[HN Gopher] Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Sing...
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Three Arrows Capital co-founder Zhu arrested in Singapore airport
Author : ipnon
Score : 128 points
Date : 2023-09-29 15:21 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| pizzalife wrote:
| This is very satisfying.
| rwmj wrote:
| https://archive.ph/B98v5
| danbruc wrote:
| This just reminded me that cryptocurrencies is a thing, this has
| not been a prominent topic here for some time, I would say. Is
| the entire cryptocurrencies stuff eventually on the way out or
| would that be a misperception? Just checked Google trends, that
| also indicates a downward trend for terms like Bitcoin,
| cryptocurrency, NFT or Ethereum for the last year or two.
| nikanj wrote:
| Grifters moved on to AI, leaving only the actually viable parts
| of crypto around. So yeah cryptos are 100% dead.
| everfree wrote:
| So far, crypto has gone through multiple market cycles lasting
| about four years each. At the peak people get euphoric and
| think it will solve all the world's problems, then in the
| trough people think it's all on its way out - that it will
| slowly fade out of public consciousness until it's forgotten. I
| believe the reality is somewhere in between.
|
| But one thing is for sure: during the trough of every cycle,
| there's always someone posting that they wonder if crypto is
| dead and never coming back.
| treyd wrote:
| It's conjectured that this is due to Bitcoin's subsidy
| halving schedule, which is every 210000 blocks or ~4 years.
| The reasoning is that the supply shock trends prices upwards
| and the rest of the market tracks Bitcoin due to many trading
| pairs between it and other cryptos. But the shock gets weaker
| over time and hopefully the nonsense will as well.
| anonporridge wrote:
| It is interesting, because while the shock does get weaker
| in relative terms it's getting stronger in absolute terms.
| i.e. a billion dollar shock to a billion dollar asset is
| relatively bigger than a 100 billion dollar shock to a 500
| billion dollar asset (bitcoin's current "market cap"), but
| the latter requires 100x the size of wealth flow.
|
| The next supply shock will also be interesting in its own
| right, specifically because it will plunge bitcoin's
| inflation rate to below that of gold, from 1.7% now to
| 0.84% in 7 months. If nothing else, that will re-highlight
| bitcoin's digital gold narrative and potentially pull in
| more wealth flow that otherwise might have flowed into
| store of value assets like gold.
|
| Bitcoin at current price and inflation rate requires $9
| billion per year net inflows to absorb newly mined coins.
| In 7 months after the halving, it will only require $4.5
| billion per year to maintain it's current price of $27,000.
| So, either it's net inflow will suddenly cut in half and
| the price will stay the same, or the current net inflow of
| $9 billion will force the price up until it reaches
| equilibrium, which usually triggers a market frenzy as
| outsiders see the gains and pile in.
|
| For some context with gold, there theoretically exists
| about $200 billion of wealth flowing into it each year just
| to absorb newly mined gold and keep the price stable.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| This is great analysis. The only caveat I would add is
| that while bitcoin is commonly priced in $ (fiat USD) it
| is much more commonly bought and sold in USDT. In fact,
| if a bunch of actors decided to sell bitcoin there might
| be plenty of USDT for that but not US$.
|
| Some of that is due to the fact that exchanges don't due
| proper KYC and have trouble maintaining US banking
| arrangements. Some of it may be that the market is
| propped up by less fiat then it would need to be liquid
| in fiat.
|
| I am not saying that as a problem-- maybe-- I don't know.
| I am just saying that as if you say bitcoin currently
| requires $9b usd a year to maintain its price that is not
| actually true.
| grotorea wrote:
| Well, there's always the possibility that _this_ time it will
| be the last. Maybe the last peak is when it reaches global
| awareness and there 's no new people to bring into the
| system. And I suspect it already reached that in the last
| cycle with Superbowl ads and Filipinos working in Axle
| Infinity.
|
| Although, I feel cryptocurrency is already too big to ever
| end completely.
| lurker919 wrote:
| The new people in the next cycle are the freshly graduated
| high schoolers and new grads who weren't following the news
| previously and have their joining bonuses and RSUs waiting
| in the bank.
| phatfish wrote:
| Can they pump Crypto as high as a good proportion of the
| "western" population widdling their thumbs for 6 months
| or more during COVID?
|
| I say western because they were the people with the
| disposable income and living under governments that could
| support furlough/stimulus payments.
| ogogmad wrote:
| It needs energy to be expended continuously in mining it,
| if it uses PoW. So it might end one day.
| Kiro wrote:
| The difficulty is adjusted automatically depending on how
| many miners there are, so it can go down.
| ogogmad wrote:
| That might be one of those things that works well in the
| short term but may also have severe tail risks.
|
| I heard a similar story about an algorithmic stablecoin
| called Luna (I think). The analogue of difficulty
| adjustments there worked fine until one day it didn't.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| Luna was a very different situation, it was nothing to do
| with difficulty adjustments.
| grotorea wrote:
| They can ultimately change the code if needed. Luna also
| tried that IIRC.
| kibwen wrote:
| Indeed, one can "change the code" to do anything...
| including things like increasing the bitcoin supply
| arbitrarily. Bitcoin's scarcity is a social construct
| that will be changed when the people who control the
| nodes want to change it.
| cesarb wrote:
| > So it might end one day.
|
| Only if the mining stops abruptly. Otherwise, the
| automatic difficulty adjustment allows it to keep working
| even with a reduced energy expenditure. In the extreme, a
| single computer running in a museum could be enough to
| keep the blockchain working forever.
| ogogmad wrote:
| A single computer in a museum would be vulnerable to 51%
| attacks. It would also be too illiquid to recoup costs.
| grotorea wrote:
| But the 51% attack would cost more than the value of the
| Bitcoin you could get by doing it, which is presumably ~0
| since the only node is a museum computer.
| iskander wrote:
| It would be a shame if this keeps happening, like: (2013)
| Bitcoin and its clones failed at all their stated purposes,
| (2017) the ICO craze left nothing of value, (2021) the
| DeFi/NFT bubble also left nothing but rubble. This stuff is
| zero sum, shuffling money without creating new things of
| enduring value.
| sneak wrote:
| Every claim in your comment is factually false.
| kibwen wrote:
| Bitcoin did factually fail at its stated goal, as laid
| out in the original whitepaper. Bitcoin has not succeeded
| at being a peer-to-peer currency, because the "peer-to-
| peer" part went out the window when users stopped hosting
| their own nodes, and the currency part was abandoned when
| people realized that transaction throughput is fatally
| low.
| ogogmad wrote:
| At the moment, you can buy drugs with it online. Don't know
| if that will last, though.
| iskander wrote:
| Can you still!?
|
| It's so incredibly traceable these days and every
| iteration of Silk Road gets busted, no?
| ogogmad wrote:
| Dark web markets absolutely still exist. The traceability
| problem is at least partially solved using mixers. I
| don't know everything there is to know here, like how
| easy it is to get back fiat.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| All the grifters and dilettantes moved on to AI :)
| [deleted]
| nerf0 wrote:
| I work in this area and to me, the tech is still super
| interesting. In particular, things like zero knowledge proof
| and related scaling/privacy solutions are at the forefront of
| cryptography in my opinion.
| Zetobal wrote:
| It's a decade now and there is still no real use case for
| it..
| danbruc wrote:
| One and a half decades actually.
| Demotomo wrote:
| Your zero knowledge proof is not true.
|
| We see the issues with it: 1. It moves the trust issue or 2.
| The trust is only on the Blockchain.
|
| World exists in a physical world which doesn't allow you at
| all to use a Blockchain there.
|
| And zero trust for your money also means zero recovery
| wmf wrote:
| We just need to find some non-speculative and non-scammy uses
| for that tech.
| grotorea wrote:
| Haven't we be trying since the beginning?
| iskander wrote:
| I think you'll see people picking those techniques and
| using them in a hidden-from-the-user way (like how git and
| BlueSky use Merkle trees)
| danbruc wrote:
| Cryptocurrencies have not actually invented much new
| technology, they mostly combined existing ideas in new
| ways. Merkel trees, for example, are an almost 50 year
| old idea, zero-knowledge proofs are almost 40 years old,
| proof of work predates Bitcoin by 15 years which makes it
| 30 years old.
| wmf wrote:
| Recent advances in SNARKs/STARKs/VDFs were funded by
| crypto. SNARKs have gone from unusably slow to reasonably
| efficient.
| iskander wrote:
| I think the initial impractical prototypes for the core
| techniques were in the literature for a while but there's
| really no comparison between eg interactive ZK protocols
| and the succinct non-interactive proofs used by the
| cryptocurrency folks. The latter are computationally
| general (you don't have to roll a new one for each
| program) and many orders of magnitude more efficient.
|
| I think it's important to give the cryptocurrency
| industry credit for the few corners in which it makes
| real (theory/tooling) contributions even if they're
| motivated by nonsense
| danbruc wrote:
| I did not want to say that they invented or improved
| nothing, just that a lot of the building blocks already
| existed. I just looked this up, non-interactive zero-
| knowledge proof also seem to have a history back to the
| late 80s, but if cryptocurrencies gave us some
| improvements and new ideas that made them more practical,
| fine, I am not going to complain about that.
| iskander wrote:
| Like, huge tangible improvements.
|
| You can do general purpose programming in all kinds of
| DSLs and Rust libraries that compiles down to big-but-
| practical arithmetic circuits and then generate proofs
| that y=f(x) without revealing x for arbitrary f. That
| really wasn't possible until a few years ago and emerged
| almost exclusively within the sphere of cryptocurrency-
| adjacent research. You can also use the succinctness of
| SNARKs to batch these proofs and shrink the verifier
| costs to almost nothing
|
| It's a cool model for asymmetric computing, with low
| capacity verifiers collecting results from high capacity
| provers. It'll probably find uses outside deranged
| gambling...
| Terr_ wrote:
| > I think you'll see people picking those techniques
|
| Those techniques were already invented and in-use _long_
| beforehand though.
|
| I think that needs emphasizing, because sometimes it
| feels like... Imagine that fans of the Segway claimed it
| will replace all other forms of transportation, and a
| worrying number of them are still out there crediting the
| (failing) product for _inventing the wheel_.
| iskander wrote:
| Merkle trees, yes! That was just an example of a
| technique that can be well hidden vs in the user's face.
|
| Newer techniques like Verkle trees, SNARKs, STARKs, &c
| are.... well, new.
| Terr_ wrote:
| The way I see it, "blockchain" (NFTs, etc) are less
| technologies and more _business-plans_ to make money--
| perhaps in a slightly more-literal sense than usual--from
| available tools.
|
| It's kind of like ride-share services: They didn't invent
| cars or databases or dispatching systems or phone-apps,
| and while their investment might have spurred some new
| tools/libraries/algorithms they use, the broader
| usefulness of those inventions doesn't flow backward to
| mean they have a good/sustainable business.
|
| There are even cases like "private blockchain" where the
| fad-marketing is getting used to mislabel what is
| actually just a regular old distributed database of
| yesteryear.
| sneak wrote:
| Cheap and safe payments are of tremendous utility.
|
| The problem is that anonymous payments are essentially
| illegal under current regulations designed to protect the
| large incumbent businesses.
|
| Cryptocurrencies could render paywalls and signupwalls a
| thing of the past, allowing you to pay a fraction of a
| penny for a page view automatically in browser without an
| account.
|
| Such systems are illegal.
| eigenket wrote:
| There are some pretty big, obvious reason why true
| anonymous payments are illegal under a lot of regulations
| in different countries. Supporting current big businesses
| is pretty damn far down the list.
| sneak wrote:
| Yes, the reasons are big, but they aren't valid or useful
| unless you are a large incumbent (or the state itself).
| callalex wrote:
| Any payment that can't be reversed after a dispute is
| inherently unsafe.
| rubatuga wrote:
| Drugs usually aren't a scam.
| theironhammer wrote:
| A solution in search of a problem? Maybe they could apply
| it to something like protecting a person's online identity
| rather than a digital coin/currency. Or something along the
| lines of Distributed Apps instead of DeFi.
| iskander wrote:
| I gave the "industry" a pretty thorough deep dive; I learned
| Solidity, wrote a bunch of smart contracts, tried a lot of
| DeFi, and listened to ~100 episodes of the Zero Knowledge
| podcast.
|
| My impression on the other end of it is that the "tech" is
| interesting in a purely academic sense but most of the
| participants are building things they know have no use and
| engaging in a lot of motivated reasoning about the future to
| justify drawing money in from the outside.
|
| Like, it can all be a lot of fun! And some techniques, like
| all ZK folding schemes, are mathematical magic. But, no one
| wants code to be law and pretty much no one should be
| managing private keys tied to money.
|
| It's a very cool but failed idea.
| SagatPetchy wrote:
| Crypto has always had extreme bull and bear markets. During
| bear markets the speculators leave, crypto's detractors once
| again proclaim its demise, and its believers anxiously wait for
| the next bull market.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| My thinking has always been that Bitcoin can solve the issue of
| continued printing of fiat money. Bitcoin and other crypto
| clearly introduces other problems but this fundamental weakness
| of fiat currency is still there and unsolved. Will
| bitcoin/crypto really go away if this issue with fiat currency
| is still unresolved?
| pavlov wrote:
| It's not going to just vanish because crypto has become the
| tool of choice for online scams and crime.
|
| Here's just one recent example, a small Kansas bank that
| collapsed entirely because its CEO got involved in a crypto
| scam:
|
| "The chief executive officer of Heartland Tri-State Bank asked
| if the client would lend him $12 million so he could get his
| money out of a cryptocurrency investment. He promised he'd pay
| him back 10 days later, offering $1 million in interest to make
| it worth his while."
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-27/crypto-sc...
|
| Billions are being stolen annually using crypto. It's the only
| use case with any traction.
|
| For the same reason, governments are increasingly cracking down
| on crypto.
|
| The conditions that created the 2011-2021 crypto booms were a
| combination of lack of regulation and zero interest rates,
| which made investors look for increasingly speculative
| investments. Those days aren't coming back.
| eftychis wrote:
| History of economics disagrees with the last -- hopeful I
| will assume -- statement. The world was and is full of
| scammers and fraudsters.
|
| Also respectfully I am not sure I get the zero interest rates
| arguments. There seems to be a subgroup of HN community that
| believes low interest rates (below some arbitrary threshold?)
| to be immoral. Maybe there is a Crime, scams and ponzi
| schemes correlation study over hundreds of years I am unaware
| of? Japan is keeping negative rates and they are not known
| for that, to give the country everyone knows counterexample.
|
| Besides that the main borrowers are countries themselves. And
| with US, Europe and China paths right now, amidst a global
| war tension, something will have to give long term to make
| ends meet. Usually it is currency devaluation and a
| fundamental systemic change.
| pavlov wrote:
| Zero interest rates will most likely return one day, but
| crypto will be heavily regulated by then. That's what I
| meant -- the combo isn't coming back where crypto is an
| unregulated sink for ZIRP speculation money.
| ethanbond wrote:
| The zero interest rate comment has nothing to do with
| morality, it means that people were doing incredibly goofy,
| risky shit to get a return, which creates ripe ground for
| conmen and fraud.
| thrawa8387336 wrote:
| Lookie the thing is as long as interest rates are down,
| wages might go up nominally but in actual material terms
| you end up poorer. Unless you already own substantial hard
| assets or have access to the low interest rate loans. At
| the end of the day what matters is how many barrels of
| oil/kWh your monthly income can directly or indirectly be
| exchanged for.
| olalonde wrote:
| > There seems to be a subgroup of HN community that
| believes low interest rates (below some arbitrary
| threshold?) to be immoral.
|
| Ironically, this is a very popular belief in the Bitcoin
| community and often cited as _the_ reason to adopt Bitcoin.
| I don 't want to start a debate but essentially, the crux
| of the belief is that low interest rates are essentially a
| means of "printing money", which in turn dilutes the value
| of the currency and acts as a hidden tax on its holders.
| The idea being that Bitcoin having a fixed supply, isn't
| vulnerable to such debasement.
| olalonde wrote:
| Drug dealers love U.S. bank notes, pedophiles hide behind
| Tor, tax evaders hide behind Delaware LLCs, scammers use
| prepaid SIM cards, bigots find a voice on 4Chan, and
| insurgents communicate through E2E encrypted messengers.
|
| The unfortunate reality is, any tool or platform offering a
| high degree of privacy will inevitably draw those with
| nefarious intentions.
| tkz1312 wrote:
| Stablecoins came close to moving as much value as visa in
| 2022 [1].
|
| The use case for crypto has always been clear. There is a lot
| of demand for digital cash, some from people who operate
| outside of the law, but also from people who lack access to
| good banking and payments infrastructure (think activists,
| sex workers, citizens of nations with unreliable monetary
| systems).
|
| Now that the speculative mania finally seems to have died
| down, what remains is what actually provides real value: a
| robust, modern and reliable financial infrastructure that
| provides privacy and does not make arbitrary decisions about
| who has access.
|
| 1: https://cryptopotato.com/stablecoins-settled-as-much-
| value-a...
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Visa has at least 343 million cardholders worldwide.
|
| Of course trying to determine crypto "users" is essentially
| impossible but even the most bloated and inflated estimates
| (users unique per chain, address = user) put the number
| somewhere around 300 million. Personally I think it's more
| like 50-100 million by the time you factor in users on
| different chains, different wallets, etc. I've spent a lot
| of time analyzing chains to come to that number, it's not
| difficult. Nearly every crypto user participates on more
| than one chain and often uses at least two addresses (hot
| and cold wallet, for example).
|
| Sure enough, the quote is right there in the report:
|
| "over 25 million blockchain addresses held over $1 in
| stablecoins"
|
| 25 million addresses, which absolutely don't equal users.
| Even if they did, that's .05% of global internet users (5.2
| billion). With the threshold for inclusion at $1...
|
| Of course you say "moving as much value" which doesn't
| necessarily correlate directly to users or their activity
| but I would venture to guess (if the report is accurate at
| all) that a substantial portion of that stablecoin "value"
| volume isn't anything resembling the economic activity of
| Visa where every swipe is in exchange for a good or
| service. At best settlement between exchanges but also wash
| trading and all kinds of weird hijinx that are basically
| just swapping tokens around with no other meaningful
| economic activity. Just look at chain analysis breakdowns
| on the latest crypto heist and watch them tumble it through
| stablecoins at least once (often many more). I guess that's
| "value" but I certainly wouldn't be touting it.
|
| The crypto narrative of helping the unbanked is essentially
| PR damage control spin to try to counter all of the obvious
| evils that crypto is directly involved in and often
| responsible for. This volume (if even accurate) has nothing
| to do with helping regular people, the oppressed, the
| unbanked, whatever.
| tkz1312 wrote:
| visa very clearly much more users who transact much lower
| amounts than stablecoins, I never claimed otherwise.
|
| The fact remains that substantial amounts of people are
| using crypto rails to move very economically significant
| sums of money.
|
| The fact that something can be used by bad people does
| not make the thing itself bad. Very similar arguments are
| often levelled at tools like Tor or Signal, but very few
| of the hacker news crowd see those viewpoints as valid.
|
| Uncensorable and private digital cash is important in the
| same way that uncensorable and private digital
| communications are.
| rrdharan wrote:
| > some from people who operate outside of the law... also
| from people who lack access to good banking and payments
| infrastructure
|
| What do you suppose that ratio to be in terms of e.g.
| transaction volume?
|
| Personally I think it's >90 : <10 (scams : sympathetic).
| Others seem to think the balance is very different, or that
| it _could_ be different some day and that alone is a reason
| to "leave it alone".
| tkz1312 wrote:
| I personally don't have an opinion on the ratio, but
| there are many reports estimating that the illicit to
| legal ratio is much lower than you suspect.
|
| Either way I actually don't care that much, I think
| access to the financial system is a human right, and not
| one that governments or US corporates should be able to
| arbitrarily remove. Crypto is the only thing we have that
| is remotely close to preserving the rights that we have
| with cash in the digital realm, and that makes it OK in
| my book.
| rrdharan wrote:
| > preserving the rights that we have with cash in the
| digital realm
|
| I think it goes quite a bit beyond that, or rather, the
| digital and physical realm are not mere 1:1 mirror images
| of each other.
|
| For example in the physical realm it is really difficult
| to move millions of dollars of cash from one place to
| another particularly across prominent geographic or
| national boundaries (oceans, mountains, countries); the
| difficulty scales with the amount. Do people have this
| "right"? Sure, I guess, but in practice and as history
| has shown us, they've never been able to exercise it.
|
| It's more or less trivial to move huge sums with crypto.
| tkz1312 wrote:
| Certainly they are not 1-1 the same. Cash has better
| privacy properties, crypto lets you move large sums more
| easily.
|
| In general, when it comes to a monetary technology, I
| view being able to quickly and easily make transfers as a
| feature not a bug.
| thrawa8387336 wrote:
| The genie is out of the box. How would 2008 have played out if
| Bitcoin existed back then?
| johnloeber wrote:
| SBF down, Do Kwon down, Su Zhu down, many many more to go... I've
| been amazed at how slow the law seems to be in apprehending the
| most egregious scammers from that era.
| mousetree wrote:
| Waiting for Tether
| ceejayoz wrote:
| And Binance's CZ.
| creddit wrote:
| Unfortunately, Tether now operates as one of the single
| greatest businesses of all time and is probably (from now)
| operating completely legitimately. No one is happy to hear
| this except for Tether themselves.
| Zanfa wrote:
| Highly improbable.
|
| While in theory they could be earning billions in interest
| just sitting on all that cash, there's very little reason
| to believe the billions they claim to have exist. Do they
| seriously expect people to believe that they have more
| assets under management than at peak crypto in 2021, with
| billions more pouring in regularly?
| peyton wrote:
| Yeah there's tons of demand for offshore dollars. It's a
| great product.
| bbarnett wrote:
| To be fair, "era" usually means "hundreds or thousands" of
| years ago, or millions.
|
| Not just a year or two.
|
| Justice, especially for complex things, which require
| investigation, is seldom fast. It probably wouldn't be fair
| otherwise.
| emodendroket wrote:
| Era is commonly used to refer to much shorter periods than
| that. The "post-War era" was a few decades, not millions of
| years
| brookst wrote:
| "The wheels of justice turn slowly, but grind finely"
| penguin_booze wrote:
| And then, sentence all the criminals who've been long dead.
| Justice: served.
| huytersd wrote:
| [dead]
| gottorf wrote:
| Indeed. "Egregious" in the court of public opinion isn't the
| same thing as a legal case put together rigorously by
| prosecutors arguing against the finest defense lawyers that
| scammers' money can buy.
| dheera wrote:
| Here's a rebel idea: In court cases, have the scoreboard
| weighted by the AGI of the lawyers.
|
| define pro = accuser, con = accused
|
| If the "pro" side has 10 points and the "con" side has 5
| points, and the con side's lawyer makes 1/3 the salary of
| the pro side's lawyer, the con side wins the case.
|
| Another rebel idea: If either side chooses to not use
| lawyers, the other side is also not allowed to use lawyers.
| If either side uses ChatGPT in the courtroom, the other
| side is also allowed to use ChatGPT.
|
| Yet another rebel idea: The lawyer budgets of both sides
| must be equal. If you have more money to spend on lawyers
| you are required by law to give some money to the other
| side for their lawyers to make the budgets equal.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Adjusted gross income?
|
| Also, what are "points"? There's no scoreboard in a
| courtroom...
| dheera wrote:
| > There's no scoreboard in a courtroom
|
| There could be ... in terms of form it's not that
| different from a glorified high school debate with some
| silly outfits and exccessive use of SAT vocabulary.
| thecyborganizer wrote:
| Your high school debates were judged by a jury of your
| peers?
|
| We had a bored teacher on their day off. (Or sometimes a
| parent, or an alumni.)
| ohdannyboy wrote:
| Let's say I have something like $1M to my name (total
| assets) and I'm accused of a serious crime. I'm ready to
| spend it all to not go to prison for decades, but the AGI
| of the prosecutor is like 1/3 of my respectable private
| attorney. State prosecutors make garbage so this isn't
| far fetched. I now have to fund the government and give a
| significant percent of my assets just to defend myself?
|
| Making somebody fund their own prosecution during trial
| is probably the least rebel thing I've ever heard.
| dheera wrote:
| > I'm ready to spend it all to not go to prison
|
| You said you were ready
|
| > give a significant percent of my assets just to defend
| myself
|
| So why not? Or get a cheaper lawyer yourself that's more
| fair to the other side.
|
| There's a lot of rich people out there who get away with
| some really bad crimes just because they have really
| clever private attorneys.
| ohdannyboy wrote:
| > So why not? Or get a cheaper lawyer yourself that's
| more fair to the other side.
|
| Because that is money I could and should be able to use
| to defend myself. And should my defense be successful
| that's my retirement money and financial security. I
| don't care about fair for the government, they accused me
| of something I didn't do. There is a 0% chance that a
| states attorneys salary will get me a private attorney of
| the same caliber. That's just not how it works.
|
| > There's a lot of rich people out there who get away
| with some really bad crimes just because they have really
| clever private attorneys.
|
| So what? Why should my ability to defend myself be
| compromised because someone with more money could afford
| a better lawyer?
|
| The presumption of innocence is one of the fundamental
| building blocks of our justice system. Prosecuting
| someone and making them fund their prosecution is a
| terrible idea, not a "rebel" one. The government already
| holds most of the cards here, this idea only cripples
| middle class and lower-end rich folks while not doing
| anything against the billionaires.
| jancsika wrote:
| I think blank slate HN'ers who want to cleverly build
| from first principles are in a sense like the problem C++
| of trying to import the banana class and accidentally
| bringing in the entire world.
|
| But with the blank slaters it's more like, "let's solve
| brown bananas by making them out of titanium." And
| somehow you are left to import some unspecified number of
| classes for them until they finally posit that even
| bringing in the entire world won't fix the bug in their
| code.
| dheera wrote:
| > There is a 0% chance that a states attorneys salary
| will get me a private attorney of the same caliber.
|
| But does the other side get the resources to have an
| attorney of the same caliber? If not, it's not a fair
| trial, and that's not how a justice system should work.
|
| In your system, the rich will always have better lawyers,
| and will get away with crimes, and that's precisely what
| I'm trying to say we need to change. The rich should NOT
| have better lawyers just because they're rich. They can
| have better houses, better cars, better vacations, and
| better Michelin food, but no, they should not have better
| lawyers than everyone else.
| ohdannyboy wrote:
| > But does the other side get the resources to have an
| attorney of the same caliber? If not, it's not a fair
| trial, and that's not how a justice system should work.
|
| I don't consider the sides equal coming in. The state is
| the accuser, with an exclusive right to file charges and
| they can do full investigations. They have taxpayer
| funding so they are far richer than all but the very
| richest people they go after. They also make the
| extremely complex system of laws that only experienced
| professionals can navigate. The deck is already stacked
| extremely in their favor in almost every way. I don't get
| your obsession with making sure the accused person has
| their money taken to level anything that might be in
| their favor.
|
| > In your system, the rich will always have better
| lawyers, and will get away with crimes, and that's
| precisely what I'm trying to say we need to change. The
| rich should NOT have better lawyers just because they're
| rich. They can have better houses, better cars, better
| vacations, and better Michelin food, but no, they should
| not have better lawyers than everyone else.
|
| I'm not disputing that the poor do get shafted in the
| current system and the rich are at an advantage. The fact
| that you want a better justice system doesn't make the
| idea you proposed any less insane.
| Alupis wrote:
| We've seen in just recent years _so very clearly_ that if
| the government wants to get you, they will spend nearly
| unlimited resources to do so. It doesn 't matter how big
| or small the individual prosecutor's salaries might be -
| they can outlast you and outspend you every single time.
|
| The deck is already stacked against most defendants.
| jron wrote:
| Hi, Craig.
| sgt101 wrote:
| [flagged]
| jqpabc123 wrote:
| More crypto con artistry.
|
| Color me --- not surprised.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| The stupidity of cryptobros remaining in countries where they can
| be arrested or deported, and of their misinvesting the funds of
| powerful people. Unfortunately, a free society must permit stupid
| to be stupid until they break the law.
|
| Another issue is the teams who put together these crypto utopias
| make themselves easy prey by shrewd grifters who are able to
| execute scams through creative misuse. They need far more
| controls and foresight to avert disaster.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| It was very profitable to trade AGAINST his recommendations.
| Because he would use his Twitter followers as exit liquidity.
| When he was praising bitcoin he was secretly selling, and when
| when he was saying crypto is done, time to get a McDonalds job
| you knew he was loading up.
| arbi_man wrote:
| I think they'll get Kevin Pawlak (https://twitter.com/0xSisyphus)
| next. See:
| https://x.com/NFTethics/status/1707422901492650013?s=20.
| Backstory is insane reading through.
| jiveturkey wrote:
| sorry. nothing to see here. 4 months for failure to testify. not
| related to crypto fraud etc.
| thelock85 wrote:
| Serious question from a crypto outsider: is four months long
| enough to deter future grifts? Will Zhu's detention increase
| likelihood of further prosecutions?
| eigenket wrote:
| Spending 4 months anywhere in Singapore without air-
| conditioning would deter me from pretty much anything. I
| imagine the experience in a prison cell is worse.
| mikhailfranco wrote:
| The prison is next to the airport - both named _Changi_ after
| the original _kampong_ village nearby.
|
| So hot, humid _and_ noisy.
| eigenket wrote:
| Interesting fact, Changi was a fairly brutal prisoner of
| war camp where allied forces were kept by the Japanese
| during world war 2. My grandfather's brother was kept there
| during the war.
| lamida wrote:
| Channel News Asia produced a really good documentary about
| Singapore prison:
| https://www.channelnewsasia.com/watch/inside-maximum-
| securit....
| lokar wrote:
| I read this as not about running a scam, but failing to help
| the people dealing with the cleanup with their work. A sort of
| procedural sanction.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > after he failed to comply with court orders to cooperate with
| the liquidation investigation.
|
| this procedural issue isn't really related to crypto
|
| its someone that didnt show up
| mpweiher wrote:
| Well...usually it is the procedure of finding out what
| exactly they did wrong, which tends to have something to do
| with them running away from that particularly procedure.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| yeah I think we all got that
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