Some day in the future — probably a very distant future, but a future nonetheless — you will be able to go an entire hour without having to think about Sam Bankman-Fried . Today, alas, will not be that day.
https://twitter.com/lizrhoffman/status/1595183732989779970
The letter’s unhingedness is self explanatory, but you’re a busy person with many non-SBF things to think about. Perhaps we can offer a summary:
SBF says he’s sorry. SBF has been ejected from FTX and, irrespective how sincere and heartfelt his regret, he really shouldn’t be writing to its employees, yet here we are
SBF says FTX’s collapse was because on two occasions there was a “run on the bank” that caused a 50 per cent drawdown of “collateral”. He doesn’t acknowledge the fact that in no sense is FTX a bank, nor that its collateral was almost entirely digital horse-feathers
SBF “deeply regrets” some things related to oversight structures and not keeping track of leverage. Nothing he regrets seems to align with court filings — no mention for example of customer accounts being routinely looted, solvency being misrepresented, houses being bought on expenses, etc — so either he doesn’t regret those things or he hasn’t read the first-day declaration?
SBF says he believes “there are billions of dollars of genuine interest that could go to making customers whole.”
SBF’s “best legal defence is to say he’s just really, really stupid,” reported The Byte last week , in an article that wraps together lawyerly advice around the theme of how it’s better to seem “staggeringly entitled and incompetent” than criminal. This does seem to be exactly how it’s playing out — but in public rather than in court, and with an added second-act grift element. If it’s all feigned entitlement and incompetence, it’s honestly pretty convincing.
Elsewhere on Wednesday . . .
— SBF, Elon Musk, and a secret text (Semafor)
— Brussels’ uphill battle to confiscate Russian assets (Politico)
— Harvard paper to central banks: buy bitcoin (Politico)
— A response to Matt Levine’s The Crypto Story (Sal Bayat)
— A mathematician’s guide to the World Cup (YouTube)
— On Qatar, and how to get on TV (London Review of Books)
— Climate change from A to Z (New Yorker)
— Two pro wrestlers developed ‘The Progressive Liberal’ to be the bad guy at matches. Then the atmosphere turned far darker (CNN)
— In Memoriam: Frederick P Brooks Jr, author of The Mythical Man-Month (CircleID)
— A history of ARM, part two (Ars Technica)
— How long would society last during a total grid collapse ? (Practical Engineering)
— Inside the hip-hop record store run by undercover cops (Vice)
— Big coin (Riksbank)
(H/T to everyone on the Alphaville.club Mastodon server who has shared links.)