Hacker News Reader

Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

From the article, SBF will likely be out in 2036, at the age of 45. There’s a good chance he’ll get himself into shenanigans again, if not already from inside prison.

View on HN

Or he could end up like Michael Milken, who went to jail for securities fraud but became known as a philanthropist. As Gandalf once said to Frodo,

   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]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7374580-frodo-it-s-a-pity-b...

A philanthropist with the money he stole? His entire fortune is fruit of the poisoned tree. Milken is trash. He was in the 80s, and he is trash in the 20s.

No amount of philanthropy washing can erase the damage his done.

Fuck that guy.

I mean, the damage is done. Let's not condemn him for at least doing good now. Would you rather he did nothing at all?

It's whitewash.

Milken spent less than two years in prison, and was fined $600 million.

SBF has been sentenced for 25 years, and fined $11 billion. Pretty big difference - how much money does he have left?

I honestly don't know what your point is. The topic being debated, "Is Michael Milken good?"

I'm not broadly aware of what Milken did but it sounds like he paid the price for his crimes and served his sentence. If he's rejoined society and has had a positive social impact, I'd call that a win.

I think that goes to show the inadequacy of the law more than anything. If he stole the same out of money by walking up to a bank teller, he would still be in jail

Isnt 11bns after all his assets being seized?

You can be sure there's a healthy reserve put aside in his parents' name.

Michael Milken got a raw deal. His actual criminal offenses only resulted in $318K of damages and were largely related to facilitating tax fraud by others. He was a piker compared to SBF. The judge in Milken's case gave him an unusually harsh sentence explicitly as a deterrent to others; I suspect it would have actually been lower under current federal sentencing guidelines.

https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/highly-c...

I do enjoy the idea that he'll create a prison super economy based on promissory notes for ramen packets and cigarettes that are tracked in some sort of hand-written block chain kept under their bunk bed and shared between toilet water pipes.

Or maybe he'll just start making yogurt.

https://www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/magazine/yoghurt-mafia-unexp...

US prison currency is mack:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/sam-bankman-fried-mackerel-fi...

Vegans don't eat mackerel, but can they ethically use mackerel as currency?

The mind boggles.

I think there's a good chance his tendencies to arrogance and mendacity will get him killed in prison.

Maybe not killed but pummelled on the regular. He might be cut out for crypto fraud but he’s definitely not going to be cut out for such a long stretch in a “survival of the fittest” environment. Any skills he has are worse than useless inside.

Nonviolent offenders don’t rub elbows with convicted murderers. It’s still prison time but I doubt his life will be in jeopardy. None of the people in that security level would risk the privileges.

It also means his co-conspirators will get a much lesser sentence (if any). Kind of disappointing that nobody else will see the inside of a prison cell. Ellison, Wang, Singh and SBF's parents all deserve lengthy sentences.

Probably get himself into a YouTube channel. I have noticed that with a lot of Excons and this very interesting.

Like hackers, I wonder if he'll be restricted from using a computer.

I hope he gets pardoned. Trump pardoned some straight vermin and I just don’t feel all that much hate towards SBF (I did lose a few thousand). I have to say I don’t see Biden being so blatantly “teamist” though I wish he would.

He'll do about 30% or less. Maybe they'll say jails are full again and release most the inmates like they did during covid.

These are federal charges, not state. In the federal prison system, you do almost all your time, with just a small percentage knocked off the end of your sentence if you maintain consistent good behavior. State justice systems do have a tendency to let prisoners out early for various different reasons but when you get a federal sentence, you're serving almost all of it.

Things actually changed in 2018 with some implementation details of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Step_Act. Parole is not given, true; but you can earn a bunch of credit days for participating in non-recidivism activities, which - when combined with good behavior - can amount to leaving prison 30-40% early. Not sure about the details after (house arrest or halfway-house may be somewhere in that mix), but not as grim at that point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com