Tag: Bitcoin
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NFT too small
Bloomberg does another deep dive into the Trump Too Small trademark case. A t-shirt vendor wanted to trademark the slogan. The trademark office correctly rejected the trademark because the vendor hadn’t acquired a license from Trump to use his name. The 5th circuit overturned, citing the meaningless and nonexistent “free speech”. Now the Supremes are…
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Guilty!
That was quick. Sammy’s guilty on all charges. Bravo and kudos to the jury. I would have had trouble with obscure concepts of balance (a thief stealing from other thieves is not really immoral)… but a jury is only supposed to deal with the letter of the law, and they did it exactly right.
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Constants and Variables on Sammy
The last day of action in Sammy’s trial brought out a set of facts that haven’t been discussed before. Why did Sammy choose to operate in the Bahamas? Because he bribed the Bahamian government. Constant: We can be sure Sammy also tried to bribe US and NY regulators. He always cheats and bribes. That’s his…
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No snappy conclusions
Tiffany gives a short report on Sammy’s actual testimony. After many years of conquering everyone he wants to conquer, many years of confidently promising the world and delivering shit, he ends up mumbling a hundred versions of “I don’t remember”. I can’t think of any snappy conclusions based on Professional Criminal personality traits. This is…
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If you’re doing it that way…
In Laura Shin’s reporting on Sammy’s testimony, she describes a setup for monitoring accounts. Sammy had one “trading engine” for running the bets in his betting parlor, and another “risk engine” for checking the bets against account limits for each customer. He claimed that the “risk engine” was slow in responding when the bets hit…
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Ledgers all the way
Tiffany also has a Substack column, which she doesn’t use as heavily as Twitter and Youtube. She does put some documents there. This one is especially informative. It’s a document Sammy wrote to her, outlining part of his defense strategy. It’s crystal clear, not fuzzy at all. Good old double-entry bookkeeping, familiar to an old…
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Nonrandom note
Just one extremely nonrandom note on the Sam Old Subject. I have considerable sympathy for Sammy’s associates, especially Singh and Wang. I HAVE GALACTICALLY INFINITE NEGATIVE SYMPATHY FOR THE INVESTORS AND CUSTOMERS. THEY KNEW EXACTLY WHAT THEY WERE GETTING INTO. IF YOU WANT YOUR MONEY TO BE SAFE OR ‘RING FENCED’, YOU PUT YOUR MONEY…
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Poignant
Nishad Singh’s testimony focuses sharply on a point I’ve been making since 2014. Nishad admired and respected Sammy UNTIL Sammy instructed him to write dishonest code. Nerds do a terrible job of judging personalities and social strategies because we don’t have personalities or social skills. BUT: When you instruct a programmer to write dishonest code,…
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Even more useless logic
Via Protos: Sammy’s lawyers are trying every tool in the box, which is their job. Now they’ve filed a motion for mistrial because Sammy hasn’t been able to get his “required” dose of Adderall, allegedly needed to fix his alleged ADHD. Also via Protos: Sammy hasn’t bothered to show the symptoms of ADHD during the…
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More thanks for advice
Continuing in thanks for good advice mode…. Noticed this while browsing Substack. The Bob Brinker financial advising firm is still around and still advising, and now it’s recommending Series I bonds again. Brinker retired a long time ago and died earlier this year; the firm is carried on by his successors. Back in 2001 I…
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Doesn’t hit the main point
A bitcoin lover interviews a bitcoin realist. Kudos to both of them for conducting a civil and informative interview. Important question around minute 12: No, there’s nothing interesting at the core. There’s no “technology” at the core. It’s just an array, which is a universal part of every computer program. The bitcoin array is an…
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Hmm…
Interesting admission in CoinDesk’s live coverage of the Sammy trial and other bitcoin-related events. A lobbyist who helps bitcoin companies deal with regulation said: The regulators have shut down the major banks who served the crypto industry, and placed strong restrictions on other banks. If you can’t work with a bank you can’t succeed in…
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Just curious
I noted in reports about Sammy’s trial that Programmer Wang used the Py randomizer to generate the official daily trading volume. As an old Pythoner I was curious to see what was happening. Here’s the trick as shown and analyzed by BitMEX. The code is dense and “one-liner” to make it harder to read, unlike…
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Blood is thicker
Michael Lewis’s defense of Sammy is so obviously bizarre that even Saagar and Krystal could see it! One of the commenters hits an important point: If SBF was a Nigerian scammer, I’m certain Michael Lewis would have a drastically different take. He’s not the only one who still defended SBF. These people saw him like…
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Wrong foot
The prosecution in Sammy’s trial started out with an immediate error. Their first witness was a commodities trader specializing in cocoa beans. He put 100k into Sammy’s swindle and then was SHOCKEDSHOCKEDSHOCKED that the 100k disappeared. This plays right into the defense argument that the suckers should have known better. The argument isn’t valid for…
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