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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29311 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested by Bahamian authorities this evening after the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York shared a sealed indictment with the Bahamian government, setting the stage for extradition and U.S. trial for the onetime crypto billionaire at the heart of the crypto exchange’s collapse.

Bankman-Fried was expected to testify before the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday. His arrest is the first concrete move by regulators to hold individuals accountable for the multi-billion dollar implosion of FTX last month.

There had been some speculation on when and even whether he would be arrested. Just yesterday someone told me to expect it to take two years. So, why right before tomorrow's hearing? And why not wait for him to give more interviews and provide more evidence?

This is apparently the new idea floating around parts of (Crypto?) Twitter right now: that SBF might get "Epsteined," meaning he will end up dead in a manner most suspicious. I don't want to give it any credence, but maybe the people saying it would have taken years for the long arm of the law to nab SBF were onto something, since if they're getting him this quickly, then one of two possibilities must be true:

  1. The Occam's Razor explanation: SBF running his mouth for the past month or so has given the government all the ammo they need to throw the book at him, saving a lot of time and effort in building a solid case against him.

  2. The Tinfoil Hat explanation(s): TPTB are planning for anything but SBF seeing a day in jail. Either the speed of the actions against him are meant to blow their load early, preventing a substantial investigation that would end in his punishment (and thus letting him walk away scot-free), or they really are going the conspiracy theory-type route of planning to have him murdered and (try to) make it look like an accident/suicide.

Wasn't he supposed to be under close observation on account of that very foreseeable risk? The guards being bribed to turn a blind eye, conveniently forget to confiscate potential makeshift ligatures, and loudly announce they're taking a sudoku puzzle to the bathroom doesn't look too dissimilar to corrupt officials ending his life. If you can accept that his lawyers bribed the guards then you can accept that the guards were amenable to bribes from anyone else. From his POV he can kill himself at any time, he's not going anywhere, so why the urgency? With billions of dollars and a black book of high level connections I'd think he could take a punt on mitigating his punishment to tolerable levels - IIRC he'd done so before. He wasn't a penniless benzo addict in withdrawal facing life in a Siberian labour camp.

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