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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.
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:
An Antisemite in June:
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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