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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30432 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.

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?"

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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