The post To take or not to take (the stand), that is SBF’s question appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Sam Bankman-Fried should never, ever take the witness stand When the criminal trial of Sam Bankman-Fried started earlier this month, everyone was (and still is) very excited to hear what the man himself might say. That’s because there was already precedent for Bankman-Fried having something to say. Right up until his arrest last December in the Bahamas, Bankman-Fried couldn’t stop talking. As FTX and Alameda went up in flames, Bankman-Fried continued to give interview after interview to anyone who would listen — a reporter friend at Vox, the New York Times, the New York Times Book Deal Conference, citizen journalist Tiffany Wong, Good Morning America, his biographer, a Bloomberg journalist writing a book about him…and that list is far from exhaustive. In fact, Bankman-Fried’s arrest interrupted his plan to testify before the House of Representatives the next day. So clearly, he’s drawn to the microphone. This is all to say that it’s very likely that Bankman-Fried himself wants to take the stand to tell his side. As an occasional courtroom observer, I can literally see him fidgeting to hold himself back as his defense attorneys misspeak or get chastised by the judge. But there is a very good reason why Bankman-Fried should not get on the witness stand. And that is the fact that his entire narrative about how Alameda ended up using FTX user funds — the narrative that he tried so desperately to get across last December — has been roundly disproven by the prosecution over the past few weeks. Bankman-Fried’s defense was naiveté: I didn’t know, I wasn’t responsible, there was no special treatment, I goofed up. But for almost every one of Bankman-Fried’s public explanations, the prosecution has the group chat screenshots, code updates and Google Docs to prove him wrong. This is not to weigh in on…

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Filed under: News - @ October 26, 2023 8:10 am