Jim Bean

@CorySwan @HasuOron @stablechen @innercitypress Just take the L and move on dude.

@GoodAtPolitics @HasuOron @stablechen @innercitypress Around that time, you could be the best world school contestant in anything in lots of countries because there would be only one world school in the country Regardless, take note that you are going to bat for a criminal fraudster who stole your money

Regarding: Do Kwon Sentencing I regret that I couldn't make it to the sentencing. I followed the tweetstorm by @innercitypress . I wasn't in the room but like many of you, I was with Do. Kind of glad I didn't go honestly, I would've cried uncontrollably, especially during his speech. But the whole situation doesn't sit right with me. I feel like this should've played out way differently. I need to say something upfront. I wanted Do to fail. I wanted him punished. I thought he was arrogant and reckless and I told him so to his face multiple times. I'm not here to defend Do Kwon the person. But the legal case is broken. I don't blame the judge. Engelmayer was sympathetic, extremely methodical, and demonstrated that he made every effort to apply the law given the circumstances and set a standard. The problem is that Do taking the guilty plea means admitting to the government's charges as is. There's no debating afterward. I found it incredibly ironic that a national speech and debate champion like Do didn't contest. My guess on what happened: Defense attorney Patton was attorney in chief for federal defenders. Thinks like a public defender. Convinced Do to take the plea. Probably thought he'd get 7-9 years, somewhere between the defense ask of 5 and prosecution ask of 12. Serving half would've been 3.5 or 4.5 years, plus credit for time in Montenegro, meant maybe 2 years before transfer to Korea to settle things there. Compared to going to trial, the expected value math probably looked good. Trial would've consumed more resources, dragged out longer, shifted the calculation. And you have to understand the state he was in. On the run in Europe. Not seeing his family. Isolated. Shitty conditions in Montenegro. The emotional uncertainty. He probably thinks he's guilty now. But even if he thinks he's guilty, I don't think the government can produce an argument that meets the legal standard for fraud, and a proper defense probably could have created reasonable doubt. The government's core theory on the Terra collapse: Do claimed the algorithm self-healed in May 2021. He didn't disclose that Jump Trading stepped in to buy UST and help restore the peg. Therefore he lied about the algorithm's strength. Therefore investors were deceived, and therefore fraud. QED. When I was at TFL, I only heard vague whispers about this Jump deal through the grapevine, and I had to piece together through rumors. And even when it was revealed to me in full during the investigation, that argument felt flawed. Fraud is when you claim your system has safety mechanisms it doesn't have, and people invest trusting that fake safety, and then they lose money when the danger you hid materializes. Like if Do had said "we have a $10 billion reserve fund backing UST" when there was nothing there. That would be fraud. You're claiming safety you don't have. But what the government is alleging is the inverse. Do said "no reserves, the algorithm alone handles it" when he actually did have Jump as a backstop. In my eyes, he was claiming less safety than he actually had. If he'd disclosed Jump, investors would have been more confident, not less. "Algorithm alone can handle stress" sounds a lot riskier than "the algorithm can handle stress, but we have market making partners with reserves to protect it." I think a case could've been made that Do made Terra sound more dangerous than it actually was at that moment. You don't defraud someone by hiding additional safety mechanisms. The direction is backwards. The prosecution claims Do's private admission that "we might've been fucked without Jump" as equivalent to "he knew the algorithm was broken." But those aren't the same thing. Might've been fucked is uncertainty about an unknowable counterfactual. Knew it would have failed is a claim of definite knowledge. The only way to actually know the algorithm wouldn't have self-healed is to not intervene and watch it die. But TFL was making every effort to treat the chain as a live financial system responsibly. It only has one chance, one life. You can't rewind and try the alternative. Do called it a tainted experiment afterward, because once he intervened out of caution, he couldn't tell whether the algorithm alone would've saved it. The algorithm was working during that period. Arbitrage was happening. UST was being burned for LUNA. Jump was also buying. Both things were true. And one could make the case that NDA with Jump wasn't concealing fraud but a game theoretic defense. Algorithmic stablecoins operate in adversarial conditions. Speculators actively try to break pegs for profit, same way Soros broke the Bank of England. If you're defending a peg, you face game theory considerations. If attackers know your exact defense capabilities, they can calculate whether an attack is profitable. Uncertainty about defense resources is itself a defense. Central banks don't announce their full intervention capacity. The Fed maintains strategic ambiguity. Not disclosing your backstop's size is standard practice when you're facing adversarial pressure. Would disclosing Jump have made Terra more or less secure? Attackers could have calculated exactly how much force was needed to overwhelm the defense. That's probably the mistake that happened with LFG. As the popular adage goes, never reveal your position. Prosecutors point out that LFG was not truly independent, that Do controlled it rather than the governing council. But does LFG independence affect death spiral risk? A truly independent council would have deployed the same reserves the same way. The mechanism that killed Terra was the redemption pressure exceeding absorption capacity. Decentralization of governance doesn't make a stablecoin more resistant to bank runs. This argument is about theater, not safety. The defense could've argued that it's not material to why people lost money. Do's statements were one signal in an incredibly noisy channel. Crypto Twitter, YouTube, Discord, news outlets, influencers, critics all talking about Terra constantly. Kevin Zhou was famous for criticizing exactly this death spiral vulnerability. The risk was described in the original white paper. The code was open source. The potential failure mode was publicly debated for years. These risks were a public discussion, not an authoritative pronouncement by Do, no matter how much he tried to be. He wasn't hiding information that wasn't available to anyone paying attention. He was one voice among thousands. The prosecution never established direct causation between Do's specific statements and investor decisions. In a public ecosystem with open source code, a white paper describing the death spiral risk, and years of public criticism, how do you prove that any individual investor relied on Do's tweets rather than on the thousands of other signals in the environment? The 20% Anchor yield was the draw. The degen looping strategies were the draw. Do's tweets were background noise in a cacophony of shilling. Fraud requires that the defendant's lie be the thing that induced the investment. In Terra's case, the risks and the rewards were both public knowledge, debated endlessly, and the prosecution never untangled Do's voice from the chorus. By May 2022, investors knew about backstops. LFG was created in January 2022 and announced publicly. Billions in Bitcoin reserves were visible on chain. The pure algorithm narrative was already dead by the time the crash happened. Investors who were in Terra in May 2022 knew there were defense mechanisms beyond the algorithm. They invested with that knowledge. It failed anyway. The May 2021 non-disclosure about Jump is causally disconnected from May 2022 losses because the information environment had completely changed by then. Terra was in essence a financial product and experimental technology. It might have oversold its founder's confidence, but it was a financial product, and like all financial products, they have operating ranges. I don't think Do ever claimed Terra would survive infinite redemption pressure. "We survived May 2021" doesn't mean "we survive all possible stress tests forever." The Titanic passed sea trials and was hailed as unsinkable. Bridges are rated for specific loads. A bridge rated for 10 tons isn't fraudulent when it collapses under 50 tons. The question is whether the rating was honest based on available knowledge. Engineering has boundaries. May 2022 was a categorically different event from May 2021. The macro environment had shifted. Fed raising rates. Risk-off sentiment across all markets. And then large coordinated sells hit UST, testing the mechanism beyond its capacity. Terra's collapse cascaded outward and contributed to Three Arrows and Celsius and the broader crypto winter. The question for fraud isn't whether Terra's failure hurt the ecosystem. It's whether Do's specific statements caused specific investors to take risks they otherwise wouldn't have. The causal chain from "algorithm self-healed in 2021" to "I lost money in May 2022" runs through too many intervening variables to establish direct causation. One thing I can't get over is the fact that Do signed off on pleading guilty to causing $40 billion in loss. Market cap decline is not fraud loss. If I buy LUNA at $1 and it goes to $100 and then back to zero, my loss is $1. The $99 was paper gains I never realized. The government is conflating actual invested principal with evaporated peak market cap. These are completely different numbers. By this logic Satoshi would be responsible for trillions in fraud every bear market when BTC drops. The actual money people put in and lost is a fraction of what the government claims. And treating market cap decline as fraud damages sets a terrible legal precedent for the industry. When the judge said that the letters from supporters, including my own, read like those supporting a cult, and "the Kool-Aid's still there", I felt hurt. But I can see a glimpse of truth in that. Do did act like a cult leader, and embraced his identity online. I said in my letter that he lost himself to a manufactured façade that was nothing like my boss. Engelmayer said that the power revealed who he was. I acknowledge that he's not totally wrong. The two sides of Do, the kind, nurturing mentor who cared genuinely for the people in his community and those he worked with, and the brazen, arrogant persona, they probably exist together. And as much I felt vindicated that Tyrant Emperor Kwon was shot down for his hubris, I do not believe he was at the center of a massive fraud. What happened with Terra was a frenzy. Hysterical mass delusion led by a charismatic founder, riding on the supercycle belief that drove 3AC, amplified by an ecosystem of degens chasing yield. Do was leading the charge but he was also a true believer. He set up LFG as reserves. He announced it publicly and investments poured in like crazy. People felt reassured, they supported the external backstop with a massive reserve denominated in the gold standard of decentralized currency. He was leading a charge and people followed his brazen certainty. When the crisis came he legitimately deployed them trying to save the peg. I personally know people who were in the war room in May 2022. Do wasn't saying "it's fine relax" and walking away. He was doing everything he could. He believed he could save it. That's not fraud. That's a founder fighting for his project and ultimately losing. Unlike FTX or Celsius, there were no lockups with Anchor. You could leave at any time. People were scared to exit, but Do wasn't forcing anyone to stay. SBF literally stole customer deposits and used them for other purposes. That's why SBF victims are being repaid. The money was taken and still exists somewhere. Terra victims can't be repaid because the value was destroyed in a crash, not stolen and moved to a different account. Treating these situations as equivalent is wrong. The Chai stuff has more merit as an actual fraud claim. The government says Chai didn't use the blockchain at all and Do faked transactions. That's not entirely accurate. Chai did use Terra for accounting, for saving on credit card processing fees, Terra wallet was integrated into the app, you could top up Chai with KRT. But Do probably stretched the truth early on about processing payments on chain when the actual payment settlement happened on traditional rails because of Korean regulatory constraints. The strongest case is institutional investors like Novogratz or Mark Cuban who I recall parroting the Chai adoption narrative. There might be measurable damages in the tens of millions there. But the Chai narrative is completely separate from peg maintenance and the May 2022 crash. Overstating Chai adoption didn't cause the death spiral. Mirror wasn't really decentralized. TFL had admin keys and used centralized bots to maintain price parity with real stocks. But I don't think anyone bought mTSLA because they believed in the purity of decentralized governance. They wanted exposure to Tesla without a brokerage account. The decentralization framing was more about keeping the SEC at bay than making claims about safety or reliability. Whether the prices were maintained by bots or by organic market makers doesn't change your risk profile as someone holding synthetic Google stock. The fraud theory here requires believing that investors cared about decentralization as a feature rather than as regulatory theater, and I don't think that's true. Anchor is harder to defend. Shilling it as sustainable stable yield when the reserves were obviously depleting, encouraging protocols to build things like Angel Protocol for "perpetual giving" on top of subsidized rates, that was reckless. Do knew the yield reserve was burning down. He knew the 20% couldn't last forever without a plan. That's probably the closest thing to actual misrepresentation that caused real harm, because people parked money in Anchor believing the yield was organic when it was a subsidy. But even here, the losses came from the depeg, not from Anchor's yield dropping. If UST had held, people would've just earned less interest. They wouldn't have lost their principal. But these specific things don't add up to $40 billion. They don't justify 15 years. Properly scoping them required an actual defense, which never happened because of the plea. If founder confidence plus project failure equals fraud, we've criminalized entrepreneurship. Every crypto founder who tweeted positively about their project is exposed. Every founder who said "we're building something that works" before their startup died could be charged. The only safe position becomes never expressing confidence in anything. And this case will be applied to future founders who don't deserve it. I don't blame Judge Engelmayer. He applied the law diligently given what was in front of him. But Do taking the guilty plea meant accepting the government's framing without any opportunity to challenge it. He cornered himself. I feel like my mentor slipped into a wrongful prison sentence. He might not see his daughter grow up. I think he could've argued this down substantially if he'd contested the government's theory with a proper defense. A man took a deal he didn't have full clarity on. Exhausted and stressed from his own poor decisions, years of running, isolation, uncertainty. He has to forever live with that. Something doesn't feel right about how this ended. I don't know how I feel. $LUNA $LUNC #LUNCcommunity

@HasuOron @CorySwan @stablechen @innercitypress …reached the semifinals of the 2007 and 2009 Korean High Schools Debating Championships, placed 2nd in the 2007 International Competition for Young Debaters, and was the best speaker.”

@HasuOron @CorySwan @stablechen @innercitypress “…from 2008 to 2010, represented Korea at the 2008, 2009, and 2010 World Schools Debating Championships, ranked 1st among non-English speaking countries' speakers, ranked 1st in the 2009 Asian Schools Debating Championships, won the 2008 National Schools Debating Championships

@CorySwan @stablechen @innercitypress Lol you’re the CEO of a company why are you engaging in a flame war on some random nuance interp of a “champion” citing incorrect AI slop as proof. Took me 3 minutes to find this: #google_vignette" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">veritas-a.com/news/articleVi… sites.google.com/site/koreafore… paullau.wordpress.com/2023/01/30/ter… paullau.wordpress.com/2023/01/30/ter…

There’s no credible evidence that Do Kwon — the jailed Terra/Luna founder — was a national debating champion in Korea in the sense of winning a National Schools Debating Championship title. Here’s what’s known: •Do Kwon (Kwon Do-hyung) is a South Korean crypto founder now convicted of fraud. •Some informal internet posts and blog posts mention that he participated in debate activities in high school and represented Korea in World Schools Debating Championships (WSDC) in the late 2000s as part of a national team, not necessarily as a champion of the domestic National Schools Debating Championship. The image you shared looks like a National Schools Debating Championship event in Korea, but: •That doesn’t prove Do Kwon individually was a champion at that event. •Being on a national team or in debates doesn’t by itself mean he won the national title. So the claim that he was a national speech & debate champion in Korea seems to be more internet rumor/assumption based on his participation in debating, not on verified championship wins. There’s no authoritative record confirming he held a national champion title.

@signulll Crazy. How’d you know?

it’s hard to overstate how deranged the pace is at the moment (even ppl like ilya are amazed by it). we’re in this weird liminal epoch where reality is outpacing people’s priors so fast that most minds just silently segfault. my contrarian take is that we’re inside a cultural singularity much more than a technical one. this is the entire thesis of my account (see the pinned tweet). i’m here because there still aren’t enough people who feel the magnitude of what’s happening cuz we’re living through a chapter that historians will write like scripture. i still can’t really wrap my head around it.

@anammostarac This is basically Zizek’s take too

Anti-social behaviour may be the cope that comes after realizing you'll never own anything

You are already rich dude I saw your dick

Thank you @neverpur for the onboarding

@neverpur It’s two planes having s3x

Well, that doesn’t look normal. Any cloud/jetstream guys wanna explain this?

In the not too distant future your uber driver is letting Jesus take the wheel of his tesla while using voice commands to vibe code a million dollar app or a new only fans model. Making money has always been about optimizing what we do in time and space, that’s all.

@mooseytunes0 @Austin_Federa Oh gotcha, I had forgotten about that.

Tariffs are a sales tax paid by Americans on imported goods. They also hurt the sanctioned country and I think tariffs can be applied extremely effectively against a weaker country to generate positive outcomes (see Colombia!) but we should not kid ourselves.

@mooseytunes0 @Austin_Federa I'll concede that if we can get things like AI and fusion energy production far enough along a lot of these macroeconomic issues can fall by the wayside, but we're nowhere near a point where we can localize production so cheaply that a tariff-funded nation is feasible.

@mooseytunes0 @Austin_Federa If your assumption allows for price increases to cover the cost of the tariffs then all we've done is replace the income tax with a nationwide consumption tax, while at the same time reducing consumption possibilities (on net stuff is less available and worse quality).

@mooseytunes0 @Austin_Federa And that’s in a world where producers don’t want to raise prices to pass along the cost of the tariff to the end consumer. Either way, prices increase.

@mooseytunes0 @Austin_Federa This is wrong. You’re conflating what margin is with what it means to pay a tariff. Producers feel the impact of tariffs by decreasing production, not taking lower margins. This also means the supply of products decreases, so prices go up anyway.

@avichal @deepseek_ai Not sure the answers matters in the end game.

What's more likely? 1 - small group of AI engineers at @deepseek_ai figures out how to beat all of the top researchers in the world as a side project 2 - Chinese government has 100k GPUs they shouldn't have and releases open source models claiming $6m training cost as a psyop

Lol. The infra is bricked for normies on solana while the cash they're throwing in is being siphoned off by the whales who are plugged in. There's not going to be anything left to bid into "strong AI projects" when this is all over. Even if there was, this take makes 0 sense.

@gadikian Idk if this means anything but this 0dqr acct links to the terra18 acct that funded contracts for the gossip attack. The 1st txn for the terra18 wallet has an osmosis address as the sender: finder.terra.money/classic/tx/D5D… Iterating through initial txns from there links to the 0dqr acct

@CelestiaOrg cosmos155svs6sgxe55rnvs6ghprtqu0mh69kehrn0dqr (chillin with a million dollars of atom liquid)

dafuq? So there is a @CelestiaOrg address sending out 5 tia every few ....seconds!? celestia155svs6sgxe55rnvs6ghprtqu0mh69kehje7a6w