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Sam Bankman-Fried is ‘under supervision’ in Bahamas?
- a9h74j 4y agoHe was going to tunnel his ultimate do-gooding to a future century. Turns out, it seems, remaining funds were tunneled out via a freeze-plug, and the founders are trying to tunnel to Dubai.
- mberning 4y agoI see strong support for crypto “assets” in the $0 range.
- jfghi 4y agoBut if you fit to a infinitely parameterized ML-boosted quantum inverted hypersonic cosine it’s quite clear that it’s nothing more than a strong buy signal ready for a 125x breakthrough prior to the next decadium /s
- rvnx 4y agoThe thing is, Bitcoin will always have intrinsic value even if everybody sell their coins because some idiots like me invested in this thing long time ago and lost their keys. All this lost and irrecoverable money is a good basis for valuation. Also, one question: where are all these people who claimed that Bitcoin was a good inflation hedge ?
- jfghi 4y agoWhat happened to the key? I think society is desperate for inflation hedges so perhaps it’s a strong marketing tool regardless of how accurate it might be.
- zen21 4y agoWhy is the unrecoverable money a good basis for valuation? It just means the total number of coins is slightly lower.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- notatoad 4y ago> where are all these people who claimed that Bitcoin was a good inflation hedge? Same place they always were: making bad takes in relative anonymity with zero consequences for being wrong. And that’s fine: you should be able to say dumb things anonymously with no consequences. The consequences come for the people who make investments on the basis of anonymous shitposts
- dragonwriter 4y ago> Bitcoin will always have intrinsic value even if everybody sell their coins because some idiots like me invested in this thing long time ago and lost their keys. Lost coins are not support for intrinsic value. Use-value that doesn't depend on the market is intrinsic. Value from perceptions and perceived scarcity (even if the perception is driven by actual scarcity) is extrinsic. But I don't think lost coins supports the existence of even extrinsic value; it might be an extrinsic >1 multiplier on value from some other source by increasingn scarcity, but it won’t provide a baseline of value if nothing else does.
- tptacek 4y agoPeople have been saying stuff like this about Bankman-Fried for days now. It's an easy story to tell. When it's for real, the source will be better than a "source familiar with the matter", and it'll run somewhere more credible than Cointelegraph.
- listenallyall 4y agoI would wager multiple BTC (if I had them) that Cointelegraph has far better and reliable contacts among insiders within the crypto space than NYTimes, FT, Economist, CNBC, etc.
- eganist 4y agoMaybe, but cointelegraph also has no sources (best guess) in law enforcement, IC/fincen, etc. The others very likely do, and it's been long enough that anyone who'd care has long ago adapted to the crypto space anyway. It would've been a different story five years ago, but not today.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoSteal money from people. Make yourself and your VC crook buddies like Sequoia rich. Board a private jet to Dubai. I mean why not? If you drop morals, this is a great gig.
- mkl 4y ago3 days ago, "Sequoia has marked its investment in FTX down to $0": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33541344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33541344
- AustinDev 4y agoHow many FTT coins were the Sequoia partners given as part of the deal or sold at very low prices? AFAIK from the crypto deals in VC I've been an observer to that is the normal way business occurs. We give you $200m you sell each partner $50m worth of your scam coin for $50,000.
- twelve40 4y ago2 days ago, "FTX’s Bankman-Fried Quietly Invested More than $500 Million in Sequoia and Other VCs"
- notch656a 4y agoWhy do people flee to Dubai? It's my understanding they almost never naturalize non-arabs, so any fugitive would forever be on perilous grounds. Honestly the dude could be in a boat god knows where in the Caribbean, slipping in and out of international waters to the point where no one knows where he is.
- Hellion 4y agoThey take bribes in the form of local business investment. If you can dump a few hundo k a year into the economy, they’ll let you get away with almost anything
- from 4y agoIt's slowly beginning to change. They used to fight but they don't care as much about non Emiratis anymore. Even less diplomatically important countries like South Africa have gotten extraditions. Look at Ramon Abbas ("Ray Hushpuppi"). Spent much of his BEC millions in Dubai and still got shipped off to America.
- Hellion 4y agoHe was running scams out of Dubai. Big bad look for them. If you take your winnings and lay low, they’ll probably leave you alone.
- atdrummond 4y agoI mean, while functionally true, the lived experience for a Dubai millionaire versus a typical immigrant labourer. They can afford to make expenditures to make their life easier. Which is good - it increases the chance they eventually slip up.
- foundajob 4y ago
- pclmulqdq 4y agoDubai is a good stopping off point before you disappear forever. They are very happy to take bribes from rich people and they will let you set up your infrastructure so that you can go off grid.
- zaptheimpaler 4y agolmaooooo. EA has always seemed like a bullshit larp for extremely online and naive people. i dont know how anyone took it seriously. in the end this is just another retelling of the same old boring finance lessons Buffet or Taleb or Burry or hundreds before them know. high leverage is the only way to get rich QUICK but it can wipe you out just as quickly. crypto is generally bullshit, the leaders are mostly grifters and its good to see the tide finally revealing them for who they are. no one seems to talk about how all the underlying concepts of finance apply identically to crypto as they do to any boring old currency, asset, stock, option or any financial instrument. but they do.. moving to a blockchain does not change any of that in the slightest. Sam is basically George Bluth now
- HPMOR 4y agoI'm sorry but these two points are extremely disconnected. EA really has no bearing on the financial mechanisms that undid SBF. Furthermore, although he was a prime donor to EA, I don't think his involvement with it necessarily discredits them.
- ryanobjc 4y agoHe’s one of EA highest profiles adherents. EA style thinking permeates SBF. This is the world EAs want - the one they’ve been advocating for a long time. It’s just in this iteration it failed. If the chance of success was higher than X% vs the risk of failing, it was all worth it. That’s the kind of morally bankrupt philosophy EA pushes.
- moistly 4y ago> EA really has no bearing on the financial mechanisms that undid SBF. It had bearing on the ethical/moral decisions he has been making. EA has allowed him to justify doing blatantly illegal acts.
- smk_ 4y agoIt’s more likely he tried to cover up massive Alameda losses due to all the usual reasons people turn to illegal acts: shame, myopia, gambling addiction. One core EA principle is integrity. If he was actually “EA”, this wouldn’t have happened the way it did.
- typon 4y agoEffective altruist but ineffective criminal
- bhouston 4y agoHonestly, if I was knowingly running a $10B scam, buying into the mastermind criminal lifestyle, and it was obviously collapsing, the first thing I would do would be to flee the country to a place without an extradition treaty. Why did they stick around? Incompetence?
- mudrockbestgirl 4y agoI'm wondering the same thing. He must've known for a long time it'll come crashing down eventually and made proper arrangements. Perhaps the sources are fake and he has already fled. If I were to find myself in the middle of running such a scam and was a billionaire I would spend all my waking hours preparing ways to get out of it.
- zen21 4y agoI think this kind of reasoning comes from ‘you’ as you are now imagining yourself suddenly ‘finding yourself’ in that situation - a bit like the character in Quantum Leap. SBF seems like Evel Knievel - i.e. he became identified with being SBF. It wasn’t a heist as such. Just the byproduct of him playing this fictional ‘genius’ character, and then getting so into it that he forgot it was just a role play.
- mudrockbestgirl 4y agoYeah I get what you're saying and there's something to it. It's just difficult to imagine to become disillusioned to the point where you're not realizing your criminal actions. I think something like Theranos is a different story. In that case it would've been much harder to escape for the founder. But for someone in crypto like SBF...
- zen21 4y agoI am think he knew something was wrong, but probably was in denial about it, and held on to the idea that as a genius he’d be able to get out of it.
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- tjmc 4y ago
- tjr225 4y ago
- readthenotes1 4y agoSo I see. (Sorry, but you almost begged me to do it!)
- dang 4y agoPlease don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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- dang 4y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments. We're trying for something else here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- lost_tourist 4y agoI wonder why he didn't head for Russia, China, or Nicaragua or something?
- proamdev123 4y agoFt