That’s right. The whole crypto mindset that govt regulation is a bad thing facilitates theft. There’s a reason for govt regulation of financial transactions - it’s to prevent fraud. Prosecuting fraudsters after the fact does not mean that the fleecees ever see their money again, no matter how long the fleecer is in the clink.
Can you imagine how pretentiously tedious the dinner conversations were in that family house when SBF was growing up? The privileged 0.1% discussing morality like it’s a game with the proles as chess pieces. It should be no surprise that he became an amoral creep.
You mean it isn’t and they aren’t?
Wow. Mind blown.
Are university professors top 0.1% in the US? I know Stanford is a top school but surely it doesn’t pay that well?
The seem to come from generational wealth and made money from writing and consulting besides their Stanford salary. Their kids went to one of the most expensive prep schools in the country
Law professors tend to be wealthier than professors of literature.
Well, yes and no. As @TroutMan has noted, it’s old fashioned fraud, stealing customer assets - but the reason that this fraud is possible is that crypto does not in fact deliver the security that it promised. The majority* of crypto is not held directly by the owner, but in custodial wallets - without the strict regulatory oversight of customer assets held at banks or brokerages.
*I think it’s the majority. The fact that I can’t easily google what proportion is held in custodial vs non-custodial wallets is iself troubling.
Yes, and I agree with what you said up-thread - that’s what the crypto community wants. Until they get ripped off.
I’m sure most people have seen this by now, the schtick being Larry playing various Larry characters though the ages thinking that brilliant new ideas are dumb - the wheel, the flushing toilet, the light bulb - culminating in FTX. And of course the really amusing thing in retrospect being that FTX was not like these other things and the Larry character was right about FTX.
But there’s another one they slipped in there - a Larry character with John Hancock et al at the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
– The people shall have the right to vote!
– Even the stupid ones?
And I guess the jury’s out on whether Larry was right or wrong on this one, whether this United States startup where the USP is “democracy” is going to pan out.
FTX was the first uniform advertising I recall in Major League Baseball. The umpires wore a patch. I had to google WTF it was. I wonder if the MLB got paid all they were due? I wonder if they’re re-thinking this particular source of revenue.
His father is a tax expert in favor of progressive taxation:
Social Welfare and the Rate Structure: A New Look At Progressive Taxation
His mother is with the Stanford Center on Poverty & Inequality.
P.S. There are conservative professors at the Stanford-affiliated Hoover Institution, and I don’t mean to imply that only progressives deeply care about those in poverty. I just post this to suggest that the family situation may be hard to judge from the outside.
I was wondering about that. A perceived advantage of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies was that they are separate from government money and traditional banks. But they’re also separate from the regulatory framework that’s been built around government money and traditional banks.
Okay, so he’d been convicted on all counts, but the sentencing is not until March? Is that to allow some time for his attorneys to launch appeals? Will he be locked-up until then, or out on his own recognizance, and then turn himself in, like what’s-her-name with the blood drops?
There’s an acronym in the cyrpto world DYOR (Do Your Own Research). The implication is that if you got rooked, it probably is your own fault, since you must have been careless. But what I got out of reading this book is that virtually no one in the crypto consumer world is capable of the sort of math heavy, error-free, own-research needed to reliably detect that they are being played, and, eventually, the great majority are played.
It’s like saying “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” (“Crypto doesn’t rob people, fraudsters rob people”), and it’s just as disingenuous.
'Zactly. IMO there are two categories of “crypto bros”. The enthusiastic booster consumers, and the folks promoting their exchanges, or coins, or whatever to those consumers.
The former is like the Gold Rush miners in California 175 years ago. The latter is like the guys selling shovels. But mostly like the guys selling, and reselling, fake mining claims to non-existence parcels.
Guess who makes the most money in those scenarios?
He is in jail and he will remain there. He will probably stay there until sentencing and then go to the Club Fed. Where he is now is horrible.
Lawyers from both sides will recommend a sentence that the judge will use that to make his decisions which could be outside of the parameters of what the two sides recommend. He could be let out pending appeal but that’s unlikely.
Yeah, I was wondering about that. I think if I were him I’d want a much earlier date for sentencing. But I suppose the 6th Amendment doesn’t really extend to that.
I assume he’ll ultimately be making license plates or furniture in a lot security prison.
Someone educated like him would become a Teacher in a regular prison. He would teach basic classes to help people get their GED or help them write documents for their legal stuff. This might not be a needed skill in the security level of Federal prison where he will end up. That’s heavily going to be white collar educated criminals.