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She's the star witness against Sam Bankman-Fried. Her testimony was explosive
- Animats 3y agoA minor note: "But at a separate trial, expected to take place next year, Bankman-Fried will face charges of bribery and bank fraud."
- everly 3y ago>When the prosecution asked Ellison whether she could identify Bankman-Fried for the jury, Ellison stood, squinted and scanned the room. It took almost a minute for her to locate him. Sounds hilariously awkward, must have felt like an eternity
- laweijfmvo 3y agoWhy was this relevant/important? Is SBF's guilt based on the testimony of a witness that "saw" him at the scene of the crime or something?
- tennisflyi 3y agoSOP for witnesses to ID the defendant of any trail.
- jlmorton 3y agoI haven't seen any color added to this observation - was she making a joke about SBF's haircut?
- chunkymilk 3y agoThe "Judging Sam" podcast had some color on this from a reporter who was there. It felt to them like she was a bit overwhelmed at being walked into a packed courtroom with everyone staring at her then being asked to point out a guy who's appearance had changed a lot recently (haircut and suit/tie). Personally, I can't imagine being very composed in that situation at that age.
- bigmattystyles 3y agoI thought she was 30
- true_religion 3y agoWhen you say “at that age”, it makes me curious… do you know that she is 29?
- peferron 3y agoThe first time I read about this in the news it was 10 seconds, the second time it was 30, and now it's a minute.
- isk517 3y agoSome say she is still scanning the court room to this very day.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- JackOfCrows 3y agoStarting to think the whole "put my ex girlfriend in charge of the business where I am committing massive financial fraud" plan had some flaws but I'm a boy genius on magazine covers so that can't be right
- dvngnt_ 3y agoeveryone knows you can't prosecute a bf and gf of the same crime
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- maxfurman 3y agoTime will tell whether or not SBF has "the worst fucking attorneys"
- tialaramex 3y agoThe problem of who you prosecute when it's unclear which of a group actually did it is why English common law has "Joint Enterprise". [Whether this is sometimes abused is a different question] If the Crown can convince the jury that you were one of a group of people with some common criminal purpose (e.g. scare a family into not going to the cops, rob a jewellery store, break someone out of prison) and that some specific crime was committed by someone in the group and that a reasonable person could have foreseen that this might happen in the course of the purpose based on what you knew, then you are guilty of the specific crime under this "Joint Enterprise" doctrine even though the jury weren't convinced, and may never have been shown evidence, that you did it and you claim only to have intended the broader crime, likely with a much lower tariff (e.g. murder usually means a long prison stretch, robbery not so much)
- SilasX 3y agoI think the parent was making a coy reference to the TV show Arrested Development, how it has a couple with the confused belief that the state can't prosecute both a husband and wife for the same crime[1]. In any case, in the US, the analogous legal structure for prosecuting such enterprise crimes is generally RICO: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Racketeer_Influenced_and_Corrupt_Organizations_Act&useskin=vector#Summary https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Racketeer_Influen... [1] which I always read as those characters getting the wires crossed between double jeopardy (you can't re-prosecute someone for the same criminal act) and marital privilege (you get some level of protection from prosecution when you're married since spouses can't be forced to testify against each other). In the show, their attorney really does suck and they make excuses for him.
- Eji1700 3y agoSo not a ton that's that surprising as someone who's been following this, but this was something special: > Ellison testified how colleagues at Alameda set up accounts on the Chinese exchange tied to the identities of Thai prostitutes, hoping they could somehow use those accounts to siphon the money away from the frozen account.
- almost_usual 3y agoIsn’t the whole point of cryptocurrency to avoid centralized authorities that can do exactly this?
- ceejayoz 3y agoIf you have a big red button marked "do not push ever", and everyone goes and pushes the button, perhaps the problem is less the people and more the button.
- nightski 3y agoNo, not all cryptocurrencies are decentralized. There's nothing about a blockchain that requires decentralization. It's a key tenet of some of the coins, but not all.
- Retric 3y agoThere’s no point to the crypto part of cryptocurrencies if it’s centralized. You just have a currency.
- nightski 3y agoI'm not sure I follow. Having an immutable system of record (verified by crypto) is of value without decentralization and the blockchain is one realization of that.
- Retric 3y agoThere’s nothing immutable about a private blockchain. Suppose Company X buys 100k in hashing power and signs everything accordingly so it all looks fine. How do you know they didn’t instead buy 200k and run two blockchains side by side until they need to pick one months later? Alternatively, they instead buy 1M in hashing power so they can spend 1 day making a believable 10 days worth of history on 100k hashing power blockchain. Now you can argue publishing a blockchain makes it immutable, but so does publishing anything else. Don’t want people to see the data? Publish hashes of your database backups.
- chollida1 3y agohttps://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/1712461930424631499 https://twitter.com/innercitypress/status/171246193042463149... This guy has been doing amazing work of live blogging the trial if you want to follow along. The biggest revelation that I found out that wasn't in Michael Lewis' book is that alameda got preferential trading treatment from FTX the exchange. Molly White has also been doing great work of doing daily summaries. https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-ftx-trial-day-six https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/the-ftx-trial-day-six The winners of the FTX bankruptcy may end up to be those of us who bought up FTX bankruptcy claims for 20 cents on the dollar after it came out that FTX invested $500M in Anthropic back in 2021. That investment alone could be worth atleast 4x that value now.
- not2b 3y agoMichael Lewis's book is such an embarrassment to him that it may permanently ruin his reputation. It seems he was completely taken in by Sam Bankman-Fried.
- chollida1 3y ago> Michael Lewis's book is such an embarrassment to him that it may permanently ruin his reputation. It seems he was completely taken in by Sam Bankman-Fried I doubt it will have any effect on his reputation at all. He doesn't say Sam is innocent, heck he doesn't take sides at all. He just writes about what he say without any judgement. What specifically about the book do you think will may permanently ruin his reputation.
- jasonjmcghee 3y agoI read this book. The tone of the entire thing is “look how amazing this guy is”. If you read a book that presented Elizabeth Holmes or Bernie Madoff in this way, what would be your perspective? I don’t pretend to have the facts or know for certain of anyone’s sure guilt, but a lot of the evidence is awfully damning. (For example) Michael Lewis strongly insinuated that SBF took calculated and justifiable risk when losing track of $X00M for months at a time
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dubcanada 3y agoI mean obviously this is a court and you're supposed to not lie. But is there not a conflict of interest here? They were together at one point, were business partners. Why wouldn't she just blast him as hard as possible, as that's her way out. Surely most of this testimony has to be taken with a grain of salt. She is 100% not capable of washing her hands, she knew what she was doing.
- not2b 3y agoShe pleaded guilty to multiple crimes. This kind of thing is common: to prosecute the boss you need the testimony of the underlings, even if the underlings are also guilty.
- ceejayoz 3y ago> Surely most of this testimony has to be taken with a grain of salt. Yes; the prosecution's job will be to weave this into the other facts and bits of testimony they introduce as evidence. The trial will not hinge on one single piece of evidence. > She is 100% not capable of washing her hands, she knew what she was doing. She has already pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
- foogazi 3y ago> She has already pled guilty to two counts of wire fraud Just two counts? Isn’t every transfer a crime ? Hmm, this will skew the demographics of the FBI crime database
- pcwalton 3y agoIt generally doesn't make much of a difference for sentencing how many counts there are; like charges group under the US Sentencing Guidelines.
- jihadjihad 3y ago> Why wouldn't she just blast him as hard as possible, as that's her way out She pleaded guilty to seven felony counts. I don't think her goal is to "wash her hands" necessarily, the whole point of having her in the prosecution's pocket is to corroborate testimony and tell the truth
- almost_usual 3y ago> In early 2021, a Chinese cryptocurrency exchange froze Alameda's trading account, and the firm lost access to approximately $1 billion in assets. The anti-thesis of cryptocurrency.
- SilasX 3y agoCan we stop with this kind of low-effort snipe on cryptocurrency exchange topics? Yes, if you run a crypto exchange, you have to interface between crypto and the conventional financial markets. So yes, you at times have to hold money with others in trust and are vulnerable to those counterparty risks. That's not some kind of brilliant "gotcha". --- Edit: Okay. Since HN now seems to love low-effort "gotchas", maybe I should take some time to show what a meaningful, curious discussion, that actually attempts to engage, would look like. So: You've heard that crypto is trustless. With that curious hacker mentality, you think you've found a contradiction (that wasn't addressed the 30 times this came up before): hey, why was FTX trusting someone with their crypto assets? Doesn't crypto obviate that? Yes and no. Like others might have told you in those previous 30 discussions, at the point where you have to move something from the trustless crypto realm to the conventional financial system, the conventional part doesn't have the same trustless guarantees, and you are vulnerable to assets being frozen. Since the role of a crypto exchange is often to interface between the crypto realm and the conventional, then, in those cases, the crypto can be seized the same way. For example, if your exchange exists to interface between crypto and the Chinese financial system, then anything held on the latter side of it can be seized under the Chinese financial system's rules. Similarly, if you trust someone with physical cash, you have less protections against them running away with it than if you e.g. paid them via PayPal. "Okay but then still, doesn't that mean that some subset could still live in the trustless realm of cryptocurrency? Why use an exchange for that part?" Well, one downside of the trustless crypto realm is that transactions are more expensive -- you incur costs to maintain the trustless guarantee. Depending on your specific use case, you may consider an institution trustworthiness enough, and the alternative expensive enough, to do the trustful way. So, yes, it is a valid criticism to say, "hey, despite being trustless, it sure sucks that crypto can't also bring down costs to handle all this stuff on cost comparable to conventional." Of course, there are limits to that to: as long as you have to convert back to the conventional financial system -- which that FTX exchange existed to facilitate -- you still have to trust counterparties in the financial system at some point. There, mystery solved! Now I have a comment to reword for the next 30 times someone makes this brilliant argument!
- draw_down 3y ago[dead]
- ilaksh 3y agoThis whole episode can offer some perspective for startups because it shows how the popularity of a startup is not necessarily connected to it's actual merit. It's not that merit and popularity aren't related, it's just that they aren't the same thing. Also, receiving a lot of investment or having many customers is not the same thing as being a real business.
- baq 3y agoThe most I’m getting out of this is don’t run a billion dollar business on a cocktail of stimulants
- listenallyall 3y agoI kind of have a feeling that if you somehow performed a complete, comprehensive audit of the employees of many billion dollar businesses, tech and traditional, you'd find an enormous variety of stimulants and drugs, some prescribed, many not
- baq 3y agoAbsolutely but adderal for breakfast, lunch, dinner and as a sleeping pill is probably rather rare.
- rubymancer 3y ago> Ultimately, Ellison said, Alameda transferred $100 million in payments to what she understood to be Chinese government officials to unfreeze the account, which could constitute a bribe. Heeeey, $100 million could constitute a bribe. That's more than I make in a year!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- krisoft 3y agoI think you are misunderstanding the sentence. It is not the amount of money which makes it a bribe vs not a bribe. It is not like $100 million “could” be a bribe while $200 would have definietly been a bribe and two cents would not have been a bribe. What the sentence says is that the specific act, depending on circumstances can be construed a bribe. One possible defense under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is if the payment was made for a lawfull purpose of the local country. For example if it was payment of some legitimate fine or tax that would make it not a bribe. The same law also has exceptions for “facilitating or expediting payments" made in furtherance of routine governmental action. Altough it is unlikely that this specific instance would count as one.
- jacquesm 3y agoTypically bribes are to individuals and fines are to government institutions.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y agoSequoia needs to be investigated and those who were involved in perpetuating this fraud need to be imprisoned. They are as culpable in this as anybody else.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat will never happen.
- Sniffnoy 3y agoThe canonical link for this is https://www.npr.org/2023/10/11/1205045583/sam-bankman-fried-trial-caroline-ellison-ftx-alameda-research https://www.npr.org/2023/10/11/1205045583/sam-bankman-fried-... so this should point to that.
- Rygian 3y agoI prefer the no cookies link, thanks.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoSome other discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37851870 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37851870
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Simulacra 3y agoZeke Faux's book(1) on crypto pretty much sums up what most people believe: SBF knowingly ran a Ponzi scheme, or at the very least knowingly stole from investors, but that all of them had a knowing hand in it and bear responsibility. Michael Lewis's book(2) however is much more sympathetic, painting SBF as a hapless nerd with autism, who meant well but wasn't socially adept enough to knowingly commit a crime; he broke the law for a good cause; altruism. I think the jury is going to have to wrestle with these two ideas, a crime versus culpability of "super smart kids" that got in over their heads. I think therein lies what will be a hung jury. 1. Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall by Zeke Faux 2. Going Infinite by Michael Lewis