"Sam Bankman-Fried perpetrated one of the biggest financial crimes in American history" SBF found guilty on all 7 counts of fraud. Crypto markets drop after verdict.
Bad Madoff. Faulty neoliberal capitalism where corruption and theft get rationalized.
Is Sam Bankman-Fried now the exemplar for the excesses of the Effective Altruism movement, especially when he tried to front end his legal defense with a rebranded capitalist prosperity doctrine, now confabulated with the A.I. panic of longtermism.
Sam Bankman-Fried admits 'mistakes' but testifies he did not defraud anyone.
Prosecutors have accused Bankman-Fried of pillaging FTX for his own high-flying ends. He faces seven counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to launder money, felony charges that could carry sentences of decades in prison if he is convicted. He has pleaded not guilty to the allegations that he stole FTX customers’ funds and used them for a $40m Bahamas penthouse, A-list celebrity endorsements and $100m in political contributions.
Prosecutors put forward multiple witnesses including former members of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle who say they committed crimes at his direction.
Also central to the charges are allegations that FTX mishandled customer data and used encrypted and disappearing messages to discuss operations of the company. The defense team sought to dispel allegations that these practices were used purposefully to obscure fraud. Bankman-Fried said in court that lawyers approved of FTX auto-deleting communications and that he believed it was allowed under FTX data retention policies. He also stated that the company encrypted communications due to “concern[s] about hacking attempts” and ex-employees interfering in its business.
www.theguardian.com/...
The first thing that should raise your suspicions about the “Effective Altruism movement” is the name. It is self-righteous in the most literal sense. Effective altruism as distinct from what? Well, all of the rest of us, presumably—the ineffective and un-altruistic, we who either do not care about other human beings or are practicing our compassion incorrectly.
We all tend to presume our own moral positions are the right ones, but the person who brands themselves an Effective Altruist goes so far as to adopt “being better than other people” as an identity. It is as if one were to label a movement the Better And Smarter People Movement—indeed, when the Effective Altruists were debating how to brand and sell themselves in the early days, the name “Super Hardcore Do-Gooders” was used as a placeholder. (Apparently in jest, but the name they eventually chose means essentially the same thing.)
Effective Altruism can be defined as a “social movement,” a “research field,” or a “practical community.” The Center For Effective Altruism says it’s about “find[ing] the best ways to help others, and put[ting] them into practice,” and is now “applied by tens of thousands of people in more than 70 countries.” It has received coverage in leading media outlets (e.g., the New Yorker, TIME, and the New York Times), and $46 billion has apparently been committed to Effective Altruist causes, although most of that appears to be pledges from the same few billionaires.
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Put this way, it sounded rather compelling. Some Effective Altruists started an organization, GiveWell, that tried to figure out which charities were actually doing a good job at saving lives and which were mostly hype. I thought that made plenty of sense. But I quickly saw qualities in EA that I found deeply off-putting. They were rigorously devoted to trying to quantify moral decisions, to decide what the mathematically morally superior course of action to take was. And as GiveWell says, while first they try to shift people from doing things that “feel” good to doing things that achieve good results, they then encourage them to ask, “How can I do as much good as possible?” Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer’s 2015 EA manifesto is called The Most Good You Can Do, and EA is strongly influenced by utilitarianism, so they are not just trying to do good, but maximize the good (measured in some kind of units of goodness) that one puts out into the world.
www.currentaffairs.org/...
And they’re not always wrong, since EAs try to consciously confront the issue of cognitive biases, whereas many people casually succumb to them. However, when you view yourself in this way, and you are surrounded with academics who unconsciously share an increasingly rigid worldview, it’s a short step to thinking that it’s ok to lie to your patrons, your investors, or even yourself, if doing so has a big enough payoff.
siphoning client funds with no securitization may have been the least of his crimes. Following a five-week trial,
@SBF_FTX, the founder and former CEO of @FTX_Official, was found guilty by a New York jury of defrauding his customers and lenders. A tentative sentencing date has been scheduled for March 28, 2024, with the potential for Bankman-Fried to face several decades in prison, with a maximum theoretical sentence of up to 115 years.
Longtermists believe we are dutybound to try to produce the best outcomes for the greatest number of humans.
This is no different to many 19th century liberals, but longtermists have a much longer timeline in mind.
They look to the far future and see trillions upon trillions of humans floating through space, colonising new worlds.
They argue that we owe the same duty to each of these future humans as we do to anyone alive today.
And because there are so many of them, they carry much more weight than today's specimens.
This kind of thinking makes the ideology "really dangerous", said Torres, author of "Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation".
"Any time you have a utopian vision of the future marked by near infinite amounts of value, and you combine that with a sort of utilitarian mode of moral thinking where the ends can justify the means, it's going to be dangerous," said Torres.
www.france24.com/...
The outlandish details of FTX’s collapse fueled broader mistrust of the cryptocurrency sector. Crypto and blockchain startups raised less money in the last four quarters combined than in the first quarter of 2022, when FTX was still riding high, according to research by digital asset investment firm Galaxy Digital. The failed firm’s tentacles seemed to extend to every corner of the sector, from lenders like Genesis to hedge funds like Three Arrows Capital. To be sure, the speculative bubble in crypto would probably have deflated even without Bankman-Fried. But his prominent role in promoting U.S. legislation to govern such assets meant that his downfall in some ways halted progress entirely.
Yet despite widespread predictions of cryptocurrency’s demise, there is still a market for virtual assets. The price of bitcoin has more than doubled this year as large financial institutions like BlackRock (BLK.N) seek to make the virtual currency more respectable. Even FTX may be set for its own rebirth. CEO John J. Ray III is working on a payout plan for customers who lost money. The bankrupt exchange is also negotiating with three bidders to help it relaunch trading services, Bloomberg reported last month.
Assistant U.S. attorney Nicolas Roos said in his closing statement before the jury, “this is not about complicated crypto, it’s about deception.” Even if Bankman-Fried appeals the verdict, his swift conviction should cause a collective sigh of relief from firms using blockchain technology to solve real problems like streamlining cross-border payments and remittances. Crypto enthusiasts argue that technology permits the creation of decentralized financial networks. It may take some old-fashioned U.S. justice to restore trust in the idea of a trustless system.
www.reuters.com/...
