Tag: Bitcoin
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Trading
Tiffany talks with Sammy again. Predictably he’s taken up trading mackerel packs, which are the modern prison equivalent of cigarettes. When I was in the walls, cigarettes were the currency. Each pack had a “par value” of a quarter, though the actual price in the commissary was 40 cents. I bought my way out of…
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Lost empathy
Via WSJ: Key Witness at Sam Bankman-Fried Trial to Launch New Crypto Exchange Ex-FTX lawyer Can Sun and other former company executives want the new exchange to allow customers to verify holdings at any time Well, I just lost my slight sympathy for those characters. They’re all incurable professional criminals. Now they’re playing the classic…
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Two-headed coins
Stock trading is the exact opposite of real business. A real business makes real things or fixes and maintains real things. Selling and delivering real things are also real businesses. A stock trader doesn’t make or fix or sell anything real. He just makes sidebets ABOUT the people who make and sell. Above all he…
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What you mean EVERYONE?
This BBC piece on Sammy starts with an obnoxious headline: Everyone got duped by Sam’s big gamble What you mean Everyone, dupe man? I wasn’t duped by any of the bitcoin shit. Plenty of others with bigger voices weren’t duped, and we all tried to tell EVERYONE that EVERYONE is a goddamn fool. This has…
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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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