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Comment by bearjaws | Hacker News Reader

Stole 1% from the pension fund for Ontario's teachers.

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.

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25 years is a long, long time. He's going to spend the best years of his life in federal prison and come out the other side in a world that's moved on without him. 25 years ago the World Trade Center buildings were still standing.

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.

we don't execute for financial fraud and white collar crimes. I do think prisoners should be given an option for assisted suicide in cases where they get 50+ year sentences, however. Obviously there would be more complexities to that like wait times and mental evaluations.

He'll serve for less than 15 years, which is a blink of an eye given the devastation he caused.

Unless he dies, gets a pardon, commutation, or sentence reduction first, the minimum he can serve under existing law is ~21 years based on a 25 year sentence and maximum good conduct time.

You're usually a very accurate poster on legal matters, but this contradicts the linked article:

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?

So, yes, I forgot to account for FSA earned time, of which up to 12 months can be applied to early supervised release (essentially, parole, though its not called that) and the remainder for pre-release custody (home confinement or residential re-entry center insteas of prison.) so, by completing the right activities, SBF could be on a parole-like status in ~20 instead of ~21 years, and in custody but not in actual prison in ~12.5 years.

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.

IIRC he must serve 85% of his sentence

First Step Act changed this and it could technically be 50% (12.5 years) although I don't personally think it will be in SBF's case.

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)

Wow, that isn't too long for billions in fraud. Thanks for the update.

Wait...why did a public pension fund invest in crypto-related <something>? (I still don't know what FTXes product was, but clearly it wasn't bare BTC or ETH, implying it was a risky derivative of a risky underlying asset).

FTX was just an exchange. If you invest money into Bitcoin, you will have to do it on some (centralized or decentralized) exchange. You'd expect that FTX would keep your Bitcoins safe in a digital vault somewhere, but SBF did not and instead used customer assets to gamble with Alameda Research.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_portfolio_theory

> 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.

This assumes both that he has such a wallet and that BTC will still be worth something when he gets out.

Btw is that money irretrievably gone? Are those people getting their money back based on the recovered price of crypto? Or did those assets get liquidated long ago into actualized losses?

>FTX Says It Expects to Repay Customers in Full. Some Are Suing for More https://www.wired.com/story/ftx-bankruptcy-bitcoin-value/

I think like all these white collar crime cases it's as much about emotion and appearance as actual damage. SBF wasn't a career criminal with multiple past grifts, and he didn't have any violent acts associated with the grift. So he got a lighter sentence. If he had been a part of a crime family, it would have been much longer. I'm not sure that the prosecutors are allowed to bring in tangential loss of life like multiple suicides (bankruptcy, financial destruction) that were no doubt triggered by SBF's efforts to defraud people.

His cellmate, ex president of Honduras got 40 mandatory years. I think 25 years is not enough for such a massive crime.

>>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.

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