bit¢oin$

SBF: *comes back into Zoom frame with giant spaghetti sauce stain on his pajama shirt* "Uh, sorry, uh, what? Yeah, *BUURRRRRP* we are well capitalized."
VCs: "This man is a genius who doesn't need to play by conventional rules."

one of the things vcs loved him for was saying he wanted people to be able to buy a banana with their app lmao

the best part was how he'd play league of legends during VC calls and that was written up glowingly in his a16z profile

The Zoom went well for all concerned. SBF looked relaxed as he answered questions, talking, as he usually does, in complete paragraphs about topics of extreme complexity. Ramnik Arora, FTX’s head of product and another ex-Facebook engineer, remembers the meeting clearly: “We’re getting all these questions from Sequoia toward the end. He’s absolutely fantastic.” Arora locks eyes with me, and I am mesmerized. Arora is intense—calling to mind a Bollywood version of Adrian Brody. “Unbelievably fantastic,” he says, shaking his head.

Bailhe remembers it the same way: “We had a great meeting with Sam, but the last question, which I remember Alfred asking, was, ‘So, everything you’re building is great, but what is your long-term vision for FTX?’”

That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”

Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.

“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.

“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.

“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.

What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF’s vision. It wasn’t a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself—with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet.

“I sit ten feet from him, and I walked over, thinking, Oh, shit, that was really good,” remembers Arora. “And it turns out that that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting.”

“We were incredibly impressed,” Bailhe says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.”

Not only that, Arora says, but League of Legends is the kind of multiplayer online battle arena video game where every four minutes or so of tactical maneuvering is punctuated by ten seconds of action known as a gank—gamer slang for “gang killing”—where you and your team gang up on an enemy. “There’s a fight that happens, basically,” says Arora, who was watching over SBF’s shoulder as he answered that final question from Sequoia, “and I’m like, This guy is fucking in a gank!”

The B round raised a billion dollars. Soon afterward came the “meme round”: $420.69 million from 69 investors.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221027180943/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/

i dont know anything about league of legends but apparently for the time he put into it hes not very good, there was a tweet from noted gamer AOC like hes only bronze 3

then you hear him talk and its like um yeah uhh so the thing you have to understand is i forgot to look at the spreadsheet

― lag∞n, Wednesday, October 25, 2023 11:10 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Elon Musk is also like this, back when the media was fawning over him nonstop (pre Thai cave submarine I guess) I watched a few videos of him speaking and thought he might honestly be the worst public speaker I've ever seen. he can barely put a sentence together and has less charisma than Mike Pence. anyway, I very much welcome this development

i think theres a thing operating where these guys sound so dumb some people assume they must be iconoclastic geniuses

especially when theyre telling them what they want to hear

apparently the game that he'd play a lot was something called "Storybook Brawl," which FTX later acquired. I guess it's from someone who had worked on Magic the Gathering video game projects, and in the aftermath of the purchase a bunch of Magic players (and some events) in the same social circle had a lot of boosting of crypto, sponsorship, etc. and when FTX blew up they all quickly swept it under the rug

apparently it also tanked the company that made Storybook Brawl

ran into a discussion online where people were saying that some Magic pro's discord had ~crypto drama~

lol gotta love it

kinda funny how one of his big ingenious innovations was celebrity endorsements

I think he did play League of Legends for a while but people have tried to retroactively act like the Storybook Brawl thing didn't exist because they wanted to act like it never happened. So any reference to it is now "uhh he was playing League"

one of the funny things he with investor money was give $200m to this fund, that was really more of a celebrity match making service, which the owners promptly put directly in their pockets

The court showed a spreadsheet of investments made in 2021. They included $1 billion to Genesis for a mining company, $499 million to startup Anthropic and $200 million to investment firm K5.

Singh said the K5 outlay was most troubling. He said Bankman-Fried sent him a term sheet detailing hundreds of millions of dollars of bonuses to the owners, Michael Kives and Bryan Baum. That followed a K5 dinner Bankman-Fried attended alongside Hillary Clinton, Katy Perry, Orlando Bloom, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kris and Kylie Jenner.

that anthropic, an ai company naturally, investment is the one that did well btw, people are saying it could cover all the ftx losses but even if thats true according to some valuation can you really sell billions of dollars of shares in some early stage startup probably not

with the amount of money they were splashing around it was possible something would eventually make money and they could close the loop on some of the scamming

but I don't think they ever really made concrete plans in that direction!

I just looked and the FTT token is still trading on other platforms. The origins of it, where it was pure nonsense backed by nothing, make no difference. It's basically trading ($1.27) for the price it opened at ($1.20)

yeah its unclear what the plan was, seems more like one of those low end scams that only end one way than an attempt a serious white collar criminality

I think there was testimony about SBF saying that a bet that led to either the end of the world or utopia was worth it. I think that was his "investing philosophy" - make reckless gambles that have a chance of massive payout. Which doesn't really seem that different to me than just going to vegas and betting your house on a roulette #, so IDGI. Galaxy brained trader. Armchair psych but he has the vibe of someone who was literally never told anything he did was wrong or stupid.

the @innercitypress account does the best of the liveblogging (molly white is also present but not allowed to use her phone apparently)

SBF's lawyer Everdell: I'll move on to another topic. Do you see the auto-delete column?
AUSA Kudla: Objection - asked and answered.
Judge Kaplan: Sustained. Mr. Everdell, this is not helpful. This is not an exam for new eyeglasses.

i watched a video on what covering the case is like and they take all your electronics on the way in even if youre just going to the overflow room, so idk how the live blogging is happening

maybe they have special dispensation from the judge, it's not as if it's happening in secret

he has the vibe of someone who was literally never told anything he did was wrong or stupid.

like so many of these clowns

maybe they have special dispensation from the judge

― mark s, Thursday, October 26, 2023 1:27 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah must be smth like that

SDNY generally makes you turn in your phones even if you're a lawyer. I think there's a way to get an exemption but I don't go often enough to bother looking into it.

like the guard takes everyone's phones and the entrance and puts them in a cubby in a security room.

our justice system is so cruel

anyway SBF is now on the stand

By Rachel Scharf · Listen to article
Law360 (October 27, 2023, 9:15 AM EDT) -- Law360 reporters are providing live coverage of the trial of FTX Trading Ltd. founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Follow along here.

10:34 a.m.: Bankman-Fried has begun his long-awaited direct testimony before the jury. He starts by point-blank denying that he defrauded anyone or stole customer money, while acknowledging that "there were significant oversights" in the management of FTX.

"A lot of people got hurt — customers, employees — and the company ended up in bankruptcy," he testifies. "I made a number of small mistakes and a number of larger mistakes. By far the largest mistake is we didn't have a dedicated risk management team."

He's now telling the jury how he founded Alameda Research after working as a trader at Jane Street Capital. At first, Bankman-Fried says, he knew "basically nothing" about cryptocurrencies and "had absolutely no idea how they worked."

Bankman-Fried says he started running Alameda from an Airbnb apartment in Berkeley, California, eventually bringing on his college buddy Gary Wang, former Jane Street colleague Caroline Ellison and his brother's high school friend Nishad Singh. All three have pled guilty and testified during the government's case-in-chief.

Later, testifies Bankman-Fried, he and Wang decided to start their own crypto exchange. He says Wang was responsible for building out FTX's technical infrastructure. The defendant seeks to distance himself by noting, "I wasn't much of a programmer. I didn't write any of FTX's code."

"I was [ Wang's] supervisor in that ultimately I was the CEO, and ultimately I had authority … [ but] I didn't supervise any of the direct work that he was doing," Bankman-Fried tells the jury. "He and Nishad were both authorized to make decisions without consulting with me."

9:57 a.m.: Good morning from 500 Pearl Street. After a false start yesterday, Sam Bankman-Fried will actually testify today to the jury tasked with deciding whether he stole billions of customer dollars from his now-defunct crypto exchange FTX.

Yesterday afternoon, Bankman-Fried delivered provisional testimony outside the jury's presence in order for U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan to decide whether his claims about the involvement of lawyers in FTX will be admissible before the jury.

Now, Judge Kaplan rules that Bankman-Fried can testify about attorneys' involvement in crafting FTX's data retention policies. But the judge bars the defendant from saying that attorneys drafted other, "plain vanilla legal documents" connected to the alleged siphoning of customer deposits from FTX to Bankman-Fried's hedge fund Alameda Research.

"That evidence would, in my judgment, be confusing and highly prejudicial by falsely implying that the lawyers, with full knowledge of all of the facts, blessed what the defendant's alleged to have done," said Judge Kaplan. "And I didn't hear that at all yesterday."

The judge also denies Bankman-Fried's request to bar his answers to government questioning yesterday — which were at times evasive and rambling — from being used as impeachment evidence on cross-examination.

"To the extent any objections were made yesterday, I ruled on them," said Judge Kaplan. "The rulings stand."

https://media.tenor.com/QKG2W3O4lW4AAAAd/caveman-lawyer-golf.gif

maybe hell do better with a day of practice

I mean tbh I can't see any defense he could raise that would be credible. I'm guessing his lawyers did all they could to try to get him to just plead guilty.

"Only the people who directly reported to me and lived with me in a mansion in the bahamas did all the bad stuff and I didn't know anything about it" doesn't really fly

its all hes got, besides taking a plea, which is what he shouldve done

did miami dade stadium change its name back yet

Kaseya Center[6] (formerly American Airlines Arena, FTX Arena, and Miami-Dade Arena) is a multi-purpose arena located along Biscayne Bay in Miami, Florida and currently named by the company Kaseya.

@innercitypress trial livetweet:
SBF: I spoke with them about if our 2021 revenue was in fact over $1 billion.
Cohen: Why was that important?
SBF: It's a round number.

one thing ive been wondering and havent found any answer to, maybe cause its too far down the crypto iceberg, is how much of the missing ftx money was real, theres weird shit where the various exchanges and other big crypto institutions shuffle money around between them that really looks like collusion in some larger fraud, did fxt really have $15b or was some of it that weird slushing around crypto, $15b is a lot for crypto, i think one of the reasons all these exchanges turn out to be fraudulent is there just isnt enough real volume to run a profitable exchange off of, most crypto trades are just market manipulation by a the relatively small handful of entities that own the majority of the market, and theyre not paying for trades they own exchanges they have deals to move crypto through each others exchanges and so forth, thats what it seems like to me

SBF's trial strategy seems to be like "i wasn't really following that stuff closely, my lawyers said it was ok to delete the speadsheets"

and the spreadsheet that was released was written in pencil and had a folder called like "not shady at all plz don't look in here"

they should call me to the stand

ftx raised $2b but that wasnt enough for them lol thats so much money

in fact i am not needed on the stand, SBF has this

@innercitypress trial livetweeting:
Cohen: Why did FTX use Slack and Signal?
SBF: They are conversational.
Cohen: What is encryption?
SBF: It's like in World War II... on the Internet, it's about only the sender and receiver seeing the message. We thought it was good.
AUSA Sassoon: Objection - who is "we"?
SBF: I am sorry, I meant me, I often say "we" to not single myself out from other employees.
Cohen: What about records retention?
SBF: Some had to be kept, some should be not kept, and then those in the middle.

like world war… on the internet

when hes right hes right

ILX = navajo code

if anyone is still wondering about it, molly white explained on her youtube-stream why inner city press can livetweet the trial but she (and most others) can't: he is an attested new york court reporter of long-standing (actually also flitting between and reporting on other trials in the same court-house) and as such has his own designated room (along with the other attested court reporters) and is allowed to bring in his phone and laptop and such

ah thank you i did half heartedly try to figure that out

good piece

There’s another rumor, which is an incomplete story — but a lot of people strongly suspect that Alameda was started with a pile of tethers backed by nothing, because there was too much heat around Bitfinex/Tether in 2017 and the whales needed a new trading partner.

https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2023/10/26/the-beautiful-mind-of-sam-bankman-fried/

very good article thx, good lord these EA people are insane

Most zillionaires don’t seek the limelight. They just get on with making money. If you see the ultra-wealthy promoting themselves, it’s a stage-managed production for publicity purposes, designed to distract from whatever is really going on.

They want you to think they’re the next Steve Jobs. Somehow, they keep turning out to be Elizabeth Holmes.

so fuckin crazy

He goes on to name a specific rationalist, Kelsey Piper of Vox — the journalist that Sam later shot his mouth off to — as someone who really should have gotten onto Adderall for greatest effectiveness in her altruism: “by my calculations, that decreased Kelsey’s effectiveness by 20%, thus costing approximately 54 billion lives.” Yeah, rationalists really do say that sort of thing as if it’s normal.