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Nick Beckstead
Leopold Aschenbrenner
Avital Balwit
Ketan Ramakrishnan
Will MacAskill
Can you answer two questions related to the source of SBF's early business wealth?
Were the Kimchi arb returns real?
As you know, the "Kimchi premium" was this difference in BTC price between Korea (Japan?) and the rest of the world.
The narrative is that SBF arbed this price difference to make many millions and create his early wealth.
The Sequoia puff piece makes this cute story:
After SBF's fall, Twitter speculation says this is dubious.
This is because the cause of the Kimchi premium was strict legal capital controls, and the liquidity was orders of magnitude too small to produce the wealth in SBF later used. At best, SBF was actively breaking laws by this trade. The amount of money he could make may have been too small to justify the narratives around his early success.
Do you have any comments on the above?
Jaan Tallinn investment
Tallinn later ended up funding SBF with $50M.
What would you say to the speculation that it was this funding, and not the Kimchi arb , that really launched SBF's career?
If this is mostly true, the takeaway is that there's little cleverness or competency being expressed here here?
It seems like power, money and access led to SBF's success. This theme would fit with SBF's later behavior, with bluffing and overaweing spend.
That tradition seems hollow and bad, maybe contagious to the things that SBF created or touched.
This could be useful in some way? It seems like the vector EA or EA PR could take, could counter this.