company or a rich person and that becomes the cost of doing business. It's factored in. But depriving the wealthy of their liberty is something the wealthy want to desperately avoid.
Case in point: the Sackler family, who are hugely responsible for the opiod epidemic by knowingly lying about the addictiveness of Oxycontin. If I had my way, the Sacklers would have every asset they own seized and they would all spend the rest of their lives in a prison cell.
Put SBF's sentence in context: this Californian man was sentenced to 10 years for carjacking and robbing a gas station with a BB gun [1]. That's roughly half of SBF's sentence. Who do you think has done more societal harm?
[1]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/los-angeles-man-sentenc...
Someone who steals food does time in jail.
> With a violent mugging encounter, you are blameless
I was mugged a decade or so ago, and while I was certainly angry with the people who mugged me, I also punished myself a bit: I shouldn't have been walking down that particular street at 2am; I'd had a bit to drink and should have called a car. Or I should have been paying more attention to my surroundings; maybe I would have seen them early enough to get away, etc.
The point isn't whether or not the thoughts I had were rational. I don't think the type of crime matters; victims always have plenty of room to assign some blame to themselves, or at least second-guess their actions.
wrt outcome, it seems physical crimes are almost inconsequential in monetary damage compared to "white collar" crimes
I can't help but think of that clint eastwood line:
"It's a hell of a thing, killin' a man. Take away all he's got, and all he's ever gonna have."
I think physical damage, and also the psychological damage of violence has a permanence compared to money and property "damage"...
Not to make light of anything, but you can always get more stuff. (and over my lifetime I've noticed stuff has been easier to get)
I think there are millions of poor people in the world who would very much disagree with that statement. But I'd hope they'd still agree that their stuff isn't worth their lives.
How about if you chose going to 2) knowing very well that muggings are a real possibility and you should probably not go there?
The harm you received was mostly financial, so the healthy way to recover is also mostly financial.
Some are worse than others, and we have laws, and punishments, etc.
But I believe there is no morality to seeking pain in others; even if you believe they deserve it. It will not raise you up, so to speak.
The same reason why the bigger the company, the more the public lets them get away with.
it might not be "fair", but forgiveness is healthier for you
https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/research-and-pu...
In 2022, the average murderer in the Federal Southern District of New York (N = 58) was sentenced to a median of 231 months, which comes out to 19 years and change.
No crime of any type had an mean or median sentence higher than 25 years; most were far less than half.
So it should be really hard to argue that this is a "light" sentence. If anything, it's excessive if you consider the nature of the crime relative to the nature of murder or kidnapping.
Imagine if I rob 10,000 people of $2,000. Some people won't feel it. Others will be suicidal and may even commit suicide partially from hopelessness. There also could have ramifications that last years into the future, and cascade. (Can't buy new car to replace old car, don't have enough money now. Old car broke, missed work, got fired, found new job elsewhere that pays less...)
I suspect the resulting number of shortened lives amongst all the people who lost $8 billion worth of their money due to the fraud is more than the number caused by a single murder.
> Kaplan said he had found that FTX customers lost $8 billion, FTX's equity investors lost $1.7 billion, and that lenders to the Alameda Research hedge fund Bankman-Fried founded lost $1.3 billion.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-bankman-fried-be-sent...
Clearly the real crime is bilking investors out of their money. It’s also questionable whether they even ended up losing money given the rising price of crypto in the past year. It’s also interesting how this happened:
> when it filed for bankruptcy after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/bankrupt-crypto-exchange-...
So basically the traders did a bank run and Sam ended up going to jail. It’s interesting that by contrast SVB leaders didn’t face any repercussions because they were part of the established ways of doing things even though that ended up being very costly for the government.
Shkreli dealt with the "making people whole/replacing money you took": it's not okay to steal or defraud people just because you later make them whole or they don't even realize that you did.
But even moreso, to your point: Please don't conflate the rising crypto price with SBF's intent. He didn't care about that. The fact that crypto rose and may have lessened the losses is entirely orthogonal to his intent, just a "fortunate" coincidence. It could equally have cratered. The people who are being recompensed are only being recompensed in part because of something entirely outside of SBF's control and intention.
The only reason people can be made whole is because SBF was arrested for fraud, and all the funds got frozen. Given his track record, had he kept steering the firm for another year or two, he would have almost pissed away all the gains/potential gains from the crypto rally, and his customers would have found themselves in an even bigger hole.
Also, Bernie Madoff could have just taken a ten year timeout, bought and rode the S&P 500, and had made his customers whole, too, so I guess he also did nothing wrong...
What? No.
The “lost” money was bet on red at the roulette wheel. While the firm was in bankruptcy, the wheel stopped spinning and came up red. That was enough to make customers whole to their original deposits. But it didn’t make up for capital gains, opportunity cost or the emotional damage caused by having your funds locked away for years.
> interesting that by contrast SVB leaders didn’t face any repercussions
Totally different situations. The analogy would be PayPal freezing everyone’s accounts for 3+ years while they put all the money into Peter Thiel’s hedge fund.
That's not how that works. Whatever purchasing power they were supposed to have that they were deprived of because of his actions results in damages - obviously equal at least to the crypto gains they would have.
LOL, yeah, no. SFB also did really well established old fashioned tradCrime. It wasn't even DeCrime.
Did it? The FDIC is funded by banks, not the government.
It’s not fully funded by the banks & borrows from the government when it’s short. I don’t know how to account the government borrowing from itself, but I wouldn’t think it’s necessarily “free”. Yes it does get paid back, but you’re borrowing on very preferential terms that aren’t available to the public so there is as cost to the broader economy.
While it's true that the FDIC is "backed by the full faith and credit of the US Government" it is funded by the banks and by interest from treasuries [0]. Has there ever been a case when the FDIC actually ran out of funds and had to be bailed out?
[0] https://www.fdic.gov/resources/deposit-insurance/understandi...
So yes, it ran out of funds & had to borrow. It has not yet experienced a shock bad enough to leverage the Treasury line of credit but that’s a fig leaf IMO. The 2008 crisis saw the government bailing out banks through TARP to shore up failing banks to the tune of 700B. Without that, FDIC would have failed. So from that perspective, yet it was bailed out in 2008 & the funding from members wouldn’t have been anywhere near sufficient. That’s why I don’t understand the political football around TARP - “the full faith and credit of the US government” would have been meaningless if FDIC failed as that would have sent a giant shockwave of trust loss through the broader population as everyday people would have lost huge savings.
Because Silicon Valley Bank leaders were nobodies whereas SBF became perceived as a trophy, pretty much immediately.
This is something to be mindful on. When doing self promotion some people start seeing you as an inspiration , many others as a fraud or a human trophy to be captured and paraded around.
Especially in startup communities where groupthink takes over and everybody wants to be the new cult figure of the Silicon Valley or the crypto valley or whatever. People outside that bubble (especially LE, prosecutors and judges) see right through that BS and are specifically looking with a magnifying glass everything that goes on hoping to get themselves a nice trophy on their desk, they want the heads of cult founders. Some would say rightfully so.
These people should be spending their free time reading papers and books on how Romans enforced their laws over remote German provinces of the Empire.
Instead they open all sorts of media and like hunters in the forest they pick a trophy that suits their liking and then they just use all their means to collect that trophy.
Or even worse they are not even creative in their trophy hunting quest, they all pile on Trump because by the way he looks and acts he looks like a fraud and advertises his nature thanks to his huge megaphone . So every prosecutor in the Nation piles on him because they want to be the one uncovering this big revelation to the American public...pathetic.
Their goal should be ratio of Money recovered from criminals to money spent for investigations/proceedings. No one operates this way because they are essentially predators, much like SBF and Trump are, just a different kind, but they receive a salary paid for by taxpayeyrs.
Given that FTX is not a bank, and does not do any sort of (high regulated for a reason) fractional reserve lending ... how exactly can there be a run? All of the assets should still have been there.
This is out of date. There is no reserve requirement anymore.
Why is it interesting? SVB leaders didn't engage in fraud or money laundering.
* In developed countries. I doubt people from 3rd world countries had $2000 on FTX.
The rationale behind prison, as opposed to corporal punishment without incarceration, is to remove dangerous people from society, so that they don't further victimize the public.
A violent murderer -- of really any type of murder, e.g. of a random stranger, of one's spouse, or a murderer-for-hire -- should be removed from society for society's benefit. The key point is that the needs of society must come first; punitive measures are a secondary concern. As theory goes, this is trivial.
In SBF's case, his ability to further harm the public is absolutely minimal, provided his punishment includes severe restrictions on his ability to access computers and serve as the director or shareholder of any business. I'd sentence him to a few years in jail, as a punitive measure, and then a lifetime of community service and probation. Let him try and do some good, if he's sincere about those stories he tells re his motivations.
You might argue that punitive measures serve a vital function as deterrence, but evidence doesn't seem to support that argument, and in any case it applies far more strongly to violent crime than to financial crimes. As, in the latter, crimes are often amorphous and poorly delineated, and selective enforcement is the rule rather than the exception.
Please stop defending white collar crime as somehow more palatable, as somehow a better class of criminal.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/11/upshot/virus-price-human-...
To you the value of somebody else's life may be $10M. To society, it varies with time and place. Yet, to the person in question, the value could well be infinite -- it's probably infinite more often than not -- i.e. no amount of money will induce somebody to die. When you kill somebody, you rob that person of everything they have, everything they ever will have, and of the value they've placed on their own life.
But we're speaking of society. Is SBF a physical danger to society? Clearly not. He's not going to rob and murder you if he catches you in the park after sundown. His reputation is destroyed, and from a harm mitigation perspective it should be enough to monitor his economic activity and make sure he isn't in a position to run any more frauds.
If you seek punitive measures, that's all well and good, but it should be done in a way that's equitable and according to a theory of punishment that's applied uniformly. I don't believe that exists, and jailing a non-violent criminal for such a period of time, when extremely violent criminals serve less time and are then allowed to reintegrate into society (often with poor results,) seems both strange and wrong.
Not true; people have committed suicide due to financial losses that they believe have destroyed their life and made it not worth living. If any FTX customers ended up killing themselves over this (I saw a post somewhere upthread claiming that was true, though I haven't verified that), isn't that just as bad? Certainly the intent is different in the case of a murderer vs. someone who incidentally drives someone to suicide by stealing their life savings. But the end result is still the same.
Regardless of that, I'm not sure how I feel about the idea that a person would value their own life at infinite dollars. Certainly I don't want to die, but would I expect or want an unbounded amount of money to be spent in order to keep me alive? No, I don't think so; that feels selfish and would undoubtedly harm others.
And people will do some funny things to help their family, including working a job where eventual death due to a job-related accident or illness is inevitable. While that's not the same as someone agreeing to be killed in exchange for money, it seems relevant. And hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there were quite a few (financially desperate) people in the world who would agree to be murdered in exchange for their family being financially taken care of for the rest of their lives.
> non-violent criminal [...] violent criminals
I really dislike this bucketing. It ignores quite a spectrum of crime: punching someone in the face at a bar is not the same as stabbing someone who survives is not the same as shooting someone who dies. And violent crimes-of-passion are not the same as cold, calculated, planned violence.
I'm just not convinced that a violent crime is automatically worse than a non-violent one.
And the terms themselves are somewhat arbitrary. I would consider it incredibly violent to deprive someone of their savings and livelihood.
This undermines a lot of the certainty of punishment and therefore the deterring factor of law enforcement, of course.
Just because you put on a suit and mask doesn't make it okay.
It also affected tens of thousands of people more than a murder or kidnapping.
The value of a single human life is not infinite. In engineering and public policy, a value like $10 million / life is typically used to make trade-offs. SBF stole funds far in excess of that.
Secondly, when funds of this scale are stolen, inevitably people wind up dying early from things like stress, and suicides.
Yep, it was mentioned in sentencing today by one of the victims.
At least 3 have already committed suicide after the shit hit the fan.
And then, yes, trial SBF for each of them as murder on top of embezzlement.
(Well, really, the opposite: you need to prove that their suicide was a direct result of SBF's fraud. And I don't think that's an impossible -- or even difficult -- bar to reach, here.)
It is impossible, I think, to come up with a "ranking" of crimes that everyone can agree on. And because that's impossible, anyone can always point to a sentence of someone else who received too little or too much in comparison.
I understand the desire to scale sentences by impact. But, I personally think it would be reasonable to give SBF the same exact sentence even if he had defrauded people out of twice as much or half as much money.
That can play out into, say, giving both a murderer and a scammer 25 years in prison, provided that they turn themselves in and otherwise co-operate with the legal process.
I'm sure police officers would rather go into houses to arrest people knowing that whatever the suspect has done, they're going to get another 25 years in jail if they fight back. Arresting someone who has no hope at all, regardless of what they do, is simply more dangerous.
Someone stealing a billion dollars is committing a far worse crime than someone that murders me.
The problem I have with this is imagine what a statistical poll would be if you posed the question "would you spend 20 years in jail for 1 billion?"
There is a good percentage that absolutely would sign up for that, obviously a much different result than "would you spend life in prison to get a billion dollars".
Let's not forget that the time they spend living before dying of things like stress and suicide will often be quite painful too. Deaths of despair are no fun.
From what I’ve seen about SBF, it does seem like he has a very high risk tolerance, was betting big to win big, and thinking the reward was worth the risk.
Heck it's almost like this describes crypto itself
I'm sure both SBF and Madoff originally thought they would be able to make enough money to cover up the theft.
I don't really think that has the moral conclusion people try to imply though. Thinking they could get away with it as a permanent secret gap that no one need ever know about is actually a worse moral character.
The idea that Sam was just a risky investor is the story Sam wants to tell. But he already told that story in court, and it was rejected.. because the evidence doesn't support it.
Or is it somehow more okay because they're out of sight, out of mind? There's still going to be a real body count for his actions, it just won't be immediately apparent.
Yes, it's ghoulish, as were his actions, but it's too easy to handwave them away as just some techbro oopsie if they're not contextualized like this.
Sometimes we moralize too much.
"AUSA Roos: They lost their life savings. A man who lives in Portugal - the day before bankruptcy his daughter was born. He was marred by the ominous specter of financial instability and his daughter's future. Then there's the 23 year old from Morocco"
"AUSA Roos: He is the eldest son. He kept money on FTX not to loan it out to the defendant but for family's security. One more - a couple in the later stages of their life, late 60s, they invested with life savings. They were depressed, they had to go back to work"
https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/177336575999912795...
Magic black box yield farming at 21:29 timestamp.
The well-considered federal sentencing guidelines put the sentence for this crime at over 100 years. That is, for an anonymous defendant at remove, our legal system believes that 100+ years is a fair sentence for this set of offenses.
So another way of looking at this is because of who the specific defendant is here, the court shaved 80 years off the "fair" sentence. I would consider that a light sentence.
https://popehat.substack.com/p/beware-the-flood-of-trump-sen...
"White collar criminals only get sentenced close to the statutory maximum when (1) they are only convicted of one or two counts with very low statutory maximum (say, one count of a crime with a five-year statutory maximum, as part of a plea bargain), or (2) cases involving truly extraordinary amounts of money."
Unlike the Trump case the article discusses, this case involves a truly extraordinary amount of money. Prosecutors did indeed ask for half that, but the court gave only half of the (already lenient) request due to facts about the person who was convicted.
Note that the Madoff case involved a similar amount of money and he indeed did get the big sentence. I suspect that was because he was likely to die in jail given any reasonable sentence, so better to make a show of it. In this case, SBF got a more lenient treatment for a similar offense because he is younger (note that the judge did not believe he has any remorse and still gave a lighter sentence).
How many people's lives were ruined or ended by his malfeasance? He got off lightly.
However, the other thing I'd point out is that murder is rarely a federal crime - it's usually a state crime. I was curious as to when it becomes a federal crime and found this: https://www.greenspunlaw.com/library/when-murder-is-a-federa...
Dollars-to-donuts that the vast majority of federal murders here were drug related. Not that I think the that makes it in any way better, but in many ways gang violence is more of a war than an individual, targeted killing. These types of circumstances matter when it comes to sentencing, and I'm not surprised at all that SBF's sentencing is longer than you "average" federal murder sentencing.
I say this tongue in cheek, but mostly because I don't know what options judges have at their disposal in these situations.
On the other hand maybe a more reasonable approach would be to treat criminals as people who need to be quarantined for as long as they’re dangerous. If we could identify a treatable disease (a tumor for example) and know with 100% certainty that treating that disease could prevent further crimes, I personally wouldn’t have an issue with it. We have an impulse to punish evil, and severely punish very evil things, but it’s more of a primitive drive than anything productive. (Of course the exception is the extent to which punishment can deter crime.)
That "exception" is the productive social instinct of what you call "a primitive drive".
And it's not just deterrence to negate other people's existing criminal intentions. It also prevents the specific individual in question from reoffending, and it also prevents other people who worked with the criminal from effectively spreading their antisocial culture/habits to unrelated individuals who otherwise have no existing proclivities for crime. It's almost about killing the idea, even more than punishing the person.
Having a standard where you're going to say "This is not okay and we absolutely won't put up with it" is vital to keeping a healthy culture where you can walk down the streets safe at night, or keep your money in a bank knowing it won't just disappear. The penalty for crimes has to be at least several times whatever the criminal gained, in order to be a viable deterrent considering the odds of getting caught, plus at least proportional to the harm inflicted, to center your societal structures on empathising and identifying with the victim. There has to be a heavy artificial cost for criminals, because otherwise game theory of the self-interested says that we'll all end up being constantly victimized.
Rule of the law isn't "primitive". I also feel the desire to forgive and quarantine, but with finite empathy, it's backwards to feel for the perpetrators rather than the victims. Look at Russia for an example to see what happens when predatorily selfish behaviors are allowed to go unpunished, and inevitably end up normalized. [1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_Russia
---
> If we could identify a treatable disease (a tumor for example) and know with 100% certainty that treating that disease could prevent further crimes, I personally wouldn’t have an issue with it.
I would consider this potentially much, much worse and more "barbaric" than imprisonment or even execution, as it would almost definitely be done unconsensually and coercibly.
It's impossible to knoe the number, but it's arguably non-zero.
He should have gotten the 40 years prosecution was asking.
Here's a live tweeting of the sentencing hearing; some of Judge Kaplan's remarks are really interesting.
https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/177334004374401064...
SBF was an outsider who stole from these people.
Sam Bankman Fried stole billions of dollars [1], probably often around $1000 at a time from tens of thousands of people. If going with my logic, he should be getting a lot longer than 25 years, upwards of hundreds or thousands of years. Obviously, it's not a linear relationship, the crime was non-violent, first-time-offender, etc. I'm just saying that 25 years seems pretty fair to me considering the magnitude of the crime.
I am one of the victims (well, of Gemini Earn anyway), and I think if I were given the choice, I'd probably sentence him to 20-25 years.
[1] Or at least so grossly mismanaged that there's no real purpose in drawing a distinction.
Almost definitely not, especially if it was your first crime. It’s pretty unlikely you’d even be caught.
Severity of the punishment has extremely diminishing returns on discouraging future crimes. The only other impetus for a longer sentence is if you think the defendant is likely to commit more crimes when released. Besides that, longer sentences are hard to justify.
The three purposes of punishment are retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence. Him getting 25 years isn't undeserved.
Prison is not and shouldn't be about rehabilitation. It's society that requires to be less exposed to SBF, by 20-25 years.
If I stole exactly one empty car exactly one time, then yes, I'd be a first time offender in the sense everyone thinks it. If I stole a thousand empty cars, and only got caught after the 999th, then sure, legally I'd be a "first time offender", but I would have still committed the crime a thousand times.
This wasn't a one-time clerical error that he failed to report. This was an intentional bit of theft that kept going for years. It's really not a "first time offense", and I don't think it's fair to categorize it as such.
"Habitual offender" has an actual legal definition in most countries that does not align with your views.
On that subject: The Russians seem to have leaked videos of the accused ISIS terrorists being tortured: "Though the goriest clips were not shown on state television, the brutal treatment of the defendants was made clear. And the decision by the Russian authorities to showcase it so publicly in court, in a way they had almost never done before, was intended as a sign of revenge and a warning to potential terrorists, analysts said." [0]
Will it work? Doubtful, because:
1. We should never underestimate the human susceptibility to overconfidence — and to rationalizing away warnings from past experience: "Well, when I do it, I won't make their mistakes." (Cf. the first chapter of The Right Stuff, describing several episodes in which a military test pilot gets killed in a crash; with each fatal crash, the dead pilot's colleagues think, How could he have been so stupid? I'd have never done [fill in action]. Yeah, right ....)
2. Plus: That sort of thing just motivates the real fanatics to escalate the cycle of revenge and punishment. (I'm rereading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August; she describes how WWI started out in somewhat the same way.)
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/26/world/europe/russia-terro...
There was a quote something like "We don't lock our doors because we are afraid of people stealing, we lock our doors because it is an easy way to take away the temptation to steal from a lot of people who would otherwise be honest"
Very good book and it showed via study that there is some threshold where at one point more people would be dishonest. It there would be completely no punishment for any stealing (even if non-voilent) I'm pretty sure more people would consider stealing.
TLDR; the idea of a punishment is not to completely prevent such behavior in the future in society but to reduce such behavior across whole society.
That said, I also have no reason to think that if he's not locked away, he won't just do the same or similar scam again. He hasn't shown any remorse, and he just pretends to be ignorant of all the crimes. If not put into jail, I suspect he'd just go to a country with difficult extradition laws and do some other cryptocurrency scam from there. Putting him in jail for 20 years at least avoids it for 20 years.
First, that punishment has three purposes – retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence – does not entail that each of these purposes must be realized in a given act of punishment in order for that act to be morally legitimate. For example, we may justly imprison a recidivist thief even if we know from experience that he is extremely unlikely to change his ways as a result of his imprisonment and even if circumstances make it unlikely that his particular imprisonment will deter other thieves. Similarly, the fact that a given act of capital punishment may not fulfill all of the ends of punishment does not by itself suffice to make that act morally illegitimate.
Second, while there is obviously a sense in which capital punishment can prevent rehabilitation, there is also a sense in which it actually facilitates rehabilitation. How so? Consider first that a wrongdoer cannot truly be rehabilitated until he comes to acknowledge the gravity of his offense. But the gravity of an offense is more manifest when the punishments for that offense reflect its gravity – that is to say, when the principle of proportionality is respected. A society in which armed robbery was regularly punished with at most a small fine would be a society in which armed robbers would have greater difficulty coming to see the seriousness of their crimes, and in which they would for that reason be less likely to be rehabilitated. Similarly, a society in which even the most sadistic serial murderers are given the same punishments as bank robbers is going to be a society in which sadistic serial murderers will have greater difficulty in coming to see the seriousness of their crimes, and thus will be less likely to be rehabilitated.
I should clarify. I think punishment mostly makes the punishee angry with the punisher. I don't think that they generally feel like they are paying their penance. If they didn't already think that what they were doing is wrong, I really don't see how they are going to suddenly start just because they were punished.
I generally think that the way that Scandinavia does prisons is better. I think that punishing people specifically with the intent of making their life worse is viscerally satisfying (the retribution part of that quote), but I think it's not actually a good thing to organize a society around increasing suffering. The US has a higher murder rate than Western European countries, despite having stricter punishments, including the death penalty. There can be thousands of factors that influence that, obviously, but it doesn't seem to be massively deterring crime.
I think prisons are basically a necessary evil; there are certain people that are antithetical to a functioning society, and so it's probably better to separate them from most people. I think the point should be, though, to not view these things as "punishment" but more "a chance at reformation".
Prisons in the US used to have college education programs, and job training programs, so that when you left you had a means of supporting yourself that wasn't criminal. If I understand correctly, this is still the case in Sweden, and I think that's a good idea.
Now of course, there are humans that are so warped that really no amount of job training is going to help them (e.g. a Jeffrey Dahmer), and at that point you really do just need to treat it like punishment.
I'm not going to say it's impossible, maybe he could be managing this big crypto empire from jail, but it would certainly be harder to do all that from prison.
For the “isolation from society” i think it’s the least compelling part of lengthy incarceration. You can probably achieve the same effect with just house arrest and other such restrictions
He probably is a higher risk of racking up 25 more years every 18 months than a shank specialist.
People like Sam Bankman Fried are much harder for me to feel bad over. He was never struggling to pay rent or having to worry about not being able to afford groceries next month. He was already well off, and just decided to gamble with other (poorer) people's money because he wanted more money.
This means, to me, that this was a more cold and calculated thing, not something out of desperation or frustration, just greed. Robbing someone that you think is rich is bad. Robbing someone you think is poor is something supervillains do. If he's already been able to square that circle once, I see no reason that he wouldn't be able to do it again.
Forgive me for not crying over how he might actually have to pay consequences for his actions.
I think there is probably a significant number of people who wouldn't normally be criminals, and thus aren't technically being "deterred", but would end up being just that little bit less scrupulous if they regularly see prominent examples of criminal behavior going unpunished.
Really, my preferred punishment for him would be a sentence of 25 years working in a non-managerial, non-ownership hourly position in the quick-service restaurant or janitorial fields, earning not more than the Federal minimum.
i think you missed the whole "justice" point there.
spending 25 year behind bars with 21+ yrs mandatory seems like enough to deter most people.
I'm not sure that's a sufficiently bad outcome to deter the next crypto narcissist.
Punishment has three purposes, namely, retribution, rehabilitation, and deterrence.
I also don't know how much rehabilitation actually occurs in our prisons. From what I understand, not much.
citation needed
Apparently that logic applied to Bernie Madoff. He got 150 years. How are these cases so similar and yet got radically different sentences?
Partially in that SBF's victims will get "100%" back, based on the USD value of their holdings at the time.
Madoff victims, especially the wealthily got a large haircut on their holdings and clawbacks on money they had taken out as far as 5 years back from sentencing.
Also Maddoff's fraud went on for 15+ years, SBF's was maybe a year to 18 months at the most?
These two cases are so widely different that you can't really compare them except at a superficial level, ie they were both fraud, and that's about where the similarities end.
I have to disagree on that. Mostly because the order of magnitude of both scams is the same (billions) and both destroyed how many lives?
And sure, maybe FTX victims will get 100% back, but when? How long until you see that money back?
SBF's system was to use clients' money to do illiquid investments. Was it fraud? YES, because he lied to his clients and said he didn't invest their money. And that's why he was tried and punished. But was it the same kind of fraud as Madoff? NO.
In law, intent is everything. If you kill someone by accident, or in self-defense, or after planning their murder for years, the law will treat that very differently; yet in all cases the result is the same (the person is dead).
Same with fraud. It's not the same if it's a pure fraud where there is no possibility that the victims will ever see their money back, or if it's a fraud where it's possible they will be made whole, even if that possibility only exists in the mind of the perpetrator, because the mind of the perpetrator is what the legal system is interested in.
The owners, the police, the prosecutor and the jury would be far more interested in the breaking and entry charge than the $1000.
In fact, in every state of the Union, if you're facing me whilst committing the act of trespassing inside my home, I can legally punch a hole through your torso with a 9mm.
We are seeing this kind of crime on a regular basis in our neighborhood. The cops have pretty much given up. They also mentioned that even if they make an arrest, the bail is set so low, these guys would be out quickly. Overall, my impression is there is zero deterrence for these kind of crimes here (a pretty affluent neighborhood in one of the tech cities in the west coast)
On 8 March 2024, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy and faces mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in prison.
It's strange to say but there's an... authenticity to this that I find endearing.
Even if you wanted to believe his statements, they do not align at all with his actions.
SBF is an archetypical pathological liar combined with an ego the size of the empire state building.
He's gotten away his entire life lying for a living all the while looking down on people around him for being his supposed intellectual inferiors.
He's gotten so used to operating in that regime that he couldn't stop doing it even when in court, not realizing he was fighting for his life.
The only thing that's "endearing" about a person like this is that he probably belongs in some sort of psychological re-education program.
So they ask if I've ever heard of "S.B.F.". After my mouth fell open and I gasped for air a few times, and demanded some proof, I got to see a not-public interview of SBF. Nothing particularly juicy, but still. I'm a nerd and I love gossip.
Apropos of nothing, other than the world is small, and weird; I guess.
I remember even before he got arrested it seemed bizarre how much PR there was about him. Allegedly it was organic but I'm sure he was paying for a lot of it in anticipation of when he got caught.
Lots of puff pieces came out after his arrest as well which also seemed bizarrely forced.
Pity? It's a pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some
that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to
deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. [0]
No amount of philanthropy washing can erase the damage his done.
Fuck that guy.
SBF has been sentenced for 25 years, and fined $11 billion. Pretty big difference - how much money does he have left?
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/highly-c...
Or maybe he'll just start making yogurt.
https://www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/magazine/yoghurt-mafia-unexp...
https://cointelegraph.com/news/sam-bankman-fried-mackerel-fi...
The mind boggles.
You cannot stop murder, rapes, petty theft etc with punishments you can deter white-collar crimes which are executed with a lot of forethought as this is a critical decision making factor.
---
To be clear I meant loosing financial license is not same as loosing medical or legal license, no one is spending 10 years of education and hundreds of thousands of to get one, so it is not much of deterrent to threaten loosing it.
No it wouldn't, what an ignorant thing to say. People like this go immediately back to scamming as soon as they leave prison, and some times from the inside.
As others have suggested, likely he won't even serve the 25 though.
...Because it just simplifies to 50/2 lol.
Because instead he'll serve 21.25?
So that would be 16 years, though obviously, it's foolish to use "right down the middle" as a heuristic for something like this. (The more severe a crime, the more incentive the defense has to pretend like it didn't happen at all.)
- The geometric average is the arithmetic average of the logarithm. It places emphasis on the ratio between numbers, rather than the absolute difference.
- The harmonic average is the arithmetic average of the multiplicative inverse. It averages values by a constant numerator rather than denominator. For example, the average fuel economy of multiple vehicles makes more sense per-distance, so miles/gallon should be rewritten as gallons/mile.
- The (RMS) root-mean-square is the arithmetic average of the square. Electrical power is proportional to the square of the amperage or voltage, so AC current and voltage uses the RMS average to make the power calculations correct.
Stole unknown amounts of peoples retirement.
Ruined many peoples lives.
How is 50 years too long? The literal largest fraud case in history doesn't even have a life sentence...
We are sending a clear message, grift and steal your way to the top and then get out just in time to retire with all your stolen goods.
You know when he gets out he is gonna go unlock a dead wallet with 100BTC (or some other coin) in it and become an expat.
IMO, if we're thinking of sentencing someone to 50 years or life in prison, we should cut to the chase and execute them instead. It's faster and cheaper for the taxpayers, and arguably less cruel.
SBF may serve as little as 12.5 years, if he gets all of the jailhouse credit available to him," Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor, told CNN.
Federal prisoners generally can earn up to 54 days of time credit a year for good behavior, which could result in an approximately 15% reduction.
Since 2018, however, nonviolent federal inmates can reduce their sentence by as much as 50% under prison reform legislation known as the First Step Act.
Are you saying the article is wrong, or did you maybe not consider this possibility?
That's not an automatic reduction (or even as close to it as good conduct time), as it requires successful participation in specified activities, but it is generally available except for a defined list of mostly violent offenses.
See this guys comment...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39856162
and a million others correcting the "85%" meme that HN parrots incessantly (not sure why anyone would expect programmers to be experts on federal incarceration nuances)
There are totally good reasons for a pension fund to invest minority assets into BTC, mostly diversification (check out Modern Portfolio Theory [1]). You may calculate the risk that BTC goes up or down, but most people probably didn't expect the exchange to lose the money.
It's not the first time it happened (see Mt Gox), but FTX prided itself on being the most risk-averse. Yet it turned out all of that was based on fraud and fake numbers, fraudulent enough to even fool pension funds.
This assumes both that he has such a wallet and that BTC will still be worth something when he gets out.
>>On 8 March 2024, Hernández was convicted of three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy and faces mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in prison.
What I never see acknowledged (or believed) by more lenient people is the fact that adequate punishment (sometimes harsh is adequate) serves to send a message not only to other offenders, but maybe most importantly to non-offenders, that the justice system is worth something.
"Crime doesn't pay" is to me a greater message to people who are not willing to commit crimes in the first place.
It seems there's a counter claim that he didn't.
> Ross was smeared with unprosecuted, false allegations of planning murder-for-hire that never occurred, were never proven, never ruled on by a jury, and were ultimately dismissed with prejudice.
Works pretty well out here in Australia, or much of Eastern Europe.
> "No senior Wall Street executives were imprisoned for actions that contributed to the global financial crisis."
Bitcoin is here to stay.
He wasted a good part of his life.
Early release means your sentence is concluded and the only lasting impacts on your life is that of having been convicted of a felony.
Media will sometimes (because this are in Manhattan) label these as a Manhattan/New York prosecutors or a Manhattan court, but it is federal, not state, prosecutors and court in New York, not New York prosecutors or court.
I wonder if they considered their role? I haven’t seen anyone accuse SBF of being a psychopath; given that, how does a person become so ethically bankrupt? A: His parents failed to do their job of ensuring that he developed a conscience.
SBF’s actions are his own; but he would never have gotten to where he ended up if they had done their job.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/09/24/sam-b...
>The suit says that SBF’s father directed where company payments would go, picked out charities to benefit from his son’s largesse, entered into and terminated contracts, hand-picked the company’s outside counsel, made hiring recommendations, and authorized expenses.
>SBF’s mother, used ill-gotten funds from her son’s businesses as a piggy bank for her political action committee.
>The suit says that Bankman, SBF’s father, was at one point drawing a $200,000 annual salary from FTX but that he thought he was “supposed to” be getting a nice, round $1 million. He emailed his son, according to the suit, “Gee, Sam I don’t know what to say here. This is the first [I] have heard of the 200K a year salary! Putting Barbara on this,” he added, calling in the boss’s mother. The suit says that shortly thereafter, Bankman-Fried made a $10 million gift to his parents out of funds from Alameda Research (FTX’s sister hedge fund), then had the couple put on the deed to a $16.4 million Bahamas property with funds “ultimately provided” by FTX.
https://www.citationneeded.news/sam-bankman-fried-is-not-a-c...
You can say maybe, the people investing in crypto have been 'playing' with money and knew there was risk involved, but stealing is still stealing and governments/juridical systems indeed need to prove that this cannot be tolerated.
meanwhile we are seeing "institutionalization" of crypto-related securities to displace the disrupters from the tech space.
[1]Specifically for crimes not included in this long list: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/3632#d_4_D
https://ia801508.us.archive.org/25/items/gov.uscourts.nysd.5...
Why do they alway say that enforcing the law is a warning? Why isn't it a known fact that if you break these rules you go to prison. Is it that sometimes they let you off the hook and now they're taking the law more seriously?
IIRC it's 85%. Federal prison does not have parole, but they do give some credit for good behavior, up to 15%.
This is the same man who leaked his ex's diaries while she was testifying against him, which led to his bail being revoked https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/11/technology/sam-bankman-fr...
What a weird take on his behavior. His parents are law professors, he had an army of lawyers working for him at the time, yet he just didn't care and did what he felt like, knowing full well the damage it would do, because that was the whole point. There is no misunderstanding, it was just indifference.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/05/technology/sam-bankman-fr...
https://nypost.com/2023/08/24/why-sam-bankman-fried-likely-w...
Absolutely spot on, and to paraphrase Tallyrand, it was worse than a crime, it was indifference.
Realistically then, SBF is looking at 11.5 years if he can stay out of trouble, which is relatively easy for white-collar criminals in relatively low security prisons.
Federal rules still don't have parole.
Piss off an inmate and get in an even slight altercation, lose some of your good behavior points.
12.5 years would be possible only if he scored 100% on good behavior.
It depends if he is sent to a USP like regular federal convicts or club fed minimum because of his connections. Typically club fed you can only get through a plea bargain like Madoff or through years of good time credits.
He'll probably need to wait about 2-4 terms, but eventually the bribery ... uh ... mercy will go through.
There's maybe one President that didn't get elected because of his use of the pardon. But then, Ford wasn't elected President or Vice President before he pardoned Nixon either.
Otherwise, I'm not aware of a pardon so controversial that it became a major campaign issue. And for a second term President, there's not really any downside.
Because the pattern they usually follow is to pardon the questionable cases (personal friends, people with financial ties to the President, etc.) just before they go out of office.
If America mistrusts government so much that it wants the President to be a de facto monarch, it should just drop the pretense at being a republic and have a monarchy already. Or make the oligarchy official and elect a CEO in chief. At least then there's only one head for the CIA to put a bullet into.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/02/sam-bankman-fried-bi...
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/20/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-allies...
> Ryan Salame, who was the CEO of FTX’s digital markets division, donated millions of dollars to Republican political action committees and affiliated “dark money” groups with funds from FTX’s affiliated hedge fund, Alameda Research, according to the documents. Salame pleaded guilty last month to federal campaign finance and money-transmitting crimes. Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda and once dated Bankman-Fried, also gave millions to right-leaning nonprofit groups, the documents say.
> Bankman-Fried donated $10 million to a [Mitch] McConnell-linked group named One Nation in August 2022, according to the evidence filed by prosecutors. The money came directly from an Alameda Research account, prosecutors said.
There's little reason to believe any of that influence remains now that he's broke.
> The purpose of those donations, he said, was to fund political initiatives supported by Bankman-Fried. In a criminal complaint unsealed Thursday, prosecutors said they had obtained private messages in which Salame wrote that Bankman-Fried wanted to support politicians in both parties who were “pro crypto,” while working to get “anti crypto” lawmakers out of office.
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/09/07/ex-ftx-executive-...
> Salame doled out more than $24 million to Republican political candidates during his time at FTX, and he was the 11th largest individual U.S. political donor in 2022 according to OpenSecrets.org. In a court filing last month, prosecutors shared “private messages” from Salame that purport to show him explaining how he was used as a straw donor to secretly funnel money from FTX and Bankman-Fried.
https://qz.com/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-republicans-democrats-m...
> In one interview last November, Bankman-Fried admitted to donating roughly equal amounts to Democrats and Republicans but made sure that “all my Republican donations were dark.” He said he did this because he felt the press had a tendency to “freak” when donations were made to the Grand Old Party (GOP). At the 2022 midterm campaign funding cycle, he said he may have been the “second or third biggest” GOP donor.
Nobody on the left wants to see him walk free, either. His remaining political capital is nill. Politicians only care about rich donors if they remain rich donors.
Salame has pled guilty to this, and his tens of millions in donations are entirely in the public record. https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=Ryan+S...
No shit. If you scroll up, I assert "FTX was attempting to buy influence on both sides of the aisle" and mention Salame numerous times. Please don't blame me for a lack of reading comprehension on your part.
SBF's texts to Salame about all this were obtained by prosecutors, garnering a guilty plea. I've presented a number of links to reputable sources, to which your replies amount to "nuh uh", so I think I'm out.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/sam-bankma...
"He was lauded for his major donations to Democrats, but now he says he was secretly giving to Republicans in roughly equal measure."
It's not like SBF is going to be making any big future donations.
Donors hoping for favours know donations only buy so much; the politician takes the money in order to improve their chances of getting elected. If you want a favour which noticeably reduces their chance of getting re-elected - you won't get it.
From the article:
> There is no possibility of parole in federal criminal cases, but Bankman-Fried can still shave time off his 25-year sentence with good behavior.
> "SBF may serve as little as 12.5 years, if he gets all of the jailhouse credit available to him," Mitchell Epner, a former federal prosecutor, told CNN.
> Federal prisoners generally can earn up to 54 days of time credit a year for good behavior, which could result in an approximately 15% reduction.
> Since 2018, however, nonviolent federal inmates can reduce their sentence by as much as 50% under prison reform legislation known as the First Step Act.
I’d be in favour of amending the law to expand to cover fraud and corruption. Those are crimes that corrode social trust in a way that is analogous to challenging the state’s monopoly on violence. (And is separate from e.g. theft.)
Otherwise, I agree.
Sure. And many murders remain unsolved. We treat murder differently from other crimes that result in human death in part due to instinct, but in part because when we don’t it becomes a political tool.
That is a strawman.
Besides (potentially) rehabilitation, prison serves to protect the populace from dangerous people who would harm others and as a deterrent to others who can see what punishment they might get if they do something illegal.
I am not claiming prison does a good job of these things, just that its goal is not to "ruin people's lives".
It is not like he will be getting away with a slap on the wrist one way or another. I just don't see more years in prison past some reasonable threshold as a good deterrent.
> I am not claiming prison does a good job of these things, just that its goal is not to "ruin people's lives".
The purpose of a system is what it does.
IMO 10 years in prison should be more than enough to discourage SBF from repeating it. And if it is not enough, then 30 years won't be enough either...
> then 30 years won't be enough either
But it's not about deterring him. It's about preventing him from doing any more damage to the society and potentially deterring other people from committing the same crime. IMHO this is one sector where draconian sentences might be actually very effective, people in finance tend to be more rational and calculating than average. If you get a to steal a few billion and maybe somehow stash a proportion of that spending 5 years in prison might seem like a reasonable deal, that's pushing it but maybe even 10, not > 30 though.
it's like saying Trump could pardon him on the way in -- and might
That is more likely than a Biden pardon: Trump in his first term was big on pardoning both financial criminals and people involved in political corruption on both sides of the aisle, and SBF is both a financial criminal and someone involved in political corruption (on both sides of the aisle, even), so he is something of an ideal Trump pardon candidate.
Since SBF publicly despised Trump, donated vast sum to his opponents, and tried to architect Trump not being president I'd say that's less likely.
https://www.businessinsider.com/sbf-wanted-tom-brady-to-run-...
>Bankman-Fried’s largest donations were $27 million to his own super PAC, which supported Democratic candidates, and $6 million to a PAC that helps elect Democrats to the U.S. House. Bankman-Fried also gave the maximum $5,800 each to support dozens of candidates, mostly Democrats.
>President Joe Biden’s 2020 run for president was one of the major beneficiaries of Bankman-Fried’s donations. Bankman-Fried gave $5 million to a PAC that supported President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, $50,000 to Biden Victory Fund, and $2,800 directly to Biden for President.
1. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/12/16/ftx-...
"The mission of the U.S. Parole Commission is to promote public safety and strive for justice and fairness in the exercise of its authority to release and revoke offenders under its jurisdiction."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_parole_in_the_United_S...
Shkreli far and away has been providing the most informed analysis of this case. He trashed the letters to the judge from SBF's parents, then Judge Kaplan went on to raise the exact points Shkreli said he would.
Federal prison does not have parole. Only good behavior options. But that could reduce it to 12.5, if he hits all behavior targets.
And people are on here arguing that this sentence is too long. How laughable.
This is a weird form of "privatize the profits, socialize the losses" but with the benefactors being the people intentionally avoiding all the financial laws.
The government shouldn’t outlaw free climbing either.
It’s your own fault if you treat a bunch of foolish kids with millions of dollars the same way you would an onshore FDIC-insured regulated bank.
Canada Bill Jones would like a word.
People don't go mass free-climbing because it isn't something you do by accident. The danger is obvious. But this danger is abstract, and the ease of entering this type of system can happen with just a few clicks from the comfort of your home. And getting dollar signs in your eyes is a very psychologically influential pull.
Similarly, torching your money on some random shitcoin isn't outlawed. But when they enter populated areas, renaming stadiums and hiring celebrities to try to trick the masses, the rules change.
This was actually a tiny slice of the overall financial mischief at FTX. But it told well in front of a jury. And it reinforced a big point that prosecutors keep wanting to make, as publicly as possible. "Don't take the customers' money to live large on your thefts!" That's a message that they want countless bookkeepers, financial planners, etc. to hear, again and again.
So, yes, they wanted to make an example out of SBF. The intricacies of FTX's full financial gyrations were sometimes too complicated to put in front of a jury. But the clueless or duped crypto-trading clients got a free bailout anyway. It came on the back of a prosecution that was largely intended to be a public slapdown of a guy committing lifestyle offenses with other people's money.
What evidence do you have of this? Jury trials frequently involve ‘complicated gyrations’ — that’s what expert testimony is for.
>The key at trial, aside from the multiple cooperators, was the way in which prosecutors simplified the case and tried it as a garden-variety fraud instead of as a complex crypto scheme.
I don't see how people ever expected the government not to enforce these financial laws on electronic currencies.
Depending how south things go, you can get assasinated inside an embassy or killed in plain day light with the whole world knowing who did it.
No, it's, as usual, the government choosing to do the wrong thing with your tax money, because it will be bad publicity not to, because votes, because power.
I'm really looking for a response from GP, bodiekane.
SIVB stock collapsed and all the investors into SIVB were wiped out. US Government stepped in and started allocating the remaining assets, prioritizing the customers and hurting the bondholders and shareholders.
IE: The shareholders / bondholders of SIVB were basically wiped out. The losses were privatized so to speak, isolated to the investor class.
FDIC funds don't come from taxpayers. *Banks* pay FDIC insurance fees.
Now you can quibble if FDIC is paid by banks, or if you think the "costs are passed onto the customers". But bank-customers are not necessarily "tax payers". At very least, the vast majority of my cash is in VMFXX and SWVXX, so I personally have very little money in Checking/Savings (so I barely pay any kind of "banking insurance" fees in practice, just enough to keep my checking account open).
The little banking insurance that my money is going towards is my Checking account / Savings Account at a local Credit Union as well. Which is NCUA (not FDIC), so a totally different insurance program.
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So none of my personal wealth is actually tied to FDIC in any way, despite myself paying plenty of taxes all the time. I'm simply not a bank customer, so there's no way I personally am related to any FDIC related situation.
And plenty other people are like me as well.
But I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you've never referred to it as "socializing the losses of having possessions in your home" when police unravel a burglary operation and return the loot to its rightful owners.
So let me rephrase your question: can a US citizen file some papers internationally that would permit them to conduct criminal activities in the US against other US citizens.
The answer should not be surprising.
That is, FTX's customers knew, or most definitely should have known, that FTX (and crypto at large - that is essentially the primary selling point of crypto) was "outside the regulatory financial framework". Yet when things blew up and all these FTX customers lost all their money, there was very little reflection of "Hey, perhaps these financial regulations really do have some purpose.", it was more "I want the government to now enforce the banking laws that I was essentially trying to evade in the first place."
Just read some of the reports John Ray III, the current "cleanup" FTX CEO, wrote shortly after he was brought in. It was a total clown show, with little to no documentation for things like huge multimillion loans to FTX principals. It's a lot easier to steal money when there is no standardized, auditable paper trail to begin with.
Fascinating level of cognitive dissonance that is prevalant in this thread. It’s a mixture of conflating competing ideas, and strawman arguments to discredit crypto users.
Custodians are subject to liability based on their own citizenship, the citizenship of their clients, and the location of the infrastructure being used, it doesn't matter what type of asset is involved.
Dang, we should really flag these non sequitur posts on every crypto thread that appears on HN, we’re almost 20 years in and the discussion level is a large aberration lower compared to other tech topics on HN and other dev and enthusiast crypto forums still, when it should be the opposite. flagging practically everything would promote more substantive discussions by making that point to otherwise well adjusted people, and surfacing the things that work well within crypto to people that otherwise aren’t exposed to that.
Your complaint would be solved with less gray area.
Businesses outside of the US should be able to do business with US citizens _without_ the consent of the US government. This comes with the caveat that if you, the customer, reject the "protection" of the US government, you are completely and totally SOL if things go south.
US citizens have never implicitly been allowed on these off-shore exchanges. You have to deliberately circumvent and lie to get an account.
It was SBF who put it in the hands of the US by declaring bankruptcy in essentially 3 days instead of playing the long wait game
Also SBF who put it in the hands of the US by staying in the Bahamas and essentially waiting to be arrested (and immediately extradicted to the US) instead of fleeing to Cuba or Colombia or South America. 25ft Inflatable ribs can make that route.
During the first day of crisis he could have gone to Russia too by private plane and pull a Snowden
The real tragedy is that NFTs turned into digital trading cards and DAOs turned into pump and dump scams. The really interesting use cases will appear once the USDT Tether books are exposed and Bitcoin price plummets. Imagine NFTs attached to shipping containers tracking custody throughout a series of mutually distrusting last mile carriers. Or DAOs that allow people to organize for collective action with radically transparent finances to prevent corruption and grift.
Of course I'm sure this will not go over well here on HN, where everyone reflexively hates crypto and loves government regulation. It's a bit ironic for a forum where the majority of members are engaged in the business of "disrupting" one or another traditional industry. Of course the industry of finance is too sacrosanct to risk such disruption. Why should Uber have to pay for taxi medallions though?
GP: > HN, where everyone reflexively hates crypto
Yeah, no, the hate of crypto stems from a fairly well grounded understanding of the technology here. BTW, the good folks at FT Alphaville also mostly hate crypto - there, it stems from a good understanding of finance. Basically, everyone that understands the tech/finance intersection reasonably well hates crypto, with one important caveat best expressed by Upton Sinclair nearly a century ago:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
Though, there are fines. Apparently, FTX might owe $9 billion in fines and penalties and $10 billion other government litigation [1]? The creditors might not get much at all.
I don’t know what the users of a cryptocurrency exchange expect. I think there’s always some chance of a “rug-pull?”
[1] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/US-v-...
More to the point, the IRS has been collecting taxes on Bitcoin earnings since around 2014[1]. Since the government is taxing you, it's fair to ask the government to protect you.
---
[1] https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/freq...
But this is one of those subjects where it gets weird.
SBF was directly responsible for millions, if not billions, of direct monetary loss to identified individuals. Yet the top comments on HN are all discussing whether incarceration is retribution, spite, deterrence, or rehabilition.
The USA incarcerates people for tiny financial damages at a higher rate than anywhere else in the world. $20 of theft? 5 years away, no problem. $1 billion: well we should consider what we're trying to achieve here...
If the USA is going to be consistent in sentencing then just fucking kill him.
Or reconsider and free the thousands of black dudes serving ridiculous sentences for minor crimes.
Who in this day and age is going to jail for half a decade because they snuck a 20 dollar bill out of the cash register when no one was looking?
There are almost always violent actions involved that are conveniently glossed over whenever someone bemoans “life in prison for stealing a loaf of bread!”
Like realistically, sbf can just be kept in a fenced compound. He's shown no great violent urge. House arrest would probably serve the same purpose of removing him from the population for X years.
Someone breaking into a building is a lot different. They need more security and cause more chaos.
Other noted fraud-y bitcoin exchange guy Mark Karpelès avoided prison after conviction, but the evidence was much weaker there and they only found him guilty on fraudulently inflating MtGox's holdings (a la Donald Trump); also, that was Japan.
(Fun fact; after the collapse of MtGox, Karpelès went into business with Andrew Lee, the guy who broke freenode and claims to be the Crown Prince of Korea. The world of weird internet grifters is small and incestuous.)
There is a certain point where it no longer matters; such connections would only really matter if they could get the investigation stopped. Once it goes to court, assuming it's a proper court, those sort of connections kind of cease to matter.
(Including, notably, Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1591822387267665921)
The top voted comment in that topic is saying he's going to jail. Just because in a forum with a gazillion people some people have a different one doesn't make it representative of the median/mean/etc.
Also, it's not bad to have a counter-opinion to a group; it is bad to claim a singular opinion is that of the group without any actual justification.
The post I replied to used the literally lowest voted top level comment as their basis of "HN didnt think he was going to jail". They skipped over all of the higher top level comments when making their post (you have to go to the bottom of page 2 to see the one they picked).
Their post is classic bad faith argument and I think it should receive a penalty (downvote).
https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-bankman-fried-be-sent...
Also, he was addicted to the internet (supposedly), he wont have access to that either.
The USA has an incredibly robust, tightly monitored and regulated financial market. The SEC, FDIC and associated regulators and auditors carefully control bank reserves, prosecute insider trading, prevent and insure against fraud.
Some people decided to opt-out of that system and send their money to an unregulated entity in the Bahamas to buy imaginary money without government oversight.
Honestly the government shouldn't have intervened here at all. The people who lost money should have been laughed at and told that's why you put your money in the regulated market. If you intentionally try to avoid taxes, anti-money laundering regulations, audits and securities law by buying crypto overseas, then taxpayer resources don't go bail you out.
You seem to wish to live in a zero trust world model where everyone is out to scam everyone at all times and "caveat emptor" if you do get scammed. We should do our best as a society to not turn into that.
Same as there's no place where murder is allowed. You can't "opt out" of parts of society. It's not even "take it or leave it", society is "take it or get out of our reach"
A lot of these people were likely acting in some level of good faith, assuming that a company so big it could afford a Super Bowl commercial starring Larry David would never scam them. I know, it's stupid, but people don't understand where the guardrails are, what FDIC insurance really is, what sort of insurance exists on retail brokerage accounts, etc. And they didn't just lose money off of crypto losing value, they lost beyond that amount off of this business co-mingling funds when they were not supposed to.
But I do not feel that badly for anyone whose life was 'ruined' over this for one big reason: they were trying to get rich quick. That's the fact that underpins so much investment in crypto. BTC to the moon! SHTC to the moon! ETCC to the moon! These people were hoping for their 'investments' (speculative gamblings) to explode in value. And they weren't planning on sharing any of it with you or me, not beyond what they're legally required to through taxes (and sometimes, not even that, like you say as well).
The victim impact testimony of ruined lives doesn't align with it.
Deterrent
I am from El Paso, which is on the border with Mexico and grew up with many kids whose parents were smugglers and cartel affiliated.
I know several parents who went to jail for ~10 years while were were in elementary school, the kids never wanted for anything, and then when the parents got out and started capital intensive business.
One parent did 12 years and got out to start a a series of high end mexican restaurants, one started a steakhouse, one bought a small hotel, one started a commercial construction company.
It's all part of the game, just how startup founders grind for years for the money.
People risk 10 years for robbing bands for a couple thousand. A guaranteed $10 million would have lines around the block for volunteers in the neighborhood I grew up in.
Speaking purely for myself, I don't feel much difference in the deterrent effect from the punishment being 5 years or 25 years. Either one would utterly wreck everything about my life, and although the latter is worse it's not enough so to change my decisions.
Prisons are good for punishing criminals and keeping them off the street, but prison sentences (particularly long sentences) are unlikely to deter future crime. Prisons actually may have the opposite effect: Inmates learn more effective crime strategies from each other, and time spent in prison may desensitize many to the threat of future imprisonment. See “Understanding the Relationship Between Sentencing and Deterrence” for additional discussion on prison as an ineffective deterrent.
———
5. There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals. According to the National Academy of Sciences, “Research on the deterrent effect of capital punishment is uninformative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates.”
I have some pretty serious doubts about it when it comes to large financial crimes where both those things are absolutely part of the process. A death sentence probably isn't going to stop someone from killing another person, they're already off the deep end of irrationality. However 25 years of prison is probably going to be a significant deterrent to someone choosing to commit billions worth of fraud, maybe the profit margin isn't that important.
Frankly, I think we need a lot more of this kind of punishment to get more trust back into our high-trust society. More rich people need to go to prison for crimes against society, because honestly it feels more like Madoff and SBF were one offs rather than business as usual.
My point along with the grand parent is that at a certain point it is more costly than it is worth in deterrence. And the data backs that up, generally.
But what that point is, I have no idea.
Capital punishment is cheap though. And more humane than life sentence. Actually I think that we should return some form of corporal punishment and shorten prison sentences for non violent crimes. Subject SBF to Singapore style caning every month and 2-3 years in prison, forbid him to ever work with other people's money and be done with him.
Getting capital punishment right is certainly not cheap, if you are worried about the finality of it.
If an otherwise peaceful person is committing fraud on a scale 1000 times larger than the next guy, wouldn’t it at least scale up logarithmically?
As a deterrent and as a punitive, I get it, but even life sentences don't seem to deter crimes that can yield those punishments.
People make mistakes, to err is human, and forgiveness should be provided to those with the capacity to change (ie harm less). Compassion is important. But if you don't believe you've done anything wrong, can we not project future potential outcomes? Prison duration is a risk assessment of harm reduction.
EDIT: Prison should still be about rehabilitation and treating humans humanely, to be clear.
Ostensibly the same thing as after a 22 year sentence, just later.
Naturally, by this logic I have to ask: why not 32 years? 52? 102? Aren't we doing society a disservice by ever allowing criminals to leave prison?
> Ostensibly
I chose this word carefully, because I think a lot of our preconceived notions on criminal behavior have not been validated by the real world, including the deterrent effects of long-term imprisonments.
Because the sentencing judge applied the guidelines provided by law as written by legislature, considered case-law, the specifics of this case and applied their professional judgement to come up with a 25-year sentence as an appropriate one for the crimes committed. If the defendant disagrees, they can appeal the sentence to get a second opinion.
You're attempting to reductio ad absurdum prison sentences - I'll apply it to your argument in turn - why send guilty people to prison at all? What's the difference between 1 day imprisonment and 60, or 6000? A sense of proportion is the difference between a black-and-white world and the one we strive for in reality.
We know the mechanics of why it was chosen. What I was asking was by your logic, 22 is less protective of society than 102, which makes me question the validity of "it protects society" reasoning. Why protect less when we have a quantifiably greater level of protection?
> You're attempting to reductio ad absurdum prison sentences
This is incredibly dismissive. We have arbitrary sentencing guidelines. They are based on reasoning, but that doesn't mean they are correct. They are fluid, change from locale to locale, and have unpredictable efficacy.
> why send people to prison at all? What's the difference between 1 day imprisonment and 60
You see, I don't think that's reductio ad absurdum at all. It's a valid question. You can argue for it and against it, but it isn't absurd or contradictory on its face.
> A sense of proportion is the difference between a black-and-white world
All you're saying here is 6000 > 1. We know this. I'm asking why 6000 is right, 1 is wrong, and why we throw away the other 5998.
The answer to all variations of your underlying question in your post is because when handing down sentences, there are multiple, oft-conflicting considerations. We don't only consider societal safety - if we did we'd just jail everyone for life.
6000 is right because it is the right point of balance between keeping society safe and the rights of the imprisoned, while reflecting the seriousness of the crime without being cruel or unusual. Prison sentences inherently take away rights from the prisoner, and this is yet another thing that's thrown onto the pile of considerations for tradeoffs which individually lengthen or shorten the term of imprisonment. It's not a binary decision like you propose (imprisoned vs not imprisoned for any crime), but finding the right balance point (likely region or volume) on multidimensional axes.
I'm not a trial judge, but I can think of the following factors off thr top of my head: nature of crime committed, remorse, amount of harm, restitution (if any), sentencing guidelines in the law, probability of recidivism, safety of society, safety of defendant, sentences issued on similar cases in the past, appeals on similar cases in the past, prosecutor sentencing recommendations, defense sentencing recommendations, time already served, culpability, the number of charges defendant is found guilty of and whether they can be served simultaneously or not, etc. You're ignoring all of these and projecting the sentence to a single dimension (societal safety).
You haven't answered why you think we imprison people in the first place (or if we should). We cant have a fruitful discussion about which sentence durations are "better" without knowing what metrics we are measuring.
This is why I asked why 22 was right and 32 is wrong. "Because the judge said so" is no more useful than my asking "why heads?" and you answering "because that's where it landed when I flipped it."
There might not be a "right answer," and I'm ok with that. But it's odd to decide it's right simply because an authority decided it was.
> You're ignoring all of these and projecting the sentence to a single dimension (societal safety).
I'm not ignoring them, I'm simply responding to the reasoning you gave. By your metrics, 22 gives 12 more years of societal safety than does 10. This is what you responded to me, and I'm trying to point out that I believe it's flawed. If there are more factors included, it doesn't make this reasoning less flawed, it's just a smaller slice of the judgment's pie.
> You haven't answered why you think we imprison people in the first place (or if we should). We cant have a fruitful discussion about which sentence durations are "better" without knowing what metrics we are measuring.
Perhaps inadvertently, I think you hit the nail on the head. We don't have metrics that validate or invalidate any of this. We rely on a set of arbitrary guidelines mediated by emotions and feelings. In a great many cases, I don't think we're accomplishing anything but pushing a problem away and pretending we fixed it.
You will save yourself and others time by steelmanning and front-loading your priors - especially in written discussion forums like HN... Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives. This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.
This isn't what happened - my end of the conversation was a reaction to your replies and only your replies.
> This thread should not have been this deep when I have been stating "there are other factors" in my second contribution to it, and it turns out you were agreeing all along.
You did in the prior reply - at least explictly - only. Forgive me for not making assumptions of things you didn't say.
But again, my point was that if "protection of society" is a factor in this complex system, there's not much argument against maximizing that.
All that said ...
> complexity, which I suppose you felt you were strongly hinting at, but I had explicitly mentioned earlier.
This wasn't my conclusion, it was simply a reaction to getting more information in that reply than you had previously offered.
> Unless you're one of those people who enjoy debating more than learning other perspectives.
:(
Getting a reductive comment like this doesn't help.
I don't really see the harm in him working at McDonalds, for example, except maybe he'd embezzle from the till, so put him on fries.
No. Prison should be about punishment combined with rehabilitation, neither at the expense of the other.
It is perfectly OK to say that punishment, the infliction of pain, for a crime, is warranted even if it has no rehabilitative value, assuming that it is not demeaning or cruel.
Why? Several reasons:
1. Punishment has it's own value for the sake of justice. A hypothetical: Imagine there was a drug, with a 10% fatality rate, that perfectly rendered the receiver incapable of murder without any other side effects. They just perfectly gain control of their emotions and reason, or something to that effect. If a person goes and murders 50 individuals, but takes the drug and lives; they've been theoretically perfectly rehabilitated and need to be let back into society, right?
If you think, "of course not," you are now admitting that punishment has a value by itself.
EDIT: Also, this hypothetical, actually exists. Imagine this case with SBF. Imagine if the only penalty for his actions, were that he could not run a banking organization ever again, or hold more than $1,000,000 in any account that he controls. Perfectly rehabilitated, my hypothetical with the drug, in one swoop. He will never be able to commit this crime again.
I think I might very well run and do a financial fraud tomorrow. At least I'll enjoy the high life for several years. You are literally telling me, in that case, I could live for years, possibly decades (if I'm Madoff), and my only punishment will be that I can't do it again. After all, it's only about rehabilitation for myself; and to do otherwise would be punishment for punishment's sake.
2. If punishment is not given out fairly, and is only contingent upon rehabilitation; you are ignoring the rights and feelings of the victims and focusing too heavily on the rights and feelings of the criminal. Victims have feelings and rights, and considering they are the harmed, their feelings and rights ought to be first priority, and the criminal's second. Otherwise, victims feel the need to take things into their own hands. Always have, always will, as part of human nature. That's how you get societal meltdown, followed by vigilantism.
And if you think it sounds reasonable?
While there's some benefit (deterrence) to there being perceived costs to bad behaviour, it's arguable whether punishment for the sake of punishment stands up on its own merits.
In your proposed world, where murderousness is recognised as a treatable illness, it doesn't really seem reasonable to punish to punish or to imprison as a deterrent.
Think about it. Under this hypothetical (which I think is OK, everybody does Trolly Problems all the time), you should be just fine with this result. The deterrence value is there (10% chance of death), I've been rehabilitated permanently so I can be let out a week after I did the murder, it's all good. I might as well add some torture to the mix as well, because the drug will perfectly rehabilitate that too, of course, so it doesn't really matter how I did it either.
Some people are. Some people who have been victimized do forgive and ask for leniency.
There is an emotional and personal aspect to that, but typically we don't set laws that way.
I'd also argue that "it's all good" is not a fair measure for when we consider justice to be served. Practically, when there's nothing left to gain, the scale tips from justice to pure retribution.
I think you're confusing forgiveness with punishment. The two are not incompatible.
If your son hits your daughter, you forgive him immediately (you do not hold hatred or anger in your heart for that action); but you still punish him to deter the future behavior. The two are not incompatible, or at odds with one another. Similarly, it is not incompatible that a man who committed mass murder might be forgiven by the families (in that they won't hold hate in their hearts, or use his name as a curse), but the families may also simultaneously desire that the individual be removed from society.
> Practically, when there's nothing left to gain, the scale tips from justice to pure retribution.
Retribution is part of justice, and is not at odds with it. If I steal $500, I owe $500 as part of justice. If I steal $1,000; I owe $1,000 as part of justice. If I steal $10 billion dollars, a sum I shall never repay, I can only beg forgiveness and pay the most I reasonably can, for a reasonable amount of my life. For justice, at that point, recognizes that a society which allowed me to steal $10 billion in the first place, has some responsibility as well, reducing the required amount for retribution.
Not at all. You said "you should be fine with it," which is really "acceptance" rather than forgiveness, although they go hand in hand.
My point was simply that being fine with it or not being fine with it as an personal, emotional response typically does not guide modern societal rules.
> Retribution is part of justice, and is not at odds with it.
Inherently this is probably true, but we actually have laws that are intended to specifically exclude that as a factor, depending on jurisdiction.
The punishment so that the universe feels more fair to me isn't all that useful. Maybe as you suggest the mob lynchings in this case are unavoidable but I'm not convinced.
Happily (both for those who want to subjectively See Justice Done, and for those who upon reflection find it all a little perverse), the two don't really seem to be separable beyond a certain point.
A heavy sentence is safety for the criminal as well.
Hard to make that argument when discussing fraud, which by definition is intentional deception.
edit: here's the article...https://aeon.co/ideas/punishment-isnt-about-the-common-good-...
Retribution ("spite") is about getting even.
Rehabilitation is about making it so that the person is less likely to offend again when released and more likely to be of positive value to society.
Removal is about locking someone up so they cannot do more crimes.
A good prison system should balance all four.
It also seems like the population of ex-criminals couldn’t be representative of the population as a whole, right?
(FWIW I think the theory of deterrence is probably not correct, I can’t prove a negative, but the burden of proof lies at the feet of people who suggesting it I think).
There are absolutely times that I do not speed because I am concerned about the consequences of getting caught.
There are absolutely students in the school where I teach who follow given rules not because they agree with them, but because they are deterred by consequences. They refrain from climbing the volleyball net not from moral agreement, but because it will get them in trouble.
It's better for people to not commit crimes because they agree on the morals and principles involved... but if people don't agree or have a moment of weakness, the consequences are still influential.
In the case of students, they seem to try and cheat sometimes, so the deterrence doesn’t seem very effective. Anyway, the negative consequence is very disperse (it hurts the reputation of the school if they get through without learning anything). The main bad result falls on them (they waste thousands of dollars to intentionally avoid learning). They also might fail the final, not as a punishment, but as a natural result of not learning the material.
In the case of speeding, everyone here speeds. The flow of traffic is always 5-10 over the speed limit here. People are intentionally breaking the posted speed limit to go the safer speed (going the speed limit here impedes the flow of traffic and makes a more dangerous situation for everyone). I think it is more of an informal decision making process—people just follow the herd—but it is a funny example!
I understand the magnitude of deterrence effects may be in question, or that the relative worth of different types of deterrence are open to debate. But I don't really understand how something that is nearly a universal human experience can be in question. Almost everyone has chosen not to do something because of the consequences of outside rules.
Indeed, we can easily try and see. If I fail to be visible during break duty (so that students think there are unlikely to be consequences), students will climb the volleyball net. :D
> going the speed limit here impedes the flow of traffic and makes a more dangerous situation for everyone).
This has been studied and is itself a silly (untrue) anecdote.
Nope.
> I understand the magnitude of deterrence effects may be in question, or that the relative worth of different types of deterrence are open to debate.
In the context of the thread
> A good prison system should balance all four.
I thought it would be clear that the magnitude and the relative worth were the topic. Sorry if that wasn’t the case! I’m definitely not going to defend the idea that nobody has ever avoided doing something for fear of punishment (although I do think that in a well functioning society, most of the negative consequences should be natural, not artificially imposed as punishments).
> If I fail to be visible during break duty (so that students think there are unlikely to be consequences), students will climb the volleyball net. :D
I think if that’s the sort of thing you are worried about, you must be working with kids. They probably need a stricter treatment, since their brains aren’t done yet.
I think that if too many people see retribution as no longer being applied, some people will start to take matters into their own hands to seek vengeance.
The state has an interest in preventing that and assuring retribution is applied as evenly as possible, and counterbalanced by other mitigating factors (e.g. the degree of offense, the circumstances under which it occurred, likelihood of reoffending, penitence of the guilty, etc.).
So if the government would take a true rehabilitative approach, and maybe arrest people but treat them well, try to help them so they don't do the same behaviors in the future, a percentage of the population might see that as insufficient and take retribution into their own hands.
You've helped me realize why I've actually shifted my professional focus from wanting to change politics to wanting to change culture. Seems a lot of being in government is doing what the people want, and if the people want retribution, then the government has to follow it.
I hope for (and am working towards) a world in which we help people know our pain not by trying to cause the same pain to them, but by expressing our pain to them with more granularity, because the pain they'd feel as a result of retribution will never be the exact same pain we feel, as our contexts are way too complex to replicate exactly.
I really appreciate your comment, thank you for helping me think more deeply about this.
It may not be entirely descriptive, but it certainly is part of it. At some point Gary Plauché becomes common.
It sounds like you're trying to be part of the solution, which I deeply commend. Thank you also for your very thoughtful reply. It's appreciated.
Fraud? The money comes from somewhere; someone is harmed by it (Pratchett's Going Postal has a good line on it - "No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”
But maybe it also has to do with whether people feel victimized. If no one felt victimized, would we punish?
So I imagine it's probably a combination of who feels victimized and who society believes should feel victimized. Because as others may respond, white-collar crime has people who get harmed as a result of the actions, even if it's not as obvious as the person directly punching them in the face.
One could argue that even the fact of breaking the law can harm those who went through great lengths to not break the law.
Yes, I know some of the people who lost money are rich, and much is being made of that by people who want to troll by saying that's the only reason he really got into trouble (e.g., on Reddit). But that's not true: there are plenty of victims from SBFs crimes, both rich and not rich.
And in this kind of discussion I suggest it's helpful to avoid hypotheticals and to look at the real situations and outcomes relating to the case we're talking about.
So if the spite causes people to feel sufficiently afraid to do the action in the future, maybe it deters people from acting that way?
edit: here's the article...https://aeon.co/ideas/punishment-isnt-about-the-common-good-...
The perceived benefit of getting rich and famous can make it easy to overlook the downsides of getting caught.
My perception of some of these financial crimes - Madoff included - is they start off with a small slip, rather than a full dive into fraud. A lot of times it snowballs while the person responsible keeps searching for a way out.
I wonder at what point SBF would have even said what he was doing was immoral. If you're running a Ponzi scheme you think you can salvage, would you compare yourself to Madoff, or would you think "I'm trying to set things right"?
Rather, I'm suggesting that in the eye of the beholder, a very clear case of fraud might be self-perceived as a bump on the road to lawful, legitimate financial dealings.
So the question is if SBF didn't see himself as committing the same crimes as Madoff (even if he was), would Madoff's sentencing and fate even register as a potential deterrent?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_Norway
Perhaps the more important distinction: if we're going to let people out of prison eventually, we should make sure that prison is a place that is set up in the best way to make that eventual return to society successful. Right now, it feels like we do the opposite.
Ouch! I hadn't heard of this before, and I gotta say I'm not a fan.
I agree with it only in principle; it seems ripe for injustice in all practical details.
If you maintain your innocence, is that a lack of remorse? Can you be any kind of 'model citizen' in prison - engaging in charity or volunteer work? Who brings the +5 year charge or provides evidence for it? The prison staff who don't find your personable, or the shrink who doesn't think you're taking the sessions seriously (if shrink visits in prison exist)?
Yep, instead of "you definitely get out of prison after X years have passed" you instead get "you get out of prison in 21 years! (or never, depending on how we feel)".
Losing 20 years of your life though will have a drastic effect on the rest of your life. As it should for some crimes.
Or is your argument we should skip from 10 to death, I'm honestly not sure.
Probably out in 17 years which is still a long time.
I was most surprised by the recommendation of medium security. Not sure how well Sam will do in a medium.
Which is why I think the sentence is too low.
There are other ways he could make reparations. One would be to have one-to-one meetings with his victims, where they tell him in person how his actions affected them.
There's a fair chance it would bounce right off SBF, because he clearly has serious personality issues.
Then again, maybe not.
That sounds more like retribution than justice. I.E. wanting to cause him pain because he caused pain in others.
Of course, i don't have a better answer by any means.
Retribution is part of the justice.
Justice would be making the victims whole.
Arguably, the social benefit is to deter more major crimes.
If all crimes were X year sentences, then once you comitted one crime you may as well continue, since the punishment is the same either way.
1) revenge ("an eye for an eye") - that's not considered a factor anymore today except as an upside-limit on the punishment, ie, the punishment should not exceed the damage caused. Here, the damage caused was immense, so don't think that'll be a limiting factor.
2) specific prevention - keep that particular perpetrator off the streets, so they can't commit crimes again. There's some argument that old people commit fewer crimes, so when the perpetrator is old enough, one can let them go. Maybe one shouldn't let SBF out until he's older than Madoff was...
3) general prevention, aka deterrence - make sure that the punishment (in conjunction with the probability of being caught) is sufficient to discourage others from committing the crime. This is problematic as apparently most perpetrators seem to think that they won't be caught (which is why capital punishment doesn't necessarily reduce crime rates). I think in this case it's good that the many, many crypto "operators" see that there is some downside in scamming people.
Definitions vary depending on context. I think of violence as a spectrum. Talking peacefully and negotiating is extremely low violence. Threats etc are more. All our war and atomics are about the limit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence?wprov=sfla1
> Some definitions are somewhat broader, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation."
Violence IMO is anything which causes harm or can be used to force a condition.
"Harming someone" is anything which causes harm. We have different words to describe different things. In this way, we can tell them apart when communicating with each other.
Words are defined by people. By seeing violence as a spectrum you can see the spectrum of possible responses to violence. We can then distinguish the different forms of violence with other words, like "physical"
At least if you are making statements going against the general understanding of the society you're in then make a reference to the ideas or theories that prompt you to make these statements.
Note: many forms of theft obviously involve violence.
For instance, by seeing violence as a spectrum you can see that while lying to the Nazi about the Jewish person in your attic is "committing violence" against said Nazi, you can also recognize that the lie is quite obviously justified violence -- and there is a spectrum of justified violence in that case.
When you lie to someone you damage their ability to see reality as it is, especially the reality of yourself (your thoughts, motivations, etc). Its not as severe as a punch to the face (in most cases at least) but it still causes harm.
If the punishment is life in prison with no chance of parole, it'll act as more of a deterrent.
Punishment lengths don't act as a deterrent to petty and violent crime, because the people commiting those crimes are not intelligent or are crimes of passion. Systematic fraud like this is slow, calculated and methodical.
The benefit is the deterrent. It's especially important for wealthy people who we may wonder if they greased wheels behind the scenes.
If you want somebody to cry about, cry about a man doing a life sentence for marijuana possession, not sbf. [1]
1 - https://eji.org/news/life-sentence-for-marijuana-possession-...
When you consider that a 1% unemployment rate increase generally correlates to ~5,000 deaths then you can consider gross financial negligence to have an actual tangible human mortality cost.
We just don't, because it's too indirect and your laywer would argue confounding factors until you are all dead; but don't be mistaken: financial crimes do cost lives.
That’s utterly useless. There is simply no way any sociopath gives one iota about it.
In particular since several people with crypto losses committed suicide, or worse, murder-suicide (killing their family and kids first).
This unfortunately widely held belief is measurably wrong and reeks of all kinds of biases. White collar criminals are one of the categories most likely to reoffend. Recidivism is much higher in white collar criminals precisely due to the leniency they often experience and the powerful financial motives associated with these types of crimes.
For violent crime 38.9% of convicts were arrested for new crime within 3 years of release. White collar crime on the other hand had a 58.8% 3-year recidivism rate.
White collar crime poses systemic risks which violent crime doesn't to the same extent. It undermines confidence in institutions by creating corruption and waste, enriching few at the expense of many. When it becomes normalized and widespread this kind of crime can destroy a country's economic and political systems.
> In examining at white collar criminals, the criteria used were any prisoner with two or fewer prior arrests, who had been convicted of larceny, theft, motor vehicle theft, or other property crime (which included types of fraud, embezzlement, etc.).
I wonder if you removed the "two or fewer" if you'd get a different result.
Another aspect of white collar crime vs violent crime is that there's no real legal concept of self defense against white collar criminals while in most places there's varying degrees of force you can use in response to a violent crime being committed against you or a stranger. With white collar crime a psychopath wearing a corporation can act with impunity and ruin your livelihood in all kinds of ways and there's nothing you can do about it.
and people will say with a straight face that defrauding large numbers of people of their money might not have numerous health / fatal consequences: anxiety, stress, divorce, loss of benefits, working longer past retirement.
It's like saying Mafia bosses or Hitler or Stalin weren't violent and dangerous because they ordered the deaths of millions with a stroke of a pen.
The "victims" knew they were intentionally avoiding government oversight of securities law, banking regulators, etc. When they lost money we should have collectively shrugged our shoulders and said that's the risk they chose to take.
*: yes stupid, not an ad hominem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
There was a trial and now a sentencing, your argument according to law is wrong.
Or would folks here suggest the numerous HN contributors who have worked in gambling tech are deserving of life in prison as well?
If SBF told everyone loud and clear "hey guys you can give me money and I will use it to gamble on my favorite crypto tokens and play board games with Caroline" then I don't think he would deserve a prison sentence (but he also wouldn't get any customers). It's the deception that makes it a crime.
I would enumerate a number of immediate logical consequences of this idiocy, but that would be illegal (a shame, really).
Personally, I'm glad SBF is being held accountable but this sentence seems very harsh, especially given that I expect all of his coconspirators will mostly be let off the hook.
If it was for me to decide - yes, absolutely.
If they committed crimes to sell tobacco (which, to my knowledge, is true for at least some of them), absolutely, yes.
And the citizenry are the only ones left who can be deterred by this message. Islamic State will switch to using suicide bombers who have no fear of torture.
My personal theory is that Prigozhin's aborted mutiny last year and Ukraine's sustained drone campaign against Russian oil infrastructure paved the way to the Crocus Hall attack. Now the doors have been opened and Russia's internal security has been revealed for the paper tiger that it is. Every single paramilitary group with a bone to pick with Russia has now been forcefully made aware of Putin's weakness and now they'll be lining up to copy these attacks. All the while, he continues to try to blame Ukraine for this despite all evidence to the contrary. Scary times to be living in Russia right now!
> A sentence of 25 years completely destroys his life.
Hopefully he is ALSO restricted, for life, from ever working in finance again.
A felony conviction is pretty effective for heavily restricting any type of employment. The universal and cheap access to background checks means work is either places that deliberately have "hire a felon" programs or some type of self-employment, or connections with people very high up in a company. Though all those angles are also complicated if any sort of state licensing is involved.
He's already proven he's perfectly fine running his empires from countries with a more relaxed attitude to financial regulations.
I would also agree that spending a 3rd of your life in prison is in effect destroying it.
How many lifetimes worth of time were destroyed by his fraud.
It's definitely not high punishment.
The difference is consent and malicious behavior.
When I invest into stock market, it can always go down.
When you move your customers money to save your other failing company, it's fraud. There is no consent and there is malicious behavior.
Crypto repeats all failings of old-fashioned banking system we have learned over 2 centuries, except it's "with blockchain" now.
They gave him a 150 year sentence for a crime on par-ish with SBF's crimes, because at 70 there is little difference between 20 years and 100 years, so you may as well go for the shock value.
Add in the desire to be seen as doing something with sentencing inflation and your get multiple hundred year sentences.
At first I felt that 25 years was short but thinking about it, he will be ~60 when he gets out... so maybe not too short.
I can't remember all the rules but the two I do: 1. Don't do anything for less than $1M. Risk isn't worth the reward. 2. Don't use a weapon. It adds years to your sentence.
It was mostly about how white-collar crime has a much safer risk/reward ratio.
He may never marry, never have children, and will experience a very different (and far worse) life than most of the population. I have very little sympathy for the man, and I know draconian punishment is fashionable and cathartic, but I personally think this is a very suitable punishment for the very severe crime he committed.
Hardly. Milken was sentenced to 10 and served 2. SBF will serve 7, at which point he'll still be under 40.
He won't be out for ~two decades.
Milken was released because Trump pardoned him, which I don't think says anything about how sentencing guidelines do or should work.
He was released after a sentence reduction for cooperation with prosecutors against others decades before the pardon. Both the release and pardon occurred, but the latter was not the reason for the former.
TIL, thank you! That makes me feel much better at what initially seemed like a slap on the wrist.
If it is to harm him and make the rest of the world satisfied with it 25 years behind bars seems enough to me, I don’t care if it is 25, 35 or 155. In five years I will have forgotten about this.
If it is stopping others, same thing, I don’t think that if someone is determined to do something similar would care about 25 or more years.
Then it’s to stop other bright minds from attempting anything like this - they’ll remember SBF. His crime has a price now: 20-25 years
Sincerely
The American Legal System
Obviously there is a sweet spot. For example, if you're okay with 60 years, than you're probably okay with 80. I'd imagine 20, give or take 5 years or so, is near that sweet spot, but that's just my gut feeling. Obviously statistics is key here, if there is any.
Honestly I think that would take LONGER than 50 years...
I think 25 is on the high end of a reasonable sentence. White collar crime in the US has been a slap on the wrist (if anything!) since Enron. It's time we fix that. People need to see personal consequences for such anti-social and destructive behavior. If you are a CEO, you should be afraid of profiting from the suffering of others.
You can’t ignore retribution and incapacitation. Focus solely on rehabilitation and people will take the law into their own hands while raging against the system when it comes to recividism.
We need to focus more on rehabilitation and restoration. But those can’t be exclusive of the other components of justice.
Singapore doesn't tax this, you can spend crypto and transact crypto and none of that is taxable.
AIUI, if the basis price of your Bitcoin was $0 and your marginal income tax rate was 50% and it was a short-term gain, that would be correct, but:
(1) Your basis value shouldn't usually be 0 or close to it,
(2) Where (1) does not hold, because you got Bitcoin when the price was near 0, it should usually be a long-term gain, on which you pay the lower LTCG rate, and
(3) The top marginal income tax rate that you would have to pay to the US government is well below 50% to start with.
> Singapore doesn't tax this, you can spend crypto and transact crypto and none of that is taxable.
Singapore is, then, tax subsidizing crypto speculation, which seems like a phenomenally bad policy (but orobably sustainable, as long as the crowd that can afford to engage in it locally is small enough that the effective subsidy can be absorbed), but, I mean, you should absolutely feel free to emigrate to Singapore if they’ll let you if this is important to you.
White collar criminals can and should be likened to serial killers in the severity of their crimes. They spread invisible miseries indiscriminately, near entirely without justice or recognition. I am glad one of them is finally being properly punished.
SBF operated with forethought and malice. He intended to deceive people. He was trying to commit fraud.
Hometown guy did not intend to crash or kill anybody.
Now the results of hometown guy's actions were more direct and severe, but had he had the choice, he would not have crashed and killed anybody. He's not a criminal, just a fucking idiot.
And hometown guy accidentally got behind the wheel of a car while drunk?
If you go out to drink, you don’t bring your car. If you know you need to drive later, you don’t drink.
They might be drunk when they are driving, but they very much put themselves into a situation where it was the likely outcome while sober.
No. He did not. Everything that happened was likely unplanned. Hence, no forethought. And I doubt he was trying to hit anybody. Hence, no malice.
Yes, he still made those choices and they were bad choices. So he does need to make restitution. But the fact that he wasn't intentionally trying to do what he did makes his offense different than SBF's.
Now, is there an issue that our penal system is ultimately more punitive than rehabilitory? Of course, but even from a punitive standpoint, accidental murder should warrant less punishment than intentional large-scale multi-billion dollar fraud. We can't base punishments solely on the outcome of an event. Intent of the perpetrator has to matter.
This does not mean that it should be legal to defraud people of billions of dollars, ruin countless lives, and harm many more.
This is a rare case where a white collar crime was appropriately punished. Sam showed no remorse, and no evidence that he would not engage in similar crimes in the future. He earned this time.
Hopefully he’ll reform and be worthy of early release; but candidly I doubt it. I think he’s irredeemable.
I'm not saying it's right. But it's the tacit consensus we maintain to make ourselves comfortable with the risks of piloting deadly machines every day.
That said, I've personally known of two people who were convicted of DWI vehicular manslaughter, and they both received 15-year sentences, so 26 months seems to be an aberration.
What was his plan? What did he expect to earn from this action? And now, who would plan to DUI because they believe it's worth a 26-month sentence?
SBF knew what we was doing and did it knowingly. He thought he wouldn't be caught and earn a few extra billions. Unless we was drunk all along…
It's about the long-term planning and the clear intent to choose a path with such a risk/reward ratio.
https://chat.openai.com/share/2dc83d60-d14b-4438-8226-ac59de...
I don't know if it can summarize books correctly always, it almost always does; and I also don't know if there's just a bias in publishing about race relations because that sells.
But it seems right to me that the most orthodox opinion is that racial bias, drug policy and socioeconomic status are the biggest factors in the severity of sentencing in general.
So you are referencing two acutely exceptional cases - a white collar crime by a rich person that only somewhat interacts with drug abuse of Aderrall that is acutely severely punished, and a drug-related crime that is acutely poorly punished.
``` I find such white-collar crimes very interesting because of the math between crime and punishment. For the crime that SBF is alleged to have committed, we can reasonably expect 20 yrs (he will be out in 10-12). But if he had committed a murder, he would be in prison for life (no parole).
Mathematically speaking, this implies that a life is worth more than fraud worth 8 billion dollars. We can make a very reasonable assumption that the govt can save 1 additional life using a million dollars (giving necessary treatment to drug addicts / suicidal people / etc). Out of the 8 billion dollars from SBF, government would have got at least 50 million dollars from taxes (this is a lower bound). Out of that 50 million, maybe the govt puts 10-20 million back for public good. So the govt could have saved at least 10-20 people from the money that SBF is alleged to have defrauded.
Based on the above, can we say that SBF indirectly killed 10-20 people? What would be the punishment for someone who kills 10-20 people? Surely more than 20 years.
This balance between the scale of crime and the severity of punishment can be very interesting. Should someone defrauding 2 billion dollars suffer twice the punishment of someone defrauding 1 billion dollars? What about 2 murders to 1 murder? What about numbers on scale that can change an economy (what SBF did)?
More fundamentally, is our legal system scalable? ```
Your analysis is flawed because you’re looking at the problem from the vantage of collective outcomes. A murderer is one person who is making a decision to take an action that can end one or many lives. You want them to weigh that heavily as an absolute cost (I will go to prison forever if caught) not some relative cost (well if I just murder a little then I’ll only get a little punishment).
The math of my argument was that with money, you can save lives, i.e., prevent people from dying. I don't believe the govt can print as much as it likes without hurting the economy (and thus people) in some other way.
The core of my argument is that defrauding billions of dollars causes deaths of dozens of people indirectly. Is that better than directly causing a death? I am not accussing anyone; just asking what I think is an interesting question.
I’m not saying that SBF has no culpability, but I don’t think you should get prison time for causing someone’s suicide, or at least society doesn’t act as if it’s in any way equivalent to murder.
Failure to voluntarily participate in a work-program is grounds for solitary confinement (which entails more penalties than just being by yourself).
It could easily have crashed.
That it went in a direction that helps make his victims more whole is entirely happenstance and SBF should get ZERO credit or recognition for this aspect of restitution.
SBF hasn’t really accepted responsibility or apologized through the trial, and didn’t at sentencing either.
Judge Kaplan seems to have taken a balanced view — far from the statutory maximum, less than the U.S. wanted, more than the defense wanted.
There will of course be appeals — SBF has already indicated he will file one.
There’s good coverage of what took place at sentencing today here — https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/177334004374401064...
Also of note is since this is a federal conviction there is no parole in that system, and so unless SBF is successful in his appeal, he will spend at least 255 months in prison, that’s a 15% reduction versus the total sentence in return for good behavior while serving his sentence.
It's actually the 6th:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/262962/countries-with-th...
Yes, the United States is the sixth listed, but the 5th listed is part of the United States, not a separate country. (So are several others, but I don't think Guam or the US Virgin Islands are big enough that they move the US overall rating down far enough to matter.)
I guess I'm really not sure what value there is to locking up someone like this for 25 years when in a sane system/society there should be far better options.
We've fixed it now.
This is likely an example of free speech and free press working to overcome corruption to achieve justice.
("This is good news for Bitcoin.")
Not sure why you are bringing up Bitcoin; SBF's business didn't have much to do with Bitcoin, beyond it being one of many methods used to deposit and withdraw funds.
I used the word "likely" for a reason.
I think it's mainly because some see a punishment as revenge and others as correction.
But, as user publius_0xf3 is showing, revenge does not work. The victims don't get their money back.
If this sentence is used as correction I also think it does not work. Would such a correction really take 25 years? His life is over. I don't see how such a long time is helpful to him, to his victims and to society.
I mean, I don't know this SBF guy, but do you think he thought there would be no punishment if he got caught stealing 8 billion dollars? I think his plan was not to get caught.
SBF caused an incredible amount of irreparable harm with his actions, which almost certainly has resulted in suicides. He deserves this punishment.
Society is not necessary interested in helping him. Ultimately he's not that important.
What is important is maintaining the rule of law and preserving faith in the justice system.
SBF probably assumed that if he got caught nothing would happen because he's witnessed that historically.
Treating it as a correction feels like a lie that polite society tells itself in order to absolve itself of the distaste of knowingly harming someone. We shouldn't pretend we can "re-educate" anyone. We can merely provide opportunities for self improvement, but we can't actively "correct" them.
On the other hand, treating punishment as revenge is unhealthy too. It's too easy to get carried away and it's even easier to get carried away by perverse incentives (gestures broadly at US incarceration rates). Two wrongs don't make a right, as they say.
So then how should society decide what punishment is fair? I believe the punishment should be as harsh as an elected judge feels is necessary for the perpetrator to think, "it wasn't worth this"—and not a bit more.
Isn't that using punishment as a deterrent? It's easy to see it that way, but no. That would make punishment impersonal again— unbinding it from the specific person, place, and circumstance that we should elect judges to consider carefully and compassionately. In other words, when one says, "the perpetrator should be punished {this much} to deter the others", then the perpetrator becomes a pawn, not a person.
All that leads me to believe that: the purpose of a punishment should be to inflict a harm equal to the perceived personal benefit of the perpetrator's crime, as an enforcement action of the social contract between the perpetrator and society.
That is right (I'm telling you how the law is, not how it should be) A jury can decide that it was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that you did something and yet you can still receiver a heavier sentence for it. (as long as they don't acquit you over all charges.)
>The 31-year-old physics graduate and former boy scout was handed five sentences: one for 20 years, one for 15 years, one for five and two for life.
I can't find the actual court documents, but I personally find a report from someone presumably at the trial more trustworthy than a government press release.
edit did find the transcripts, https://www.scribd.com/doc/283722300/Ross-Ulbricht-Sentencin...
>that on Counts Two and Four you are sentenced to a period of life imprisonment to run concurrently
To most people, just the act of losing everything you have, losing your ability to provide for your family or yourself. Losing your reputation, your career and future career opportunities, is enough to deter them. Whether a crime will give you 10 years or 20 years, most people consider that to be so long, that it's more or less all the same. It feels like an eternity, and it feels like your life is over. So if they are going to take a risk, or make a stupid decision, then they are going to do it regardless. Not because they accept the risk, but because nobody ever believes they are ever going to get caught. They consider that as "my life is over anyway". And usually, it is. That's not the point of prison. If you are ever going to let people out, why not focus on making sure they don't come back. Punishing people by throwing them in cages with worse people, absolutely does not work. (note: I am speaking mostly about non-violent crimes, which make up 72% of the federal system)
Not the best sources but you get the point.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat... 2. https://www.dailyo.in/wallet/heard-of-prison-stocks-here-are...
I call bullshit. Typical punitive justice reasoning. He might had done fraud, but it's hardly a risk that he "will be in a position to do something very bad in the future".
I could easily see a different, harsher, but more fair punishment...
1. All assets are sold off to pay victims
2. Prison for a few years. 5?
3. can only work jobs where nobody reports to them (no management, C levels, etc). Also cannot make companies.
4. Cannot own more than 2 properties, one of which is his place of residence.
5. Cannot rent out any property.
6. 25% of what he makes goes into restitution for the rest of his life.
7. Investments into any wealth instrument is to be confiscated, with exception to a 401k.
Basically, this person cannot be trusted with making money other than by working for someone else. This still allows him to make a life, but severely limits the similar path he used to defraud people.
Sending this guy to prison for 25 years is a waste for everyone involved.
Do you remember the trial? The man can’t follow rules. You would be wasting the court every microsecond because Sam decides he doesn’t understand what two properties or renting technically means.
Agreed. 10 years is pretty much a life sentence already; who is the same person that they were a decade ago? Sentences beyond 10 years are not instructive but punitive and sadistic: if you're putting people in cages for that long then justice would be better served to banish. International waters? Make an interior Australia on federal lands over a few States: walled off with full security entry/exit points?
Not only is taking so many years equivalent to partial death, without the normalcies prison strips from its victims (yes America's prisoners are victims like the Brit's victims of hang-em for everything were still victims) it effectively kills off the family lines of these people because only a few states have conjugal visits. Most prisoners in the US are in enforced inceldom. If you argue crime is genetic and it's a good thing they are prevented from reproducing, then you just contravened civils rights arguments against that.
As bad as the American ones are, Japan treats you worse. I got to hear my internet friend and troll JS on voice chat after Japan let him out of jail, what he said completely disabused me of any interest in visiting that place. It's soft torture not by exposure to appaling conditions (US), but by excruciating and consistent techniques of 'light' torture employed, such as only being able to sit/kneal and lay in two positions almost every bit of all 24-hour periods and being unable to communicate with anybody. It is a mental solitary confinement, and if I witnessed some parent treat even an "unruly child" the way the Japanese system treats those in their custody, I would see pink mist/red cave and be sent off to prison for a long time myself.
Zimbardo's prison experiment decades ago should have indicated to us that we are experiencing dozens of holocaust-tier human rights crises (sans the mass deaths) every year these things continue to operate in current form.
If you can't treat them as human in prison (partial autonomy, dignity), then you are saying they are criminally insane. If they are insane, they need to be in an assylum and not a dungeon (assylums had {and may still have [idk]} their own serious issues too). Prison should never be punitive, that is partially killing someone to punish them. Deterrence Theory is century old bunk we tell ourselves so we don't feel bad for Uncle Ned possibly being equivalent to a camp guard in a massive human rights quagmire made trying to address a millennia-old problem.
Wow, this turned into a rant! Time to smack submit, push the hemorrhoid back up, flush, and be done! :^)
Don't forget he has ruined many peoples lives, and probably driven quite a few to kill themselves.
Even if he does everything above-board, the absolute most he could expect to make legally from a job that's not a grift and has no direct reports would be ~500K/yr. Over 60 years, that would mean his victims get back $30,000,000, or about 0.3% of what he stole.
Brian Peck got 16 months of prison and it seems to be that he caused a lot more harm to society than ol SBF here.
I can't find the case but he was also probably charged by the state rather than the Feds.
I was under the impression his crimes were entirely financial in nature, whereas in my mind the sexual exploitation of minors is several orders of magnitude worse than financial losses.
That means he might miss his chance to have kids. Having your first kid at 38 is old, I should know.
That means, ironically, he will be prevented from self imposed financial ruin, which is to say, trying to raise children in the US, especially as someone who came from the opulence of the bay area. Can you imagine the cost of trying to keep up with the Joneses when those are your peers.
It seems like a fair punishment for him would actually be to force him to have kids and have to work as a janitor in silicon valley until they graduate from community college. That would really be teaching him to experience the financial ruin he imposed on others.
</sarcasm>
Had my first kid at 45 and second at 49. Guess that makes me ... ancient?
Elizabeth Holmes?
Mt.Gox guy?
25 years is an exageration to be honest, there was never criminal intent, if anything there was too much belief in their creature, less like Madoff and more like the Long Term Capital Management guys. I don't remember them serving a single day in jail.
It goes to show that judges and prosecutors are just trophy hunters for media attention these days, as proven by the 1000s of proceedings against Donald Trump which costed millions of dollars and recovered exactly 0 dollars.
In any event this goes to show that if you are on the spectrum and can't empathize you should RUN at the first sign of things going south. This guy was in the Bahamas too, from there you can reach Cuba with an Inflatable Rib with a 40hp motor, South America too, St. Kitts and Nevis too which doesn't have an extradition treaty and is the place that many real criminals call home.
Sounds like someone didn't follow this case closely enough
The crypto space is rife with scams, so it's good to finally see some real sentencing.
Holmes got 11 years.
The Mt. Gox guy was prosecuted in Japan.
Jordan Belfort: 4 years (served 22 months)
Elizabeth Holmes: 11 years
Mt. Gox guy: I do not know which guy you refer to. Two Russian men were indicted for the actual Mt Gox hack. Separately Mark Karpeles was sentenced to 2 1/2 years, suspended sentence, in Japan - but only for record tampering. He was found not guilty of embezzlement. This entire saga seems very very far removed from what SBF did.
Bernie Madoff: 150 years
This human impulse is why aliens don't visit. We're too barbaric to ourselves! xD
Billions of dollars of fraud that took years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyer fees to prove should have a sentence that is a strong deterrent to future crime probabilities.
If we continue to run prisons the way we do in America, all sentencing needs to go through a strong base log function, and be strictly concurrent.
Retribution is a valid component of justice.[1]
[1] Stolen from another commenter above
Retribution is a valid component of justice. But I’d argue, in the case of a fraudster, incapacitation is of equal concern.
"Four major goals are usually attributed to the sentencing process: retribution, rehabilitation, deterrence, and incapacitation. Retribution refers to just deserts: people who break the law deserve to be punished. The other three goals are utilitarian, emphasizing methods to protect the public."
Given the scale of fraud, the money involved, and the nature of SBF at trail, I would disagree.
https://www.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh241/files/archives/n...
How is putting this person in a cage (and filling the coffers of prison profiteers) supposed to restore his victims?
If jailing someone for a decade doesn’t do it, nothing will.
It seems purely vindictive at some point. The justice system should not be vindictive.
"spxneo, if you deceive people that demands to be deceived, you will be rich. if you are truthful with those people that demands to be deceived, you will become enemies. if you are truthful with people that demands truth, you will be neither friends nor enemies and poor."
We'll know more in about an hour.
EDIT: Actually, the Verge has already reported:"The judge applied a 240-month sentence and a 60-month sentence to be served consecutively."
I can only agree this form of imprisonment for murderers, rapists, ones who physically and mentally hurt people with permanent losses.
Ones can argue that he mentally & physically hurt others, but we need evidence. We should have a better system to force these individuals to pay back or make up the losses. Of course, he will never be able to pay back all the losses, but at least that's a better punishment and I'm almost certain every prisoner will agree to do. They will absolutely trade all of their finances for x years in exchange for freedom.
> Everyone has only 1 life
Doesn't that make imprisonment (the ultimate time penalty) one of the fairest, most equitable punishments there is?
> We should have a better system to force these individuals to pay back or make up the losses.
As you say, he'll never be able to pay it back. The state can't force him to pursue high-paying work, and he goes unpunished in the meantime?
I think imprisonment doesn't make it's one of the fairest penalty. A set of humans made that up to imprison/strip away freedom/rights of other humans. No human at birth signs these laws, it is all made up by the people with power.
I agree that creating a system to force him payback is challenging, there's no easy way to create a system like that. Maybe something as simple as 50% tax to start with for the rest of his life as long as he belongs to this society.
SBF was sentenced somewhat after 1987, so those rules don't apply to him.
He is not; there is no federal parole (for people sentenced ib the last ~37 years.) There is “good conduct time” that can reduce time served to not less than ~85% of the time sentenced, so around 21 years minimum.
in what world is stealing ~$8bn a "small" crime?
A crime is not less of a crime based on the economic status of the victims. And raising rent or utilities is not a crime.
If I steal $1000 each from thousands of people, how much time should I serve then?
I don't know how it is the US, but in Finland people get relatively longer sentences for financial crimes because long sentences have inhibitory effect for money crimes.
Most violent crimes happen without premeditation by people without impulse control and longer sentences don't actually reduce crime. White collar criminals weigh the costs and benefits and do their crimes in cold blood after long time of planning.
For stealing money! Given that the risk of repeat offense is low, I just don't see the point of these sentences. I think they're mostly about notoriety. Meanwhile murderers and rapists get less time, and they're at high risk for re-offending.
Is it? Did he even admit to criminal wrong doing? The article thinks otherwise:
> Judge Lewis Kaplan, just before announcing Bankman-Fried's 25-year sentence, said there was a risk "that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and it's not a trivial risk."
> Bankman-Fried acknowledged his mistakes and said he was sorry for what happened to customers but "never a word of remorse for the commission of terrible crimes," Judge Kaplan said.
> "He knew it was wrong," he added.
Whether that means he should have a shorter sentence depends on the purpose of criminal sentences. If the purpose is punishment or deterrence, re-offense probability isn't as relevant, but if it is merely to protect others while he is put away, it is the most relevant consideration.
There would no doubt be people happy to give SBF the funds to go fleece a whole new herd of victims on the off chance he got away with it enough to make the number go up.
For a second thing, I’m not so sure the chance of a repeat offense is low.
In terms of the chance of repeat offense...who would invest money with SBF at this point? It's not like he was mugging people, they voluntarily gave him their money.
risk = size of punishment * probability of being caught.
So how do you deter a potential criminal who is unlikely to get caught? You have to jack up the size of the punishment to compensate for that low probability.
Economist Gary Becker started this school of thought in the 60s and it's been implemented and debated in a million ways since then. Example: https://masonlec.org/site/rte_uploads/files/JEP/Readings/But...
Stealing money may not inherently "feel" like a real crime, because money (especially digital crypto money) is a very intangible hypothetical thing. It does not resonate with our lizard brains like violence does.
However, it is a real crime. And harsh punishments like prison time are needed to remind us of that.
Also - the real reason he's getting such a heavy handed punishment isn't because he stole money, it's because he stole money from the rich and the powerful.