Pretty insane that Sam Bankman-Fried decided to plead not-guilty. And it's interesting that their defense is an implication that a witness is committing perjury for a lighter sentence without any evidence backing it up.

And just what in the world were any of these people thinking? Sam Bankman-Fried isn't remotely charismatic, so I just don't understand why people would follow his demands and actively participate in such obvious fraud. How do you reason with yourself about randomly generating an insurance fund's balance that has been testified, under oath to Congress and various other binding contracts I'm sure?

The code snippet where they generated the FTX backstop fund's "current balance" displayed on the website by multiplying the exchange's daily trading volume by a random normal number is NUTS!

This was the supposed crypto wonder-platform!

Wild to see some actual code from the FTX repo. Laughed at the takeaway of making sure you at least hide your fraud behind some messy code.

I remember working somewhere as a contractor and given a legacy piece of code to update. And then that went ok so later they approached me again but this time with much less clear requirements. It became a stalemate, me asking them to clarify, them pointing to their watches and saying when can this be done. Eventually they tried to pressure me into basically add a backdoor. I almost did this but eventually explained in my pr why the code want not safe and would lead to possibility of unauthorized crap. Everybody else was extremely junior and seemed to be unaware of this.

A tip: If you intend to commit fraud or other illicit activity dont host / store your code on Microsoft GitHub.

Hmm in fact dont use git at all.

Law enforcement only need to find a single developer pc/laptop/whatever and they will have the entire history, comments, who did it, and code.

Having it all in a centralized system that is configured to be easily nuked is safer, than trying to nuke every laptop/pc/whatever that has a copy.

Of course, the entire code base will probably be available on any laptop/pc/whatever that LE can seize, but it is less data than with git.

I wonder if you could do the development all on ram drives on the development machine, that way if you shut down all the code is gone. Just make damn sure to stow/check in your code before doing so.

I have partially done this myself a several years ago, but that was only to try and speed up compile times.

There has obviously been some bad stuff going on over at FTX, but is the counter on a website really the "most" proof that they could find?

https://www.ycombinator.com/ Is every number on that page real time accurate? Is the combined value $600bn - if it is 599bn or even 601bn then ding ding ding we have ourselves fraud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Debt_Clock - Can I get any and all people behind this (and Similar Projectes) jailed for fraud?

Off-topic:

The "listen to the article" feature on this blog post ... is it using an AI voice trained specifically on the author's real voice? Or is it a real recording by any chance?

This is besides the point, but is this actually valid Python?

    if not account.allow_negative:
        if (balance.available_ignoring_collateral if ignore_collateral else balance.available) < 0: 
            raise BadRequest('Account does not have enough balances')

Was the exchange actually running on Python? Or was Python used for less intensive stuff?

[flagged]

All banking is becoming like a casino where the house alone knows the code.

"Some have wondered why Wang chose such a seemingly arbitrary number as $65,355,999,994"

int((2^16 - 180) * 999999.9999 + 1) = 65,355,999,994