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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

His "fortune" is mostly ownership of Binance which is now under the thumb of the US government. If—as widely theorized—Binance's secret ingredient is crime then it's not going to be worth what it once was.

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I'm pretty sure that he also has personal BTC stash. Maybe not billions though.

Most likely multiple anonymous wallets of different cryptos. The real question is whether anyone else has access to them... if yes I expect there to be nothing left.

I think his wife is holding everything in Dubai.

His wife wife or his unofficial wife?

After SBF, he’d be pretty stupid for not stashing his assets just in case.

Let's just say they were very ambivalent about KYC. They had a lot of phantom liquidity as well, Binance pioneered the scam wick.

There is Binance US and Binance the global version. I expect Binance US to be tailored to US laws and regulations, but are you implying the global version is also under tight US govt control?

May 2024: "The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) appointed Forensic Risk Alliance (FRA) to serve as the outside monitor over the crypto exchange Binance. Binance must undergo a monitorship of three years as part of its plea deal with the DOJ related to money laundering violations." https://www.theblock.co/post/293834/doj-taps-fra-over-sulliv...

Yes, global banks also fall under US control if they want to transact with anything in the US financial system. Less so if they don’t have American customers, but they still do have to follow American laws.

For example several very old Swiss banks have been shut down by US regulators because they were doing business in the US with US citizens and their secrecy was being used to break US law by Americans.

Do you have a source for that? It sounds interesting and I want to learn more, as I was not aware of anything like this happening.

AFAIK significant banks didn't really shut down over FATCA, some have paid fines or higher tax rates and most of them do the minimum for anyone who matches any of the criteria for persecuting a possible US person, within the limits of the institution's local laws, if any.

From a general government structure POV, I respected a Congress more than the prevalent US views, but I don't respect the US Congress any more.

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-politics/details-of-swiss...

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/how-the-us-tax-evasion....

If I understand correctly, the issue is not even the citizenship of a clients. The issue is currency. If any two humans in any country wish to transact in the Swiss Franc then that transaction must go through Swiss clearing bank. If they wish to transact in the USD, then it must go through US clearing bank. In both cases client bank must comply with the clearing bank rules. Swiss banks can totally sever interaction with USA, but only if they will also never ever transact in USD.

The decrease in the number of Swiss banks prior to the UBS-Credit Suisse merger was largely a product of Swiss bank consolidation in the 1990s, not the US shutting them down. UBS and Swiss Bank Corporation were the first and third largest Swiss banks when they merged in 1998. Credit Suisse was the second largest Swiss Bank when they acquired Switzerland's then fourth largest bank, Volksbank in 1993 and they had also acquired Switzerlands oldest bank, Bank Leu just a few years before that.

UBS paid a nearly $800M fine to the US, they didn't collapse because they could pay that. At least a couple of Swiss banks collapsed when they went through actual prosecution, but around 100 Swiss banks paid absolutely enormous fines to avoid prosecution in a political deal between the US and Switzerland with the implication that if they continued helping Americans hide assets they'd be prosecuted for all of it anyway. The fines were actually sized correctly for once, 20% to 50% of the total of assets Americans had hidden in them.

Google says net worth 60bn. I think he'll be ok even if that goes down a bit.

Binance far and away dominates non-United States volume of crypto trading. If you think that Coinbase, a publicly traded US company, has real volume and earns a fee for that, then it's not hard to understand why Binance has real revenues and value.

I don’t think anyone is disputing it’s volume and fees, I think what they are pointing out is that a nontrivial, maybe majority of that, is proceeds of crime, which makes the business somewhat less attractive.

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