Topic: When will Sam Bankman-Fried go to jail? - page 8. (Read 2430 times)

You would be happy to hear that the once dubbed "most generous billionaire" is now apprehended by the Bahaman Police Authority. Though this is just a drop of water against the sea of consequences he should be facing after accidentally admitting guilt from defrauding people of their hard-earned money following FTX's collapse, this is still a good start. I just hope that the US justice system couldn't be bought by these people, considering that he has donated millions of dollars to some politicians to earn their favor and trust, alongside having competent law professors for parents. I wouldn't be so certain about saying this could be the cause of bitcoin recovering a bit, it's still a long way to go and I don't think SBF's arrest would do much about bitcoin's price honestly. Although that being said his apprehension is a good thing and could connote even more greater things in the future for cryptocurrency.

As of today he is arrested and was requested extradition to US. I am not sure if that is the real reason why BTC have gone up to $17,800+ as of this time of writing and Ethereum around $1,340+. This could be a bull trap or a dead cat bounce which only leads to a temporary pump before correcting again. Just my opinion.

Even if seems most people think he wont be punished because of the political donations,i think its exactly because of this that he will,what i mean by this is that it will be painfully obvious if otherwise,they'll want to make him an example,probably wont be a long sentence but jail time is guaranteed i think.

Don't want to add too much to the discussions but as pointed out exactly by gmaxwell -- it's the model that's flawed, the business (mal)practice. And the reason for that is also foundational, a board that was able to make decisions without any checks and balance, headed by people who, by their own admissions, didn't know what they were doing.

Right, anyway, so Bitcoin up because this guy got arrested? That doesn't make sense to me, but I suppose it's not a bad thing. Will he get what's coming? Doubt.

Now that's he's been arrested, it's worth addressing this.  If corruption is a factor, the question becomes whether SBF is still useful to those in power.  Donors are only influential while they can keep paying.  It's not like he's going to be making any further donations anytime soon.  No one is ever going to trust him to run a business again.  He's a complete pariah.  I'm not convinced a government would risk damaging their reputation to help out someone who is nothing but a liability at this stage.  It would be too much bad publicity.

The only thing keeping him out of jail is how well he has or hasn't covered his tracks.  And given that he seems like a complete idiot, I'm assuming he hasn't done that very well.  If they find the missing money and it turns out he has access to it, he's going away for a long time.

BTC is up!
I said it several times before. The bad guy is arrested, and that instantly restores confidence.

Great news this morning!

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/12/business/sam-bankman-fried-arrested/index.html

On U.S. charges, meaning it's quite likely Sam Bankman-Fried will be deported to New York. I'm very happy.

There is a chance, however, it will be a very small chance of almost 0 hehe. The government officials in much of the 3rd world countries are corrupt and they are also experts in creating a show that they are doing something for their country but they are really doing nothing.

If there are people who might be offended by this, I reckon you should look around you. We cannot deny this reality that part of the problem are corrupt and the unqualified people in the government. They do not have the public's interest in their hearts, only their own agenda.

Being arrested and being jailed are different things. If you commit a crime then they arrest you so that your whereabouts are known and you end up working towards building the case. In this example, he was arrested so he doesn't run away, meanwhile, they are building a case against him for what he did. The real punishment starts after he is found guilty. So even if he steps foot in the USA and gets arrested, that doesn't mean he will be jailed, it means he will get his day in court and after that, if he is found guilty then he will go to jail, if he isn't then he could still be let go after the arrest.

I mean he's under house arrest in the Bahamas... if he sets a foot in a US airport the chances are that he would be arrested on the spot by US police. I don't think the government is *that* incompetent to let him go, especially since he has screwed around with like 10 celebrities and sports clubs/leagues.

The guy is even had a speaking attendance and engagement in New York. That's how the world goes, even if he has totally f* up with people's money, he's free in the wild talking nonsense to events.

Well, before he does speak some sense when people were like amazed on how the guy became big and a billionaire. But now, everything that he speaks, for sure no one will ever believe anymore.

though he has exposure of US gov.. where some think "uncle" grensler at the SEC will pardon him and just slap him with a fine

he is also being investigated also by the Bahamas authorities.. so THEY could find him guilty.

the Bahamas police announced that the government are doing investigations into possible criminal action


so while some think he can escape american prison. there is a chance of being locked up in a bahamas prison

Connections, pushing for regulations, his parents.
These 3 are the reasons why he has little to no chance in getting to jail.

I know that many investors lost their money in investing into FTX, and I didn't lose a single penny on it (though I thought of buying it a few months ago) but there's nothing that investors can do about especially we know for a fact that he has many connections like Gary Gensler. There is a chance that he and his buddies that has a relationship with will not get jailed for what they've done to investors.

Damage has been done and investors already lose their money so putting him into jail will not change anything. The best thing that investors can do is to just avoid any ventures or projects that has a link or connection to SBF. Good still if he will get jailed, but him seeing roaming freely in the Bahamas isn't a good sign already.

Will Sam be allowed to go to jail? Most likely not in my opinion because the democrats he has donated wouldn't want to see there and wiped along with his mistake. apart from that one reason, he may go back to jail but I don't think it will be in the Bahamas neither nor the US because after following some of the updates surrounding him, I was made to understand that he will reimburse all FTX. US users 100% of their balance and his extradition is unlikely and also during the cost of FTX collapse, he allowed some Bahamas investors to withdraw their investments because he doesn't want people to surround his compound, may be other countries may threaten him if they don’t get their funds from FTX international.

This year has been full of dramas and has affected bitcoin growth but rest assured, it will bounce back because the worst has happened in the past and we saw a new ATH of bitcoin price.

Part of me thinks that he'll never see the inside of a jail cell.  More likely he'll get some sort of deal and have to stay in his penthouse in the Bahamas on house arrest while his 6 buddies diddle around with him.  At least that's how it would go in the US since he's greased all the right wheels.  However, FTX screwed a lot of people in a lot of different countries.  I assume one of them isn't corrupt and will go after him.  Not sure how much protection from every country the Bahamas offers, but I guess we'll soon find out.  Him not being arrested yet is a bit shocking.  I get that police are looking the other way on theft these days, but billions?

From https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/29/business/nightcap-sbf-lawyers/index.html

From https://cointelegraph.com/news/bankman-fried-on-the-hook-in-texas-called-to-appear-at-feb-hearing

More and more prosecutors are looking at the case. In several states, and in several countries (the Bahamas, first).
It will be very difficult for Bankman-Fried to avoid penalty.

I don't want to say that character counts for nothing, because that clearly isn't true and there may be a billion dollars or so lost in FTX due to people at the top more or less pocketing it.  But the real implosion from FTX came from the nature of the business itself.  They imploded because they extended margin to users and prices changed.

Lets imagine that tomorrow the price of bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency jumped to a million dollars a coin almost instantly and stayed there, or jumped to $5 per coin and stayed there (US says it's making Bitcoin legal tender vs US says its outlawing Bitcoin).  What would happen to the solvency of the services?

A traditional Bitcoin exchange that doesn't have any funny business products would be unaffected-- other than increased or decreased activity might bring their revenue up or down (or cause their website to suffer from high traffic). One Bitcoin there is still one Bitcoin, one dollar is still one dollar. All is fine.

A Bitcoin options exchange that uses physically delivered (as opposed to cash settled) options-- again: everything is fine. Some traders will have bad or good days when positions move for or against them but every contract will be delivered as promised.

Now compare that to an exchange that offers leverage using paper bitcoins.  They will go bankrupt and be unable to process withdraws in at least one of those scenarios, depending on if they were net long or net short.

Competent execution means that the third model can go longer, get bigger, handle higher volatility before imploding. If they have high fees to bilk the customers or manipulation to move the odds more in the houses favor, all can help.  But the structure itself doesn't *guarantee* it won't implode and so it eventually will-- you just hope not in your lifetime, or not while you have funds on there.

Why expose yourself?  The risks are opaque to you and it's not like you're getting revenue sharing.   You can just choose to not do business with companies that have products that make them take on potentially unbounded liability.

It's not like they should be able to say anything to convince you-- FTX has long webpages about what would happen if their 'insurance fund' couldn't cover their needs and when push came to shove it was all meaningless.  The incentives for the operators are generally to continue to crank the risk until they fail-- the risk is *your* risk, and they make more profit by cranking it up at least until the wheels come off.

The same think applies to blockfi, Celsius, gemini earn...  8%/yr for just depositing bitcoin? Yeah turns out that just handed your bitcoins over to "funds" that paid them 15%/yr and those funds just invested them in "defi" ponzi schemes paying 20%/yr. ... Schemes most people wouldn't fall for because the 20%/yr yield alone made it pretty clear what it was and what would happen. The primary business of these entities was just a whitewashing front to make obvious ponzis less obvious, skimming off half the rewards (but not taking the risk).

When you hand over your coins to some else you're getting a debt in return.  In a non-debt economy you don't have to worry much about what your business partners are in.  But when you're getting a debt from them you absolutely do.  Some businesses are just bad and their badness is why they're willing to share them with you in the first place.

Badness is context specific.  A stock brokerage can offer margin to retail -- subject to a huge amount of limitations including limiting leverage to 2x, limiting what assets you can use it for, etc. in huge, super diversified and mature markets where the underlying assets have real value, managed by risk managed experts, and backstopped by industry and government supported insurance.  But none of that characterizes cryptocurrency market, especially the closer you get to shitcoins (because they're more volitile and more likely to turn out to be worth nothing by surprise, among other issues).  Unregulated, irresponsible, many assets which have absolutely zero value but trade at inflated prices for long spans, insanely volitile ... and then people want to slather 5x ... 20x or more leverage on top, and not via schemes that can guarantee delivery.

Because the markets are so non-transparent honest players who try to do less risky stuff will just be out-competed by the manic that has snorted the longest line of cocaine.

It's insanity.

And no matter how competent you think someone offering that insanity is: they fundamentally can't be or they wouldn't be in such a dumb business to begin with... so if the signal about their competence is misleading what else might be being misread?

Fact is that a fair portion of people who become rich do so not because they're smart but because they're stupid -- they make the bad gambles that have good rewards because others weren't so foolish as to take them... and it works until it doesn't.  That's clearly the business FTX was in (as shown by both Ellison and SBF posts about bet sizing), and you can reduce your risk of exposure by avoiding the businesses with bad models and obviously suspicious behavior and that's about all you can do because no one is going to just come out and tell you that their business is gonna gobble your money.

In some sense people are fortunate FTX was so incompetently run: If it were somewhat more competently run but still fundamentally based on a broken model then perhaps it could have ballooned to 10x its size* and caused a lot more damage when it imploded.

(*Keep in mind I think actual losses in FTX are probably overstated 3x - 20x; because they're counting paper bitcoin bought on margin they can't deliver as a liability.  But the real loss is the money put in that can't be recovered, not the value of the levered Bitcoin users never really owned because it never actually existed.)

I understand your resentment, but putting a bad guy in jail is unlikely to get your money back. Also, I support the opinion that any wrongdoing should be held accountable and, if necessary, there should be punishment. The question of what it will be and whether it will be at all in the case of the founder of the FTX remains open. Can you imagine that Sam Bankman-Fried will get off very easily? This would infuriate a lot of his former clients.

I understand that Bankman stole your money, but you yourself gave it to him. It's as if the world is facing a crypto exchange crash for the first time. This happened repeatedly and all users should have been aware of this and anticipate the possible risks. You have been warned repeatedly about the great risk of holding currencies on centralized exchanges. You neglected caution, for which you paid. This is a painful lesson for both you and new users. Don't let history repeat itself.

He should be punished for what he has done. So that no one dares to create such a situation. Millions of investors lost everything as a result of his FTX collapse. According to the lower, Sam Bankman-Fried could be jailed for more than a decade if the law found any discrepancy in the FTX collapse.

Sam Bankman should refrain from speaking publicly about the recently collapsed about the crypto exchange which is indicated by the lawer as well. If Sam Bankman violating the FTX law could lead to a jail term of up to 15 years. Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX may sent to jail that depending on the extent of potential legal violations related to FTX's collapse and if he is convicted.

Several U.S. government organization, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Department of Justice, are investigating Bankman-Fried and his Bahamas-based company after the sudden fall of FTX this month. If he is guilty then legal action will be taken against him as per the report of organizations.

Still putting the perpetrator behind the bar will have a good effect in the future.  It may not change what happened but it gives warning to people who are thinking of doing the same thing SBF did.  If the perpetrator is still on loose, then many scammer will just do the same thing because they will think that authority won't mind them scamming people everywhere.


There are lots of people like SBF waiting for the right moment to prey on their victim.  So making an example of SBF will shoo them away which means a cleaner healthier crypto ecosystem.


Proof of reserve has long been due.  Centralized exchanges should have done this thing from the start.  But yes, better late than never.  I hope all of crypto exchanges will follow the example of Binance in term of implementing proof of reserve for the their client's peace of mind sake.