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Spending a decade in jail at age 60+ is a hell of a price to pay for a few millions. I'm tempted to believe he doesn't actually know where the coins are. If tha
by olalonde 7mo ago
Spending a decade in jail at age 60+ is a hell of a price to pay for a few millions. I'm tempted to believe he doesn't actually know where the coins are. If that's the case, he just spent 10+ years in a cage because a judge didn't believe him....
- lukan 7mo agoAt what age do you believe, 10 years in jail are a better price to pay?
- olalonde 7mo agoYounger. The opportunity cost of time scales non-linearly with age. If you're old enough, 10 years can be a life sentence.
- CrossVR 7mo agoIf I were asked to give up 10 years of my life I would rather choose to give up the final 10 years than 10 years in the prime of my life.
- Dylan16807 7mo agoIf you ask people that would still have 25+ years of life after they're freed, I bet a lot of them would willingly take that trade.
- lukan 7mo agoNobody knows how long you will have to live, especially not if you spend 10 years in an average prison. But there is a limited time of being young.
- tasuki 7mo agoI don't think there exists an amount of money I'd take in exchange for 10 years in jail, at any point in my life. 10 years is a long time. And sure, it depends on the jail... Can I like go for at least a short bike ride or go running? Can I have my computer and internet and Hacker News? Can I drink my oolongs and pu-erhs? Is the food delicious? But then it's not much of a jail anymore...
- N7lo4nl34akaoSN 7mo ago1 trillion dollars.
- tasuki 7mo agoCan I use the 1 trillion dollars to make my jail stay more comfortable? If not, then I'm not interested. What would I do with 1 trillion dollars to offset the missing 10 years? Perhaps if there was a good chance I could prolong my "still healthy" years by 20 years or more, I should take it. But it seems like disappearing for 10 years would break a lot of things. People will die, friends will move on... sounds like a rather bad deal still.
- N7lo4nl34akaoSN 7mo ago1 quadrillion dollars. I'm not sure if I would take it either. I would feel better earning (a fraction of) the money instead of just sitting around for it.
- cbg0 7mo agoIt depends on what life you've lived so far.
- latexr 7mo agoSeveral people in the comments are focusing too much on the 10 years and on if that’s an acceptable trade-off. It’s worth pointing out no one knew it would be 10 years, not even the judge. The sentence wasn’t “10 years”, it was “indefinitely until we get an answer”. It just so happens that 10 years is when this judge decided “alright, we’re not going to get an answer, no point in the jail time”.
- cultofmetatron 7mo ago10 years for refusing to to say where he found gold is wild. people who committed fraud against elderly people and child molesters often get sentenced for less than that.
- heavyset_go 7mo agoHe defrauded his investors. As much as I find that funny, what he did was a white collar crime that has consequences.
- DetroitThrow 7mo agoYeah it's a sad consequence but... He effectively stole from others, why are people shocked? And yes contempt charges shouldn't go this long, but that's a separate qualm than "should he be criminally charged at all".
- fn-mote 7mo agoRight. It’s a mystery to me how on one day on HN you will see “corporate death penalty” discussed and on the next “$400MM white collar crimes should not be punished as much as murdering a single person”. If this were Apple, Google, or Meta having committed the crime, I think the tenor of the discussion would be very different.
- xmodem 7mo agoIt's almost as if comments on a website called "hacker news" are written by individuals with differing and varying opinions, and not by some nebulous hive-mind that purports to be internally consistent.
- chrisweekly 7mo agoSarcasm was unnecessary to make this excellent point.
- heavyset_go 7mo ago
- vaginaphobic 7mo ago[dead]
- bredren 7mo agoThis presumes he knew he would be held that long. Presuming he holds keys to vast wealth, the calculation would have shifted over time. Especially once he was serving his original sentence again starting a year ago. Another consideration is that many go to jail longer with no upside once getting released.
- jbstack 7mo agoAccording to the article, the lawsuit said the coins were worth up to $400m. That's more than a "few" millions, it's $40m per year spent in jail. I think the bigger issue for him is that it will be very hard to launder all of that without getting caught.
- Fargren 7mo agoAt no point in my life would I choose to spend 10 years in jail for $400m. Only if my current living situation was very poor and this was my only way out of it. I can sort of imagine why one would... but it seems like an awful decision to me. It seems more plausible to me he actually doesn't have the gold.
- craftkiller 7mo agoI would in a heartbeat. $400,000,000 is never-work-again-in-your-life money. Not just for me, but for my parents and other members of my family. You could put it into bonds at a mere 2% APY (far lower than current interest rates) and get 8 million dollars per year in interest for doing nothing. At 16 waking hours per day, we're losing at least half of that with work, so it would only take 1 additional decade before I break even in terms of time, not even considering the vastly improved quality of life having millions of dollars of annual passive income nets you. I could even afford dram.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- carlosjobim 7mo agoI'm sure there's an elegant gentleman willing to offer you much more than 400 million in exchange of a bare eternity of imprisonment.
- anal_reactor 7mo agoMe too. I hate my corporate job. Once I leave jail I'd still have a good chunk of life in front of me.
- pingou 7mo agoSeems more like sunk cost fallacy, after 12 months in jail you could be unwilling to give up and tell where the treasure is, because then you would have spent a year in jail for nothing, and then it just gets worse and worse each passing year...