bit¢oin$

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.

yep, and added in comments by author when someone said "that was just a joke":

Rationalists do say that sort of thing in all seriousness, and it would only work as a joke because they do. This example is in the class of statements that they mean until they’re called on them, at which point they claim they were “jokes.” Scott Alexander has always been very heavy on this variety of deniable statement.

c.f. Sartre on fascism

its obviously a joke you can tell cause its 20% more hyperbolic than the stuff they usually say

one of many things bad things about ea is theyre "first principles" cultists, like upon hearing the term effective altruism you might assume its a good thing people learning about the best way to give away their fortunes by say consulting experts on the topic, but no theyre just going to figure it out themselves using logic, the same logic that lead bankman to the conclude that shakespeare was bad because there were fewer people alive back then

shakespeare was bad because there were fewer people alive back then

lol what

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F7xys_AbcAAmoWF?format=jpg&name=large

its funny how mad so many of these geniuses are about having been made to read a few books in school

a silicon valley billionaire reading proust "this is inefficient!"

on one hand I feel bad for the guy if he's all discombobulated by not having any medication in jail, but on the other hand the entire shtick of him having "brain fog" and being "unable to focus" is totally him thinking he only sounds very smart and has the Good Thoughts when he's cranked to the gills on speed

many people throughout history have had this issue, and a surprising number have been able to convince others that their ideas are very good by talking quickly and verbosely. or writing many pages about how great their thoughts are, like Ayn Rand

they should let him be cranked up on the stand in front of the jury imo

hell yeah lets do this

the rate at which guys with altered brain chemistry whether via drugs or mental illness have been history makers is pretty high lol

I see that this was covered in that david gerard link above, nm

people like to give attention to people who stand out. one of the main ways to succeed out there is to figure out what people think is normal and then do something just far enough out of their comfort zones to keep their interest

@innercitypress

Cohen: How many hours a day were you working?
SBF: 22 a day, 23 maybe

his guys shd ask him abt panera lemonade consumption, it's a cast-iron defence imo

(cross has now started btw, the above is from before that)

live nytimes coverage here: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/10/30/business/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-trial

everything from the prosecutor is asking him if he remembered saying things that he obviously said and he's all "I don't remember but maybe I said that"

the defense is completely "I didn't know anything and if I said I did, I do not recall having said that"

the classic "I'm just a little guy!" defense but a little guy with memory problems

only works when youre being questioned by congress