Patrick McKenzie

And those are done on a state-by-state basis.

They got 50 regulators to sign off on it, et cetera, et cetera.

Like there were many objective indicia of them being very good at their jobs until they lost all the money.

It's not merely a matter of getting them to look the other way.

But if you go back to the original SBF interviews where he's telling the founding myth of Alameda, he says like very loudly, you know, the reason why I got this opportunity to do Bitcoin arbitrage between Japan and the United States is because I was able to do something that the rest of the world wasn't.

I was able to, he doesn't say this in this many words, I will say it, suborn a Japanese bank.

because you need that as one of the pieces to run this arb.

And then they pulled tens of millions of dollars out of this.

I don't think people really listened to what he was saying there.

And he literally says in the interview on Bloomberg, if I was a compliance person, this would look like the sketchiest thing in the world.

This looks like it's obviously money laundering because it is money laundering.

money laundering.

And then, interestingly, Michael Lewis retells this story, and he locates a story in South Korea rather than in Japan.

And some people who were involved say, we tried it in South Korea and Japan, which people would like pull on more threads there.

Like, there's still lots of that story that we don't know.

Anyhow, how sophisticated do you have to be to launder tens of billions of dollars around?

SBF did that.

So that is Abar for sophistication.

He was eventually caught.

He was not caught for laundering tens of billions of dollars around.