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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Author, journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin plans to interview SBF on Nov. 30th

https://twitter.com/andrewrsorkin/status/1595517635441090565

SBF confirms

https://twitter.com/SBF_FTX/status/1595512579417378837

Even though SBF limited his replies to only people he follows, he is still getting trashed in his comments. Others are livid as well.

Does SBF deserve a platform despite being presumably a major fugitive? Is this ethical on the part of Sorkin?

Why is SBF still free or at least not in trouble?

Regarding the second item, I am guessing the feds are still in the evidence gathering stage. The feds cannot just issue an arrest unless they have enough evidence to build a case that with a near 100% certainty will lead to a conviction or a plea. Kenneth Lay of Enron for example was indicted in June 2004, nearly 3 years after Enron's bankruptcy.

Dumb question but how does that actually work in practice? Does the SEC or FBI or whoever beam out a list of naughty people to gate agent terminals at airports across the country, and if someone on the naughty list tries to board the computer shows a big red warning icon or something? What's stopping SBF from driving to some rarely used Mexican border checkpoint and driving to the nearest Mexican international airport and then flying to [country without an extradition agreement with the U.S.]?

Why is SBF still free or at least not in trouble?

Because it's all about who you are and who you know. How many people got jailed after the 2008 crash? I can only think of a single person. Financial crimes pay off because you can bribe, sorry, I meant "donate", to politicians.

As someone who’s favorite movie as a teenager was The Dark Knight, let me tell you, SBF is living the dream. He’s LARPing as a cross between Two-Face and the Joker with plot armor, right down to the insane attracted-to-power on/off accomplice gf. This dude is going around spinning crazy utilitarian ethical dilemmas, releasing cryptic messages to a global audience, and inexplicably raising large amounts of capital. This is what agency looks like folks. A civilization without unaccountable, unregulated, international crypto empires can never have citizens who are truly free.

Does SBF deserve a platform despite being presumably a major fugitive?

Presumably? You know of an arrest warrant for him? One from an authority that has valid jurisdiction over him?

Is this ethical on the part of Sorkin?

What ethical rule are you suggesting Sorkin may have broken?

why you directing this at me. these are some of the comments and and concerns that other people raising . In my post I answered why they are not going after him. simply not enough evidence, too early in the investigation. The FBI and SS do travel and work with foreign governments to extradite criminals.

Is he turning up in person or is this going to be via Zoom or something? If he can fly back to the States for this, I'm surprised; I would have imagined he'd stay in the Bahamas safely out of reach for the moment. But Bankman-Fried, going by recent comments, is either delusional or still desperately clinging to the scam (e.g. his claim that 'minutes' after signing the bankruptcy agreement, billions in investment offers flooded in - how very convenient and I don't believe a word of it).

As for the NYT, they'd interview a cannibal plague rat so long as they thought they'd get headlines out of it. They may have pretensions to being 'the newspaper of record'. but nothing will stoke interest in this 'summit' like having the big name of the moment in financial fraud turning up there.

If I had to guess, almost certainly he is not flying back to the states

Does SBF deserve a platform despite being presumably a major fugitive? Is this ethical on the part of Sorkin?

I don't see why not. It's not like he killed people just to get a message or manifesto out.

So there is a line to be drawn. That's the sort of debate I am aiming for. I think in the case of SBF he should be allowed to talk but I can see certain cases where possibly a line is crossed.

The kind of scam he pulled off is pretty elaborate. The reason you'd avoid giving someone who's done crimes a platform is to avoid copycats. He's well know in his field already and I think there's little worry of unhinged members of the public deciding to 'do an FTX' in the same way that going postal is contagious.

I quite like the Supreme Court’s “imminent lawless action” standard. He deserves a platform up to and including him being dragged out of his penthouse screaming, “THE ROBOTS ARE TAKING OVER. LONG LIVE EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM, LONG LIVE MIRI.”

All establishment sources and authorized establishment underdogs seem committed to frame this primarily as a failure of crypto and not of Bankman-Fried and his cronies; the sentiment on Twitter and HN and in other places is also being amplified in this direction (with bafflingly basic takes like «non-custodial wallets are hard what if I forget my password, this is dangerous for clients», so I guess normies have been primed for the next step in their disempowerment).

Bankman-Fried, being a psychopath of some sort, is committed not to admit blame in any nuanced analysis, he'll apologize pro forma for «fucking up», but when going into details he will blame external forces like CZ, insufficient regulation, crypto bros, whatever, indeed, as per OP's link, he intends to spin such schlock about victory stolen from him in the last minute at Sorkin. So platforming him, and promoting his narrative, is in the establishment's interest, even if in the end he only compromises his own defense.

P.S. Me, not long ago, speculating:

Like they ask you in the Russian prison: there are two chairs. Say, you're a normal rationalist, it's mid-2022, and you want to use an exchange to park some of your crypto in a token. So, there are two major exchanges. ... Using only knowledge provided here, whom would you rather entrust with your money? And what would an Antisemite do?

An Antisemite in June:

"you're hiding uncollateralized loans underneath your floorboards, aren't you?"

The economic power that the American and global elite wield wouldn’t be diminished by crypto

This is only true a priori in a world where economic power is either the be-all and end-all or completely separated from matters of any import – the world where money can, at most, buy you more money. And not, like, unregistered weapons, strategic amounts of compute, or tools for fabricating a stronger sort of COVID. I suppose you genuinely believe, based on a wealth of experience, that this is the world we live in.

But it takes active effort, mainly non-financial, on part of system maintainers to keep the real world similar enough to this nice quantitative image.

They’re normal people, they’re going to buy and hold on an exchange, and they’re liable to lose a shit ton (or indeed, in the case of many coins) all of their money, with zero compensation (something unfamiliar to people used to credit card refunds, peace of mind via deposit insurance schemes, and financial services that are with a few notable exceptions broadly quite well regulated).

I know what normies are, thank you very much. They wouldn't have started to use any data encryption either, if it wasn't forced on them by a tiny minority of humans who can both parse technical writing and care about others (and, of course, spillover damage from normies immolating themselves).

I just believe that people of this sort are a liability for the spark of consciousness and beauty that is humanity; them being endowed with unmerited equal right to weigh in on matters of political power is making this liability lethal; and the class of people who cultivate this vulnerable, exploitable, dependent, atomized mass with the intent to wield them, their childish needs and easily inflated fears against peer competitors is the apex of evil on this planet. Carving out a meaningful niche for sentient human beings where these merry people and their self-appointed psychopathic shepherds cannot infringe upon is hard, probably impossible despite rosy appearances mere decades ago, and that makes my blood boil on a daily basis.

Pardon me this banal pathos.

SBF isn’t a psychopath

Maybe not a very skillful one. Certainly not the violent sort. I condede the term may be inapt.

You know, I don't see the smart part. Rather, don't hear it, since we're talking of verbal IQ. It strikes me as a very Hoffmanesque story, specifically Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober, known to all half-decent Russians through Shenderovich's puppet show fable of Putin's rise to power by the grace of Fairy Godmother Berezovsky. But I digress.

Did he get some cool math papers published, or ace Putnam, or what? How is he like Buffett or, say, Simons? In every interview he comes across as an overconfident goofy midwit with shallow takes, whose mom told him he's the smartest boy; his opening capital allegedly originates in a two-bit (and probably illegal) arbitrage; and other than that, it's just «oh, he used to work at Jane Street» and the very pile of brazen schemes that made jaded finance analysts go «bruh», which has now unraveled.

Caroline on the other hand – this girl is verbal-smart. Maybe as smart as you. But, sorry, that's still not quite 26 billion USD net worth smart. They truly needed a ton of chutzpah to pull it off. And chutzpah on that scale has to involve some psychopathy.

I don't know about psychopathy. Well, not inborn psychopathy anyway; maybe their weird trajectory turned them into psychopaths, if such a thing is consistent with the definition. I think they demonstrated some skill in locating the original arbitrage and building institutions around it, and a lot of luck in starting in the opening innings of a massive boom market; but from there, Main Character Syndrome explains the rest. Sure, they crossed a red line when they bailed out Alameda with stolen customer reserves, but all of their nonconformist iconoclasm so far had been rewarded by the universe, and by that point their whole identity was "brash entrepreneurs who do what it takes to bring home wins for the good guys." Who were the authority figures to impress upon them the wisdom of the gods of the copybook headings? SBF's parents were well known law professors at Stanford Law School and apparently they were themselves busy buying $70M vacation properties in the Bahamas: not, it would seem, stentorian voices for discipline and humility. Every signal they got from the world, during their less than three decades on this planet, was reinforcement.

Most of the mainstream has been expectedly harsh, though, and is directly blaming it on SBF and colleagues, as I argued before.

Vox - "The fallen crypto CEO on what went wrong, why he did what he did, and what lies he told along the way.". Okay, sure, that's from Kelsey Piper

Financial Times - New FTX chief says crypto group’s lack of control worse than Enron

Bloomberg - Bankman-Fried often communicated through applications that were set to auto-delete after a short period of time and encouraged employees to do the same, Ray wrote. Most of the financial statements Ray reviewed were not audited. [...] Ray also wrote that Bankman-Fried had made "erratic and misleading public statements," citing an exchange with a reporter on Twitter [...] "It is apparent from this investment that perhaps our belief in the actions, judgment and leadership of Sam Bankman-Fried ... would appear to have been misplaced," Temasek said.

CNBC - Ray, who oversaw Enron’s restructuring, noted that “certain real estate” was recorded as being directly owned in the personal name of certain employees. Ray torched the lack of financial controls at FTX, calling the heart of Sam Bankman-Fried’s empire lacking in “corporate controls” and absent of “trustworthy financial information.” Corporate funds were used to purchase homes in the Bahamas and “personal items” in the name of employees and advisors of FTX, a bankruptcy declaration said, days after the penthouse apartment of founder Sam Bankman-Fried was listed for nearly $40 million.

foreign policy - Crypto’s Boy King Got Dethroned Overnight. Sam Bankman-Fried sold himself as a savior—but was sitting on a hollow company., admittedly written by david gerard

vanity fair - And that’s got to hurt, but probably of more concern to “SBF,” as he is known, is the prospect of potentially going to prison following the stunning, epic collapse of his company, which filed for bankruptcy on Friday, days after he assured customers that “FTX is fine.” ... Bankman-Fried implemented what…two people described as a “backdoor” in FTX’s book-keeping system, which was built using bespoke software. They said the “backdoor” allowed Bankman-Fried to execute commands that could alter the company’s financial records without alerting other people, including external auditors. This set-up meant that the movement of the $10 billion in funds to Alameda did not trigger internal compliance or accounting red flags at FTX, they said.

fortune - Could Sam Bankman-Fried go to prison for the FTX disaster?

MSNBC - But after reporting alleging that Bankman-Fried had covertly and inappropriately used funds from FTX customers to make risky bets for a hedge fund he also ran, a huge number of customers rushed to withdraw their money from the platform quickly, causing the exchange to implode. [...] But they had no accountability to any regulator. They had no shareholder visibility. They didn’t even have a board of directors. And they weren’t under the oversight of any of the American regulators like the SEC or the CFTC. So you had this black box run by, apparently, a bunch of 20-somethings in the Bahamas, with billions of dollars sloshing around in it and nobody looking into it. - an interview with some crypto skeptic coder i only know from twitter, also author of "Let’s Write an LLVM Specializer for Python!, Write You a Haskell, Implementing a JIT Compiled Language with Haskell and LLVM, What I Wish I Knew When Learning Haskell".

This doesn't disprove 'the media' sometimes in a semi-coordinated way pushing the narrative to help a 'bad guy', that does happen, just that most of the establishment is not doing that here.

Self-custody is better than exchanges but still easy to mess up, such as losing the piece of paper that has your codes, someone accidentally throwing them out, someone copying them and stealing your crypto, etc. You have to anticipate many things that can go wrong. BIP 38 is supposed to mitigate some of these risks, to some extent.

Insane to me that SBF is speaking as publicly as he has been. I get criminal law is different if you are rich (formally), but I thought rule #1 was don’t talk to anyone.

There's a picture of his desk with a bottle of modafinil next to a MAOI label, so even if people smarter and much better informed than me "don’t really want to have an opinion on this", I think the list of hypotheses should at least include "he's impaired his decision making" somewhere near the top.

Could be selection effects too, though. If the path to becoming ridiculously rich these days relies on having all of talent and connections and hard-work and luck and risk-seeking behavior (because if you only have four out of five then you only get 80% of the log(success), and that's not enough to get you on magazine covers), then predicting that ridiculously (if only briefly...) rich people will continue to exhibit risk-seeking behavior afterward would just be the null hypothesis, whether that behavior came from drugs or just from their personality.

I think he figures he is either screwed or he thinks can somehow talk his way out of this by making his case to the public. THe only opinion that matter is the prosecutor not the public . The public opinion is irreverent here.

Seemingly he doesn't listen to his own lawyers, so there's no shutting him up and stopping him from digging the hole deeper. He also seems to be trying to rescue his reputation, so he's still maintaining he could have sorted it all out, except... people jumped ship, persuaded him to apply for bankruptcy, didn't keep him informed, pulled the rug out from under FTX, etc. etc. etc.

He never did anything wrong, except maybe be a bit careless with paperwork, and he could have made it all work because there were billions in investment due to come in and if only that pesky run hadn't started, so on and so forth.

I do think he's at least half a fraudster and swindler, but he also seems to be half delusional; believing so firmly in his own genius and talent, and good intentions, that while he may say "I fucked up", deep down he doesn't believe it.

He got too many arse-licking interviews and articles, like that Sequoia one, praising how he was this philanthropic genius who was going to make crypto the currency everyone used, and infinite profits forever and ever amen, that he can't face reality: he wasn't that smart, some of it was down to pure luck, and he is a swindler.

The guy was used to lapping up crap like this as his due, of course he can't accept that it's all nonsense:

In 2017, when he was merely 25, SBF collapsed the so-called kimchi premium, an anomalous delta between the price of Bitcoin in much of Asia and its price in the rest of the world. It was a daring feat of arbitrage—SBF is the only trader known to have pulled this off in any meaningful way—one which quickly made him a billionaire and achieved the status of legend.

Among Wall Street’s financial elite, SBF’s Bitcoin arb is mentioned in the same hushed tones as Paul Tudor Jones’s 1987 shorting of the entire American economy, or George Soros’s 1992 raid on the Bank of England, or John Paulson’s 2008 bet against subprime mortgages.

SBF learned to trade at Jane Street, an under-the-radar high-frequency trading shop in New York’s financial district. The firm recruits from the smartest students in math and physics at MIT. SBF, a physics major at MIT, had interned at Jane Street in the summer of 2013 and was one of the few such recruits invited back for a full-time job. He was put to work as a market maker trading global ETFs—more difficult than simply making a market for a single stock, in the same way Tri-Dimensional Chess is more difficult than the bog-standard variety.

Dear God in Heaven, no wonder the guy thought he was the Messiah, given a steady diet of this sort of flattery.

I have two theories on his motivation:

  1. Force of habit: SBF has marketed himself pretty intensively and owes a lot to his image. By his own account he thought that was necessary for his business. He may just be incapable of not trying to talk his way into more money.

  2. SBF has donated to many news outlets, including Vox and the Intercept. One suggested motivation for his disastrous Vox interview was that he thought he was be dealing with a friendly.

Note the "Vox interview" was published by Kelsey Piper, who is another figure in the EA community. It's possible he thought he was confiding in a friend, whereas she thought the public's right to know what he said was more important than his friendship.

What a ridiculous bit of delusion, though, to think even that your written correspondence with a friend would be beyond the reach of a prosecutor.

Is it delusion, or just naivete?

When that friend is a Vox journalist, you haven't even asked for it to be off the record, and you're communicating over an unencrypted medium the feds can just subpoena? Stupid either way. His lawyers had to have told him all the relevant information by then, he just told them to go fuck themselves.

It is. But clients are often idiots.

Does SBF deserve a platform despite being presumably a major fugitive? Is this ethical on the part of Sorkin?

  1. Yes 2. Yes

  2. It will give him enough rope to hang himself. Prince Andrew interview comes to mind.

agree. this is useful for the investigation

Why is SBF still free or at least not in trouble?

He's probably in a lot of trouble and will probably eventually not be free, or at least on the run from U.S. authorities. But as for why he's still free at this moment, it's because FTX isn't a bank and was crypto-based, plus he's in the Bahamas at the moment.

Wouldn't it be public knowledge if he was a fugitive?

Does SBF deserve a platform despite being presumably a major fugitive? Is this ethical on the part of Sorkin?

Given he's being investigated, a live Q&A can hurt his case if he contradicts himself, reveals previously unknown information, etc. I don't see how it's unethical.

Agree. He may give himself enough rope to hang himself even more so than he already has done. I found it odd how some people who seem to oppose de-platforming in other instances want SBF to be de-platformed. like this guy https://twitter.com/danheld/status/1595525976179499018

Does seem early to arrest. Madoff basically admitted to it.

So he’s going to be spending 60 years in jail. I don’t care if he gets to enjoy an interview. But I have two interests

  1. It’s going to be entertaining and I value my own enjoyment

  2. Anything he says can be used against him.

Now my bullshit detector is turned on. When does a son of law school professors violate core rights less to self incriminating?

Yeah, if he is presumably going away for a long time, then who cares if he gets a few extra weeks or even a year of normalcy.

When does a son of law school professors violate core rights less to self incriminating?

(1) When he is firmly convinced his father, amongst others, gave him bad advice (his father was amongst those who he consulted before agreeing to resign)

(From the Vox article): But he also insisted that much of the trouble could have been avoided if FTX had not declared bankruptcy, which has largely taken financial matters out of his control. ... “The people in charge of [the company] are trying to burn it all to the ground out of shame,” he told me.

Bankman-Fried argues he should instead have kept trying to raise more money, and insisted that if he’d just done that, “withdrawals would be opening up in a month with customers fully whole.”

(From the bankruptcy filing): 44. At the same time, negotiations were being held between certain senior individuals of the FTX Group and Mr. Bankman-Fried concerning the resignation of Mr. Bankman-Fried and the commencement of these Chapter 11 Cases. Mr. Bankman-Fried consulted with numerous lawyers, including lawyers at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, other legal counsel and his father, Professor Joseph Bankman of Stanford Law School. A document effecting a relinquishment of control was prepared and comments from Mr. Bankman-Fried’s team incorporated. At approximately 4:30 a.m. EST on Friday, November 11, 2022, after further consultation with his legal counsel, Mr. Bankman-Fried ultimately agreed to resign, resulting in my appointment as the Debtors’ CEO. I was delegated all corporate powers and authority under applicable law, including the power to appoint independent directors and commence these Chapter 11 Cases on an emergency basis.

(2) When he is firmly convinced he did nothing wrong and this is his chance to explain that

(Vox article): Bankman-Fried has maintained that FTX has never invested the deposits of crypto account holders on the exchange. I pressed him on that point via Twitter, and while he continued to insist that FTX did not directly use account money in this way, he said that Alameda — which he also owns — had borrowed far more money from FTX’s balance sheet for investments than he had realized, which ultimately left FTX vulnerable to the crypto equivalent of a bank run.

Why didn’t Bankman-Fried realize what was happening until it was too late? “Sometimes life creeps up on you,” he said.

One theory is that the seeds of FTX’s downfall were sown earlier this year, when Alameda reportedly took huge losses after the crypto company Terra’s LUNA stablecoin collapsed. Bankman-Fried said he didn’t realize the extent of the problem because of “messy accounting” — albeit messy accounting to the tune of billions of dollars.

(3) When he has his head so far up his own arse as 'SBF' does

I’m going with (3). Though I would think his parents are as deep into crypto that they would give him good advice.

I guess there is

(4) they all know he’s f$cked. So best play is act like your just a true believer tech enthusiast and legitimately believed the coin you printed yesterday is worth $40 billion. Hence you never stole customer funds but put them in a U.S. treasury like security. Theranos chick got what 10 years? Madoff got 150. So play the tech guy fake it to you make it game and hope it gets bought instead of the Madoff I just stole your money game.

I give these people a lot of respect for being smart. And aware. So dumb pumper doesn’t work for me.

Conspiracy theory takes:

  1. SBF is a fed.

  2. SBF is a Dem donor to the feds.

  3. SBF is an unknowing honeypot. The feds want him to attract compatriots to a location.

  4. SBF is being tricked to coming back to America so we can easily arrest him, and the NYT is an intelligence asset.

SBF ends up in North Korea running North Korean cyber-crime.

As an actual group, SBF and his partner gave $32 million to Dem's and $24 million to the GOP. This idea he was some Democrat-only donor simply isn't true.

As an actual group, SBF and his partner gave $32 million to Dem's and $24 million to the GOP. This idea he was some Democrat-only donor simply isn't true.

It seems a little bit of a bait and switch to say that SBF donated to republicans as well because his partner did.

See, this is what is called being a Debbie downer. I want conspiracy theory takes. Not boring numbers.

Tell me, which Republicans were they giving to, and for what purpose?

Apparently or allegedly, not sure which, co-founder Ryan Salame donated to Republicans and it was Republicans who were sympathetic to crypto or involved in discussions about regulating it. So pure self-interest donations:

While he’s [Bankman-Fried] said that his reason for donating was to advance pandemic prevention, he’s also donated to conservative-leaning PACs that support crypto interests.

That includes the Alabama Conservatives Fund — which backed Republican Katie Britt, whose campaign accepted donations in crypto — and Heartland Resurgence, which backed Republican Sen. John Boozman of Arkansas. Boozman co-wrote legislation that aims to put crypto markets under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which is widely regarded in the industry as being a more favorable regulator than the better-funded Securities and Exchange Commission. (In the aftermath of FTX’s collapse, the senator said he would need to revisit the language of the bill.)

Some of the recipients are giving it elsewhere:

Bankman-Fried was among the most significant donors to Democrats during the cycle, distributing more than $40 million through direct contributions and super PACs. Salame gave roughly $24 million to Republicans.

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