What I don’t understand is that SBF’s own explanation is fraud. His argument against it being fraud is that he was too dumb to know that he was committing fraud. I don’t think that’s believable at all, and even if that’s the case, I don’t think it makes his fraud any less criminal.
the son of 2 tax experts that have helped draft tax legislation, is insinuating that he doesn't know the basics of what makes his actions fraud, and how he wants to distance himself from Alameda, even though he is a 90% owner, just sounds fishy
I'm no SBF apologist, but this is about the silliest argument you could make. What does what his parents did have anything to do with anything? I don't know anything about my parents' field of expertise.
His father, Joe Bankman, was heavily involved in FTX from very early on, being the firm's first lawyer. Here he is saying as much in his own words: https://youtu.be/MmmXUtRt6xo?t=2140
On a related note, I am very curious to find out what kinds of representations he made to his investors around accounting and risk management. Would not be at all surprised if he goes down on very similar charges as did Elizabeth Holmes.
> “They were wired to Alameda, and…I can only speculate about what happened after that,” Mr. Bankman-Fried told the Journal.
In a sane world, this would be an obvious confession to criminal negligence and violating his fiduciary duty. SBF paints this as one big stupid mistake, yet reporting from other sources paints a compelling argument that the chaotic structure and lack of oversight was a deliberate construction. It's highly suspect for a company, let alone a finance company, to not have a CFO.
Are we really supposed to believe that he was so busy he wasn't apprised of what was going on with both of his companies, even though he had plenty of time to funnel hundreds of millions into political donations and luxury properties?
His uh...(ex) intimate partner[0][1]...was running Alameda. This guy is dumber than a bag of hammers, but he might be smart or vengeful enough to try to shift some blame upon Caroline Ellison.
I've been thinking the blame handoff to her is his only way out. And as far as we currently know, she may have been heavily involved or even in charge of these shenanigans.
Since their beginnings were down the street from my house, I also keep wondering if I've met them. But then I remember that they're squares who can barely down a beer in favour of pharma pills.
Yeah. This is not an answer that I would accept for stuff that involves way less money or responsibility
"I can only guess", sounds like a 17yo that never had to buy his own toilet paper. Ah no but he can play videogames while in a meeting, he's an investment genius somehow /s
>"I can only guess", sounds like a 17yo that never had to buy his own toilet paper
Some people, and I was one of them, who weren't paying much attention, read that he had worked for Jane Street, and said to themselves, "ah, he must be a relatively mature adult, unlike the other crypto bros".
But in hindsight, it seems that his role there did not prepare him for running a multibillion dollar business and why should it have?
Working for a big company means you in fact don't have to buy toilet paper (for the office). And if you aren't particularly mature or self-aware, you might take it for granted.
From "Money Stuff":
"If, later, you leave to start your own firm...you certainly won’t take its risk-management systems. And then when your colleagues say to you “hey, let’s set up some risk systems and hire an accountant, like we had at Jane Street,” you can reply “nah, I’d prefer to ignore that stuff, like I did at Jane Street.” You’re both right! Someone else at Jane Street set up those systems so you didn’t have to worry about them. But now you’re in charge, and if you don’t worry about them no one will, and then you end up not knowing how much money you have, or how much you’re making or losing, or how much you owe your customers."
1) Smart guy gets good at arbitrage trading, gets a taste for it
2) Starts a trading desk company
3) Loses some bets when he has never lost before, so he bets the farm (keep in mind the farm in this case is every piece of currency that he can conceivably reach regardless of laws, ethics, morality)
4) Loses his hail mary bets. Game over.
Dude needs to be a man/woman and spend the rest of his life working to repay everyone he hurt all while justice crushes his freedom forever.
> who were told their money was theirs was in fact lent to Alameda.
Even if we assume for a second that this wasn’t some sort of overt theft scheme and not only just an accounting failure with double counted deposits, what was the least bad scenario here?
That SBF et al were so obsessed with their altruistic charity stuff that they thought they could gamble their billions and turn it into 100 billion and become neo-Bill Gates?
Some kids who had no rules making crazy high risk bets on other crypto stuff, blindly believing in their ability and leveraging their parent company’s name to over extend themselves… Then FTX came to the rescue with customer deposits and hoping growth would cover the downside, while not telling anyone or changing controls as far back as April 2021?
Most charitable, and I think likely true, is that most of the funds never existed in the first place. FTX took in 2-3 billion from investors and retail, told customers had big winnings on large leverage bets. 1 billion was squandered, 2 billion was withdrawn by customers. And poof they couldn't process withdraws anymore even though their accounts say they're still 8 billion in the hole.
In that theory the real story is that they were just running a casino offering extremely leveraged side-bets on the prices of all manner of nonsense (they've even been sued for manipulating the underlying prices to benefit themselves by triggering liquidations). But to make this all appear legitimate they claimed these bets were fully collateralized, but the secret being that they'd accept illiquid magic beans as the collateral (and not just their own, but other random trash too).
Now they're stuck because it's hard to explain what happened without explaining that the collateral was just a pretext and the real business they were in was a bucketshop. So they're stuck feigning surprise that the obviously worthless stuff they took as collateral turned out to be worthless.
> But to make this all appear legitimate they claimed these bets were fully collateralized, but the secret being that they'd accept illiquid magic beans as the collateral (and not just their own, but other random trash too).
This is a key lie that SBF has been allowed to peddle in these interviews. He claims that, had he not panicked and announced bankruptcy, FTX would have been fine; however, the lawyers and suits that took over have decided to burn it to the ground instead.
He handily omits that the liquidity he's claiming would have saved the day is the now worthless magic beans. It reminds me of how people dishonesty reference "market cap" for NFTs and cryptocurrencies with incredibly high valuations extrapolated from a handful of sales.
“Here’s a list of stuff, will you give us a few billion dollars for this list of stuff? Look! The top thing on the list is this nice clean Robinhood stake. Okay that’s enough looking.” You take a wad of crumpled $1 bills and $3 bills and dry cleaning receipts and chewing-gum wrappers, you wrap some crisp $20s around the outside, you hold the wad up in front of people and see what they’ll give you for it.
Yeah, it's not clear to me why people keep allowing him to attribute significant value to those assets in these interviews particularly since the public disclosure that Alameda's balance sheet was mostly that stuff is what initially triggered the collapse.
It's like a bank-of-lore collapsing after people heard that their gold vaults were full of tungsten bars ... and then none of the interviews go into talking about the tungsten bars.
Valuations often have non-liquid portions of their estimates. Market caps of regular stonks are fairly incorrect, too, since if a large holder sold all of their shares, that price per share would drop.
But yeah making ones own super magic bean FTT in an already magical bean world should have been a VERY obvious red flag to anyone who knew that. I'm more shocked that he was able to get any investors with his abysmal accounting practices.
SBF twice talked about how they had “real legitimate income” covering their actions but it sounds like their books were such a mess that even though they were taking very obvious serious losses on trades by Alameda he still (best case) somehow thought their assets covered it or (worst case) dual booked deposits purposefully to inflate their balance sheets and propped up their now illiquid asset to keep the casino running until loses get covered by future growth.
The "least bad scenario" I read is that if we assume the money was lost through "well-intentioned but incompetent bumbling" then nevertheless the company "lied, constantly, about how carefully it was keeping track of risk and customer money".
They were supposed to have automated systems to instantly liquidate margin positions like Alameda's so FTX wouldn't lose money. Without favoritism or human judgement.
Now SBF is going around apparently saying "aw shucks, I made an error in judgement and also in arithmetic". Ok, noted, but that shouldn't have mattered?
> Mr. Bankman-Fried’s remarks suggest that FTX customer funds flowing into Alameda bank accounts could have been recorded in two places—both as FTX customer funds and as part of Alameda’s trading positions.
But we know that they weren’t recorded in the first place, since the balance sheets maintained by FTX when SBF was in charge, as reported in the bankruptcy filing, had $0 (both as assets and liabilities) for customer fiat deposits, and no recording of customer crypto deposits. (pp. 13-14 of the bankruptcy filing) [0]
At a minimum, failed to account for them in a way which very much enabled embezzlement, but, yes, the massive set of accounting and other record keeping irregularities at the FTX family of companies would look like a deliberate setup to enable fraud and embezzlement even if you just looked at what wasn’t recorded, and not at SBFs explicit instruction to others to use self-destructing messages for company business to avoid a permanent record.
Everything was set up in a way which complicates being able to prove exactly who involved stole what (lack of records of assets and debts, particularly customer accounts, lack of records of bank accounts controlled by the various corporations, lack of records of who the employees of the various corporations were, and what their terms of employment were, unprotected group email account with keys for corporate crypto wallets–which coincidentally a large sum was transferred out of right around the time of the bankruptcy, etc.), but in a way which makes it very hard to imagine that it was anything but deliberately structured for exactly that purpose.
There are three reasons I think your post here is naive (maybe too combative here, sorry):
- politically, the smart thing to do is bury SBF. There's no upside to sparing him.
- throwing the book at him sends a message to all other would be scammers, again at no cost
- powerful people can be powerfully vindictive when you expose them to risk and embarrassment
I agree Democrats shouldn't have taken SBF money, or any crypto money. It's always been an obvious scam and it's incredibly bad for the planet. But I admit the facts are esoteric, and we really wanted to beat Trump, because he's also really bad for the planet (remember that one time he spent years weakening NATO and building up Putin, and then Putin invaded Ukraine and set the world economy on its head and threatened to starve/freeze hundreds of millions of people?) No good option here, is what I'm saying.
There's other ways to do that that don't involve exposing yourself to political and legal risk. You also don't want people to do what SBF did again; you want to incentivize an un-prosecutable (under current SCOTUS standards) quid pro quo, not become the beneficiary of an international financial scam bankrolling domestic political operations--that's the stuff of FBI/SEC/FEC investigations.
That's a dumb bet. The crimes he'd be on the hook for all have sentences that mostly hinge on 2B1.1(b), which scales sentences by the dollar amount of the crime. He'll easily be into double digit years just based on the dollar amounts involved here, if he's convicted.
He'll also be charged federally. There is no federal parole.
SBF is the largest donor to the Democratic Party this year and his mom runs an org that raises hundreds of millions for political bribes each year. I'm sure that won't be forgotten.
Elizabeth Holmes committed worse crimes and got a slap on the wrist--mostly because the was stealing from the elite. People are going to forget all about SBF and he'll get charged in a few years and get forgotten until he times some meager sentence and then re-emerges a few years later as the new Jordan Belfort, probably selling some new get rich quick scheme.
I'd disagree. Madoff was a token/scapegoat and Holmes got off easy. They both also took from the rich--which the rich don't like. SBF stole from small timers on the internet. He'll get charged in a few years when no one cares anymore and let off easy.
> I bet it’s less than 7 years total and probably serves less than 5.
Unless his sentence is commuted, its not possible for a 7 year federal sentence to result in release in 5; there is no federal parole, and good conduct time is limited to 54 days per year.
Personally I don't think so. Elizabeth Holmes actions could have killed people who were making health decisions based on totally fake results. SBF stole money people were gambling/speculating with. Both are bad, but only one of these could have directly led to the deaths of their customers.
Giving narcissistic sociopaths like SBF an audience is absolutely disgusting—from "citizen journalists" like Tiffany Fong that are engagement farming this tragedy for clout, to Mario Nawfal's cringe-inducing Twitter spaces, to Kim Dotcom's insufferable attempt to regain any kind of relevance, to Bitboy Crypto trying to convince his followers that he saw through SBF the whole time (even though he shilled FTT just last year)—in typical crypto fashion, everyone is trying to take advantage of this situation for their own gain. Oh yeah, there's also Kevin O'Leary who said SBF ain't that bad of a guy. But then again, a16z just gave Adam Newmann $350M, so maybe it's just par for the course. And who can forget about the NYT, writing several puff pieces about SBF, with gems like:
> Critics of Mr. Bankman-Fried in the crypto community have questioned the idea that someone with his intelligence could have blundered into losing billions of dollars, suggesting that he took the money knowingly.
Gross. Anyone with their wits about them knows SBF literally gambled with other people's money. Full stop. Maybe he's not indictable by the US government and will never see a day in jail, but that doesn't mean everyone needs to give him a platform.
What does “giving a platform” even mean? Asking him to explain himself while the slow moving process of banks, regulators, courts, and criminal investigators take apart his company?
Do you think this will somehow stop any of that from happening? That he can talk his way out of losing $5 billion?
There's nothing to explain, and more importantly, no one is challenging him on bullshit answers. He gets asked questions like "So what happened to the 8+ billion dollars FTX is missing?" to which he's answered (several times now) with a variation of "Well you see, running an exchange is complicated, and we mislabeled accounts. Really, though, the money is actually almost all there, and people can be made whole" with zero pushback.
I listened to that spaces, and Coffeezilla is the one exception. Btw, SBF quickly bailed just after Coffeezilla took the stage because he can't handle it when someone really brings the heat; he was around for like an hour+ prior taking softball questions from the crypto clown show.
SBF is, at the minimum, a conman and a liar. And not only is he a conman and a liar, but an exceptionally skilled one. He managed to get the backing of the World Economic Forum, and even various world leaders including Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
The "narrative" should stay within the domain of the facts established, and not within the ever-widening range of fables being spun by a skilled liar. And the facts established are not ambiguous.
Money, in the billions, is completely unaccounted for. What money that can be accounted for was repeatedly misappropriated (which is a high felony, and not the 'oopsie' it might sound). There were "backdoors" to enable money to be removed from accounts with 0 accounting, and more. This is a not a "nuanced" case.
> GenZ won’t be watching raw WSJ interviews, it will be chopped up in TikTok videos with the usual “world is going to shit” spin the media always uses.
I am old enough to remember when mostly Silent Generation and older types were saying essentially the same thing (using different youth culture reference points) about the “the MTV generation” (Gen X, mostly), and its a lot like complaints about youth that have been attested to about as far back as we have recovered writing.
> GenZ won’t be watching raw WSJ interviews, it will be chopped up in TikTok videos with the usual “world is going to shit” spin the media always uses.
This is an unfair statement, because it implies a difference about GenZ versus the millennials with cnn or boomers with Fox News.
Not only is it unsubstantiated but also unnecessary.
I don’t think it’s any different but let’s be honest about the type of political content younger people often consume. It’s always snippy, fast paced, and with a “surprising” angle.
24hr talking heads are equally low brow but it’s usually more straight forward sound bite + overt opinion layer.
A few of the best in-depth coverages of the scummy US politicians during the 2020 election were done by Teen Vogue. TikTok is a pile, but I agree that juxtaposing it to Clinton Network Network, MSDNC, and Fox Snooze as if those hold any integrity at this point is laughable.
This is such a bizarre view. Allowing him to explain himself in his own words (a) lets him create lies that are difficult to worm his way out of further down the road and (b) lets journalists cross reference what he's saying with anonymous sources - who may be less willing to cooperate with the law lest the sources incriminate themselves - and challenge SBF with that information, a process which beautifully crystallised during SBF's latest interview with Coffeezilla in a Twitter space where he was challenged on several statements which appear to be lies, and led to extremely uncomfortable squirming from SBF.
This position of yours is so weird. Yes, if someone does quality journalism, like Fong and Coffeezilla have done, then they do earn clout from that. What's the problem there? The person who is at the centre of the story should be allowed to give their side of the story, "Bad person bad, no I won't talk to them" is not useful journalism.
Also, this should go without saying but the bizarre stalking that Bitboy did is obviously unacceptable harassment, and the vulture-like tactics of others is not helpful and not what I'm condoning here.
> Giving narcissistic sociopaths like SBF an audience is absolutely disgusting
Their goal should be informing the public-- putting SBF up does that, he's not duping anyone else now.
The fact that he may be getting off on the attention isn't any of our concern.
But yeah the puff pieces are obnoxious. This is a case where no one (in the US, probably anywhere) is getting fired for coming out guns blazing. There isn't any good reason I can see to hold back here, there won't be any more "donations" of customer funds to media orgs.
Too much modern journalism isn't just unwilling to speak truth to power, it's unwilling to speak the truth about scammers that put on a power nose and glasses.
> Their goal should be informing the public-- putting SBF up does that, he's not duping anyone else now.
Arguably, allowing SBF to make unsubstantiated claims and not challenging them is the opposite of informing the public.
Like you've said, many institutions are unwilling to challenge even the most vile scammers, and it's because interviewing the scammer generates clicks and the scammer won't agree to come on if they know they'll be challenged. It isn't just journalism either: lot's of auditing firms more-or-less rubber stamp their larger customers because giving them a hard time means they won't be hired again; heck, the ratings agencies were key factors that lead to the 2008 collapse, for similar reasons.
What can modern journalism do when it was all bought by the 'power' its supposed to be speaking truth to?
The consolidation of media has been a massive issue throughout the world but predominantly in the US and started a long way back. There are two movies that are imho great watches reflecting the topic:
There's no tragedy here. Let's be absolutely clear - every single person who lost money in this abomination was as greedy as SBF, trying to milk a cryptocurrency ecosystem they never believed in nor understood.
Was it marketed to regular people, the financially naive? Were misleading statements and advertising used?
Then people who were told it was a safe way to invest lost significant money, they were defrauded. Some lost life savings, kids college funds, retirement funds, you name it. There are likely thousands of small tragedies here.
Being ripped off due to naivety does not make one as culpable of fraud as SBF. This is pure victim blaming.
People invest in things they don’t understand every day, and we have regulations to prevent predatory fraudsters taking their money. The crypto space needs to be regulated the same way. Preferably regulated right into the dirt.
Not everyone involved chose to be - for example, the Ontario Teacher's Pension Plan invested $95M into FTX. Thousands of teachers' retirement plans are impacted through no fault (or very possibly, knowledge) of their own.
He was smarter than that. He claims he gave just as much money to Republicans. He just used dark money for Republicans because he thought it would look better.
Was't "blockchain technology" supposed to prevent this exact thing -- no record of money transfers? Instead it just enables obfuscation and fraud. I really hope the IRS/FBI have more success tracking down where that money went. No one can spend that much on Adderall.
FTX was not a blockchain, but a centralized exchange. If it had been a decentralized exchange (DEX), all funds would have been traceable. This would never have happened.
Most people in the crypto space are familiar with custodial risks and know the difference between a decentralized and a centralized platform.
The FTX collapse didn't affect the true crypto community who kept the bulk of their assets on-chain; the consequences mostly fell on the shoulders of speculators and the entities who cater to them.
It will surely scare away a few of them from the crypto space, but we don't need them anyway. Crypto doesn't need more speculators. Crypto space actually benefits from these periodic cleansings. If MtGox collapse didn't end crypto, then this surely won't.
No, blockchain technology was never intended to prevent this kind of fraud. How could it? If $N bln is missing, how any blockchain could tell you where it went if those dollars have never been represented on that blockchain? The blockchain can only record operations made within the chain, blaming it for fraud that happened outside the chain is like blaming differential equations that they don't prevent robbery. It's not something that is possible for this technology, and it was never intended to solve it. If all the transactions everywhere happened on the blockchain, then you could make claims that it should be traceable (even then it doesn't mean it actually is, though) - but it's clearly not the case.
I think you missed the sarcasm in my comment even though I tried to make it obvious. Fraud is fraud, technology can’t stop it.
In the popular mind, away from the “crypto community,” regular people equate crypto with claims for the revolutionary blockchain. That enables scammers and predators. Technology cannot bear fault or blame because it has no will or action.
I'm not sure what would be the reason to think blockchain will change anything in the fraud department. It's like expecting electric cars will cure cancer. I mean, maybe some people have weird expectations, but I work in a crypto-adjacent company and it is true that a lot of people misunderstand crypto and blockchains, but I haven't encountered many that would expect it to magically stop fraud.
Maybe because Satoshi specifically mentioned preventing fraud in the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Blockchain/crypto enthusiasts frequently tout the supposed transparency of an immutable public ledger as a way to prevent fraud. I know they refer to the kind of fraud and financial corruption that led to the 2008 bank meltdown, not necessarily sellers defrauding buyers of NFTs, but the FTX crash seems more Lehman Brothers scale than "this beanie baby is fake" scale.
Lehman was a legit business that got caught with some risky bets and, for various reasons, it was decided to let it go down. That may be analogous to the situation with Alameda (minus the drugs) - but FTX is more like a cross between Madoff (affinity fraud) and degenerate gambling.
Yup and this has almost nothing to do with blockchain technology and everything to do with common capitalistic greed. And money in the hands of someone who's really bad at gambling.
Aside from crypto pretty much nothing has anything to do with blockchain. Crypto and blockchain remain linked as near-synonyms in the public mind. The only real-world remotely useful application of blockchain remains crypto. No one outside of the "blockchain community" or "blockchain adjacent community" (whatever that means) knows about any other use for blockchain "technology."
I agree that the FTX crash had everything to do with greed, and in SBF and company's case, incompetence. And I don't get how supposedly savvy investors both within and outside the "crypto space" got sucked in by such a charlatan.
Why is everyone giving him such a hard time? I mean, who among us hasn’t misplaced a few billion dollars at some point in our lives? At a company we ran?
