Hacker News Reader

Comment by __loam | Hacker News Reader

> How can you be giddy about a human being locked in a cage for 25 years?

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.

View on HN

> White collar criminals, especially those as pedigreed as SBF, are rarely held accountable for their actions.

Eg, Andy Bernstein got charged $200, scaled down to FAANG engineer salary for insider trading. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39838351

Genuinely, thank you for your reply. I appreciate you sharing your perspective :-)

I don't entirely disagree with your point, and I see the real harm done here. But if I were a juror on this case, I'd have a really hard time being a part of taking away a full third of another human beings' life for what he did. There's no doubt that he knowingly did something wrong, he hurt people, and he deserves some level of punishment. But when I really think about what he did relative to the potential for 25 years in prison, that strikes me as barbaric.

I'd be able to do it easily and sleep at night like a baby.

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.

I think treating petty criminals so badly and going easy on white collar criminals is barbaric. A third of his life is nothing compared to the damage he caused. I find it incredible that you would feel sorry for him.

> I think treating petty criminals so badly and going easy on white collar criminals is barbaric.

Where do you see GP arguing that we should treat petty criminals as badly as we do?

SBF’s actions caused more damage than many violent muggings. If /u/kbos87 would support letting dozens of muggers to go free to (say) halve SBF’s sentence, then I take the argument seriously and will rescind my positions here so far.

It‘s not a third, it will probably be 1/6 in practice. And what should it be? 3 years? 5? If it‘s just than it will incentivize others to try the same. In fact many do, I know plenty of crypto guys running a bunch of dodgy offshore companies, there is a long tail.

If you think 25 years is too much, I don't think you actually understand what he did, how many people he did it to, and why what he did was bad. Think about the years of savings he destroyed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com