[somenewaccount1]

The idiot (Sam) took billions of peoples hard saved assets and let a 27 year old twit day trade gamble it down the tube.

IMHO, 100% of all the assets are "Stolen or Missing". Sam stole them. That's where they went. He did it. That was the guy. He's right there. Just look at him. Where are the assets? Sam stole them. And then spent them and snorted them and then spent some more. And yeah, he probably didn't secure them very well either, so once crypto hackers knew he was a thief they just dove right in and helped themselves.

I suspect this will be an unpopular opinion - but I respect Bernie Madoff more than Sam Bankman Fried. Bernie knew he was a fraud. When he was busted, the only question he had was what took them so long. There is an honesty of guilt there. This guy just thinks "he made mistakes". Bullshit. You don't transfer custodial assets to a losing gambling routine and "it's just a mistake". That's like Achmed calling it "just a flesh wound".

I hope Sam gets life in prison or worse.

[dang]

Would you please not fulminate on HN? No one's saying you owe billionaire fraudster wunderkinds better, but you owe this community better if you're posting here, regardless of how strongly you feel.

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

[somenewaccount1]

Oh God. Thanks for the flag. I was not fulminating though, I was pointing out factual matter that no one else wants to say outright: SBF is, was, and forever shall be a thief.

35 others upvoted my comment, it appears the community liked it just fine.

I owe you nothing. You owe me an apologie.

[dang]

It was fulminating in the sense that the HN guidelines mean the word: intense, low-information venting. Far from "no one else wanting to say it", it was interchangeable with hundreds if not thousands of similar comments that have been posted so far. That's a clear sign that there's nothing new in such a post, therefore nothing to learn from it, and therefore that it is not related to intellectual curiosity, which is what we're optimizing for here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

I'm not saying your feelings aren't justified - just that that sort of comment is obviously against the mandate of this site.

As for upvotes, fulminating and other indignant comments routinely get upvoted—this is a weakness of the voting system, and is why HN is regulated not just by upvotes but also by flags, various software mechanisms, and moderation. Past explanations about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....

Certainly you don't owe me anything—but every commenter here owes some things to the community, and this is one.

[TacticalCoder]

> The idiot (Sam) took billions of peoples hard saved assets and let a 27 year old twit day trade gamble it down the tube.

That's the same story those who portrayed SBF as a hero now try to sell you.

Go back and read the explanation of the scam from those who explained the scam while it was ongoing (months and even years it blew up). From independent journalists to traders to even people testifying against FTX in front of congress: several saw SBF was a nobody and that he was full of shit (some junior trader who successfully executed three minor arbitrage at Jane Street on some minor market or something: nobody knew his name in the finance world, he was a complete no-name).

These people who sniffed him for the fraud he was have got a different story.

Here are a few interesting facts:

- top lawyer at FTX, Dan Friedberg, is an ex- colleague of the top lawyer at BitFinex, Stuart Hoegner... What did they both work on as colleagues? Biggest online poker scam, where a company wrote a poker server with a "god mode" to defraud players. Coincidence right? I mean... FTX / BitFinex, just a coincidence.

- SBF said he was fed up with the usual crypto exchanges that couldn't be trusted

- first thing SBF does is send $$$ to tether (through 100+ fake companies/banks like Moonstone banks and the like) in exchange for USDTs

So he doesn't trust exchange, but sends over the years billions of his customers' real USD to the most shady of them all to get, in exchange, counterfeited money (tether/USDT)? And the top FTX lawyer happens to have been involved in both a fraud and a coverup with the top lawyer at BitFinex.

BTW it's the Panama papers that revealed that the gang between tether and BitFinex where the exact same people.

Every single Bitcoin pump is linked to insane volume on the BTC/USDT trading pair. Even the last one, done through FTX/Alameda, when Coinbase and USDC were already big.

So everything circles around tether / Bitfinex (who are still in the game, compared to SBF / FTX / Alameda).

And that official story: "The 27 years old lost it all to bad leveraged trades that had no stop-losses".

OK, sure. Fine. Maybe.

But tell me... Wasn't it Bitfinex or Bitfinex's Alameda on the other side of that trade? (for Bitfinex also has the same structure with their own "independent" trading arm, whose name I currently forgot).

I mean... Let's not talk about the petty $40 m in donations to grease politicians (mostly democrats but also republicans). That's petty money. Just like the rumours about $120m in real estate that SBF's parents acquired (which may or may not be true). Even if true, that's still cheap kickbacks for the money mule / fuse / useful idiots.

WHERE ARE THE FUCKING TENS OF BILLIONS?

[bluelightning2k]

From your tone, were you caught up in this? If so my condolences.

I, like many people, don't do crypto as I don't believe in the fundamental economics (no value creation). So we kind of want to see it fail as we would want a MLM business to fail.

But that's really not the same as having been burned. That really really sucks

[ipython]

I’m not involved - and own no crypto - but just as angry as the gp.

Why? I’m tired of these cryptobro idiots being held up on some sort of bullshit pedestal while people who truly get shit done have zero recognition and toil away in obscurity. It’s sickening - and 1000x more when that person is not just an idiot, but a malicious one to boot. Throw the book at them.

I enjoyed tbray’s blog post yesterday - one sentence in particular which I’ve oft repeated with crypto enthusiasts. Civilization is built on trust. You can’t “code” that away.

[cguess]

I didn't lose anything in FTX (nor do I have any crypto invested beyond some BTC change from a long time ago) and I agree with OP 100% (except the "life, or worse," I'm firmly against the death penalty but totally fine with letting him sit in a cell in Terre Haute for the rest of his life).

[sleepymoose]

> (except the "life, or worse," I'm firmly against the death penalty but totally fine with letting him sit in a cell in Terre Haute for the rest of his life).

Can I ask why you think this is better? I just did some quick math, and based on the average yearly cost of incarceration for an Adult Male in Indiana at $19,202[1], assuming SBF lives for another 50 years, that's $960,250 of tax payer dollars being used to store someonne that contributes nothing to society. So after he's stolen billions of dollars, we'll spend another million keeping him alive for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It doesn't make sense to me economically or socially. It doesn't even make sense to me as an individual, as I'd much rather just bite the bullet than spend the next few decades looking at concrete walls.

[1] https://faqs.in.gov/hc/en-us/articles/115005238288-How-much-...

[StrictDabbler]

It takes millions of dollars to go through the legal process necessary to execute somebody with any confidence in the judgment. It is vastly more expensive than life imprisonment.

It also costs a lot to go through that process and determine that execution is not justified, at which point we're still on the hook for imprisonment.

Putting somebody in jail for life is a bargain in comparison.

[1] https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/76th2011/ExhibitDo...

[sleepymoose]

Whelp, that answered my question! Seems like there's a lot of cost cutting to do across the entire board. I saw an article the other day on here talking about Riker's and it said that 1 inmate costs something like $550,000 annually.

[mrep]

Somewhat surprisingly, it is actually cheaper to just throw them in prison for the rest of their life then use the death penalty. Like 50% more to a whopping 1000% for California [0].

[0]: https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalt...

[jrochkind1]

Of all the reasons to be in favor of the state calmly killing people, to argue for it because saves money over the alternatives is truly chillingly terrifying to me.

[MonkeyClub]

> Can I ask why you think this is better? I just did some quick math, [...]

Others are discussing whether your math is correct, but the fact remains: it's murder, we shouldn't be killing people, period.

[1123581321]

Probably opposition to ending life and/or assigning a positive value to living while incarcerated, rather than making a financial calculation.

[kwere]

execution should be only for the "lost losers" of society, like school shooters & similia; rich and powerful people who value their own life, time & status would suffer immensily from being demeaned as "simple prisoners"

[thatfrenchguy]

Life in prison is so much of a harder sentence than death.

[kybernetyk]

>So we kind of want to see it fail as we would want a MLM business to fail.

Do "we" really? I like you don't see any value creation when it comes to coins, NFTs and what else is out there. But the idea of a crypto _currency_ is great. I just want the speculation to end and for people to use it as it was intended: As an alternative to government provided funny money.

[john_alan]

> (no value creation)

Do you know how Seigniorage works?

[spaceman0997]

FTX failing is not crypto failing. FTX failing just proves the fundament of crypto to be right - don't use centralized finance (yes, FTX is centralized finance).

[jqpabc123]

(yes, FTX is centralized finance).

All finance is centralized. De-centralized finance really doesn't exist --- crypto is just the latest example of this.

Before any crypto transaction who do the buyer and seller both turn to for a "fair market value" ? A *centralized* exchange.

The crypto market is controlled by companies like FTX. This still holds true even if you don't deal directly with these companies. Money equates to influence and control and crypto is no exception.

[spaceman0997]

What central authority controls Bitcoin?

> Before any crypto transaction who do the buyer and seller both turn to for a "fair market value" ? A centralized exchange.

That's the simplest way today - but definitely not a requirement, and doesn't make it centralized in any way. The centralized exchanges don't set the price (if anything, they suggest it) and they can't control transactions nor wallets. Who doesn't know the private key can't do anything with the funds on a wallet.

> The crypto market is controlled by companies like FTX. This still holds true even if you deal directly with these companies.

The "crypto market" - maybe. But they don't control the cryptocurrencies themselves in any way. This is like saying that because NASDAQ controls the $MSFT market they control Microsoft - of course they don't.

[jqpabc123]

But they don't control the cryptocurrencies themselves in any way.

Binance and Bitfinex have control over the one thing that matters most about Bitcoin --- the price. They exercise this control in the same way a central bank does --- they have access to an unlimited supply of "stablecoins" they can mint at will and use to buy/sell bitcoin as they see fit.

[spaceman0997]

The price isn't the thing that matters the most about Bitcoin...

What matters the most is that nobody can take my coins from my wallet if I don't want them to and that I can send the coins to anybody I want, however much I want and whenever I want.

[djbebs]

Did you miss the existence of decentralized exchanges?

[jerojero]

Can you turn US dollars or Euros into crypto in decentralized exchanges? As far as I remember you could only trade crypto; one token for another.

That's useful if you have crypto, but how do you get into the field in the first place? As long as people aren't being paid in crypto and can't buy and sell things in crypto there is no way to get into the system without going through someone willing to exchange crypto for fiat. And this someone tends to be a centralized exchange.

[jqpabc123]

No. Did you miss the fact that centralized exchanges set the "market" price of crypto --- even for trades on decentralized exchanges?

Yes, you can set your own asking price for crypto --- but the reality is it's unlikely you can sell for significantly more than the "market" price set by centralized exchanges. And good luck finding someone who will sell to you for significantly less.

Most people won't surrender value just for the sake of "decentralization".

[nly]

So it really wouldn't matter if someone hacked https://app.uniswap.org/ ???

No way to steal funds doing that, hmmm....

[moomin]

Yes, but the vast majority of crypto is centralised, so the moral is don’t use crypto.

[spaceman0997]

It's perfectly possible to use crypto without centralized exchanges and many people do so. As "centralized crypto" continues to fail, people will use it in a decentralized way more and more. I don't see how the conclusion is "don't use crypto". People seeked simplicity, found out there is no free lunch - that doesn't mean they will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

[tpxl]

How do you enter or exit crypto? Either through a centralized exchange or you buy/sell from/to a shady dude in the alley.

[landemva]

This is the same as entering or exiting the gold coin market. Buy it or earn it or mine it.

[jjtheblunt]

> This guy just thinks "he made mistakes"

He CLAIMS that he thinks he made mistakes. Probably lying even there.

[senthil_rajasek]

While I sympathize with most of your frustrations I have to take offense to your casual use of a "racist muslim caricature" Achmed in your response.

That caricature propagates the stereotype that all Brown people are terrorists.

In 2022 America, I thought we were well past that stereotype.

This wikipedia page details a lot of the criticisms around the Achmed racist stereotype.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dunham

Thank you.

[z3c0]

I was more offended by the vicarious reference to something as brilliantly funny as the Holy Grail via something as terribly unfunny as Jeff Dunham.

[mikestew]

Not being familiar with the meme, my first thought was “78 viewings, and I’m just now learning that the Black Knight had a name?”

[kranke155]

SBF is a sociopath no question.

[infamouscow]

Sam lives in The Bahamas, an archipelagic state consisting of thousands of islands, cays, and islets.

A fatal boating accident is simply a foregone conclusion.