What's a "camp"? Is it not a prison? Non-US person here.

Do prisoners have to work?

Danbury is only "in the Boston area" by the most generous of measures. Hell, Danbury's probably closer to Philadelphia than Boston.

> I dont think it was greed. I think he legitimately thought he was doing the right thing, thought it was fun, and thought it was interesting.

It was absolutely greed by the original sense of the word, which isn't necessary only about money, he knew he was breaking the laws given the step he took to cover his tracks, badly, but he was very well aware of the fraud he was partaking in, it was proven during his trial.

There is the crime and then there is the cover up, or attempt at doing so.

And ever after Sam was arrested he tried to intimidate and discredit, publicly, his co-defendant. He was fully aware of the crimes he committed, he just thought he could miraculously get out of his situation on top, like a trader who just lost and still going to bet everything: that's greed.

Just make sure you're paying taxes.

People keep saying there's not enough punishment but they're not seeing that somebody is being punished; it's just not Caroline.

Why?

Her cooperation landed Sam in prison by helping the feds understand the evidence, and alerted them to crimes they hadn't yet discovered.

Sam's cooperation... wasn't. He could have cut a plea deal and he chose to deny everything despite ample evidence.

Acceptance of responsibility is a thing.

There are not many jobs out there that pay you a few million dollars for two years of work, so yes!

Downside: among the usual US-specific stuff, as a felon it's much harder to receive most countries' permanent visas. It's a case by case and you will get unlucky. There's often a 'character requirement' which is very loosely defined.

it's dubious whether it would pay off long term given the stigma of being a felon. whatever return there is, probably not enough to account for the mental distress involved

Pre-marriage Yes. Im a family man now, so not for 2.

2 million is about 10 years of salary. maybe double if you include the time value of money.

Would you spend 2 years in jail now to live 20 years longer? Have 2 more children? to retire 30 years earlier?

Man. American poor people enlist to the army, knowing very well they have a pretty good chance of being sent to be maimed or killed in some desert fighting for some oil company or Israel for far less money than a few million.

Not now, as I have a child, but pre-child, I would give it serious consideration.

2 years in the prison she will end up at or the one SBF is at? For multiple millions, yeah 100% immediately.

2 years in a supermax or in one of the super violent federal prisons... probably not.

Two years, two million?

I wouldn't, but millions of people would.

You think she stole a few?

At her age with world as your oyster it would be tough.

At 30,40+ already locked into a narrowly defined routine of toddlers screaming at you 24/7 because of some variation of you selected the wrong color cup, and your bank account and energy constantly being drained to zero by thankless familial responsibilities I can see how someone might find it attractive to spend a few years reading in a cell and working out with the cartel bros and some payload of cash waiting to satisfy any remaining child support.

The Bitcoin was only worth $620,000 at the time though, and he only was able to do so because he stumbled upon a bug in the Silk Road, so it wasn't premeditated. That's very different from intentionally gambling with billions of dollars from your customer's money like Ellison or SBF.

>living like a billionaire for nine years was worth the one year prison sentence he received

He's only been out for a little bit. Give it 10 years and ask him how being a broke felon is. Especially with a fraud conviction which will preclude him from employment even more.

> I never understand people who seem to think any amount of jail time is trivial.

There's "jail" (colloquial for generic/television "prison" and all the real and fictional horrors that evokes), and then there's "minimum security womens' prison". These are qualitatively different things, and Ms Ellison is headed for the latter.

> I wouldn’t serve 30 days in jail for a billion dollars.

Interesting. I suspect that for a lot less than that, most people would even consider serving 30 days in a supermax. Or solitary confinement.

We have a few regular posters here on HN who have spent much more than 30 days in some version of "prison". I am not one of them, so my thoughts are of little value, but I would be very curious to hear theirs.

> I wouldn’t serve 30 days in jail for a billion dollars.

I certainly would. $1 billion is well into "never work again" territory, and lots of people spend much more time in jail than that, have far fewer resources waiting for them, and turn out just fine.

Nobody said that jail time is trivial. I take it very seriously, but you're going way overboard in saying you would refuse $1 billion to spend 30 days in jail. That is such a large amount of money that you are set for the rest of your life, never have to worry about any needs again. 30 days of pure concentrated misery is something a lot of people would be willing to pay for that kind of reward.

> I wouldn’t serve 30 days in jail for a billion dollars.

You’d rather spend 50 years _totally free_ in your cubicle?

I served 30-ish days in jail for a lot less than that. Not that I had a lot of choice in the matter.

> I wouldn’t serve 30 days in jail for a billion dollars.

Prison isn’t that bad. Especially a federal minimum security woman’s prison. It’s basically like a summer camp, but with nothing fun to do.

"I wouldn’t serve 30 days in jail for a billion dollars."

That would be a no brainer for me. I would do a year, no problem. Probably more.

Corporate america is like a prison. Only you have the illusion of choice.

It speaks to the level of seriousness with which they approached their fiduciary duties, would be my view.

Is there any evidence to say that they happened? The only thing I have seen is extrapolation from comments made online about polyamory. Is there a source citing specific events at specific locations?

I think the comment was hyperbole

Not necessarily illegal from what I understand; but it easily could contribute to a lawsuit for a hostile work environment, could anger investors, and could maybe cause a lawsuit for allowing the executives to be irresponsibly vulnerable to blackmail or rape allegations.

Besides professionalism, it's just plain stupid. What happens if a participant claims they were pressured into it for the sake of a promotion, or for the sake of not being fired, or for the sake of not losing their visa? The result would be a disaster. This is also so predictable, that maybe an investor could claim legal negligence.

It seems flawed to assume that he was the mastermind, especially given the actual outcome.

There is a lot of room for manipulation in the justice system in determining the hierarchy and who gets to be offered a sweet deal. Had Caroline been labeled by the media as 'the mastermind' and Sam as 'the help' by the media, the outcomes may have flipped.

The media could totally construct a story where Sam was just the helpless front guy who knew nothing, misled as to the source of the money which Alameda Research was providing.

I'm fairly confident that she would have been required to surrender all of her crypto as part of the plea deal. If she didn't, it's perjury and she gets to go back to jail.

I think I read she owes $11B as part of her conviction.

You can do them too, haha

You can get life in prison for three non-violent convictions of selling LSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_L._Tyler

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-03-03-me-38444-...

Dumb? All these people, ONCE THEY'RE CAUGHT, want us to believe that they're dumb.

Her parents are both MIT Professors. She was on the US team(!) for the International Linguistic Olympiad. She won all sorts of academic contests before getting a Math degree from Stanford.

She was CEO of Alameda Research.

And now we're supposed to believe she was a "dumb" naive waif, manipulated and preyed upon by SBF, that evil manipulative shark?!

In the USA if you exercise your right to a trail then a very heavy trial tax is imposed, especially in Federal cases. https://naacp.org/resources/eliminating-illegal-practice-tri...

You have the right, but you are severely punished if you dare exercise it. This is 'just' (as in keeping with justice) because it helps reduce the strain on our justice system that is not designed and can in no way handle a non-trivial amount of cases actually going to trial and people exercising their rights. Just like companies can no longer function without people giving up their rights and requiring binding arbitration, our justice system would not be able to function if people didn't give up their right to trial.

The USA used to make fun of China because it has enshrined rights in it's constitution that, in practice, are not available or not applicable in actual daily life. I have free speech, but not where people would hear it. I have the right to a trial, but with it comes actuality the government will change my sentence to near life (or the portion of life that has any quality to it) if I dare avail myself of that right.

How many people close to you will die if you dare take your case to trial and get a trial tax imposed? How much of your childrens' lives will you miss? How long will they suffer without you earning money to support them? Or, will you miss out on the child rearing years completely when one starts a family because of the lengthy trial tax? Best to take the plea. There's a reason the Feds conviction rate is 95%, it's the explicit threat/coercion that is the trial tax. Remember, the longer the sentence, the rougher the prison you are sent to as well, because your security rating is heavily based on remaining sentence length. So it's not just a threat of length, but also the level of violence you will be subjected to during imprisonment.

Ironically, you have to testify that you were not coerced, to the judge, in court, to get out of having the trial tax imposed when you take your plea, when the very same judge knows of and is the person who applies the trial tax.

Nate Silver interviewed SBF before the court case for his book, and asked if he would accept a plea deal:

> The last question I asked him is Hey Sam, what if they gave you a two-year plea deal, right? Two years in some minimum security prison and then you can't do some trading stuff for some probationary period of time. Bankman Fried said no, he wouldn't take that deal. His day in court was worth the risk.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0jqbjp5

Bankman-Fried has a superhuman ability to ignore sound advice.

Whatever it is that got SBF in this mess it's the same thing that prevented him getting out of it with a light sentence. I don't know if that means he deserves it exactly - it seems like a better system wouldn't put a person like him in the place where he could do so much damage, but that's kinda where we're at.

SBF didn't have anyone bigger to flip on.

Who is SBF going to flip on up the chain? The Feds give deals to people lower on the hierarchy to get the people at the top (in this case, in their judgement, SBF alone).

Did you read what he was doing while this case went on? Dude was on talk shows and podcasts and posting online while constantly admitting to felonies. I can't think of a worse client, there was absolutely nothing his lawyers could do short of a literal (not figurative) gag.

"Are you saying that if SBF had cooperated in the same way, he would also have gotten"

Why are you asking a rando about a judicial decree?

The legal systems in most countries are rather more nuanced than your if ... then clause.

Going to a federal trial in general is almost always a mistake. The feds rarely lose cases; the plea bargain they offer is almost always going to be the best option for you.

Probably not, because he led the conspiracy.

He’s the trigger man and she’s the gold finger

True or not he could have created a pretty strong argument the investors purposefully selected a guy set up with all the moral hazards to run off the rails and make them cash while frontrunning a casino. Frame it as a clever deck of plausible deniability by rich elites who created the perfect recipe of a crime without actually explicitly inviting it.

We all know the investors knew what they were doing when they sent this arrogant, inexperienced, greedy sociopath on his course. Unfortunately for him he didn't realize he was also a patsy, and he took pretty much all the heat.

She didn't just describe her own crimes, although I'm sure that played a part.

She also described somebody else's crimes, and did that in a way which helped the government with sentencing the "real villain."

You only get a reduced sentence if you cooperate in the prosecution against someone else the government / prosecutor is just as or more interested in. That wouldn't be the case with the diddle.

>So all diddy needs to do is get on the stand and describe every single party of his and he’ll get a slap on the wrist?

Do you honestly think this is how the legal system works?

In the real world, a prosecutor can only nail a higher-up with the cooperation of the people lower down. Those people only cooperate if they get a lighter sentence. It's too bad, but that's how it is and it plays out every day in criminal courts.

As for Diddy: a real, disinterested DOJ would say, "oh, you can testify against <people more famous than you>? Well, we might be able to cut you a deal."

Of course, if the DOJ is not interested in prosecuting those people, then no deal. If they think Diddy is already important enough and they can't let him slide, then no deal, or at least, a medium-stiff sentence.

Finally, two years in prison is not a picnic. See if you want to do it.

No, because when prosecutors offer a light sentence to a secondary criminal in a conspiracy, it's usually a strategic decision to secure cooperation in prosecuting the main target. It wouldn't make sense that a lighter sentence for an accomplice/secondary sets a precedent for a principal actor and Diddy is the principal actor in his case, AFAIK.

(I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with any of this, just saying this is the internally consistent approach.)

We want to bribe criminals to betray each other. The people who they are betraying could do anything up to killing them to prevent this, and we have to compete with that.

The world gets zero benefit to imprisoning this woman indefinitely, it in fact costs money, and if the government had to prove their case against her without her cooperation, it would just cost even more money. Not letting a fully-cooperating sucker like her off is the opposite of a deterrent to crime. It's telling low-level people who are involved in crimes that it's better to keep quiet. We want to encourage them to betray. I hope when she gets out she becomes a celebrity, and it encourages other young people to decide to whistleblow or turn snitch on the scammy companies they work for.