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> along with numerous communications about intentionally facilitating money laundering, sanctions evasions and a host of other securities law violations

He turned himself in, plead guilty and presumably provided law enforcement with a decade’s worth of easy convictions. I’m not convinced Zhao will be a pest on release. I’m not convinced SBF won’t be even half a century on.

> didn't really steal customer funds, he just did a negligently bad job of running the bank of crypto

No, he absolutely stole the money. Lending yourself money from the coffers is embezzling, full stop. It also seems clear he knew what he was doing was wrong, given the bizarre series of lies and obfuscation that he started making before being indicted and while on the stand.

> I’m not convinced Zhao will be a pest on release

He will, as long as he believes that he can do something without getting caught. He probably just decided that giving himself up and pleading guilty was the more rational choice the time and would allow him to get back to being a fulltime grifter much sooner

> When you put money into your checking account, the bank doesn't hold it in a vault, they re-lend it out as mortgages and car loans and small business loans. They just do it competently, and under the scrutiny of bank regulators and insurers.

A bank CEO can definitely not lend customers' money to themselves with fake assets (shitty tokens) as collateral, likely without intention to repay. SBF was a thief, full stop.

Would it make more sense to draw conclusions about criminal culpability from his trial, or from a dumb book written by a fawning admirer?

Let's split the difference and get ChatGPT to summarize them both.

> based on what was published in Michael Lewis' "Going Infinite”

No. You can’t posit anything about SBF based on this book.

My takeaway was that he was a lunatic, not particularly thoughtful and had an infinite risk tolerance

Except they were an exchange not a “bank” who promised and contractually made out that customer funds were segregated and not re hypothecated. Both demonstrably false assertions that enabled significant fraud.

CZ got very lucky (by virtue of an excellent legal team) here, but that doesn't diminish Sam's faults.

It seems unwise to based your opinion of SBF on “Going Infinite” especially given that the court case established he stole customer funds, not that he’s a silly boy who doesn’t know how to keep the books straight.

Given required capital rules, your bank deposit analogy is so wide of the mark it’s hard to know where to start but one thing a bank doesn’t do with customer funds is give them to a hedge fund which is allowed to run an almost infinite negative balance. If you own and run that hedge fund that isn’t poor record keeping or poor risk management it’s stealing customer funds.

If you’re going to bring the “unlicenced broker bro” message in Binance up it seems remiss not to mention that SBF and Caroline Ellison and others coordinated the transfers between FTX and Alameda in a Telegram chat group called “Wire Fraud”.