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I Accidentally Got SBF To Admit to Fraud
So...SBF is simply a moron. I've been trying to resist that conclusion, but now I'm asking myself why I bothered.
In the link above Youtuber Coffeezilla drops into a call with SBF (a second time! Why is he still taking calls??) and proceeds to basically get him to admit that funds were comingled.
Coffeezilla noted that SBF always deflects the issue by arguing that some accounts were trading on margin and so were deliberately open to being used by Alameda, unlike regular accounts. So literally all he does - and all any journalist needed to do - was just keep drilling down on whether the FTX only customers who weren't doing that could still get their funds. SBF obviously has no answer. Even worse, he basically screws himself by admitting that they had one withdrawal process which was him admitting to comingling funds.
So...the guy is just a moron. He doesn't have some grand legal plan to plead negligence or ignorance. He has a half-baked plan based on the idea that everyone is dumber than him (despite multiple counterexamples) and he falls apart the minute anyone puts any thought into his answers.
The entire video is actually a good look at how a journalist should view someone like SBF and his word games and deflections and how they should strategize to defeat them (and the end has the sort of pure joy at skewering the target that I bet all journalists feel but are too dignified to admit when picking up their Pulitzer). And this is coming from someone who thought the idea of people like Coffeezilla being "journalists" laughable.
But he has legitimately done the best job of questioning SBF out of everyone (Stefanopoulos was the close second)
Well, yeah. But the important thing to remember is that he's a smart moron. The embarrassing Sequoia fanboy squee article hit that point, too:
As an aside, anyone who coins a cutesy neologism like "mathletic" should be rolling around on the floor, clutching their ears, in agony. But what is my point here?
Because the worship of intelligence/IQ I see in these circles, including on here, usually "X is really really good at STEM/maths". I've seen comments casually tossed off about 'normies', about '95 IQ rednecks', many assumptions that Ordinary People Are Dumb, and we know it because they must all be sub-100 IQ, we know that because if they were Smart Like Us they wouldn't be rednecks or normies.
Well, guys, here's one of the Smart Like Us crew who is dumber than an ordinary person when it came to "I can make yuuuuge money out of trading magic beans".
I agree that he doesn't have some grand legal plan, but I do think he is relying on "negligence or ignorance". The entire set-up at his Bahamas tax haven base (see the Sequoia article again, man that is probably the worst thing this Adam Fisher ever wrote but it's a treasure trove of nuggets about the mindset of everyone involved, from the fanboy journalist to the investors throwing money at Bankman-Fried on the basis of one Zoom call) was juvenile - it sounds like "still living like we're in college in our second year even though we're all late twenties and heading into our thirties". Everyone seems to have had an instinctive mindset that the conventional way of doing things - even business - was somehow icky, somehow.... normie. And they weren't normies! They were supersmart EA types who were going to save the world by making tons of money and having fun doing it!
So whether or not Bankman-Fried set out from the outset with fraud in mind, the setup was so chaotic, it was conducive to it. I think there is something suspicious there, because Bankman-Fried had so much ownership and control behind the scenes, but he may genuinely have thought he was a supersmart cookie who could find a new way to make zillions after his One Weird Trick dried up.
His parents are lawyers, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he imbibed some half-baked notion that "if I say X was separate from Y, and it was Y did all the fiddling around with funds, then I'm in the clear" when it comes to his technicality about "it wasn't FTX that did it, it was Alameda". I do think he's relying on technicalities to save his skin, which just shows once again that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".
I really hope one of the lessons people in the rationalist and rationalist-adjacent sphere, including on here, take away from this is to lose the ugly attitude around the idolisation of 'intelligence' and the corresponding denigration of 'normies' (this constant assumption, as I've said, that ordinary people are all 90-95 IQ and not the average of 100 IQ or even up to 105!).
Yeah, even though I've been as critical of him as anyone I have to ask myself if that's at play in my frustration here. Like...I have an intellectual theory for why Bankman-Fried is acting this way, but it just seems to not be able to intuitively connect. So I keep instinctually looking for more and then get annoyed when I don't find it.
But, if this was some random SovCiv
representingfucking himself in court, I don't know that I'd be having this same reaction at the inability to just shut the fuck up. I'd laugh at the video of the moron on /r/PublicFreakout and move on.But SBF was supposed to be smart, even if just in an Elizabeth Holmes way.
It would be ironic if his original PR blitz is still subtly shaping my reaction despite its original purpose having fallen apart.
I was literally thinking to myself, upon hearing of them in the mansion, that "this sounds like kids playing start-up in the Bahamas with Daddy's money". Unfortunately for them, they didn't use Daddy's money.
That part is debatable, because a lot of the "non-normie" stuff they did was directly in service of fraud: e.g. sending sensitive messages in a format that deleted them after some time. Now SBF is trying to cover up some of that shit (most importantly the comingling of funds) by acting like they were basically just college kids doing bullshit without following the rules cause they were innovators maaaan. But that "we moved fast and broke things" seems like a convenient cover.
But, then again, there was some shit that I can't see being beneficial to fraud and really does look like stupid/lazy people simply not bothering with rules: e.g. the revelation that they apparently paid expenses via chat emojis.
I think it became fraud, more than it started as fraud (otherwise why lose all that money trying to do legitimate trades in Alameda? Caroline Ellison allegedly lost $1 billion....). But the whole thing had such a basic lack of any controls and regulation that it was a hop skip. If you're smart but also dumb, desperate, likely hopped off on stimulants and working/living in some weird nerd-frat house instead of a real company then maybe this seems like a good idea. And then there's no one to stop you.
It's true. Your average idiot knows enough to "shut the fuck up and lawyer up". I do think part of Bankman-Fried's problem is that he is smart but up to now hasn't really faced any (obvious) consequences of failure. He seems to have been conventionally bright, done conventionally well at school, went into a conventionally good job, then decided (and maybe this is on MacAskill and maybe not) that philanthropy was the way to get fame and good repute, and to do that he needed a lot of money, and hey he was already working in a trading firm, crypto was the new big thing all his nerdy friends were geeking out about, how about he picked up some of that easy money?
And now he really doesn't seem to realise that he did anything wrong. Everyone in crypto does sketchy stuff! If only they had given him a bit more time, he could have made all the money back! Why doesn't anyone realise he isn't the bad guy here? So he keeps giving interviews and shooting his mouth off to show how he's just misunderstood and sure he fucked up but that wasn't malicious, and he keeps digging the hole for himself deeper and deeper.
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I do not understand why handling expense claims via Discord or Slack bot is somehow problematic. This emoji thing gets repeated together with other clearly problematic ones and I do not understand it.
Because you're supposed to have a system to deal with petty cash disbursements, with expenses, with "okay hey boss I need fifty mil, fine?" "yeah sure fine".
Boring, conventional, stuffy old-fashioned business routine stuff. The problem with Discord, Slack and emojis is now all this money has gone "poof!" and nobody can say who spent what or where it went, and when they need to account for this in order to pay the creditors, that's important.
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Because Discord and Slack messages are mutable after the fact, they do not create an auditable trail (depending on implementation).
Imagine an implementation that runs like this. When an expense is submitted a bot posts a summary of that expense in a Discord channel. The expense is authorized by some kind of emoji reply or react to the bots message. It would be trivial for anyone with administrator privileges on this discord (or even mere expense approver privileges) to commit fraud in this system, in a way that would be difficult to detect.
At some time t_0 our insider submits an expense they know is fraudulent. The bot posts the expense summary and the insider approves the expense. At some later time t_1 the actual disbursement of funds for the fraudulent expense occurs. Then at some later time t_2 the insider goes back and undoes their approval of the expense (they remove their react or delete their message or whatever). If the insider has admin permissions on the discord they could even delete the bots message perhaps wiping away any trace the expense existed. At some time t_3 the apparently unapproved disbursement is discovered. How do you reconstruct who approved the fraudulent disbursement?
There's a reason that software specifically for managing expenses exists. There's a reason that software records information like who submitted the expense, what the expense was for (often by line-item), and who approved. Crucially there's a reason why these expense records are immutable after they are approved and the funds disbursed.
I assumed that Slack/Discord would be used as interface, with bot archiving it to some persistent less mutable database.
Or channel being configured in way blocking editing - for example with bot reposting message.
Given that it was crypto and specifically FTX I assume that expense claim process was filled with fraud with bad implementation serving as smoke screen (deliberately or accidentally).
But I still do not see problem with emoji specifically
That is possible also with software specifically for managing expenses, there someone with admin permissions also can tamper with database. It is also possible with paper.
Which is why you have two people who keep track of where the money are goin'. One of the joys (🙁) of my admin work is getting the year-end reconciliation of the petty cash dumped on me before we send the accounts off to the auditors. You have to match up receipts with expenses claimed, money out, money remaining, money drawn on to replenish imprest, etc.
I couldn't just print out a list of emojis and say "there you go, boss" as to who purchased what, where, when and for how much.
When I was keeping track of expenditure on a multi-million punt project back in the day, I certainly couldn't have got away with "here's the list of emojis by which we approved that £100,000 for buying equipment that time, dunno when exactly".
According to the Sequoia article, where the reporter was in the Bahamas sitting in on meetings and ordinary operations, this is the kind of money they were shifiting:
You really do want to be keeping a record of where even your sub-$100 million purchases are going and who approved it and who asked for it.
that part is DEFINITELY insane
that is also insane - but not emoji part part - the "lol, we have not recorded what was actually approved by whom"
The bankruptcy filing is great reading because John Ray is very not happy one bit with the way things were done.
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