Sam Bankman Fried is back in jail

August 12, 2023 12:49 PM

U.S. judge sends FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried to jail over witness tampering
posted by buffy12 (61 comments total)

Really unsurprising. Given his apparent inability to a) stop talking about his crimes and b) stop doing new crimes, Bankman-Fried probably should have never been granted bail.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:55 PM on August 12, 2023 [10 favorites]

Mod note: Comment removed. This isn't a thread about Trump, so there's no need to bring him up here, thanks!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 1:06 PM on August 12, 2023 [25 favorites]

I don't really see how you could name someone "Bankman" and not expect them to become a financial criminal.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:12 PM on August 12, 2023 [19 favorites]

Even if he's in PC, the MDC should be...an eye-opening experience for a guy cradled in privilege and entitlement since birth.
posted by praemunire at 1:13 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

One of the things that is most infuriating about the whole FTX/SBF story is the pure stupidity of genuflecting to privilege. Bankman-Fried is such a perfect example of the “very special boy” who got a leg up because of his economic class and family connections, where fawning journalists ate up the line “he is a genius, because that explains his improbable success — how can FTX make all this money?” as opposed to asking the more sensible question “it seems really unlikely that this company can possibly do what it claims to be doing; maybe SBF is a brazen grifter.” I guess it’s easy to be conned when your class solidarity depends on it….
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:16 PM on August 12, 2023 [47 favorites]

Details of the case from Molly White, who is required reading on crypto grift.
posted by happyinmotion at 1:26 PM on August 12, 2023 [37 favorites]

As I said in the other thread, his lawyers using the Sideshow Bob "attempted chemistry" defense to argue that see, it's okay that he surrendered the intimate writings of a material witness to the press in an effort to intimidate and character assassinate her is just...it has real "pound the table" energy.
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:30 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

As someone put it elsewhere, when you're out on his kind of release you're not supposed to jaywalk or take an extra cilantro shrimp from the Costco sampler stand.

But our protagonist here is somebody who literally never didn't get another chance, and probably was not capable of internalizing that.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 1:37 PM on August 12, 2023 [37 favorites]

Paraphrasing a quote I half-remember: We need to dismantle the carceral state, yes. We need to abolish this cruel and unnecessary treatment of any humans, even those who've committed crimes. But when that day comes, we should make sure to set this guy free last.
posted by mhoye at 1:47 PM on August 12, 2023 [28 favorites]

Well, well, well. If it isn't the consequences of my own actions.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:05 PM on August 12, 2023 [15 favorites]

So happy that there's gonna be a little finding-out associated with all his fucking around.
posted by humbug at 2:18 PM on August 12, 2023 [18 favorites]

from article:
a series of pre-trial hearings related to the ex-billionaire’s continued dealings with the press –

That's worth repeating.

a series of pre-trial hearings related to the ex-billionaire’s continued dealings with the press –
posted by clavdivs at 2:21 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

The Molly White article posted by happyinmotion is almost required reading if you’re interested in this case(s).
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:32 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

Scam Bankrun-Fraud is one of the of his white card references in the unfinished Cards Against Blockchain deck, but no black card references for him yet, only to FTX itself.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:35 PM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

Been watching the news of this and also the news of that guy who ended up dead resisting arrest after threatening everyone and their uncle with his sniper rifle, and it's feeling like the Justice Department is actually doing things that they haven't done in a long while. Maybe this is just perception, but if that's my perception, then they're sending out a loud message drip by drip to people who might have troublemaking thoughts in their head right now -- we're not going to ignore any of this shit anymore.
posted by hippybear at 3:00 PM on August 12, 2023 [5 favorites]

I feel a little bit sorry for him, in the sense I feel a little bit sorry for anyone who is almost too stupid to live. (Yes, I appreciate that he likely has a high IQ and great facility with abstract concepts. That doesn’t foreclose the possibility of being almost too stupid to live.)
posted by PaulVario at 3:02 PM on August 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

Let this be a lesson to all would be grifters and cons: don’t con and grift rich people. Especially on a grand, humiliating scale.
posted by notyou at 3:09 PM on August 12, 2023 [3 favorites]

This guy is an endless tragi-comedy goldmine and simply cannot shut the fuck up. I can't even imagine what it's like to be on his legal team right now and desperately trying to get him to do the one simple thing of simply shutting the fuck up.

I really hope his parents are brought into this because there's absolutely no way they're not directly involved and the recipient of stolen funds.
posted by loquacious at 3:09 PM on August 12, 2023 [18 favorites]

Let this be a lesson to all would be grifters and cons: don’t con and grift rich people.

I don't know all the specifics about the FTX business, but a large part of the tragedy of all these crypto schemes is that it's not the rich people losing their money. Often the rich people are getting out of these things just fine, the handful of them involved, while the thousands of people who are just working schmoes put their wishes and dreams for a better life into a basket along with all their money and all that is now gone. Just gone, usually with zero recourse.

I've watched enough coffeezilla videos by now to know it's really not the rich losing here. And the stories can be really heartbreaking, with people's entire fiscal life going up in smoke.

I know there's a bit of victim blaming easy to apply here, with people hoping for a too-good-to-be-true dollar. But this is the industry that had Matt Damon doing Superb Owl commercials at one point. The amount of glamour they used to hex their victims is far and away beyond what had been employed before.
posted by hippybear at 3:15 PM on August 12, 2023 [19 favorites]

Isn't there an NFL or NBA stadium that has a crypto corp as the name rights holder? Ugh

EDIT: Yeah, in LA Home of the Lakers, Kings, Clippers and Sparks. UGH!!!
posted by Windopaene at 4:04 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

There was also an FTX center in Miami that's been renamed.
posted by LionIndex at 4:10 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sparks has their own home stadium! I had no idea the band had gotten that huge! They'd always seemed a bit more niche to me.
posted by hippybear at 4:24 PM on August 12, 2023 [16 favorites]

SBF continues to do effective altruism by invigorating the investigation and prosecution of major financial crimes.
posted by srboisvert at 4:54 PM on August 12, 2023 [27 favorites]

I don't know if it originated with Molly or if she just quoted it or was just credited with it, but I saw some variation of "it was the fuckaroundiest of times, it was the findoutiest of times" attributed to her recently on Masto re SBF and it certainly feels earned
posted by cortex at 5:11 PM on August 12, 2023 [26 favorites]

Perhaps they'll allow communications with Elizabeth Holmes.
posted by thecincinnatikid at 5:15 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

a large part of the tragedy of all these crypto schemes is that it's not the rich people losing their money

No, even if you take the premise that the customers were just humble middle-class people, his lenders and investors have been fucked. If it weren't for them, this would be getting a lot less coverage (but then of course they had to be there for it to happen at all, so it's a weird hypothetical). The secured creditors may end up doing better than the customers who are, I think, unsecured creditors, but the investors are last in line, and a lot of the collateral turned out to be magic beans anyway.

I admit that for me crypto falls into the same bucket as meme stocks, in that the stronger objection to people scamming the victims is not that the victims are innocents but that the people helping themselves to their money in various ways will do so much worse with it than they could. I do have some sympathy, the way you have sympathy for, say, King Lear, or really any fellow-human who blew up their own life, but buying into crypto and then using FTX was a vote against meaningful regulation of banking in general and investing in particular. Casting that vote by going out of your way to hand your money to an unlicensed "bank" run by a dude in his 30s based out of the Caymans...man, maybe next time you should listen to all the mainstream advice about how to invest instead of staking your savings on a lottery ticket issued by some guys on the Internet you don't even know and who are openly against existing anti-robbery schemes.

Most people who get screwed by financial manipulations in our system may have made mistakes, but they don't deliberately put themselves in the position to be screwed and support undermining the built-in protections against being screwed while ignoring warnings that they're going to be screwed. No one writes about the tragedy of people charged junk fees by their credit card lenders. They should.
posted by praemunire at 5:48 PM on August 12, 2023 [18 favorites]

There was also an FTX center in Miami that's been renamed.

I believe it was last season (maybe the season before last?) all MLB umpires had small-ish FTX logos on their uniforms.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:56 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

I don't know all the specifics about the FTX business, but a large part of the tragedy of all these crypto schemes is that it's not the rich people losing their money. Often the rich people are getting out of these things just fine, the handful of them involved, while the thousands of people who are just working schmoes put their wishes and dreams for a better life into a basket along with all their money and all that is now gone. Just gone, usually with zero recourse.

I know one of these people who (probably) lost a pile of money in crypto, although I haven't talked with him since this happened. I did mention my concerns before the (most recent) collapse, and he said he didn't have anything in it that he couldn't afford to lose. Yes, I thought, but you could still have it now, and it would make things better for you, right? I didn't push it though. I hope he managed to get out of it in a positive direction. It's the kind of thing I don't think I'd bring up if I saw him again (he's no longer in the job that I knew him through), since it might be a sore subject.

To respond to praenumier, I think many of these people weren't actively trying to bring down the system, it was just something that seemed like a route out of grinding poverty. My friend has no financial ideology, that I know of at least, but it was a route to financial success that seemed to be in his reach, so he reached for it.
posted by JHarris at 5:56 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Yeah, in LA Home of the Lakers, Kings, Clippers and Sparks. UGH!!!

people still say Staples Center, mostly
posted by snuffleupagus at 5:59 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

it was just something that seemed like a route out of grinding poverty.…it was a route to financial success that seemed to be in his reach, so he reached for it.

This is, alas, the main driver of most scams I think. People like to say it’s greed, but IME it much more likely to be “I just want to feel secure for once”.
posted by aramaic at 6:07 PM on August 12, 2023 [6 favorites]

> people still say Staples Center, mostly

forever immortalized in the pre-chorus of System of a Down's tune Deer Dance
posted by glonous keming at 6:09 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

In case anyone else was weirdly concerned that Keith Raniere might still be in MDC Brooklyn: he was transferred out at the end of 2020.
posted by unknowncommand at 7:09 PM on August 12, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not too long ago, the podcast Scamfluencers did an interesting interview with Ben McKenzie, who co-wrote a book criticizing crypto. I haven't read the book (and might not), but the interview is worth listening to, even if it doesn't tell you anything new about how crypto works. They discuss the reasons people invest in crypto, including things like desperation, toxic masculinity, and grift.

I don't think you can generalize people who invest in crypto. John buys crypto because he has terrible politics and thinks it's the future; Bob buys crypto despite not believing in it, thinking he's smart enough to cash out before it crashes; George has heard that people are getting rich buying crypto but doesn't really understand it; Michael has a gambling addiction and buys crypto as an addition to his day-trading habit.

It's also just really easy to overestimate what the average person knows about crypto if you're basing it on your own knowledge.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:19 PM on August 12, 2023 [12 favorites]

A podcast called "Against the Rules" by the author Michael Lewis -- of "Moneyball" fame -- has recently been featuring backgrounder interviews with money people that he's done while writing a book on SBF. (Great timing!)

They are casual and fun and quite illuminating.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:41 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's also just really easy to overestimate what the average person knows about crypto if you're basing it on your own knowledge.

One deplorable factor is how these scams parasitize existing social relationships. If you did any serious research at all, it was obvious that they couldn’t work as claimed – but many, many people did not do that research: they trusted a friend, family member, coworker, or especially someone at their church who said they’d bought in. This is very similar to other MLMs except with a much larger marketing budget – I’m old enough to remember the early internet’s “make money fast” era but the cryptocurrency campaigns have much better production value.

The main difference I noticed compared to the older rounds is that four decades into the Reagan revolution there are a lot of financially precarious people who don’t think they have much prospect for better lives under the mainstream system. Taking those correct concerns and channeling them into this hyper-capitalist scam was unethical but brilliant.
posted by adamsc at 8:42 PM on August 12, 2023 [9 favorites]

Bankman-Fried probably should have never been granted bail.

It’s better for the prosecutors if he is free on bail continuing to say dumb shit to people. Every time he does so, it’s makes their job easier.

And, assuming he doesn’t plead out and “only” gets 1000 years and we actually have a trial, everyone involved would wish he was still on bail. Trying someone who had to be taken to/from jail for every court appearance is a giant pain in the ass.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 11:11 PM on August 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is, alas, the main driver of most scams I think. People like to say it’s greed, but IME it much more likely to be “I just want to feel secure for once”.

The thing is, like all trading, getting rich doing it relies on screwing someone else. For you to buy low and sell high, others must be selling high and buying low. Trading doesn't create value, it merely moves it around, and doubly so with cryptocurrencies which aren't tied to or backed by anything.

I am am for sympathy for people who just want a stable life and some economic security. I'm not sympathetic to people whose route there is screwing the guys next to them. That's what crypto trading is.
posted by Dysk at 11:21 PM on August 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

Say what you want, it's clear he's a great guy deep down.

The evidence is clear: leaking her personal diaries makes his ex girlfriend more sympathetic and makes it way easier for the prosecution to give her a super sweet deal when it's her turn to be sentenced.

Before she was a co-conspirator and part of basically a criminal gang, now she's someone who got sucked into a scheme by a nasty and (borderline?) abusive partner who thinks nothing of trying to intimidate her from testifying. Also, the worse he makes himself look, the more the public will be comfortable with putting just him away for a long time and not Caroline or the other co-operating witnesses - despite the fact that they also definitely did a lot of crimes. Just being a massive asshole does count for something in terms of what prosecutors feel comfortable putting forward in a plea deal for others in order to ensure that they nail him and he's such an asshole that he might now be pushing his co-conspirators into not even seeing the inside of a cell.
posted by atrazine at 12:37 AM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

The other thing that's different about crypto rather than past scams is the influence of influencers-- parasocial relationships rather than social relationships.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:55 AM on August 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

There was also an FTX center in Miami that's been renamed.
Nowhere near as big, but the Mercedes F1 team had FTX as one of their herd of sponsors until the big uh-oh. Lucky for them, it still pales next to Haas's Rich Energy fiasco.

F2 has a crypto meme themed car "The Moon" which is obnoxious even in the brand-laden world of F1 et al.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given *waves hand at cryptobros*, people from "The Moon" (aka millionaire YouTuber Runefelt and his friends) are pretty much banned from anywhere you must behave yourself in F1, F2, and F3.

Last year, Runefelt went on the pit wall during a race. This is not allowed and the actual race team was fined.

At the first feature F2 race of this season, Runefelt's friend went into the pit lane. During the race. To take pictures of/with the safety car. This is suuuuper not allowed and the actual race team said "...it’s very difficult for us to take care of them."

Cryptobros can't behave because they don't care. They don't know the rules and won't bother to learn them. And they're really into the "Law of Attraction" bs.

I really hope motorsports will cool it with the crypto.
posted by Baethan at 1:13 AM on August 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

I'm not sure getting his co-conspirators off is being a great guy. I'd rather see am the guilty parties get nailed. Even if we accept the premise that protecting his former colleagues is what he is doing, that is itself evil.
posted by Dysk at 1:14 AM on August 13, 2023

If you did any serious research at all, it was obvious that they couldn’t work as claimed – but many, many people did not do that research: they trusted a friend, family member, coworker, or especially someone at their church who said they’d bought in.

Of everyone I know in real personal physical life, maybe two of them are internet savvy enough to do that research. There is a vast sea of people out there, even now, who don't understand how to determine who to trust online. In this area I am extremely lucky because I've been browsing the web since... maybe 1993? Social media brought in a huge swath of humanity, but many of them have not really integrated to the web or learned how it works.

Take the Nigerian Prince category of scams, that of some person who emails you out of the blue and claims they have a pile of cash that you can have a part of, if you just pay some amount to help get them through the bureaucracy. These have been around for a couple of decades now. In very-online circles, they are legendary. Jokes are made about them on late night television. But there's still many people who have never heard of them.

In my town, these tech-clueless people are everywhere. They are people for whom, at best, Facebook is the internet. My brother still has me help him fill out online forms for his food stamps. My father, the moment something involving the internet has to be done, he calls for me--sometimes he wants me to help him through it, but the moment filling out text fields comes into it, he grumbles harshly, quote, "It's too complicated for me!", and also-quote, "I'll throw that computer in the trash." Both of these people think I'm kind of blinkered and lacking in common sense about most things (especially politics), but when it comes to something involving the internet in any way and they're as helpless as lambs, and at least know enough to get me to guide them through it. And the thing is, I really don't think I'm that knowledgeable.

It's easy to assume that everyone knows how to do something online, but when you have our level of tech savvyiness, the voices you hear, and those who hear from you, are selected from others in our category. Meanwhile social media, refusing to value-judge categories as positive or negative, actively tries to keep people in their bubbles rather than exposing them to voices that might teach them to be more careful online.
posted by JHarris at 1:19 AM on August 13, 2023 [26 favorites]

I think the idea that Bankman-Fried is playing some sort of “long game” to help his coconspirators out is an odd fantasy. Nothing he’s done suggests any great empathy or even competence. It’s pretty similar to the approach taken by the journalists I mentioned above “he’s a Very Special Boy; he must be doing it for a reason.” Beyond never suffering consequences before, I don’t think there is a reason — he just can’t stop fucking around, even while he’s in the middle of finding out. He’s certainly not doing anything beyond incompetently trying to crime his way out of the crime hole he’s in.

I have considerably less idea about Ellison, Wang, Singh, etc — mostly because, for criminal conspirators, they sensibly kept out of the spotlight Bankman-Fried was always shining on himself and rushed to cooperate when they realized the jig was up. None of them seem to have Bankman-Fried’s idea that he can “just keep doing whatever comes to mind and something will work,” but who knows?
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:07 AM on August 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

(I think atrazine's comment was sarcasm.)
posted by wenestvedt at 5:15 AM on August 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

If you did any serious research at all, it was obvious that they couldn’t work as claimed – but many, many people did not do that research: they trusted a friend, family member, coworker, or especially someone at their church who said they’d bought in.

Of everyone I know in real personal physical life, maybe two of them are internet savvy enough to do that research.

Your point is excellent but I wasn’t actually thinking about it as tech research but rather from a business perspective – where is value created, what are the upper bounds on demand, etc. – which I think ends up being the same point from a different perspective because there are still a lot of people who think the internet is basically magic invalidating normal analysis.

If you owned a pizza shop you’d probably agree with the cryptobros that credit card fees are inconveniently high and be receptive to the pitch until you saw that it was for a slower system which costs more and entails higher risk, which is why they tried to lead with a bunch of quasi-theology trying to keep people out of a rational mindset. Anything to keep you from realizing that you didn’t really need to understand the underlying technology to assess the actual value it gave you.
posted by adamsc at 6:17 AM on August 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Didn't a lot of VCs get taken in? It wasn't just unsophisticated morons who got scammed and lost money. Plenty of very fancy morons lost money, too.
posted by ryanrs at 8:09 AM on August 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

VCs are the “can’t scam an honest man” moral of the story: they didn’t care about outcomes as long as they could cash out before the collapse. To the extent that anyone lost money, it was because they weren’t as good at timing as they thought.
posted by adamsc at 9:46 AM on August 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

If you owned a pizza shop you’d probably agree with the cryptobros that credit card fees are inconveniently high and be receptive to the pitch until you saw that it was for a slower system which costs more and entails higher risk, which is why they tried to lead with a bunch of quasi-theology trying to keep people out of a rational mindset. Anything to keep you from realizing that you didn’t really need to understand the underlying technology to assess the actual value it gave you.

Well, and also that, as "crypto as a tool for speculation" took off, the "crypto as a tool for exchange" system withered and died. The currency part was never a very significant thing, and it was pretty much strangled by "everything will keep getting more valuable forever," which isn't a viable plan, nor does it make any sense, when you think about it. The relatively recent goal of luring J. Public into "investing" is that, without actual money entering the system, there is no way for those already in the system to cash out, which they would very much like to do....
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:47 AM on August 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

One time my startup (5 employees) got inspected by the IRS (not a raid, they scheduled a visit) solely based on having the word "Mine" in the company name, so they thought we might be mining bitcoin. They actually sent an agent to our downtown San Francisco office to look for GPUs, in case we were running a giant GPU farm in our one-room SoMa office.

We joked that we should cynically pivot our "3D camera tech" to "3D camera tech on the blockchain". But then a company in our same building pivoted from "IoT radio network" to "IoT radio network with blockchain tech" and raised $200M. We didn't do a blockchain pivot, and ended up running out of money and shutting down.
posted by ryanrs at 1:08 PM on August 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

One of the big problems seems to be that too much capital is controlled or influenced by too few people. They don't have the mental bandwidth to invest in a thousand small companies, so they need to go all-in on big investments. This makes the VC community very susceptible to fads, and scams. On a societal level, this is not a great way to allocate capital.
posted by ryanrs at 1:20 PM on August 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

crypto is multilevel marketing for men

One difference is that people on the bottom rung of an MLM generally work extremely hard. Unlike cryptobros, they are being scammed of both money and effort.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 5:49 PM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

One of the big problems seems to be that too much capital is controlled or influenced by too few people.

A simple rubric might be: if you have enough money to invest in VC, you need to be taxed until that is no longer true.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:23 PM on August 13, 2023 [9 favorites]

I never “did a lot of research” into crypto, I just listened to a few podcasts of people talking about it (some in a dispassionate “explainer”-y kind of way, some who were boosters) and it became super obvious that the people who were pitching it were, in the most generous interpretation of their motivations, trying to wrest control of financial markets from central banks because their fortune-cookie libertarian ethos can’t handle that there’s still a part of the infrastructure of society they haven’t totally atomized.

So when people started asking *me* to explain what crypto is I’d say “up until the Great Depression there was this thing called the Gold Standard, and it led to wild swings in the economy and there were Great Depression-scale collapses every 30 years or so. Then countries decided to get off the gold standard so that would stop happening and instead used central banks to keep things more stable. Crypto is a bunch of dudes with too much money trying to recreate the gold standard.”
posted by dry white toast at 9:46 PM on August 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

Nixon took the US off the gold standard somewhat after the Great Depression:

Nixon Ends Convertibility of U.S. Dollars to Gold and Announces Wage/Price Controls

August 1971

With inflation on the rise and a gold run looming, President Richard Nixon's team enacted a plan that ended dollar convertibility to gold and implemented wage and price controls, which soon brought an end to the Bretton Woods System.

But that you don’t know that, or that it pleases you to pretend you don’t, is almost more interesting to me than the trurth.
posted by jamjam at 11:38 PM on August 13, 2023

To be fair, that does sort of fit with that narrative - you're a little over 30 years past the end of the Great Depression, and going off the gold standard was at least sold as a move to head off a looming collapse.
posted by Dysk at 11:49 PM on August 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

re the gold standard, the US transitioned from "hard money", where the term "dollar" meant some defined weight of precious metal, gold and/or silver, to the current paper money regime starting in June 1933 (dollars no longer backed by gold except for a $35/ounce international settlement regime, but the currency itself still more or less convertible to silver), June 1963 (no more silver backing), and finally with Nixon "closing the gold window" for foreigners in 1971.

Having been born in the late 60s when all this was a fait accompli , it was something of a mindf*** to first see a "hard money" folding currency note, with its "The USA will pay to the bearer on demand X dollars" . . . why would the Treasury have to do this if the bearer was already holding $X???
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:34 AM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

Nixon took the US off the gold standard somewhat after the Great Depression:

We're in a sort of yes but situation here. FDR suspended the convertability of dollars for gold in 1933. Citizens were required to turn in gold specie and gold back dollar bills*, which, interestingly, they did. (Cf requirements to convert european current for euros). Gold certificates became so much paper, same as federal reserve notes.* Citizens got $US 20.67 for their gold coins per ounce (tiny premium for a twenty dollar gold piece which was a hair under one ounce). In 1934, congress set the price of gold at a fixed $US 35.00. Not that US citizens could take advantage, outside of jewelry and industry. Nice little scam the government pulled there.

Fast forward to 1944 and Bretton Woods, in which the $US became the world standard because who else was there? Plus back by gold, at least on paper. It was another two decades until De Gaulle suggested in 1965 that there was something wrong with this picture and maybe France should get gold instead of paper. Which France started to do. Which led to Nixon 1971

Now untethered, the price of gold skyrocketed. Which was more a reflection of the value of the dollar than of gold itself. The rise of the credit card as a staple in your wallet began soon after.

*Old time gold certificates were promissory notes, until 1933 you could exchange them for real gold at any Federal Reserve bank. As late as the early sixties, however, you could still bring silver certificate notes into any federal reserve bank and trade it in for actual silver. They grumbled, but they did it. Then silver went out of coins and here we are.

...that guy who ended up dead resisting arrest after threatening everyone and their uncle with his sniper rifle, and it's feeling like the Justice Department is actually doing things that they haven't done in a long while

The guy was seventy five, overweight, no record of actual violence so far as I know, under surveillance for months, and made weekly trips to his church, presumably without a gun. They could have handled this arrest a whole lot better.

The question then becomes, why didn't they?
posted by BWA at 6:36 AM on August 14, 2023

"Robertson was armed at the time of the shooting."
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 6:44 AM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

weekly trips to his church, presumably without a gun

Why is this presumable?
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:56 AM on August 14, 2023 [5 favorites]

I don't think you can generalize people who invest in crypto. John buys crypto because he has terrible politics and thinks it's the future; Bob buys crypto despite not believing in it, thinking he's smart enough to cash out before it crashes; George has heard that people are getting rich buying crypto but doesn't really understand it; Michael has a gambling addiction and buys crypto as an addition to his day-trading habit.

John, Bob, George, and Michael do all seem to have one glaring thing in common though...
posted by CheeseLouise at 9:02 AM on August 14, 2023 [3 favorites]

The question then becomes, why didn't they?

They were in his cul-de-sac for a long time demanding he come out and surrender. The question becomes, why didn't he, before it escalated?
posted by hippybear at 2:55 PM on August 14, 2023 [2 favorites]