@moh_kohn
It's astonishing how widely applicable this is.
Nobody knew invading Iraq would throw the whole middle east into chaos. Nobody knew the UK leaving the EU without a plan would be a problem. Nobody knew what kind of person Boris Johnson is. In a few years nobody will have known climate change was going to disrupt the global food supply.
@petealexharris@moh_kohn I've worked many large defense contracts, and watched some of them run of the rails even when the signs of failure were obvious.
The constant phrases of the *status quo *managers were:
It's too soon to know for sure
and
It's too late to change
If you hear either of those phrases, 9 out of 10 times someone is making good money from the present (fucked up) situation.
@moh_kohn@Lazarou
As I understand it, the prosecution case was that SFX was a criminal enterprise from the start. On the wider issues, it now looks as though the US regulators are out to shut down the entire crypto industry. People will say that are possible uses for blockchain, but no-one has successfully implemented it except for cryptocurrency. And cryptocurrency has no practical uses except criminal uses. Bitcoin is as old as the iPad, yet has hardly any public profile
@moh_kohn@Lazarou But crypto is something which venture capitalists invested heavily in (some of those were at Sunak’s AI summit this week- Musk has been enthusiastic for crypto, too). Powerful people will want us to quickly forget how wrong they were (and how they assisted crooks like SBF to defraud billions, often from people who couldn’t afford to lose the money)
@Peternimmo@moh_kohn@Lazarou the only benefit of Blockchain over an insert-only database table is that you don't have to trust the database administrator.
Which is fine if you don't live in a world in which the vast majority of people of people are trustworthy.
@simon_brooke@Peternimmo@moh_kohn@Lazarou Yeah, you just have to trust over 50% of the admins. Capture a majority of the nodes supporting the block chain, and you can insert and delete all you want. State actors and the very rich can do this.
@moh_kohn I remember when I warned people around me about NFTs and crypto. They laughed in my face, saying that I needed to educate myself on both to understand how it could help my career as an artist.
Well, I'm sorry, but anything that sounds too good to be true actually turns out to be too good to be true. That's common sense.
Sometimes, I think that many people choose to be gullible so they can play the victims later.
@moh_kohn What does bitcoin have to do with it? That's like saying you were reading accurate critiques of Fedwire long before Bernie Madoff scammed his investors. The two are completely unrelated.
Also, it was literally bitcoiners who suspected and then uncovered the FTX scam by poking SBF in public debates.
Maybe it was an editing error, and what they meant to say was, "Everyone wanted to get duped by Sam Bankman-Fried's big gamble..."
I mean, some folks want to believe things that aren't true, because maybe if they were, their lives would be better.
The fact that most of the crypto-believers were guys in their twenties, who might have been wishing for everything to be easier than it was, as I did when I was that age, that'd explain a lot right there...
Sam used profits and FTX investments to cover losses in his separate hedge fund company.
Co- mingling or fraud is an old crime. The scale of the attempt to cover the loss is what will draw a lengthy prison sentence.
It was the strength of Crypto investments that tempted SBF to cover losses elsewhere, in this case, with legal consequences.
@Dolphinchaz@moh_kohn The coverage all seems to be from the perspective that SBF was a crook in an honest market, not a participant in a system that is set up to defraud and steal. It is like saying "this guy who got caught smuggling meth across multiple borders was clearly a very bad man, because meth transportation should be done in an open and above board manner."
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