3 ms·

I know some people who worked with SBF at Jane Street, and their opinion was that he was both very smart and extremely risk tolerant. And this comes from a com

I know some people who worked with SBF at Jane Street, and their opinion was that he was both very smart and extremely risk tolerant. And this comes from a company where people regularly bet thousands of dollars with each other on trivial things (one guy I know lost $10000 on coin flips at one party). It turned out that FTX itself was just one giant leveraged trade, not the legitimate exchange business we all thought. SBF did the kimchi arbitrage back in 2017, which also shows an immense tolerance for risk and a disregard for the exact definitions of rules.

wslh 4y ago
It is interesting you separate "immense tolerance for risk and a disregard for the exact definitions of rules". You can be infinitely tolerant for risk but not at the expense of (some) ethics: stealing other people money. So, there is tolerance for risk and there is: your are a f****** plain (white collar) thief. We can also include the factor of being an American citizen which makes could make things worse in this case.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Yes, you can take huge risks within the law if you want, and if you do, have fun! You're probably going to lose it all at some point soon. Cryptocurrency/Web3 has had a lot of actual fraudsters and thieves, and a lot of them deserve jail time. Hopefully, some of them will get some. By the way, expanding on the arbitrage I mentioned, the Kimchi arbitrage was a well-known trade and the big players in cryptocurrency weren't doing it for good reasons. South Korea's capital controls and anti-money laundering laws would make it very difficult to do legally without risking your other trading operations in the country. SBF was brazen enough to go for it (and risk-tolerant enough to carry a huge number of Bitcoins on his balance sheet for the ~week it takes for them to actually move) and it worked out well for him. In retrospect, it revealed a lot about his personality.

wslh 4y ago

It is interesting you separate "immense tolerance for risk and a disregard for the exact definitions of rules". You can be infinitely tolerant for risk but not at the expense of (some) ethics: stealing other people money. So, there is tolerance for risk and there is: your are a f****** plain (white collar) thief. We can also include the factor of being an American citizen which makes could make things worse in this case.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
Yes, you can take huge risks within the law if you want, and if you do, have fun! You're probably going to lose it all at some point soon. Cryptocurrency/Web3 has had a lot of actual fraudsters and thieves, and a lot of them deserve jail time. Hopefully, some of them will get some. By the way, expanding on the arbitrage I mentioned, the Kimchi arbitrage was a well-known trade and the big players in cryptocurrency weren't doing it for good reasons. South Korea's capital controls and anti-money laundering laws would make it very difficult to do legally without risking your other trading operations in the country. SBF was brazen enough to go for it (and risk-tolerant enough to carry a huge number of Bitcoins on his balance sheet for the ~week it takes for them to actually move) and it worked out well for him. In retrospect, it revealed a lot about his personality.