An uncle once commented about a cousin of ours that he demonstrated how it's possible to screw things up so badly that you can't possibly recover. I think that's true for Sam. I hope it's not true for the people in his orbit; I hope they can get out from under this and try to find meaning, ideally from repairing the harm they've done.
As Rick Heicklen writes, "We are not ever going to be Sam. But we could be Caroline, or Nishad, or Natalie. Or even Michael Lewis. We could easily make the same mistakes they do." [0]
FWIW, I didn't find Lewis's book as bad (or amoral) as it's often made out to be. Yes, he didn't put his judgement in every paragraph, but his description of SBF was:
a) absolutely damning! SBF's lack of empathy, his notion that (given that everyone else is stupid) he knew best and should basically ignore the advice of everyone else (particularly his elders), his naive utilitarianism without any deontological/virtue temperance, his reckless "many-worlds" risk-neutrality in gambling - that was all described in detail in the book, even if it was not explicitly condemned. Lewis didn't bother to show why these traits are bad. (I don't know what Lewis himself thought about them, but who cares? Show, don't tell.)
b) empathetic, eliciting compassion. Sure, the kid was screwed up, but here's why. And, btw, you might well have turned out the same way under similar circumstances, but for the grace of god.
My conclusion: 1) Lewis's book was good and insightful, and it's unfair to describe it as an apologia. 2) SBF has severe moral deficiencies and belongs in prison for a long time, but not because he is "evil". 3) Let's have some damn humility.
I very much agree. "Number go up" by Faux is the better book in many respects, but Lewis's book contains much background info not reported elsewhere. Lewis's book is damning about SBF as you said. About how unapologetic and manipulative he is. About his willingness to gamble with other people's money. About his complete lack of ethical boundaries. About the casual way SBF ignored all laws he didn't like. About SBF's history of reckless gambling.
Yes, Lewis was (and probably still is) sympathetic to SBF. But that's also how he got him to talk! The book wouldn't have been possible had Lewis behaved as a skeptical investigative journalist. Lewis gave SBF all the rope he needed to hang himself with, and that was all he needed to do.
If you're aware of a financial crime, please report it to the SEC or one of the other financial regulators through their whistleblower hotline. You may be in for a big payday.
If you think the terms are unfair to you, you have the option to not do business with this particular bank. If all banks do the same, have you thought there's a financial reason behind it that you might not be aware of (say, default rate, operational costs, etc).
Selling an expensive product or service is very different from committing fraud or stealing. There are plenty of practices within banking that are a lot more immoral than charging high fees.
For example, payday loans are explicit in saying they will charge you a percentage of your payday for a 14 day loan. But if you do the math, it's about 1000% interest annually
I am aware of at least 2, I'm not in the U.S. , to disclose one crime I'd have to breach confidentiality and the most likely outcome would be that the bank would get a slap in the wrist or even nothing, meanwhile I'd be sued to oblivion and it would ruin my life (the same happens with some other crimes I know about, I once tried an anonymous tip about some grifting in the military and instead of taking it they said they went fully hostile and said they'd trace my call !!).
The other one I didn't have enough proof, apparently someone else did tip the authorities and the shady payday loan company is getting a slap in the wrist. Not exactly something to instill confidence in our justice (and my country is one of the least corrupt ones!)
> Lewis gave SBF all the rope he needed to hang himself with, and that was all he needed to do.
Very nicely put.
Book recommendations: Faux Number go up is beautifully reported, in particular on the many scam and trafficking victims, the culture (Bored Ape parties), some of the players (eg SBF, the Tether people, etc.), and the underlying anarcho-capitalist mindset.
On the impact on the underprivileged (that the "check your financial privilege" and "banking the unbanked" predatory inclusion crypto crowd purports to care so much for), the green-washing of Bitcoin, the crypto philanthropy "bad samaritans", Metaverse and Web3, check Peter Howson's Let Them Eat Crypto.
Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman's Easy Money is another non-technical examination of fraud in crypto, El Salvador, and the severe consequences for victims.
The problem with Lewis's book is that it was pretty clear it was an on-a-dime pivot from the original story he had planned to tell, about a wunderkind revolutionizing finance and trying to save the world at the same time.
And Lewis was into the original plot less than this one. Lewis is clearly on board with the progressive inclination to say that their cause is more important than operating within traditional bounds on behavior. Lewis was on board with SBF's irresponsible approach to risk management and regulatory oversight, because unlike Wall Streeters taking excessive risk for personal gain, SBF doing it for the sake of "improving humanity" was just breaking an egg to make an omelette.
Yup, I'm really surprised by people defending Lewis. Don't get me wrong, I own most of his books but his 60 minutes interview about SBF was a cringe fest.
Yeah, I think those people just didn’t watch Lewis’ interviews on SBF.
Seeing those tarnished my whole opinion on Lewis, and I cannot disassociate it from the book at this point. Not because I am “not able to separate the art from the artist”, but because Lews was talking about the exact subject matter of the book in those interviews. All while providing enough clarifying extra detail to fully affirm to me that he is either seriously delusional or is just on the grift of caring more about writing an exciting story (instead of actually having a more factual take on things).
I had already got burned by one of his books before[0], but i took it as a one-off. The SBF one, and especially those interviews, sold me on the idea that this is how he just is. Which is sad, because his writing and plots and stories are genuinely good, but the problem is that they pretend to be almost journalism. I really hope he considers going all in on grounded-in-the-real-world fiction genre officially.
[0] That was with one of his earlier books, Flash Boys. It was kind of embarrassing to reread it years later, once I actually gained some literacy in what the markets actually were and the high level mechanisms of how they operate. The framing of characters and events in the book was not only extremely biased, the whole premise and the problem statement were hanging on the absolute worst bad faith takes that were a almost a foot into “this is not a straight up lie only on the most technical level” territory.
You're like reading my mind. Flash Boys made me question everything he ever wrote. I happen to know a great deal about HFT, and Lewis was like a proto-GPT, espousing with great confidence things that were easily verifiably false. It made me wonder if all his books were just as ill-informed and my ignorance of the subject kept me from realizing it.
There's more of us it seems! I've been in HFT for the past 15 years and after reading Flash Boys I had to do a full 180 on Lewis. Every single book from him I now treat as mainly fiction sprinkled with some historical facts to maybe make it more relatable.
I don't even think it requires knowledge of HFT to see the flaw in the whole thing.
For example, the whole premise of the book was that banks would see 10,000 shares offered on 5 different exchanges. They'd go to buy 10,000, but only get filled on 2,000, and then cry foul. But people don't normally think like this. For example, if I wanted to sell my bike. I list it on Craigslist, Facebook and Next Door. If someone simultaneously contacted me through all three platforms, no one would expect that I was responsible for selling three bikes. Now, replace "bike" with "2,000 shares."
Even if FTX had never collapsed, I would still be shocked that Lewis didn't get proof of the management team's charitable donations. Through the whole book, Lewis keeps saying that all the profits were getting rolled into charity. Then in the trial, it came Singh testified that he hadn't actually been giving away money; it is unclear if other folks were doing the same thing.
No no, he is rich so of course he is just a kid, lost in the sauce, accidentally squandering a few billion. Now, 16 year old male from a low income household, those are men, and should know the consequence of their actions better. /s
This infantilizing is disgusting propaganda in and of itself.
It's not really propaganda, I think it popped up mostly because typical finance leaders are seen as being on the older side. As a Patrick Boyle video on the issue had put it, they had barely been in finance long enough to be trusted with the morning coffee run.
"Kid" is meant to be derogatory, highlighting the absurdity of traditional investors trusting openly irresponsible people with such little experience in such a heavily experience and regulation dependent field like finance. They behaved like spoiled children, with all the drugs and sex going around within the company, gaming while talking to investors etc. It doesn't make SBF look better.
Finance is about money, that's going to attract some people that are motivated purely by money. That's a bad thing and the culture in any institution should discourage this.
Yet at the same time finance is a big industry, there's plenty of honest, hardworking people that do their 9 to 5 (or more realistically 8 to 7) and go home to their kids. Finance has bad apples (just like tech) but I don't think we should write off the entire industry for that.
I'm learning his age in this thread and pretty surprised. I would have pegged him as being in his late twenties. I think stuff like his haircut, his general attitude, the league of legends thing, all contribute to making him seem younger than he his.
There's not many years difference between "late 20s" and 32. 3 years, if we set our benchmark at 29. As someone in their early 30s themself, do I consider myself much more mature or experienced than I was a few years ago? Not really; my life is in a better place, but that's because of factors that are kind of orthogonal to maturity.
I think your criticism is unfair. I didn't know how biological age, and I thought he was probably in his early-mid 20s. Not because he's rich and white, but because he acts, dresses, and cuts his hair like an emotionally immature boy genius right out of college.
A few of us wear suit jackets now, but I think that's just to stand out from the crowds of jeans and t-shirts that became my generation's accidental dress code.
(Though perhaps I'm just projecting; on the rare occasions I wear a suit jacket, that's what I'm thinking).
oh it was no accident. it took a lot of determined laziness and disregard for the casual Friday corporate culture BS by smarter than most people to change to rules.. band shirts, cargo shorts and skate shoes beats button downs, khakis, and leather loafers all day err day. got a not so casual work event to attend? bust out the nice grateful dead shirt, black zip up hoodie, and the jeans without the holes, and own it hard
1) blazers, specifically, are awesome, they’re wearable purses that also make you look sharper. They’re a superior version of the open button-up shirt I’d wear in high school because it was trendy back then and which also had (less well-realized) utility and useful-in-a-pinch value, and
2) loafers are the best shoe for everyday not-very-active stuff, and it’s not a close call. Slip on! It’s insane that they’re considered even a little dressy. A small miracle.
Except if you're an active person. Blazers don't give you full range of arm motion unless they are laughable baggy or made of some weird stretch material that looks cheap. Loafers are sub-optimal for running up stairs, catching the train/bus that's about to leave, or moving heavy things.
> The students were also shown photographs alongside descriptions of various crimes and asked to assess the age and innocence of white, black or Latino boys ages 10 to 17. The students overestimated the age of blacks by an average of 4.5 years and found them more culpable than whites or Latinos, particularly when the boys were matched with serious crimes, the study found
He's a full grown adult, who was trusted with billions of dollars, and worked with other full grown adults, who aided in his crimes.
Calling him a kid implies that he wasn't fully in control of his actions and shouldn't be held accountable to the same level as an adult would, and that's ridiculous.
Lewis also soft-sells the polyamorous relationships and complications that caused around SBF's relationship with Caroline Ellison. Caroline wants to go public, and why that would be a much bigger deal in the polyamorous world they were living in.
It's similar in many of Lewis's other analysis of SBF's relationships. Lewis avoids context that makes SBF look much worse.
I'm not familiar with the book but this doesn't sound like it pattern matches with any of the poly I've experienced. Going public is a big deal in poly in particular? Since when? What kind of self respecting tech bro group house doesn't have a graph of all the poly on their whiteboard?
If it wasn't a big deal, SBF would have been OK with Ellison going public with it. But he wasn't, and held out against it. Lewis spends not a single word digging into SBF's motivations around that.
Worse, he spends barely a chapter on how the polyamory which pervaded the highest levels of both Alameda and FTX might have clouded everyone's judgement and ability to say no. Mostly just limiting himself to: "It was a bunch of young adults all living together and who slept with whom changed rather fluidly. It wasn't a sex or orgy den, and the lurid tales about sex parties and all that aren't accurate."
Which I guess is probably true as far as it goes.
But not spending any time at all about how those relationships may have affected the corporate governance shows a strange lack of curiosity and unwillingness to think about conflicts of interest any relationship between business partners creates.
[I have no problem with polyamory itself--as long as everyone is consenting it's not really any of my business.]
I love salacious details like everyone else, but it sounds like you're looking for data where none exists. Why would those relationships affect the company, and who is going to consent to an interview about it? What exactly are you expecting Lewis to do?
The problem as I see it is not polyamory, it is casual sexual relationships between coworkers. It is kind of like why officers are not supposed to have relationships with their subordinates -- it subverts the authority that must exist in a structure where people are held accountable for decisions. By adding polyamory into the mixed it just made it worse since it increased the incidents exponentially.
Small beans compared to stealing billions of dollars. It's astonishing how the actual crime that SBF committed is almost invisible in much of this discussion.
YC is a success, PG/JL's relationship survived, and nobody got indicted. They're role models. If YC failed or PG got divorced, people might view it differently.
I guess what I'm saying is... I wouldn't read too much into SBF's sex life, and I wouldn't berate Lewis for not prying, especially with uncooperative subjects.
FTX had a 32--billion dollar valuation by that point, with over one-million users. Alameda was well over one billion and doing very sophisticated financial transactions.
That's not a tiny little startup hoping to make it big. Your investors and board want you to follow proper corporate governance, especially around conflicts of interest. Your users would like you to follow proper corporate governance rules so they don't lose their money. And do little things like following the express rules you told them you would follow (like FTX not loaning customer deposits to Alameda).
Playing fast and loose with the rules is what got him into trouble. The fact that Lewis doesn't pursue this angle just shows how big the pass Lewis gave him. It didn't have to be all about the lurid details, but the lack of best practices here was pretty bad.
By what point? The SBF/Ellison relationship predated FTX by years.
SBF lost+stole billions and you are angry with Lewis because he didn't pry into the guy's sex life? Which might not even be all that interesting, we're just assuming it. I like a good tabloid story too but come on.
I’m not angry about his sex life as such. Good grief. If it was exactly the same only with a bunch of people he didn’t employ and wasn’t committing fraud with I wouldn’t care at all.
Romantic relationships within a business, especially within the executive suite, cause conflicts of interest. Webs of romantic relationships create webs of conflicts of interest. If the executive suite commits a multi billion dollar fraud, not inquiring into what role the conflicts of interest played in that fraud ignores an important piece of the story.
The conflicts of interest almost certainly made the financial crimes much worse in the form of less oversight and less ability to look at what and was doing objectively.
Since the type of financial situation and financier Lewis writes about typically is amoral but also is sure that they are correct and proper, Lewis' continued access to future SBFs requires that he offload judgement to the reader.
It's almost like a realtime version of "Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises" or "This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly".
I think I read that Lewis was almost finished with the book, which was about to come out, and which was highly pro-SBF, when the FTX scandal Broke? So he then had to quickly revise and "save" the book by changing the tone in view of the FTX scandal? If so, it's probably an unusual book in view of the last hour rewrites.
That doesn't seem to be the case at all. A lot of the sympathetic content occurs _after_ the scandal and arrest, and Lewis has continued to take the same tone in interviews. Further, an inordinate amount of time is dedicated earlier in the book to a problem at Alameda that Lewis draws parallels to the scandal that took him down, clearly working toward his thesis. Lewis is one of the most-read living authors: they could have gotten a crack team of editors to help him revise the book in no time if he wanted to. It seems that his _actual_ take was that SBF was a dumbass rather than a criminal mastermind. It's not even an implausible view.
If you are talking about the time Alameda lost track of a bunch of money, and everyone freaks out except SBF, who turns out to be right, that story was hilarious foreshadowing.
Lewis also spends lots of time explaining how the whole thing that led to the collapse could have been avoided, they didn't need to be 'lent' money from clients coffers. They had money they could draw on and had in the past to finance market bets. SBF was just not very detail oriented, certain of his success and sure the rules didn't matter much.
He literally had meetings where he told people to buy other crypto companies with the criteria "Don't stop until you hit a billion dollars spent".
One of his supporters was certain he didn't do anything wrong, when the collapse happened, because he thought it would be insane to risk a golden goose like FTX, where you are the house in a giant gambling frenzy.
A special kind of non-chalant, non-selfaware hubris.
> SBF was just not very detail oriented ... and sure the rules didn't matter much.
anybody well versed with human personalities will know those 2 things overlap and might as well be the same thing (details and rules). Thats who SBF is by nature. And he created a company with similar culture. Thats's a recipe for disaster. That's where his lack of emotional intelligence shows up. not realizing the absolutely necessary need for the other opposite of his personality (people who need details and follow rules diligently). SBF was always going to end up where he ended unless he had found ways to make up for his lack of details and disdain for rules. Yes it helps him take risks others wouldn't take, make money quicker than others couuld, but it also came with the risks of losing money faster than others and ending up way afoul of the society. As someone with a similar personality style (fast rough estimate calculator with little regards for deails and rules), I have no sympathy for him. He lacks the most important dimension of intelligence - emotional intelligence. His arrogance in his own intelligence wouldn't even let him see that he did.
this exactly. the freakonomics podcast (iirc, maybe the economist's money talks?) did a long form interview with the "emergency CEO" that was parachuted in when ftz filed for bankruptcy.
my big takeaway from that is that the books, when they existed, were a complete shitshow. the money ended up all being there, but it was so scattered that it's taken all this time to find it. an investment here, a forgotten wallet there. they lost billions the way normal people lose dollar bills or car keys.
ofc that doesn't mean there wasn't fraud happening. the fact that they intentionally faked reserve balances and treated alameda like a piggy bank and did gymnastics to hide it can't be ignored. but even that still smacks of hubris to me more than a Bernie Madoff type scam.
it was like sbf didn't think it would be an issue because he genuinely believed that it would never be an issue. eg "people just want to believe there's a reserve, so let's show them one. we don't actually need it tho because we're actual geniuses." or maybe "no one will ever look because we're in the Bahamas and the Bahamas loves us, needs us." or it could be simply "money solves all problems and we have infinite money".
tldr: gambling addict gambled to the end and the house always wins.
>the fact that they intentionally faked reserve balances and treated alameda like a piggy bank and did gymnastics to hide it can't be ignored.
To be clear, they also gambled with normal FTX customer funds. People who were just buying cryptocurrency through ordinary means and not trying to do sophisticated trading. It was simple theft. You can say they thought they'd make the money back plus some, but I think a lot of Ponzi scheme heads think the exact same way.
>the money ended up all being there, but it was so scattered that it's taken all this time to find it.
This is explicitly not the case. The new management has not found hundreds of millions (billions) in cryptocurrency assets. Some other assets have surged in value and that may allow FTX to make some customers "whole" (meaning, they will not lose much money in an environment where otherwise maybe they would have strongly profited), but this isn't the same thing.
The new management found many billions of assets of various asset classes https://www.reuters.com/technology/bankrupt-crypto-exchange-... When FTX thought it was broke, there were really billions of dollars of stuff they were too much of a mess to come up with.
That isn't to say that 'all the money was there' or that the conduct wasn't deeply criminal and unethical, but a huge part of the shortfall was really just terrible books.
That billions of stuff were other coins that dropped in value which they were using to run their scheme and investments that are still illiquid, like their 500 million dollar investment in Anthropic. I can only imagine what that Anthropic investment is worth today.
This is even from the article you reference:
"FTX has benefited from a recent rise in crypto prices, Dietderich said. Its total recovery would be valued at $6.2 billion based on crypto prices from November 2022, when it filed for bankruptcy after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal."
When you’re talking about 8 billion dollars, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that “a huge part of the shortfall was found” means that billions of dollars weren’t.
One concrete claim I found is that many BTC holders might get paid back in USD at the then-price of the coin, which is ~$16K. Bitcoin is currently at ~$65K, which indicates that they could have lost up to 75% of the underlying coins. Just to be clear: this is not the same as being made whole.
You have a source indicating the $473 to $600+ million that was supposedly moved to cold storage from client wallets was all recovered by the law, and/or the new stewards of FTX?
The famous John Ray (emergency CEO) quote from a court filing was
> Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.
Someone associated with the case said that just because it was possible to recover most of the money he stole doesn't mean he didn't steal it. Crooks routinely go to jail even when the cops recover the money or goods.
This guy was lying like crazy in the media. He even said it was a ponzi scheme. Maybe he's a dumbass but he's also a criminal who was committing crimes while out there doing PR the whole time. Even during his trial he was lying so let's not act like he was in over his head and made some mistakes. He's never even owned up to it.
> He got caught up in it all and you bend, bend, bend until the next thing you know..
This denies him agency. Probably a better hypothesis is that he was a raging narcissist who thought he could swindle everyone with none the wiser, without realizing how transparent his fraud was.
It seems like for your theory to be better, it should fit the facts better (not saying it doesn't). Whether it seems agentic or not doesn't seem very relevant to whether it's what happened.
>And, btw, you might well have turned out the same way under similar circumstances, but for the grace of god.
that criteria is applicable to literally any criminal, ever. It's effectively useless as a statement about crime and punishment, although it serves as a useful reminder to those not condemned.
>2) SBF has severe moral deficiencies and belongs in prison for a long time, but not because he is "evil".
moral standpoint doesn't put you in shackles, poor judgement when comparing your morality with that of society is what does that.
finance is one of the most amoral industries to ever exist. They sit next to weapons and land-mine manufacturers, as far as i'm concerned.
Amorality is a benefit to the financier, the trick is finding someone that is amorale while also retaining a powerful enough understanding of the law and governing society that they can get away with enacting their deviousness without fear of prosecution.
SBFs morality doesn't matter -- what broke him was his poor judgement and overzealous confidence. We're not condemning him for his morality, that just speaks better to the court; he's in trouble because his plans backfired and money was lost for important people.
(p.s. we don't imprison people for being 'amorale', whatever that might mean from whoever is saying it.)
> the trick is finding someone that is amoral while also retaining a powerful enough understanding of the law and governing society that they can get away with enacting their deviousness without fear of prosecution.
A good biography does not cast too many moral aspersions. Its job is to paint a portrait of the person's life, including the details and quirks that shed insight into the subject's character. If you want affirmations of the awfulness of SBF and his crimes, there is no shortage of that by media and pundits.
> a) absolutely damning! SBF's lack of empathy, his notion that (given that everyone else is stupid)
Wow, I can’t fathom how one could believe everyone else is stupid. Yeah, SBF went to MIT, but really the best students in each descent university likely fall into the same percentile of academic talent. Or, as Bezos used to say, people can be smart in a thousand ways.
Im a big Michael Lewis fan and my only major gripe with that book is that he released it when the trial began, which meant he had to finish it well before. He left out the ending.
It’s an interesting story but it’s basically a cliffhanger with no sequel. He cut out right at the point where we learn the gritty details.
Not for nuttin' but that sounds like Aspergers. Mind you, I'm not a trained professional (to make that diagnosis). It's also no excuse.
That said, it makes a case for being aware of your blindspots (read: weaknesses). And if you think you have none... Well that's a blind spot. Fucking deal with it.
#2 is true of everyone. I'm not arguing against the kind of empathy you're describing, I just think we should extend it to all sorts of criminals. The murderer and rapist in the cell was screwed the moment they were born to dysfunctional, probably abusive parents. They have to fight hard to break the generational cycle.
All this means is that crime and violence are a systemic problem. Thinking about free will as the cause of crime isn't useful compared to thinking about how we might support and treat abused children and help them take a different path.
> btw, you might well have turned out the same way under similar circumstances
Which is where it’s bullshit arising out of the incentives of access journalism.
The Heinlen quote is more meaningful: you won’t be Sam. (If you’re in the set of people who could be Sam, the conversation is different.) But you might fall into his orbit.
So much of the apologia for SBF is disgusting. I don't need to have any humility, because I don't steal from people. I don't throw colleagues and lovers under the bus when I get caught stealing. I have humility and don't believe I'm the savior of crypto, the unbanked, etc etc. His entire worldview reeks of hubris and narcissism on a level I find disgusting and so common in "bro" culture. The idea that he can get out in 25 years makes me sad with our justice system.
Banality of evil. I'm sure SBF seems like a decent person who just wants to run a cool business and play with technology. He never thought he was a crook.
I don't think the banality of evil applies here. Banality of evil is when cogs in a bureaucratic machine don't think about how their actions hurt others, because they are just processing paperwork or following standard operating procedure. Regular people doing regular people things can do great evil.
In this case SBF was the architect and the driving force behind the fraud. He decided to comingle customers funds with business funds. He decided to trick banks into processing client money. He decided to split FTX into dozens of shell corporations to make effective oversight impossible. He decided to operate from Hong Kong and the Bahama's.
Banality of evil might apply to a junior engineer at FTX. It doesn't apply to SBF who masterminded the whole criminal enterprise.
(Eichmann was a Nazi through and through, fiercely antisemitic, knew exactly what was going on, and liked it. He didn't just "go along with it" in the banal sense, he chose evil knowingly.)
I never understood it that way. It was just that Eichmann and many other prominent monsters of the Nazi era were polite, cordial and unassuming people when you got them alone. That you could never tell what hideous souls they had because they didn't put it on display. They weren't cackling madmen or vicious savages in their personal lives.
I think that interpretation conflates civility politics and banality of evil.
One axis about decorum and appearance. Those who look and act like "good and decent upper middle class people" always get the benefit of the doubt where others do not, even when that appearance, like with Eichmann, completely falls apart on closer inspection.
The other axis distinguishes between people who have a highly ideological agenda and execute on it (evil) and those who are mostly unthinking cogs in a machine of destruction (banal evil).
Yes, but it was coined to promote specific view of Eichmann that he himself tried to cast himself in: that he didn't really like murdering Jews, he was just following orders.
I got a laugh from the author's assertion that the Lewis book examines "the psychology of an impulsive, chaotic, misanthropic genius". I mean, "genius" has long been a ludicrously overused word, but even so, this is a new low.
Isaac Newton is an example of an actual genius, someone whose work changed the world. Sam Bankman-Fried is an epically hubristic confidence man who stole/lost eight billion dollars and will as a consequence be spending a long time in jail.
Could we really all watch a friend spend hundreds of millions of dollars, getting into a questionable business, and not ask a single question about what’s going on?
Because I’m really, really confident I would never find myself in that situation.
It’s like comparing helping a serial killer bury 25 bodies to being a wingman to your buddy in a bar and backing him up when he claims to be 6’ when you know he’s really 5’10”.
Only one of these situations I can picture myself in.
"I hope they can get out from under this and try to find meaning, ideally from repairing the harm they've done."
How exactly would they do this? Have you read the victim impact statements?
Mistakes are errors. Like typing "Rick Heicklen" instead of "Ricki Heicklen".
But intentionally breaking the law in order to profit, is that a "mistake"?
A error in judgment perhaps.
SBF claimed he made "mistakes" but he never admitted guilt and he never apologised for breaking the law. He perjured himself while expecting the audience to believe he was "brilliant", competent and trustworthy to handle other peoples' money.
If what Heicklen calls "smart people" can work for a company with no organizational chart, no board of directors, no CFO, no need to use more than QuickBooks for handling millions of dollars in customer deposits, then perhaps these people are not "smart".
And it would be a "mistake" to believe otherwise. (Heicklen may still be disillusioned.)
We are living in a time when it is not safe to assume that because there is large amounts of money behind something that this something is in fact legitimate.
These people named in the comment all come from privileged backgrounds. Many of the victims of the FTX collapse, the ones who wrote to Judge Kaplan before the trial and the ones who submitted impact statements before sentencing, do not. Call me cynical but I do not forsee any of those named in Heicklen's blog post going to work to serve (cf. exploit) people from non-privileged backgrounds.
I highly doubt he will serve all 25. There is no parole in a fed case, but could get reduced time for good behavior. Unlikely he will be in prison stabbing people.
Imagine going into prison in the late 90's and coming out all the technology in the world today, none of which you've seen except maybe on TV.
The Dick Tracey movie came out in 1990 and now we've got smart watches which are literally a cell phone on your wrist.
Imagine going into jail when AIM/MSN/ICQ were the hotness and coming out to tiktok and snapchat.
That's someone who went into jail in the 90's. Imagine someone who went into jail in the early 80's or 70's. Coming out to the modern world would be like time traveling.
A lot of inmates coming out of multi-decade imprisonment are completely overwhelmed by how far society has advanced.
Pfft, in what ways has society advanced since then?
I'm being a bit facetious, but lets be real, most of the interactions people have with technological advancement create negative value for themselves and everyone around them.
The only thing that's arguably neutral is basic chat, and maybe HN which is marginally more sophisticated than it would have been then. Being able to take high quality photo and video at any time is quite a lot more commodified, but I feel like a former prisoner could handle that.
Maybe video calls would do it, that's another big one, but people born in the 30s can deal with it.
No dog in this race either way, but what is Michael Lewis meant to have done? Is it just that people feel hist treatment of SBF in Going Infinite was too lenient?
> An uncle once commented about a cousin of ours that he demonstrated how it's possible to screw things up so badly that you can't possibly recover.
beyond me why this irrelevant uncle comment is at the top but let me tell you this ... you can always recover. the only thing you don't recover from is death.
> I think that's true for Sam. I hope it's not true for the people in his orbit
People in his orbit knew very well what they were doing and looks that they will get mostly slapped on their wrists, since most fault was attributed to SBF only.
Sorry but he didn't "screw things up" he knew (objectively) early on that it was a cascade. And so he did the first mistake, load from a sister company, using self assets. When it wasn't called out, of course you think "this must be okay".
He's cheeky and a chancer. He is a victim of your uncles idiom. But that's not the crime, the crime is getting there.
What are you talking about? 25 years is absolutely nothing! You think he will not recover? I bet you he’ll be an influencer or something like that once he is out after 15 years (because USA is corrupt as hell).
> I hope it's not true for the people in his orbit; I hope they can get out from under this and try to find meaning, ideally from repairing the harm they've done.
Lol they're all very well off. Why tf are you worried about them, of all people in the world?
put another way, you're engaged in sexual, financial, and managerial relationships with an epic fraudster, and continue that pattern well after it's become clear that they're, at best, kind of dubious.
most people will never be anywhere near that, not on that scale and scope, and not with that kind of insight.
I think you mean to say, "An uncle once commented about a cousin of ours that he demonstrated how it's possible to screw things up so badly that you can't possibly get away with it."
I don't think Caroline is a bad person. She was brilliant smart and focused on academics etc. She got pulled into this mess during the crypto mania phase.
She willingly conjured up fake financial documents to suit Sam's needs. She had the kind of credentials that would have easily landed her a job at other financial institutions, she absolutely could have quit at any point.
It's funny. I lost tens of thousands of dollars thanks to this individual, yet his sentence brings me no joy or arouses any emotion at all. I'm utterly indifferent to his fate for some reason and I don't know why. Yet if he had been a mugger who stole a much smaller amount of money from me on the street, I think I would've been far more vengeful.
Should I feel vindictive? Or is it healthy to forget about it and move on? I'm not sure.
Purely speculation on my part, but I tend to feel similarly, and I think the reason is that the mugger includes a physical threat of violence.
Evolutionarily, the emergence of an economy with capital at modern-day scales are so new that we haven't had time to really adjust emotionally. It kind of reminds me of the various birds on previously untouched-by-humanity islands that had no fear of humans and would just sit there and allow a human to club them to death, until their species went extinct. They had no time evolutionarily to develop an innate (emotional) fear of humans.
Physical violence/robbery on the other hand is a long-standing human tradition, and something we are hardwired to react to emotionally (Amygdala vs. PFC, etc). We can of course override our Amygdalas with our PFCs to some extent (in the medium to long-term), but the "gut reaction" core is still there.
Another possible reason (for me at least) is that ethically I have a lot of inner turmoil over violent punishments (which physical incarceration absolutely is IMHO) for nonviolent crimes. Of course reality is much more grayscale than that given that crimes like SBFs could leave a family destitute and starving, which is violence-adjacent if not outrightly violent. A violent sentence for a violent crime intuitively feels a lot more "let the punishment fit the crime" than a violent sentence for a nonviolent crime.
Anyway, I don't have answers, but throwing some speculation onto the pile.
I had a business partner/family member steal money from me in our business. It very much hurt and was a painful experience hoping for vengence. Perhaps SBF being distant from you is what makes you indifferent.
Yes that's fair criticism regarding my feelings, but GP feels the same and they had stolen $10K. So the distance from it can't be all there is to it.
I'm also pretty distant from a mugging that might happen today, but I find myself getting angry about it, so that also seems to contradict the theory that it's about distance (though to be clear, I largely agree with you and I suspect distance is going to be a factor for most or maybe the vast majority of people).
After thinking about it, I think some humans do feel anger towards deadly diseases. If not anger, certainly fear. My aunt died of cancer, and most of our family was pretty mad at "cancer." I remember seeing a Twitter thing going around that was basically a lot of people tweeting things like "fuck cancer" and encouraging others to donate to the cause.
Maybe that's not really "anger," but it kind of feels and seems like it
I lost my dad to cancer. I was very much furious with cancer while being well aware of the irrationality of feeling that way. Still am, and it's been a few years. It's easy to be furious at cancer, and the pure random destructive wastefulness of it.
For cancer and forces of nature, there is anger, there is a sense of unfairness, but we ask "why" and the instinctive answer is there - force of nature.
To the robber metaphor, for example I've had cars try to run me off the road on my bicycle, so I approach the driver and it becomes immediately clear this is an insane person with major problems, and I think "oh, force of nature, this person is completely insane" - similar how "not guilty by way of insanity" is a real thing. Again we get an answer "why" - because this person is insane.
For me the deep insult that causes anger is if this is intentional, this is a person, they willfully did this of sound mind. Perhaps why a Madoff might make someone angry, but not SBF. In my view, SBF was a step or two removed from a big "too big too fail" 2008 bank that offered an interest rate to account holders by making investments with some risk. It seems to me SBF was operating along similar lines, 8% interest rate if I recall, but his intent wasn't to steal so much as illegally hide risk and hope for the best - and in his case, he was small enough to fail.
Predators also 'play the game of life' and humanity is downright vindictive about any who prey upon them. I personally suspect the real difference is how incredibly hard it is to target a disease. Hell, just identification of what a disease really is was spotty for millennia.
> we haven't had time to really adjust emotionally.
I think we adjusted, but we just apply broader context. No one would recommend going all-in on FTX with your life savings. Likely no one involved is really poor and this affected his life strongly. People lost money for their retirement retro vehicle, it's fairly easy to adjust to that.
This not saying it's ok, but its annoyance in effects mostly or should be(I think likely there are may be people, who put too much money, but then again internet financial advisory board all appears and says: HA! Told ya not to do it!).
I'm an indirect victim via BlockFi (headed by Zach Prince), which did business with FTX and lost my money as a result. I held 33 ETH in a BlockFi BIA account, and only recently got 4 ETH back. I don't know if I will ever recover the rest of my funds.
I don't know what your financial situation is but I'm not rich, and it is extremely painful to look at ETH trading at above $3000 and realizing my rainy day fund has been stolen by criminal nincompoops.
My personal values dictate that I be significantly more careful with money when it is someone else's money. Even if you gave me $20 to get you a Burrito, I'll get you the best deal, tip the minimum, and give you your exact change. I'd even give you a few cents more just in case because I don't want to be owing you anything.
So when a group of people behaves irresponsibly with people's money it boils my blood. He deserves every jail year he got, just on the hubris alone.
>So when a group of people behaves irresponsibly with people's money it boils my blood. He deserves every jail year he got, just on the hubris alone.
I don't want to rub on your wound but you need to take some responsibility as well. You knew crypto was risky. You knew many exchanges have scammed and went under, taking their customer's funds with them. It's arguable that every crypto exchange is shady and it's inevitable that every single one them will fall.
You should also blame the laws because exchanges and most crypto are clearly securities. But our law makers have been slow to respond and have probably been paid off by crypto money.
Not that I would lose sleep in anger over my missing ETH (I was not hit by this, I did not have anything touching FTX), but I think your take is a little unreasonable when FTX clearly acted in a way that is directly illegal to do as a financial institution. I don't keep my life savings in crypto either, too risky, but still.
Cryptocurrency is different because the primary value proposition is the "law of the jungle" market economics. The value of your tokens comes from the general swirl of criminal activity. You can't say you deserve the upside but not the downside risk.
Median household wealth is about $200k, and 90th percentile is about $1.6 million.
That means every tenth person in line at the DMV (a decent cross-section of society) is worth over a million dollars, and if you're in a major metropolitan area, much more.
> The median American in the 45–54 age bracket has merely seven thousand dollars more saved for retirement than you had thrown into crypto.
You should take those headlines with a grain of salt because they grossly misrepresent the studies they are reporting on. Quoting directly from your article:
"The median 401(k) balance is just $35,345."
Most people who have a 401(k) work at more than one company in their career and rarely roll funds over into the new company's 401(k). It's more common to leave it or roll it into an IRA.
All we know is the median 401(k) account balance at Vanguard is $35k. Vanguard doesn't know about these people's other retirement accounts at Fidelity or Schwab or wherever. If their customers hold IRAs at Vanguard, those aren't accounted for. In the case that a person has multiple 401(k) accounts with Vanguard, it wasn't even clear if the account balances are summed together and counted as one account.
tl;dr These reports are always about average and median retirement account balances, which is not at all the same as average and median retirement savings.
Are there actually a lot of retirees working as greeters? Maybe you only see the ones who didn't save enough. Or maybe they have enough money but like getting out of the house. Or they're doing it for the health benefits.
I assume retirees prefer greeter jobs because those probably don't require lifting anything heavy, as a stocker or cashier might need to do.
I worked at a grocery store for 5 years. A couple retirees worked there because they had to, but most of them just wanted something to do and health benefits.
As someone who lost a little bit through this whole debacle I think it is because we willingly gave our money to FTX. We wanted to believe in this story that was too good to be true. We got fooled and we are slightly ashamed.
When you get mugged you have no choice on what is happening. The actions are being forced physically on you. With FTX We chose to go that way so it somehow feels like we are as much to blame as SBF (and to be honest, we are).
I deposited some money with FTX and expected them not to steal it in the same way you expect a bank not to steal your deposits. I didn't gift to them or expect anything too good to be true. If a bank manager steals customer deposits to pay his gambling debts I put the blame 100% on the manager 0% on the customers.
Why on earth would you "expect them not to steal it in the same way you expect a bank not to steal your deposits" when a cryptocurrency exchange / hedge fund is not subject to even a fraction of the regulations banks are?
Especially when prior to FTX's collapse, numerous other crypto exchanges were turning out to be scams or going under, and even back then there was plenty of evidence that crypto was being used and manipulated by nation-states and criminal organizations? And it was practically a meme that crypto was full of shysters and scams?
Comparing putting your money into a too-good-to-be-true crypto hedge fund is nothing like "a bank manager stealing money to pay off his gambling debts." I won't name a culpability breakdown but there is no way you have 0% responsibility here.
> a cryptocurrency exchange / hedge fund is not subject to even a fraction of the regulations banks are?
US ones are. Shady ass casinos in the Bahamas like what SBF was running aren't though. Exchanges like Coinbase have been operating in the US under heavy US regulations for over a decade, and have never had anything close to a solvency issue. It's absolutely ridiculous that SBF was getting invited to basically write US policy despite FTX not even being a US based exchange.
> That’s strange. If I invest my money into any form of securities it’s pretty clear to me that the value of that capital might go to zero overnight.
What is strange about it? Losing money through investment risk is part of the deal when you invest, losing money because the fund manager decides to steal it is not part of the deal.
Crypto is more like handing money out to joe random on the street corner because he promises he’ll be there again next Friday with a 10% interest rate.
But there is still a difference between risk and fraud.
Risk would be if joe random tells you he'll "invest" your money in lottery tickets and then give you a 10% return if he wins or nothing if the "investment" goes bad.
Fraud is when he tells you that, but takes your money and buys himself some stuff.
Either way you lost all your money but in the second case you can sue the guy for fraud. In the first case he did as promised and lost the money but you only have yourself to blame for doing a dumb investment.
> As someone who lost a little bit through this whole debacle I think it is because we willingly gave our money to FTX.
That's not the whole picture though. If I invest in some risky stock (or even what I thought was not a risky one) and it tanks, sure I feel bad but it's part of the deal so it's ok.
But if I invest in something risky and I lose the money not through investment risk but simply because the fund manager outright stole my money, I'd be very angry.
This response is not helpful and I know of honest people who have been cheated. Basically, the response boils down to “if you got cheated, you are dishonest and deserved it”. Bullshit.
In this case, it’s somewhat more fair: everyone involved was trying to find much higher returns than they could get in regulated financial markets so while it’s sad that they were defrauded it’s also part of the risk they voluntarily took on by using cryptocurrency.
A lot of folks keep making that argument. What it sounds like you're saying is that Average Joe should really understand that crypto implicitly carries a risk of fraud and you are likely to lose your money. We should shout that from the rooftops. If you deposit BTC/whatever with someone, they are probably going to steal it. When they do, we will remind you that this was a foreseeable outcome.
I'm starting to think that these organizations need to be regulated as banks, stat.
Any institution where you invest or deposit money carries a risk of fraud.
Banks have steadily become less and less fraudulent over the last century.
Crypto exchanges have also steadily become less fraudulent, but still carry a much larger risk than the financial institutions to which people have become accustomed.
> What it sounds like you're saying is that Average Joe should really understand that crypto implicitly carries a risk of fraud and you are likely to lose your money
That is what a lot of people have been saying for a very long time now!
I don't mean this in a way to blame the victims of the crypto fraudsters, merely to explain the somewhat exasperated responses by people who feel like they've been trying to warn people who have been ignoring them.
> I'm starting to think that these organizations need to be regulated as banks, stat.
I mean, why do you think they don't want to be regulated and brag that they aren't? To make you more money?
Money _should be_ the least of the concerns of a mugger on the street. Subjecting yourself to lawlessness exposes you to real danger and kinda detracts from your ability to participate in commerce.
Granted, I haven’t seen any scientific evidence to suggest that a lack of money causes a lack of ability to reason (and thus a lack of responsibility for one’s own actions) but my own anecdotal experience does suggest it
Not really. The use of a gun/knife/lethal force implies a much different risk profile (you could easily die or be crippled for life). It's not about the money - it's about the violence.
That's a fair point. With FTX you might feel some sense of responsibility because you voluntarily gave up your money (whether it was fraud by deception or not). But a mugger is infringing on your freedom to walk around at night.
If someone put a big chunk of their savings into a speculative vehicle, they should be having a moment of contemplation about why they ignored basic investment advice. It’s not a happy moment for anyone but at some point you do have to take responsibility for your decisions.
If the loss was due to the speculative asset going the unexpected direction sure. But here was fraud.
Would you say the same if a pension fund ran with your retirement, since it is invested in some stock index, most likely in previous metals, and probably a slice in crypto?
Yes, it’s fraud but it was also in a system which intentionally was set up outside of the normal protections against fraud. The relationship between Alameda and FTX wouldn’t have been allowed for a traditional finance company, for example. He’s a crook and I’m not defending him in any way but at some level this is like buying a Rolex off of a guy in Times Square and then being surprised that it’s not real.
Enron is an interesting example: first, you had to go back a quarter of a century for the example whereas that kind of thing happens routinely in the cryptocurrency space, and the response wasn’t just to shrug but to pass stricter regulations (Sarbanes-Oxley) to prevent it from happening again.
Remember, the claim isn’t that the traditional finance world is without problems but rather that people who deliberately seek out high-risk investments do share some responsibility when those fail. Someone who trusted Enron’s public audit reports was more comprehensively failed than someone who sought out a company specifically incorporated in the Bahamas to avoid compliance with US regulations!
What does it being a speculative vehicle have to do with FTX stealing the money? These people did not lose money because their speculative investment lost value. On the contrary, it has gone up considerably in the meantime but FTX pocketed all of the gains.
Think about what happened as soon as a grownup entered the room and saw their records? Real financial companies have tons of regulatory and insurance requirements for things like audits, reserves, etc. to prevent things like that from happening but the entire point of his field was “that stuff’s just slowing me down and we don’t need it!” because everyone was focused on getting rich and overrode their judgment.
It’s the next level of risk up from people who buy stocks because the price is going up without checking the fundamentals. If all you do is hang around with other people hyping the same thing, it’s really easy to focus on the “number goes up” part and not want to be the person spoiling the party by asking about value.
Sure because it’s impossible to have another Madoff in the traditional Wall Street system? No. And some people have found themselves in clawback if they made their money back. Imaging someone investing in Madoff for 25 years and finding out that the investment is a scam, losing their capital but also the state is now after them for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The obvious risk was that FTX would just take their money? I would have thought the obvious risks were crypto tokens losing value. They didn't get burned by that, except in the sense that their tokens were no longer theirs while the value went way up.
I agree it wasn't obvious FTX would just take all the money, but it was obvious that you could lose all your money.
"The very first Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, collapsed in 2014". Different reason, similar outcome.
And Bitcoin was down 2/3 from peak when FTX collapsed. Close to losing it all. And enough doomsayers to know any gambler was running that risk.
And countless prior examples in lots of markets showing that speculation in risky assets is very risky!
You often don't know the specifics of why something is risky, so even if a particular outcome was unlikely, that doesn't mean an investment was "savings".
Uh, yes. They should have. One of the whole shticks of this whole thing is that the money transfers anonymously. Once you are gifting someone money with a credit card for some numbers in a database under their control? In the ** bahamas?
Of course there is - being mugged(or having stuff stolen from you) can ruin your life, not even in any physical sense but psychologically it can be devastating. I've had a bike stolen from my house, I didn't even witness it being stolen or anything, just one morning I woke up and the house was broken into and my bike gone - relatively minor financial inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, but for the next 2 years I hated living in that place, I was uncomfortable in my own house and scared of walking around, I honestly felt violated in the sanctum of my own home and couldn't get relaxed around there again. Eventually we moved and in the large portion it was exactly because of that.
So please tell me, even assuming if that person stole my bike to buy bread - how can it possibly have been moral given the impact it had on the life of another person?
It's a little odd that you've changed the topic from stealing food to survive, to stealing someone's bicycle (regardless of your halfhearted comment about the possibility that they stole your bike so they can go buy bread... which... what?).
If someone needs to steal something (anything) in order to survive (an actually survival need), hopefully they will be able to do so in a way that doesn't cause a bystander the kind of difficulty you're talking about. Like they could steal the bicycle from a bike shop instead of a person's home.
But ultimately, if it's actually a survival need, I hope if push came to shove, I wouldn't put my psychological well-being (something that, when hurt, can be healed) above someone else's life (something that, when lost, cannot be returned).
>>It's a little odd that you've changed the topic from stealing food to survive,
Why is it odd? OP said stealing to survive is never immoral, to which I said that of course it is, because theft has a profound impact on the victim, no matter the reason for stealing. People who are victims of theft rarely know why they were stolen from, so they cannot adjust their emotional response as if every thief is stealing to feed their families - and I think acting as if that's a reasonable assumption in any way is well, unreasonable. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
>>But ultimately, if it's actually a survival need, I hope if push came to shove, I wouldn't put my psychological well-being
Sure, and neither would I, but I don't accept that stealing is the moral choice - the person could have literally knocked on my door and asked for food and I would have given them food, and I'm sure majority of people would as well. Again there is a bunch of assumptions there, but I find the whole conversation a bit disingenuous - there is of course actual undeniable theft where the alternative is death in various places around the world, but I refuse to accept that this is the kind of theft most people are talking about here - no one in any modern country is stealing to survive, literally every developed country has programs that will just give you food if you ask - dying from starvation should not be happening anywhere with even a semi functional social system.
You think the sanctity of your home and peace of mind is worth another man dying, rather than eating, when your bike could have saved him?
... You and I both know that your bike wasn't robbed to prevent starvation, making your example completely beside the point. If it had been robbed to prevent the starvation of a human, you ought to feel happy rather than violated - your small sacrifice saved a whole life!
America has more than enough wealth to feed everyone on the planet, but 10 million kids are hungry in the US right now. Someone is stealing that wealth, and it isn't muggers. Try to gain some perspective, despite the daily news telling you to be scared of the poor.
Your approach is gross. Blessing theft the way you do creates two victims, the one from whom it is stolen and one who is not steered towards a better way to live.
The US even still has tremendous opportunity to build a life and earn money. Stealing undermines one's ability and focus to build such a life and undermines the surrounding community as well.
You clearly think you're a great guy/gal/whatever for thinking that someone should be thrilled to be stolen from and you're oblivious to the nothing-but-more-misery this approach practically generates.
I'm kinda on your side here, but you did say "you ought to feel happy" after being robbed by someone who needs it more than you do, which is a bit ridiculous.
The hypothetical situation wasn't "someone who needs it more", it was someone who is literally starving to death.
A contrived situation, no doubt (though not mine). But despite HNers claims to the contrary, some people actually do starve to death because they can't earn for a variety of reasons. And, rather than take care of those people, the US vilifies them.
This leads to a society where tech-bubbled freaks get slightly rabid at the notion that it's morally ok to steal to survive - even going so far as to flag such comments.
I laugh, but the tech community keeps putting up these red flags the last few decades, and it's actually worrying. The disconnect from reality is unfathomable. There's people here claiming that stealing bread to save your life is just as bad as stealing 8 billion dollars - that's unhinged on a level that's hard to imagine.
>>You think the sanctity of your home and peace of mind is worth another man dying, rather than eating, when your bike could have saved him?
Yes, because they could have just asked and I would have given them food. Literally anyone would I'm sure.
The thief in that case choose the path that inflicts psychological damage, because they were too cowardly to just ask for food. In that case they have literally zero of my sympathy. Thieves are the worst people in the society just after murderers and rapists.
Saving that human life is the job of the institutions that we all sacrifice a huge portion of our resources and freedoms to.
It's not the job of an individual to keep their property available in case a desperate person needs to steal it in order to survive.
The implication of what you're saying is that any crime is morally justified as long as the perpetrator is doing it in order to survive, and the victim isn't killed. Which is insane.
> The implication of what you're saying is that any crime is morally justified as long as the perpetrator is doing it in order to survive, and the victim isn't killed. Which is insane.
That doesn't seem insane to me. I think you've phrased it in a somewhat unfair way. But I don't think doing what you need to do to survive is really a moral issue. Certainly it's best to secure your survival without hurting anyone else. But if the choice is between death and making someone else uncomfortable, I don't think I'd blame someone for choosing life if they have to make someone else uncomfortable or inconvenience them.
Certainly the scales have more trouble balancing when it moves from discomfort/inconvenience toward physical harm, especially permanent physical harm. But also consider that in many cases people do have a choice how they react: a shopkeeper, when confronted with someone stealing bread, can get physically involved and risk their safety for the sake of that bread, or they can let it go and consider it the cost of doing business.
This is why most people recommend that if you get mugged, you don't try to play the hero: you just hand over what the mugger wants, and let them go. Your wallet or phone or laptop isn't worth your life. This doesn't make it ok for the mugger to do what they did, but ultimately what matters is the outcome: do you want to get out of it relatively unscathed, or do you want to risk injury or death? Once you're in that situation, you do get to choose how you react.
Anyhow, that doesn't make it "right" or moral or whatever if the thief ends up hurting the shopkeeper during the theft, but it's hard for me to get too up in arms if the thief has no alternative than stealing food. It's understandable, even if it's a bad outcome.
The consequences of robbing someone under threat of violence go far, far beyond them losing their property, even if they aren't physically harmed at all. Calling this making someone "uncomfortable" or "inconveniencing them" is disingenuous bordering on dishonest. In many cases, the victims of robberies are simply unable to continue leading normal lives, even though their limbs are still attached to their body as before.
I can't believe I'm arguing that it's immoral to steal on HN, but here we are...
Yes, you might decide that breaking your moral code to feed yourself or your family is an acceptable tradeoff, but it's a tradeoff nonetheless. It's a conscious choice. A lot of people in history made a decision to go hungry instead.
Children might see the world in Marxist generics where some ambiguous, but for some reason always "wealthy" people stole all the fruit trees and poisoned the water. Adults usually deal with specifics. Who are all these mysterious people are? Do you think the food just fell from the sky before the industrial age? What do you think happened to the people who stole before the industrial age, hungry or not?
If you don't think income and wealth inequality is real, I'm not sure what anyone here is going to do to help you understand this better.
The fact remains that we could feed everyone on the planet... if we chose to. Capitalism just doesn't incentivize us to do so.
You talk about how stealing bread to survive would be "breaking your moral code", but I think it's absurd that we've gotten to this point. How is a society moral if it allows people to starve? I won't say two wrongs make a right, but when society actively allows people to die of hunger, I think those tut-tutting about moral codes need some side-eyes and eye-rolls directed their way.
And we are all culpable to a certain extent, as members of that society. Perhaps those of us who donate our money or time to help those in need are a bit less culpable (along with people who are just scraping by and don't have the money or time to spare). But if we've benefited from that system (as I have), we share some of the blame (as I do). And go further and consider people who actively vote for politicians and policies that remove social safety nets and make it harder for people on the margins to feed themselves. All the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" the US who seem to think that no one deserves any help for anything. It's disgusting.
I said "stealing to eat". Because the claim was "stealing is never moral and is just as bad no matter the amount".
You heard "point a weapon at a stranger and demand the contents of his pockets".
And, since this seems to be really confusing to a lot of people here for some reason, stealing tens/hundreds of millions of dollars from people is in fact unambiguously worse than mugging someone for their wallet. It's far more violent, and causes far more suffering.
The topic of the thread changed at some point; you seem to still be on the original topic, when the rest of us are talking about stealing food to survive.
You realize Le Miz is fictional, right? No one needs to steal to eat, some people choose to steal rather than earn. Stealing is immoral regardless of the circumstance, don’t take your moral philosophy from Disney movies and broadway.
> Stealing is immoral regardless of the circumstance
That's your opinion and your conception of morality. My moral code isn't so rigid that I can't imagine a world of nuance, a world where things aren't black and white, where things don't fit neatly into little boxes.
There are plenty of people in the world who end up in bad circumstances due to things outside their control. And yes, some of them need to steal to eat. Even if it's just for a little while, so they can work on improving their circumstances. Something that's incredibly hard to do when you're malnourished.
This might be the most out of touch comment I've ever read, to the point where it genuinely looks like sarcasm mocking someone who would think like that. Apologies if so.
There is no amount of “being in touch” that could justify literally criminal behavior. The consequences of propagating lawlessness are far greater than starving to death. Unless, of course, you have a self-centered point of view and/or no principles.
If you have a problem with the way the world works, there is always a non-violent course of action to take to change it. There is no other option. If you think there is another option all you have to do is say so, I’m sure the keepers of law and order and the voting masses on whose behalf they act are equally willing to deal with whatever you choose.
I think it's criminal that society allows people to fall into circumstances where they become homeless and/or hungry, to the point where they're desperate enough to need to steal to eat.
"Criminal behavior" is a construct of human society. Morality is, too, for that matter. I have no problem with someone stealing food to survive. Hopefully they are able to do so without harming anyone else. If someone does get harmed, I won't hold the thief blameless, but I also can't find it in my heart to condemn them, either.
> The consequences of propagating lawlessness are far greater than starving to death.
That's a false dichotomy.
> Unless, of course, you have a self-centered point of view and/or no principles.
Do you think no one irl ever stole bread to feed their family only to be extremely punished? ...
> No one needs to steal to eat, some people choose to steal rather than earn.
You're wrong. You're a hundred kinds of wrong. That mindset is a deep, deep sickness.
> Stealing is immoral regardless of the circumstance
If the choice is between stealing and starvation, the moral thing to do is steal. Which is, in fact, the scenario we are talking about.
Not everyone can earn - and in a society where wages have become untethered from productivity for over 50 fucking years, where the social contract is broken and ground into dust, where healthcare and housing are seen as privileges rather than rights, you might start to expect getting pushback on such untethered and inhuman views.
> don’t take your moral philosophy from Disney movies and broadway.
Better than taking it from literal comicbook villains.
The “No one needs to steal to eat” mindset is a “deep, deep sickness”? My brother in Christ what kind of backwards world do you live in? Where on this planet is it acceptable to steal, especially in a mugging situation that implies physical confrontation and the threat of violence? I can’t tell if you’re trolling, you’re actually asserting that you live in a fairytale defending something like Robin Hood.
Wages have never been tethered to productivity, arbitrage has existed since before there was even a currency. Healthcare and housing has always been and always will be a privilege, your human rights only extend so far as they do not infringe upon someone else’s human rights. Doctors and construction workers cannot be compelled against their will to do work, neither can the collective taxpayer.
I think the problem here is they are imagining extreme situations where you genuinely don't have any opportunity to survive without it. Such situations could exist, like in Mao's Red August and a score of other such historical tragedies. But what the commenter is not understanding is that "Morals" matter jack shit in such a situation. "Morals" are a product of civilization, if you are not being treated as human by your society you have no obligation to act as human either.
> But what the commenter is not understanding is that "Morals" matter jack shit in such a situation. "Morals" are a product of civilization, if you are not being treated as human by your society you have no obligation to act as human either.
My gut feeling here is that this isn't even a moral issue at all, but I've been having trouble articulating that point. You absolutely hit the nail on the head with this.
> The “No one needs to steal to eat” mindset is a “deep, deep sickness”? My brother in Christ what kind of backwards world do you live in?
This one! Our world is pretty backwards! If you can't see that, you must live a privileged, sheltered life.
Do you think a world where medical bills can bankrupt people is not a backwards world? Do you think a world with homeless people is not a backwards world? Do you think a world where we incarcerate people by the millions for smoking a plant is not a backwards world? And these are just a small sampling of things that happen in the US.
If you truly don't believe we live in a backwards world, I don't know what to say. You're just so completely out of touch with the reality we live in that there's no way to have a productive discussion.
If we're going to talk morality, a lot of land ownership and resource extraction stands on very shaky ground, given that a lot of land was at some point in recorded (or recent) history stolen from someone else. And stealing is always immoral, so...
Perhaps previous exit scams in the crypto space dulled your senses?
If anything, I feel like you should share your story to protect others, especially during times when crypto is peaking (like now) and others are tempted to jump in: use exchanges to buy/sell and get out, store your keys on a cold storage device, and transfer out fiat ASAP.
Surely the better takeaway is to just not bet on crypto in general? It's supposed to act like a currency, not a stock. So long as people keep feeding into these pump-and-dump schemes they'll keep happening.
Money doesn't come from nowhere. For every dollar you make on crypto, somone loses a dollar. All these BS coins do is shuffle wealth from the unlucky gamblers to the lucky ones. Go spend your money at a casino instead.
This is oversimplifying, but stocks are essentially purchasing a stake in ownership of the company. The company uses that money to advance its mission - ideally generating more profits which are shared with the stockholders (dividends). It's that stake in ownership and expected dividends that give stocks inherent value.
There is no company behind crypto currencies that holders get ownership of. There is no product or service to drive profits. There are no dividends, voting power, or anything that gives inherent value to the coins. It's all pure speculation. Just money getting shifted around among the holders - with exchanges taking a cut off the top of each transaction.
I'm sorry, but what am going to do with my Class C shares of Google which have no voting rights? They also haven't paid dividends. My buying of them didn't give Google any money, either. My infinitesimal ownership in Google doesn't get anything other than it's a number in a database somewhere that hopefully goes up. There's underlying assets there, sure, but as we've seen with GME, TSLA, and now NVDA, it's all just vibes.
In this case though, FTX had their own token FTT that gave people that owned it voting rights in FTX and "staking rewards" aka dividends. It's not worth anything today due to the fraud that SBF perpetrated, but that sure smells a awful lot like a stock to me.
Long-term investors are buying more stocks at a lower price, with the idea that at some point the company may eventually pay dividends that justify the price of the stock, at which point they get more share of the dividend profits. Folks who purchase these stocks after this point would base the value on the value of the dividends.
Day traders are gamblers.
Cryptocurrencies will _never_ pay dividends, because they are based purely on speculation. These things are absolutely not the same. Cryptocurrencies only provide gambling.
That's because they're running the validators, and they're sharing some of the gas fees with you. If you're getting a high APR it's because the protocol is extremely expensive for users. Imagine if your stock trades, purchases, or bank transfers cost 5% (which is a low estimate, because if you're getting 5.1%, then Coinbase is also taking a cut).
You're locking up your crypto for this for some period of time, which means you lose liquidity to get gains. During that period of time the coin can crash and you're out of that money.
For stocks, you don't need to lose liquidity to get dividends. For companies generating profit, they don't necessarily need to be parasitic to generate those profits. It's possible to generate profits while also providing value for users.
Take for instance Venmo and the ability to get funds from your wallet into your bank instantly. Venmo is taking risk by doing so, the banks are taking risk to do so. They charge you a fee for this risk. You want your money faster, and they want their risk covered. They're going to eat some amount of fraud by providing this service, but the cost of providing it should cover the fraud cost and offer a small profit. It's mutually beneficial and optional (regular bank transfers are slower, but free).
Lots of SaaS products are similar. They offer a product businesses need, at a lower cost than the businesses would have to pay to build/run it themselves.
Those are profitable things that are just services, like crypto, but businesses also build things that have physical value, like houses, undersea communication cables, etc.
If people stop trading crypto, all value is immediately gone.
Stocks are not completely nondeterministic games of chance, which is why most people who hold properly diversified stock portfolios have seen long-term growth instead of loss. That's probably why people don't call it gambling.
> Stocks are not completely nondeterministic games of chance
That's a bit of a straw man, as no one claimed they are. "Gambling" is often not a nondeterministic game of chance, either. For example, when I go to a casino and play poker, I'm still gambling, even though there's plenty of determinism and strategy to go along with the elements of chance.
>>My buying of them didn't give Google any money, either.
You buying the stock raised the price of the stock. Google uses the stock as compensation. The higher the price, the easier they can hire, and the less cash they need to offer to employees while still being attractive.
...is explaining it here too much of an effort, or what? Like I don't mean to be rude, but that really doesn't strike me as an unreasonable question to ask.
I don't know what you do and don't know, and what misunderstandings you're operating under, and threaded forums really aren't set up for the kind of back and forth it would take to do a proper calibration so as to give an appropriate answer that is at the right level of explain-y, and not mansplain-y/condescending. But what the hell, I'm waiting on a build (rust).
Companies IPO and sell shares. The company gets paid by people who want to own shares. The company IPOs and sells 1000 shares at $50 each, gaining them $50k which they can then use to buy a new whatever. Then, in a market like NYSE, other people can buy and sell stock. If I think the stock is undervalued I offer to buy 1 from someone at $55. that person gives me 1 stock, I give them $55, netting them $5. The company is not involved in this transaction and does not get anything from that specific transaction.
Now that the price is at $55, the company could decide to sell additional stock, now at $55 instead of $50, but that's a separate event from the transaction that happened previously. So the company does benefit from the stock price being high, but not directly off each transaction.
I've omitted all the details, but I think that's enough to get the gist of it.
When you go to your brokerage account and buy a share of Google, you aren't buying it from Google, you're buying it from some other random shareholder out there who wants to sell. Google does not see a cent of that money.
In general, the only times a company gets money when you buy shares are if you participate in an IPO, or if an already-public company decides to offer more shares for sale in order to raise some money, and you buy some of those shares. (There are exceptions, but retail investors like you and me usually don't get invited to participate in those deals, though.) The vast majority of shares that trade hands on the markets every day are not owned by the company whose name is next to the ticker symbol.
Read up on Capital Markets (Stocks / Bonds). Ways for companies to raise money.
HN/VC is NOT the traditional way for companies to raise money.
Buying outside a IPO is called the secondary market. If nobody could buy a share in the secondary market, the stock is almost worthless. Just like your private company with one round of funding and shares. If you can't sell them, they aren't worth much.
> Why would someone sell the share for less than this "inherent" value then?
Because the inherent value includes things we know about such as the assets the company has, but it also includes the speculative future earnings which we can't be sure about.
The market cap of its stock might but if you looked at the financial press during that episode it was full of people pointing out that there was no change in the fundamental value of the company. That’s because real businesses have things like sales volume, profit margins, property rights, etc. which aren’t entirely arbitrary and dampen the swings considerably. That’s not perfect or immune to abuse as Boeing shareholders are no doubt aware but it’s very different from something which has no grounding beyond momentary social consensus.
While I agree that there is a lot of hot air in crypto, what gives value to something like ethereum is the fact that you need it to use the network. Given people think it's useful to use that network it will give value to ether.
That does add some value but it’s fairly weak - people can always choose to switch to something cheaper, capping the maximum - and it adds its own risks: price spikes might leave you unable to perform transactions within your budget.
Yes, people can always switch. Unlike a sovereign currency nobody has a legal obligation to use any cryptocurrency, which means everyone is going to assess whether they’d be getting better value using something else.
Yes, and in doing so you've managed to blissfully ignore all the speculation and outright gambling that goes on in the stock market.
I'm not a crypto defender; I think it's mostly useless and a waste of people's time and money. But let's not paint a big rosy picture of the rest of our financial system. That's just not where the truth lies.
I did no such thing. I only answered the question I was asked. For some reason a bunch of people interpreted that as a defense of short-term stock trading.
Publicly traded companies make money by creating value and selling products or services. At least, the good companies that actually sell something (you'll find a bunch of them don't do crap or are just outright scams).
Take Apple or Coca Cola for example: They have well established lines of products and lines of business. You know people will keep buying iPhones and MacBooks and AirPods and whatever else Apple makes. You know people will keep buying Coca Cola drinks forever and ever.
The popular blockchains do not create any intrinsic value (Looking at Bitcoin and Ethereum). They are heavy and cumbersome and can't handle planetary scale. Some blockchain solutions promise secure, fee-less transfers (for example IOTA and NANO). In my opinion, those blockchains at least partially implement the true promise of Crypto that, if successful, would be able to replace the existing financial system which is extremely wasteful.
Just think about how much money it costs to implement FIAT: You have to print it, which is very expensive (both notes and coins). You then have to move it around using heavy armored vehicles. You have to secure it in extremely expensive vaults. You then need to keep securing it across the entire vertical: Every business that takes cash has to deal with theft, securing the cash, fake notes, etc. Even credit cards are very expensive to maintain. Cards have to be printed & mailed out all the time. It's all plastic, and it all ends up in landfills. The inks are toxic, as are the metals in the chips. The equipment required to process cards is expensive, breaks and needs to be replaced, is annoying, slow, ridden with fraud and theft and chargebacks and a host of other issues.
I implemented EMV and 3D-Secure for card processing, a few years ago. I also implemented cash processing equipment. It ALL sucks. You have no idea how Crypto is a breath of fresh air compared to those crappy standards and mechanisms that take an insane amount of time and money and bureaucracy to implement and maintain.
A really good blockchain that does secure, fee-less transactions in less than a second and can handle planetary scale, now that is the holy grail! You don't need equipment, you already have a phone. The merchants get their money instantly, and they are done, that's it. They have their money. Done. They need to pay their vendors? They pay them, done! They could even instantly pay their vendors at the moment of sale. Can you imagine how revolutionary that is? how this completely changes the game for commerce?
The entire crypto world has been held back by greedy assholes, tens of thousands of scammers (how many ICOs and rug pulls have screwed countless users?!), governments, government bodies and banks, and unregulated companies that behave irresponsibly with customer funds (for example FTX and BlockFi). Leadership that lacks vision and initiative (Any 1st world country that accepts crypto and leads with it, would make its citizens rich, by definition, on a planetary scale).
> Publicly traded companies make money by creating value and selling products or services.
But their stock price is (mostly) independent of that. It is indeed true that at least with short-term trading, your gain is someone's loss, and vice versa. There is a difference between cryptocurrency and companies, but there is little difference between trading in cryptocurrency, and trading in traditional company stocks.
Absolutely totally utterly fee-less is unrealistic. Operating the network costs something. Visa/MC get to take their cut, why should a replacement system be run as a charity? that's not sustainable.
You're basically just describing fee-less digital currency. The problem is that achieving the fee-less part by using a blockchain makes some extremely undesirable tradeoffs. To name a few:
-Money laundering becomes impossible to prevent when no entity has control over identity verification of the users.
-All transactions are public, so normal users who won't be trying to lie about their identity lose all financial privacy.
-Undoing transactions due to fraud or simple error becomes extremely cumbersome and ultimately requires re-centralization of authority that crypto supposedly was created to avoid.
Digital fiat transactions operating in the current financial system are the best of all worlds, and unsurprisingly they are already extremely common.
Crypto is one of the only markets where someone with virtually zero investment can become very rich. It's not easy, but smart traders can make a lot of money. You are not doing that at the casino.
Crypto is supposed to act like a stock. Very few people actually want decentralized digital dollars. Compared to the number of people who want decentralized digital get rich quick schemes.
If it isn't obvious already that cryptocurrency is one giant grift, then I don't know how many more stories are going to help. The SEC or Congress or someone with power needs to just make it illegal, or else this kind of thing will keep happening. It happened before we got our shit together in the early 20th century, but we collectively realized markets were actively doing shady things, and then we legislated to fix things. Will we do it again?
You should feel how you want to feel. However, I think certain politicians and most mass media outlets push you to have more compassion for white collar criminals and to think of others as less than human. When you hear them talk/print "tough on crime", they never seem to include white collar criminals in that. When the current admin expanded the IRS enforcement, they pushed back.
It's no surprise. After all, these politicians and the owners of such outlets are likely to be a little guilty of ripping people off a few thousand here and there as well...
Mugging is much more violent and personal. SBF didn't see you and think "that's the person I'm going to get" he essentially created a fraud machine that you and hundreds of others got caught up in. Very impersonal.
It's a bit of a different scale/topic, but I found the discourse here quite insightful. It talks about the method "Restorative Justice" by going through a concrete example where this was lacking. Really heartwarming to listen to.
"Restorative Justice" is more bullying from authorities and taking time from the victim.
From your link: "Victims may help decide on the punishment for the person who harm them. They often get answers and an apology. Offenders might receive reduced sentences." -- how about increased sentences because of how the victim feels? No, it's all about going easier on offenders. All the authorities involved are pushing victims to "go easy" on offenders aka bullying, victimizing them once again.
Someone, not a thief, hopefully filled the seat in the master's program Donovan was eligible for.
Restorative Justice means different things in different [US] states and counties, for different types of crime, it depends on whether the state's attitude to felony convictions and expungement is medieval or not (like in FL, KY), and the wide discretion prosecutors have to charge/plead something as a felony, misdemeanor or not to charge at all, plus the discretion police have on what to arrest for. And especially, it depends on the DA, who is an elected official:
* That HiddenBrain story was about a VA conviction for felony grand larceny for stealing a bike whose value exceeded the grand larceny threshold ($1000). In that case the victim (an English guy who supported the UK equivalent) emphatically did consent to restorative justice approach and expected a non-custodial conviction could be quickly expunged, but the VA system doesn't work that way. So all his intervention effectively did was spare jail time to the thief, but not all the other consequences.
* Compare to the 2021 Oakland, CA gang-related freeway shooting death of 23mo toddler Jasper Wu [0] in a rolling gunbattle between two rival gangs (one of them using an AR-15) on highway I-880 at 2:07pm in the afternoon, Wu was hit in the head by a stray 7.62mm rifle bullet in the rear of his mother's car. Three accused were charged with murder (one since had charges dropped), but then 4/2023 [1], new incoming DA Pamela Price, in the name of restorative justice, wrote an internal memo of her intention to "bring balance back to sentencing and reduce recidivism"- by not allowing prosecutors to "file or require defendants plead to sentencing enhancements." Not adding the special circumstances charge would drastically reduce any likely sentences, and exclude a life sentence (Price points out that she did add the gang-enhancer, but not the special circumstances charge) [3]. The victim's family were not consulted before Price's decision, and objected. [2]
Price sent a series of emails to members of the Asian American community and county supervisors. In one, she claims "certain vocal members of the local Chinese community and media including reporter Dion Lim... misled the public."
In another email one week later, Price addresses "Chinese communities" calling many "misinformed" and blamed [them] for "spreading misinformation."
The matter is pretty politically divisive in the East Bay [3]. DA Price refuses to budge on this and there is currently in 2024 a major recall effort against her [4].
These two cases are pretty much the opposite end of the spectrum to each other. They also show how politicized the actions of an elected DA can be, depending on the mood of the electorate that put them in office. They also show that DAs can completely disregard the victim's/family's wishes.
Maybe on some level you felt that the risk of this kind of thing was part of the investment decision? Presumably this was high risk, high return sort of stuff. As others say, the mugger is threatening you physically - SBF just cheated (I assume, haven't read the details) at a game, wild west new types of badly regulated investments.
We see this among political figures that swindle hundreds of millions, fail to pay taxes, etc. over and over again. They are granted absolution and even admired.
A mugger is less likely to be deterred by fear of punishments. It usually comes from desperation and impulsiveness, it's not like they've carefully weighed their chances of being caught.
SBF probably thought "If I get away with this I get a billion dollars and if I don't I just get a slap on the wrist and go back to normal life".
I think not letting anger factor into it is good, but we also have to make sure the deterrence is there to prevent the inevitable future SBF.
> I didn't lose a penny and I'm giddy about it. Justice has been done.
How can you be giddy about a human being locked in a cage for 25 years? Would you be giddy if he were being flogged, or hanged? As long as there has been recording, flogging and hangings were common punishments and usually defended as "justice has been done." Incarceration really isn't far from medieval punishments.
I'm by no means suggesting that nothing should be done, and maybe 25 years in prison is a just sentence (that's debatable, but for moving forward let's assume it is), but it still leaves me with a sick feeling. I just can't relate whatsoever with feeling "giddy" over it.
> 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.
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.
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.
Our prison system is undeniable terrible but we also so rarely see white collar criminals get what they deserve. Most of these guys get a slap on the wrist and somehow fail upwards.
And he's almost guaranteed to serve a smaller portion of that time for "good behavior".
Many people see justice served as a win for society, a reason to be hopeful that the future will be better. One life out of billions is valuable only to that person and their immediately family, it would be odd to feel sick over someone else getting punished for defrauding so many others of their life savings.
> it would be odd to feel sick over someone else getting punished for defrauding so many others of their life savings.
that's a pretty extreme strawman of my position. Don't you think there's some spectrum between 25 years of prison time and no punishment? And if you don't, then how would you feel about flogging or hanging as I mentioned above? Does it seem odd to you for someone to feel sick about a public hanging in the town square, even if the person is guilty of the crime?
Very lenient and it doesn't set a deterrent at all for people like SBF. Basically you can go off the charts on the sentencing guidelines and commit 3 counts of perjury in court and still have the same Expected Value as if you stopped the crime at a smaller scale
Not sure I agree. 25 years in prison is life-ruining. Even if he ultimately gets out in 10 (or whatever), his life will be forever changed for the worse because of this, even with rich parents who will get him back on his feet after he's out.
I think the kind of person who would see this sentence and think "eh, no big deal if that happens to me" would probably still not be fazed if he got a significantly longer sentence.
> How can you be giddy about a human being locked in a cage for 25 years?
The guy is a massive fraudster who not only cost thousands of people their savings, but - maybe even worse - he did significant damage to crypto finance reputation.
He was an already wealthy entrepreneur who could’ve at any point chosen not to be a massive fraud.
Actions have consequences. Good riddance.
There's a difference between feeling satisfied that you believe justice has been done, and feeling "giddy".
I think it's awful to have positive, happy feelings when bad things happen to other people, even when those people deserve it. I'm not saying I'm totally immune to feelings like that, but I try to work on my attitude. These sorts of feelings are a stain on one's soul (for lack of a better word, as I'm not religious).
Giddy is maybe the wrong word but I am happy about it. He has acted indifferent during the trial which makes it likely that he could become a repeat offender. This was a strong motivation behind his sentence. If the judge is right in that, and who am I to not believe so, then it is probably correct to remove him from society for 25 years. This is an extremely dangerous individual who may lead hundreds or thousands to financial ruin and is indifferent about it.
> Incarceration really isn't far from medieval punishments.
Sincere question: in your ideal world, what would be done in this case?
I, too, am dubious that 25 entire years serves justice. On the other hand, many victims' entire life savings wiped out, hard-working people impoverished. How do we deter or redeem, here?
To answer my own question, in an ideal world, SBF would voluntarily work every day to pay everyone back.
> Sincere question: in your ideal world, what would be done in this case?
Great question, and very hard. I don't really have a concrete answer, but generally speaking in my ideal world justice would focus on restoration to the victims. I concede that we may need some aspect of "punishment" to serve as a deterrent, but I think that punishment should benefit the victims, not the state. For example, stole $10k from somebody? Pay them back $25k. There should be no victimless crimes IMHO, and if "society" is the "victim" we should approach that one very skeptically and there should be very clear causation. For example, a dad who takes a few hits on a cannabis joint before bed is not "harming society" even though that has been the justification for draconian drug laws for decades.
I also fully concede that real life is going to be a lot messier and more nuanced than what I've captured, and that such a system would require a large mindshift from society in addition to just systemic reform. It may take a while to get there.
Disclaimer: If I actually had any ability to influence this I would want to spend a lot more time stuyding it and examining current research/science, and it's quite possible my opinion would adjust based on evidence.
Sure, and that certainly means any rehabilitation would be harder, and we'd be right to be skeptical of the results of that rehabilitation (as in, is he just pretending to be rehabilitated).
Ideally, a much higher-tech system would have highly tailored solutions for incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restoration. (There should be no considerations for "retribution".)
I'm conflicted on whether incapacitation should continue only until rehabilitation is achieved, or also until restoration is completed.
Prison is just a really blunt instrument for incapacitation, and sentences are a really blunt way to predict how long it would take to be rehabilitated.
> Ideally, a much higher-tech system would have highly tailored solutions for incapacitation
This is pretty interesting. If a person could be anesthetized for the entire sentence and then revived at the end of their period of incapacity, would that be acceptable?
Oh, I understood "incapacitation, rehabilitation, and restoration" as a sequence of activities. Like after a period of incapacitation, rehabilitation is performed on the human and then restoration.
What types of rehabilitation activities would you suggest for SBF during incapacitation? Would it include job training for an alternative career since he is unlikely to be allowed a fiduciary role in the future? As I understood it, he had a great talent in video gaming.
Apologies, I intended incapacitation as not unconsciousness, but finding a narrowly-tailored way to prevent the offender from re-committing the crime, in order to protect society. Ultimately, rehabilitation is the answer on how to do that, but until rehabilitation is completed, some manner of incapacitation or restriction is necessary.
I don't know enough about SBF's crime, which is very complex. But for white collar crime in general that isn't wanton indiscriminate violence, imprisonment seems like it is inherently punitive and thus wasteful, unless it's in a place that is highly focused on rehabilitation (education, therapy, etc).
I interpreted it as literally “remove the capacity (to continue committing crime)”. Incarceration is one means of achieving that, but possibly not the only, and I feel like the OP was trying to draw that distinction.
I don’t think they were meaning incapacitation as in rendered unconscious.
That's right, thank you. I didn't realize it wasn't commonly used in this context, and completely forgot about its other meaning. :) Yes, ideally the concept of "protecting society from the offender re-offending" should be narrowly tailored to only prevent those offenses, and only if those offenses present risk to surrounding society.
The difficulty of doing so doesn't obviate the necessity of doing so.
At worst, he works for the rest of his life with his wages heavily garnished. If he holds investments, he'd be required to liquidate and surrender some percentage of them periodically.
Of course, someone in his position could just live off his parents and not play ball. So you'd need a contingency for that. Maybe prison still does have a place, but only for people who refuse to even try to make amends for what they did?
Justice is not opposed to empathy. Everyone should look at SBF and feel empathy, and think, "losing the prime years of my life as he will would be horribly painful. Maybe I shouldn't commit fraud and steal thousands of people livelihoods like he did?"
Last I checked he’s not going to Treblinka. If you’re feeling sick about this you obviously need to read the court case and look into what low security federal prison is like.
I'm not giddy or anything like that. Our prison system is terrible, and our legal system is often unjust. But I think I'm... satisfied? that a white-collar criminal is experiencing consequences for what he's done. Too often these sorts of people get away with a slap on the wrist at most, and go on to commit more grift.
After a new-years eve terrorist attack in Europe a few years ago, a former colleague (who was in a different country) told me she “would now never go to a public space for a new year celebration”. But she drove a car to and from work every week day. We over estimate the risk of things we have no control over, but as soon as we have even a little bit of control, we underestimate the risk.
Did you learn your lesson to stay off of the crypto? If not, then that's why you feel nothing. It's part of your continued denial that crypto is pure evil. What's it going to cost you to ditch it, do you think? Another ten grand? More? I'm curious
It is probably because there is a difference between getting mugged and being scammed. With falling victim to SBF's scheme, you probably believe you are partly to blame and you had to face that fact yourself, did some work on it mentally at the very least in the background. Him getting punished does not make a difference, you probably punished yourself and that is what mattered. With a violent mugging encounter, you are blameless, so you need to see the other party get punished to process and to feel that the world will get slightly better / safer with the delivery of the punishment.
> With a violent mugging encounter, you are blameless
I was mugged a decade or so ago, and while I was certainly angry with the people who mugged me, I also punished myself a bit: I shouldn't have been walking down that particular street at 2am; I'd had a bit to drink and should have called a car. Or I should have been paying more attention to my surroundings; maybe I would have seen them early enough to get away, etc.
The point isn't whether or not the thoughts I had were rational. I don't think the type of crime matters; victims always have plenty of room to assign some blame to themselves, or at least second-guess their actions.
I think there are millions of poor people in the world who would very much disagree with that statement. But I'd hope they'd still agree that their stuff isn't worth their lives.
I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars with this guy. I was hateful when this whole thing was unwinding. Now I’m indifferent — I just hope John Ray can make the customers whole
For me, I don't think I feel the same way as you (my loss was small). There have been many cases where white collar crime which has similar (or greater) financial ramifications as the example of mugging you give, but the punishment is generally significantly lower (if at all). Granted a mugging could have differing levels of direct emotional impact, but white collar crime generally ends in lighter sentences.
I think “violence” is at times such a silly measuring stick for modern justice.
Instead, we should see it as lost/ruined human potential. What is worse, violently robbing one bank of $10k, or “peacefully” robbing a massive number of people for billions of dollars?
I sure as hell know what I think, and it’s absolutely not in line with SBF’s sentence. He should rot in Ryker’s with people who have, unfortunately, done less harm but still found their way there.
25 years will be enough to where he’s doing time, wish it was more. Sadly his parents have enough cushion to where he won’t have to work when he is out.
Many people are in prison for doing less harm and for longer sentences than many white collar criminals.
It is _obviously_ healthy to forget about it and move on. Having said that, any anger at the guy is going to be not because he effected any one person, but because he effected so many - and because he embodied a particular attitude in the cryptocurrency world that lives on in so many others who haven't yet had their luck run out.
> I understood everyone would be made whole at some point
That is only true if you define 'made whole' as giving back each customer the amount of money denominated in USD that they deposited with FTX. That is super convenient for FTX, which has benefited from the spike in BTC value, but not for the customer. To really be made whole, they would need to get back exactly what they deposited. 1 BTC in? 1 BTC out.
When you invest in monopoly money where the main feature is eliminating institutional protections, don't be surprised that institutions refuse to protect the value you pretend it has. The US government has no obligation to recognize BTC as a measure of fungible value.
Finally a take I agree with. The victims here are IMHO victims of their own greed. They wanted all the reward of putting money into unprotected and unregulated schemes and now many cry that the risks didn't go their way.
It doesn't make SBF less of a criminal but it does make the victims less victimised.
> They wanted all the reward of putting money into unprotected and unregulated schemes and now many cry that the risks didn't go their way.
Is that not just victim blaming? This was not an investment gone bad, this was stolen funds. It would be one thing if they lost all their money because BTC value dropped to zero. But SBF stole the money.
I really dislike the term "victim blaming", as too often it's used to shut down rational discussion about the facts of what happened. Not saying that's what you're trying to do here, but...
Often a victim of a crime could have taken different actions that would have prevented their victimization. That doesn't necessarily make it their fault, or even assign some portion of the blame to them. It's just a fact of circumstance.
A decade or so ago I was mugged by three men while walking home from a bar on a deserted, poorly-lit stretch of street at 2am on a Tuesday morning. It wasn't my fault that it happened, but I could have made other -- better -- choices leading up to that which would have prevented it from happening to me. We can argue whether or not it would have been reasonable to expect me to make those better decisions given my circumstances before getting mugged, but those are still the facts on the ground. I did not need to be walking home; I could have called a car or taken a bus instead. I did not need to be there, at that time, with my judgment, reaction time, and situational awareness impaired. This is about outcomes, not blame.
If I were looking to make some money and had a choice between buying conventional stocks or buying crypto, I'd hopefully consider the risks beforehand. By now I think it's fair to assume that most people who might buy crypto should have heard about a variety of scams, fraud, and outright theft that have occurred in the crypto space. All other things being equal (they're not, but let's say they are), a decision to buy stocks vs. crypto should take into account the expectation that there's a higher risk of losing the money to a scam when buying crypto. Again, that doesn't make it the crypto-buyer's fault when the person/company holding the crypto wallet for them steals it. But it's true that the crypto-buyer could have made different -- better -- decisions up front to avoid the possibility of that outcome.
I'm not blaming the victims, I'm blaming everyone involved, at any level. You consider them victims, I consider them to have discovered the "find out" half after "fuck about".
If I run about in the road and someone runs me down, I may be the victim of driver, but also my own stupidity.
Suffering the consequences of one's own decisions doesn't automatically infer victim hood by someone else entirely.
> The US government has no obligation to recognize BTC as a measure of fungible value.
And the very next reply says these are unregulated schemes. So what does the USG's opinion on BTC have to do with FTX's obligation to return the assets deposited with it, or whether their renumeration constitutes 'making customers whole'?
> So what does the USG's opinion on BTC have to do with FTX's obligation to return the assets deposited with it, or whether their renumeration constitutes 'making customers whole'?
Given that the USG is the only entity that could legally require these customers be made whole, it has everything to do with it. Depositing US dollars into a FTX account is easy: the government believes in the value of the dollar and will want customers to get back the same number of dollars they put in. A court can and might order FTX's current custodians to do their best to make that happen.
But if a customer didn't give FTX any dollars, but gave them BTC? The USG has no obligation to recognize those Bitcoins as having any particular value, or even any value whatsoever. In fact the government may be incentivized to value BTC deposited at zero, because doing so might free up more dollars to compensate people who deposited dollars, assuming there isn't enough to compensate everyone fully.
I feel like I'm experiencing whiplash. When it's convenient, crypto is unregulated and unprotected. But for this argument it is convenient to refer to it the matter as fiduciary, which implies trust, and declare that the only amount which matters is USD.
You might expect to only get the USD equivalent back, but not for one minute does that make you whole. A lot of money was in fact stolen.
I don't think there's any one definition of being made whole here, and people could reasonably disagree on what that means.
Ignoring bitcoin entirely for a second, I might deposit $1000 in an (unregulated, let's say) investment account. Later that amount -- unrealized, of course -- goes up to $2000. But it turns out it was all a scam and the investment manager ran away with the money. I might think I'm entitled to the full $2000, even though that may have just been a number the fraudster typed into a database, not representing anything real. Or I might argue that making me whole means also compensating me for the lost opportunity cost of keeping the money somewhere else where I could have made, say, 10% in that time. Or I might just recognize that I was duped, there was no investment, my $1000 never actually grew, and that's all I'm entitled to getting back.
I'm not sure that's how I would characterize the situation. The government can certainly treat it as a security, and try to regulate it. But if you participate in an unregulated scheme, you get to keep the pieces when it breaks.
The USD equivalent would still be higher than before due to the USD value of the asset that FTX systems would be reporting - if they hadn't been taken down in a criminal investigation, through no fault of the client.
It's good to process the emotions associated, if truly is none, then great! Still suggest meditating if something didn't get pushed under the mind's rug with the financial loss.
Definitely move on, this case had some external closure where most hurts in life don't.
> Should I feel vindictive? Or is it healthy to forget about it and move on? I'm not sure.
However you feel about it is the right way to feel about it. Everyone copes with things differently. Regardless, it would appear some type of justice has been done in this case.
I'm actually surprised the sentence is this low. This is Bernie Madoff territory.
This doesn't get you your money back. It doesn't even necessarily make you feel better so what's the point? This gets into the philosophy of a criminal justice system.
The noble idea behind the criminal justice system is to be restorative. The offender is to be reformed so they don't repeat their crimes and can become productive members of society. This is why we push for things like education in prison, access to mental health treatment and so on. It's for our collective good. Unfortunately, the criminal justice system in the US is predominantly retributive. We punish to make ourselves feel better. There is a ton of evidence of this and it lays bare other societal issues (eg racial disparity in sentencing).
One big argument is whether heavy sentences prevent others from committing crimes. This has been used to justify, for example, three strikes laws and 10+ year sentences for mere drug possession at the height of the war on drugs. None of this works. Such crimes are the result of over-policing, up-charging by prosecutors and material conditions.
But where it actually works is with rich people. Why? Because you fine a company or a rich person and that becomes the cost of doing business. It's factored in. But depriving the wealthy of their liberty is something the wealthy want to desperately avoid.
Case in point: the Sackler family, who are hugely responsible for the opiod epidemic by knowingly lying about the addictiveness of Oxycontin. If I had my way, the Sacklers would have every asset they own seized and they would all spend the rest of their lives in a prison cell.
Put SBF's sentence in context: this Californian man was sentenced to 10 years for carjacking and robbing a gas station with a BB gun [1]. That's roughly half of SBF's sentence. Who do you think has done more societal harm?
The point of the system is to remove threats from society. It should be long enough such that the person will never pose a threat to society again. Justice was served in this case.
thats one of the purposes. As usual Judges are not as dumb as people think. There are plenty of people who have commited crime who are exceedingly unlikely to commit it again (most murderers have a lifetime average of 1). There are more factors, punishment being one.
i don't why this is downvoted. it seems pretty logical to me. if someone commits a crime and then goes to jail, they can't commit the crime again, right?
Maybe had already internalized the idea that money "invested" in crypto is doomed to theft, or collapse. Slot machine players have a similar vibe -- the money is already gone, even before it enters the machine.
which one would make you more angry: 1) being mugged in full daylight in an area with low crime rate (maybe near where you live) 2) being mugged walking in a dark alley somewhere in the "bad" part of the town?
How about if you chose going to 2) knowing very well that muggings are a real possibility and you should probably not go there?
It’s ok and normal to feel both. If I lost tens of thousands of dollars, I’d be thinking of how much that would affect either the timing or the quality of my retirement. That would tend to make me inclined toward feeling pretty damn vindictive.
And yet, the damage is done. Feels of anger and vengeance are withdrawals from your balance of available happiness and they don’t actually affect the end result. The money’s gone. Mourn it, accept it, and move on.
I’d totally forgive anyone for wishing bad things on him if he destroyed their investment. It’s better to forgive, but sometimes that’s asking a bit much.
Hilariously with crypto, that's not necessarily true, for better or worse. The change in valuation of underlying crypto assets means that customers can sometimes be made "whole" - meaning they get back the value in USD they put in, but not including inflation and interest, so they're still poorer than they would be, but at least not out the whole amount.
It's still not resolved, but it's possible creditors in Mt Gox will be made whole. 1 BTC was worth $760 when Mt Gox went down. Today 1 BTC is around $70k, meaning they have almost $10 billion in BTC with which to pay back creditors.
Honestly I feel more vindictive toward the IRS and CA FTB who steal way, way, way more of my money and don't do anything useful with it. I still get cars smashed and I don't have free healthcare or high-speed rail.
As Rick Heicklen writes, "We are not ever going to be Sam. But we could be Caroline, or Nishad, or Natalie. Or even Michael Lewis. We could easily make the same mistakes they do." [0]
[0] https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/michael-lewis-s-blind-side, posted previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39118124