- 971.15M USDT (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7baba482077843514d9c72bac0110ba091...
- 823M USDC (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0xc954c86f118e8e410e6a3eb9e3b38ff4a9...
- 312.73M USDT (Tron): https://tronscan.org/#/transaction/71b0ec0fe873fe820c37cc3ec...
- 175M USDT (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0c07a5e428ce233a3bcb40f257ad899594...
So USDT is not truly decentralized and your money can be frozen for any reason or no reason at all.
- much more awkward to use
- more liable to hacks
- deposits are not insured
- fewer legal protections
- doesn’t pay interest (or not easily anyway)
- and as I find out, bannable by a central institution with lower legal oversight than the Fed
I’ll keep a mental note of this.
It is politically impossible to go back on KYC/AML measures in the traditional financial system, even if some of them were perhaps a bit too ill-advised. It's much easier to say "this is shiny new tech, very different from that old tech over there; we support innovation so we won't impose KYC requirements on it", even if there's no logical reason to do that.
As it stands, stablecoins let you make a keypair in the privacy of your own home (or your own agent sandbox, as it were) and immediately start transacting. They're allowed-by-default instead of blocked-by-default, with the US government still able to block you if they have a specific reason. No traditional bank I know of, in any country, works like this. This is a valuable capability to have, technologically, even if there's no technical reason why a Postgres database and a REST API couldn't provide the same service, but faster and more easily.
I've heard good things about monero from a friend. This is not an attack on monero, rather a reflection on the general tone of the message.
Monero is so obscure the IRS has put out a million dollar bounty to trace it, unlike any other crypto even btc lol
It's not and never supposed to be and everybody who uses it in any significant amount knows that. Don't mistake a cryptotoken with a cryptocurrency.
Then people get into shitty casino tokens that are widely available because the state doesn't care about a little gambling and got surprised that they are in the casino in the first place.
This is but one model developed within academia for an entirely anarchist organisation, there are dozens of others and they have been both studied for efficacy (they tend to work better than a more hierarchical structure), as well as put into practice in real life within certain organisations. To this date there are a number of non-profit organisations and coöperatives that use this governance system to improve the situation where they are locally.
The entire point of anarchism is that there isn't One Big Guy, it's that it's people, deciding on a system and working together on a small scale — this then translates to the big scale through cross-group meetings, information sharing, and resource sharing. There is a lot of evidence within the social sciences to back these methodologies up as being very efficacious compared to traditional methods of group organisation.
Turns out, Coinbase "Wallet" is a completely separate thing from Coinbase, and long story short, ultimately ended up accidentally converting some spare ETH I transfered into some kind of garbage Binance "wrapped" Litecoin. Which had zero indication/warnings in the app other than a like 4 pixel Binance logo superimposed on the 16 pixel Litecoin logo that it wasn't the real thing.
Once I gave up on this Wallet experiment I ended up needing Gemini to walk me through all the Binance "gas" nonsense to finally manage to swap into a real coin I could transfer out (like 80% of what I started with after subtracting gas fees and miscellaneous leftover change I was stuck with). And while transferring I had to avoid like a dozen alternative networks consisting of seemingly random strings and a scary red banner saying "yo don't fuck this up".
My first red flag should have been that Coinbase Wallet's Play Store name literally advertised betting on prediction apps. Second red flag was while looking for "Litecoin" in the list of coins, there were literally about 5000 different spam/meme coins with dozens of near identical clones that were all name squatting on top of each other.
As someone who came of age in the Crypto 1.0 "Bitcoin is for buying drugs" era the entire exercise was utterly baffling and somehow significantly less usable than crypto was a decade ago for actual payments. I guess for a young person looking to illegally gamble their paychecks at some unlicensed offshore prediction market it provides some utility I'm missing but man, the experience just made the post-Web 3.0 crypto scene look .... grim.
No, their entire business model relies on bank/CC providers don't ban them. Somehow, they treat all crypto related transactions as iffy but USDT, bought to buy crypto, got under much less scrutiny. The entire problem their solver was that new users couldn't move cash to exchanges fast enough to join bull runs.
What will they do when the alternative is broken bones?
> almost-unregulated except when the authority say no.
Perhaps I am missing your argument.
not your keys not your bitcoin
Imho Bitcoins being stolen is not at all Bitcoin being "bent, broken, or subverted", it's just a natural consequence of the design goals. If an unrelated third party could block my bitcoins by accusing me of terrorism that would be subverting the system, and such things have not happened to bitcoin-core (but have happened in other parts of the bitcoin ecosystem)
I find something odd about this, because it seems to contradict some of what I understand of the arguments for bitcoin.
However, there is merit to your point, and if something is working as intended, then nothing was attacked in the first place.
The issue that is often raised with Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies is that not even the law can help you in case of theft. Now, it's true that the police wouldn't bother helping me recover a wallet with 100€ into it, but things change if someone steals millions or even billions like in this case.
For the less economical-savvy ones it was like Beanie Babies or Tulips (with predictable consequences)
The predictable outcome is that the deers get to them, but I got to see a few go into full bloom last year and it was wonderful.
If the police retrieves your money from the thief?
If it's stolen from a bank, it's their obligation to recuperate you.
FWIW, most countries have a type of insurance if a legally operating bank goes under, at least some of your savings are protected (eg. in Serbia that's up to 50kEUR).
It applies equally well to a fiduciary coin with a promise that 1 gcoin = 1g of gold or whatever.
However, it does not necessarily apply to algorithmic stable coins (Terra) or crypto-backed overcollateralised coins (DAI). That's why I said "fiat-backed".
You don't need to see where the coins are and move to promise $1 of going for every coin.
How are you bootstrapping a network to validate private transactions without the promise of potential gains in coin value as its popularity takes off?
Why? BTC is pretty stable longterm and nobody is going to touch your cold wallet. Anything that has an owner or legal entity is not decentralized, subject to either rug pull or censorship and shouldn't be touched, sounds very easy.
Everything that promises you any return is a scam in crypto, simple as that.
Plus, freezing funds and waiting for US law enforcement to weigh in rather than being the proverbial judge, jury and executioner is now likely to keep you on the right side of said law enforcement.
Managing a wallet where there is no recourse if your wallet is compromised is simply too difficult when even crypto exchanges get hacked and otherwise sophisticated people get compromised when taking cautious measures (eg [1]).
Crypto really is and always was a race to the rug pull.
[1]: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/about-3-5-million-los...
This by itself is a reason to push for more crypto acceptance, in my eyes.
It's invisible, insidious censorship. They don't hit your hands with a ruler and say "stop, no buying that, bad". They make it so that what they don't like doesn't get to be on the store shelves in the first place. Hard to buy what isn't being sold, isn't it?
As for why they do it - it's unclear, but there's speculation that payment processor leadership might be in part ideologically captured by the usual "think of the children" moralizers and puritans. The same types that used to spurn moral panics, rally against D&D and later GTA, and are the first in line to propose sacrificing freedoms for imaginary safety - now allowed to wield covert influence over most of the payments that happen online.
Am I missing something here? Seems like a waste of time
I wonder why not swap them? And had he, would it have bricked the swap pool?
It seems like it took some number of minutes and scored billions, and at that point it was a matter of whether/how much they could trade out before it was locked. I don’t know how many minutes or hours it took to lock? If they managed to trade 1% before blocking, that would be an extra tens of millions. If 10% that would be hundreds of millions, etc.
Have bad security, get hacked.
If binance wanted to hedge against that risk, they could have bought a cyberinsurance policy (if they could get one for the amounts they'd need).
No. You just can't use these platforms. But a knowledgeable hacker will be able to add a transaction tot he blockchain.
oh, and three acounts hold like 25% of all btc in circulation.
crypto can do some things, but decentralization isn't one of them. just ask Coinbase
USD tether is barely crypto at all, it's a wrapper around treasury bonds which the US govt. regulates
That's probably socially harmful, but it is the claim.
The latter is volatility.
Apples and oranges.
You take 1 $ from someone and give them a token, now you have money the other not. In theory you need to make sure you keep the 1$ but you want to pay people and you are greedy so you invest it and suddenly everyone is broke.
The only difference is regulations -- banks have them; things labelled crypto don't (in the US).
How does freezing crypto work in this context?
However, the stablecoins are not “real” cryptocurrencies like e.g. BTC or ETH, but are built as smartcontracts on top of ETH, basically using it as a big replicated database. So they might(?) just manually “give back” the money to Binance, as in freezing money in the stolen account forever and “printing” an equal amount to Binance's credit.
Or, to put it in another way, no need to reverse an erroneous SQL transaction if you can just create a new one that fixes the data you altered.
If they can mint with no impact doesn’t that mean they can just print money?
It's remarkable to me how long this scam has lasted and how much confidence people have in it, in spite of the very shady characters involved and the likelihood of fraud.
And yes they can print money, you have to trust their reserves that are off chain.
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/stablecoin... (I didn't verify per-stablecoin volume, or actual volume at those hours, or typical volume for those exact hours, which a better analysis would have done.)
https://medium.com/chainargos/losing-the-blacklisting-race-e...
Keys? Hahaha, still not your crypto.
If you ban a coin, instead of persuing the actual criminal, then you're both doing a disservice to honest users of the coin and leaving the bad actor to do harm to society in some other way.
There are only 8B people in the world - they all fit into a "box" of 2k by 2k by 2k of humans.
It really isn't that hard to know who's doing bad things to others, especially with current technology.
Criminals used to meet in person to discuss crime (because mail/phones can be intercepted) and meet in person to move cash. It was a hard limiting factor on what they can get away with. With e2e messengers and anonymous crypto both of those "issues" are fixed.
Do you know anyone who uses it for legit purposes? I don't. I bet you ban a coin like that and you kill orders of magnitude more crime revenue compared to .001% of honest users using it to send money home and save a few dollars on the transaction.
It is an evolutionary process, with incentives are high enough for both sides to keep finding solutions.
Like the whole point of crypto to me I money without central governance.
I never liked stable coins or the concept of it and it’s mainly a huge fraud, so freezing just adds on top.
For instance to unwind a 5 billion dollar robbery
Have you talked to Crypto-enthusiasts before? They very much don't want that.
So crypto + legal company means not really following bitcoin ideology anymore
The feature literally appears to have just saved over two billion USD from being stolen! I mean, fine, "disgusting" is subjective. But the need for the feature is real and quantifiable (and very large) and it did what it advertised.
My heart goes out to you, along with these two definitely not Nazi salutes.
Smart contracts and stablecoins by extention sound technologically interesting, but at the end you always rely on trusting people.
The core of the financial system is about managing trust and therefore a social issue, not a tech issue. It'd be nice if more tech nerds would internalize that tech can't solve social issues on it's own
In the freebanking era that the US had (before the FED was founded) every bank emmitet their own dollar. And, of course, there were banks over-issuing and bank runs left people without their assets. But that was before we had free flow of information and the internet. In todays world you can monitor and trade stablecoins, market cap, exchange rates in a freebanking system in sub-seconds. Any erosion in trust will immediately result in price fluctuations. We need a digital freebanking era, and it is a shame the genius act fell through. Exporting the dollar to people without access to banking would benefit the US (but I get that it currently mostly benefits trumps family).
I don't think you're using that term right. Not knowing how something works doesn't mean you're cargo culting.
People are not so knowledgeable about the other coins because the whole point of magic internet money is that it can't be controlled by anyone. If your entire account exists in some box somewhere under the control of some entity, how is that any different from a bank (which also mostly doesn't operate on cash but just moves bytes around)?
Bitcoin isn't a store of value (its too volatile), it isn't a currency (too slow and expensive for small transactions), and it isn't even a product in its own right.
But a lot (generalizing here) don't like giving up access "in case they need it". I haven't worked backend in ages, but years ago there was one developer that went to the ops guys and said "can I just ssh to production I need to check some env vars to debug my software" (or something to that degree). Ops team was good and it was a hard no - "just add some logging, you can deploy a new release quickly enough".
A good solution to this is to have a "break glass" system. Ie. access permissions get granted to the developer directly in an emergency by going through a set of steps available beforehand. All requests by that developer are then allowed, limited to 10 kilobytes of results per minute and logged.
For example, imagine you run a bank, and a rare code bug means that at exactly midnight on new years eve all bank balances have $1B added to them.
Your oncall takes down the production servers to to reduce losses and uses the break glass system, by getting approval from n other developers, allowing them direct database access. They use that access to count(accounts) with a balance around $1B or more, see it is everyone, and subtract $1B from them all, before bringing production back up with an older software release. Downtime = 2 hours.
In the morning, all the developers actions are reviewed.
If the developer turned evil and trying to dump the database, the n approvers and 10 kilobytes per minute would reduce data loss. But the break glass system still lets the developer make fairly major emergency fixes to reduce losses or downtime.
I agree it's a grave fuckup but its a common one. You should just assume that when you deposit coins somewhere there are dozens of people who could just walk off with everything on their own. It's remarkable that it doesn't happen more often.
The nice thing is that using the private key requires physical touch. That means that AI itself (or a remote attacker, for that matter) can't do things unless I confirm.
This is a one-sentence horror story. I almost can't believe someone would let this happen, unless the 1Password account is not important (highly unlikely).
In my thinking, this is more secure than plaintext in filesystem
you know most tools like gcloud, bitwarden, etc store auth keys just in dotfiles too?
Local compromise is KO now, and we can't do shit on platforms like MacOs didn't research Linux recently
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203051
Besides, when its in your computer they send you a modified computer with an esim and steal it just like that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054092
The whole thing is a shady casino where the code is the law and who knows maybe the Binance guy actually made a deal to send $5B of crypto for a really cool NFT when drunk and now pretends that its a hack? We will never know, the code is the law and the law says that someone else has it now.
In crypto, you should gamble fast lose or win and get out. Pay/receive the ransom and get out. Pay/receive your drug/guns/espionage money and get out. You should never keep crypto if you are not OK with losing it.
Pirates wanted gold because they did not belong to any State to issue them IOU.
But owning the gold in a locker and trading with the IOU of the bank means you need to trust the bank instead.
If you want to use the BC on your computer, you can transfer it to wherever you want.
Assuming they actually can cover the losses financially.
And if they don't good luck suing them.
This comment is a tangent to the article and my experience of trying to use crypto for the first time few weeks ago after watching it from pretty much the day 0. Maybe day 2 or 3 as when bitcoin was launched I was few months shy of leaving college and I just thought it was just an "Internet thing" like many of us did. And I am aware that evne among decentralsied coins BTC might not have been the first, but let's just say it was.
So a few weeks ago, I wanted to make some payment to some sites. There were/are 4-5; one of them is openrouter and similar, but there's one that helps with Linux ISOs. I definitely didn't want to leave my credit card number on those sites (not even on openrotuer). I am wary of leaving my credit card numbers to sites outside my home country India. It's not about better or worse security, it's just about a sense of comfort, or maybe even habit.
There was no expectation or plan for anonymity, privacy whatsoever. Though I would not have minded a bit of privacy on those immediate businesses/sites – as in if someone hacked their systems/DBs they'd find my throwaway email and crypto address (maybe) but if some legal entity investigated they could easily trace it back to my via exchanges and I was fine with that. Yes, I could explore temporary cards and everything but I still had to manage things more than I wanted to.
I created accounts on three crypto exchanges (one was Binance, two from India). I needed those to be complaint to my country's fin/tax laws and I dind't want to deal with anything even remotely p2p (oh, it's quite active here and rarely ends well for end or occasional users like me).
The crowded UX, dark patterns, and absolutely no easy way to figure out how can I just:
- buy some coins
- transfer to my personal wallet (this is deliberately not made straightforward and on some exchanges downright impossible – sometimes hiding it behind some sort of eligibility to do so and even that is hidden further behind some sort of automatic and random eligibility check process)
- get done with it
were just too much. Add to it that I learnt I had to buy some other type of coin(s) just to pay for the gas (chain/network exepenses?). Then suddenly there were additional KYC requirements from payment related parties and then a request for a recorded video of myself.
At that point I was done and had all three of my KYC'ed account closed.
I have always felt crypto coins were a bit weird (as anything unusual feels) but I had never tried it and had assumed as weird as those sounded, those would be very easy to use. How wrong I was. It's a mess and not only because at the end of the day it had to be complaint to real world finance regulations which is what it was supposed to replace in the first place - or was part of the popular appeal at least. It's just a complicated, often costly, and quite often slow mess.
Luckily Apple Pay launched in my country around that time and I was able to use that instead (otherwise I was going to dust off my ancient PayPal a/c) and Apple Pay is an underimplimented and under-supported thing in its own right but that's another story.
Are you suggesting that this is not a big deal? $6B feels like a lot but sounds like in the scheme of things it isn’t as a fraction of trading volume. Is that right?
Any company losing 10 months of revenue overnight is a BIG fucking deal. Doubly so in a speculative asset that you’re holding for others “securely”. The financial hit has only just begun for them.
That said yes the trading volume has huge.
As of now, DebugBear webite has been taken offline: https://www.debugbear.com/
And they just posted on Twitter: https://x.com/DebugBear/status/2115930681398239278
Of course, Tether runs completely counter to any of the idealistic claims about crypto.
A bank API can be 10-100s+ kloc if they need that to implement access controls.
There is selection bias in play now. The remaining people are naturally more risk tolerant. So I agree this second time around, no lessons will be learned.
during Mt. Gox it felt like nerds and insiders, nowadays boomer dads are into crypto.
my point being that i don't agree with "the remaining people are naturally more risk tolerant", as there are way more 'new' people.
Binance's reputation is hardly impeccable, but by crypto standards they're kinda sorta the adults in the room. Then again, so was FTX.
Maybe the sim card is on a timer to broadcast your keys after a year, so you just can't detect cellular signal usage now.
To securely own bitcoin you have to first create a new chip fabrication plant to then make your own hardware wallet.
I no longer dunk on crypto.
Not because crypto got better, but because the joke got old. I got tired of dunking on it.
Is crypto like USDT really decentralized if they can freeze assets... I guess it's in some middle ground between banks and true decentralization?
The point of a cold wallet is to keep the private key physically offline. That way you know it cannot be stolen by electronic means, because the physical device containing the key needed to authorize transactions is locked up and not powered on. Then you only power it on during very specific, audited times and conditions when it's needed to fund the hot wallet, which does all the actual automated trading and transfers.
GP's point is to have all incoming transactions to an exchange go to a cold wallet, which becomes a one-way sink, and then periodically the exchange powers up the cold wallet to sign transactions transferring assets to the hot wallet, which then funds all outgoing transactions. This isn't a bad architecture, though I'm not sure it'd save all that much here.
Then when things calm down you go and find ... the keys under the birdbath are lost, and you're fucked in a different way.
But at least it might work.
You can't "move money into an offline crypto wallet that is not online at all."
If "money" i.e. crypto "currency" is in a crypto "wallet" then it is online. Anyone with the key and an Internet connection can transfer it at any time.
The wording is confusing because to someone who doesn't know how cryptocurrencies work it sounds like you can simply "take the crypto offline and put it into a physical device" as if it was a file. But that's not how it works. The physical key merely contains the actual key for the always-online wallet.
Only spending from that wallet needs online access to private key - depositing to it does not.
[0]: https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/north-korea-steals-us...
Seriously, they have professionalized attacks on crypto infra to a degree that whenever you hear about a massive heist, you can be pretty sure it's North Korea.
That's not necessarily true as you can introduce extra layers to handle the storage. Why store A, B, C, D sending each other cents when you can aggregate it to once a week balance sheet changes. All of these are actually solvable tech issues even in 2012 computers.
The main failure of crypto is that it claimed to design away human corruption which in theory made a lot of sense but in practice it did the opposite - it accelerated human corruption without bad actors having to even break the rules. Just how Hitler rose to power through gaming the democratic processes crypto was gamed without anyone having to break 51% proof of work to rewrite the ledger.
The idea of running everything without oversight of humans and institutions is just fundamentally unsustainable - who are we running this system for if not for us, the people?
think of it this way - if someone steals your iphone, and you lock it, does apple pop? No, apple sells you another one. locked devices are good for apple because it causes more demand.
https://tether.io/news/tether-completes-the-largest-inaugura...
CZ from Binance was also done for… fraud but miraculously pardoned by Donald Trump (I wonder why?!) and somehow still has enormous influence and inside knowledge in spite being banned from managing Binance. He talks as if he runs the company. Hmmm.
https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...
The Israelis don't have any problem acquiring hard currency. North Korea does, and has an established MO of stealing crypto and running online moneymaking scams like ransomware.
You linked an article about a single Israeli criminal getting extradited to stand trial for a crime.
Do you not understand the distinction between "the Israelis" (often used as a shorthand for its government) and "an Israeli"?
IIRC, the North Korean government itself has programs to steal cryptocurrency to fund its government.
This fits the NK MO to a T. It does not fit Israeli intelligence activity. Your claim rings hollow without any support.
Of all the reasons to demonize a government, that seems like a pretty good one. Why the snark?
Setting aside the genocide, it is particularly funny at a time when Western governments are oppressing their own by crushing dissent on Israel, but I don’t see the same outrage there.
I don’t understand what you mean about faux concern only lasting as long as the media says. North Korea is, as you say, evergreen. And I’m pretty sure it’s based on how awful that government is, not on “the media” telling us to hate them.
I meant the faux concern over NK is evergreen unlike some other causes such as the ones I mentioned.
As soon as (if ever) NK joins the fold of Western-aligned liberal states, the media machine will spin up and it will cease to be maligned, and you will move on to the next bogeyman.
If NK ever were to join the fold of western-aligned liberal states, it will probably be accompanied by no longer behind quite such utter bastards to their people and a cessation of maligning would be entirely justified.
I just don’t get it. Of all the things to complain about propaganda in the world, why North Korea? This is one where they get it right.
Is the criticism of Israel from the people, or from Western govs and media outlets (i.e., the establishment, the centers of actual power)? And isn’t the outrage logical given the nature of the atrocities being committed by Israel right now? And pray tell: which Western countries are sanctioning Israel?
On the other hand, NK is vilified by the Western establishment, i.e. by the holders of power, but on a more background level. It isn’t the topic du jour right now, but NK is ever present as a big bad evil. Propaganda helps maintain this image in the West, even when NK isn’t present in the news cycle. And it is sanctioned to hell and back.
And even if it is “right”, it does not mean that it is completely right, nor does it mean that the propaganda isn’t doing its job effectively even if you don’t realize it.
Anyhow, I think this thread is deep enough, so I will stop here.
Everything you know about NK is from the media.
It’s definitely true that crimes against other countries are more frowned upon than crimes against one’s own people. Which doesn’t seem right to me at all. People are people and victims are victims whether it’s their own government or someone else’s. Hence why I’m confused about the snark. This seems like an instance where ugly norms are being broken for a good reason and it’s being treated like hypocrisy.
TBH I think I (and maybe others) just get triggered when the bogey man is invoked each time there's a crypto story.
It’s not a “bogey man” because it’s literally North Korea’s well-documented MO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazarus_Group
It’s like reading an article about a Russian dissident politician dying from falling out of a window and then getting outraged when someone suggests he may have been murdered by someone in power.
Sure you can print USD to make it all magically go away
But it would be very convenient if there's some experimental token of which a majority was stolen, so that irreversible damage was caused. If the token is experimental it could have a low damage, but could demonstrate the irreversible nature of these types of attacks, returning fiat money doesn't waive the issue away.
There's also the fact of funding criminal networks for billions of dollars, which probably causes them to scale cyber or non cyber operations or otherwise gain power.
This attack vector has become so common and funny.
In one scenario, i remember a company got hacked because an engineer downloaded a RAT package on company laptop during fake interview and asked him to keep it running for days as part of the interview process while they stole the data.
Need to get better in prompting
I guess at some point they'll have to cash out. Seems hard to spend $6B in vape shops.
Binance wallet 16 came online in 2021.
Why to wait 5 years to attack.
What am I missing ?
the laundering wouldnt be all that hard to take those buttcoins on in exchange for clean ones.
edit: I suppose it would be hard still. You can get anonymity inside wallets with Tornado Cash but then to turn that into actual money it will be very dependent on the country
Whoever went for this has some balls.
The hack is purely technical in nature.
This could have been the FED's system that got compromised and the response would have been the same.
Oh, no, sorry - it wouldn't because we wouldn't even know it happened as FED is fully opaque while crypto is quite transparent.
In that sense crypto is much more democratic because at least there's some ability for the public to audit it. With FED there's none.
Separation of duties so more than one person is needed to create and then approve such transactions?
Same goes with startup banks - if you exceed FDIC limits, make sure the difference is in a large institutional bank. Nearly learned this one the hard way.
Trying to save a few basis points in txn fees in very volatile industries comes at a huge risk premium
> “A lot of the people who come into this money are flashy, and they’re signaling that they have wealth,” he previously told The Post.
As long as you don't brag about it, I don't really see this being a real world issue. I think credit card fraud is a lot more likely.
If someone steals my notebook I take a bigger hit on my net worth lol.
But it's also surprising that it happened to binance at all. This checks a lot of the boxes for being, at least indirectly, an inside job.
or just not rebuild it at all.
pros: can already be used to buy all things, and doesn't set the earth on fire in order to verify transactions
cons: cannot be used to buy live grenades and CSAM
idk to me that just seems intuitively like something you'd need to have to be credible? Cold is a different story...but how can hot not be covered?
Thats been the fascinating part of crypto is watching society speedrun “best hits of financial crisis from history” by ignoring things we already solved.
Crypto is roughly agreeing that the current password rotation practices kinda suck and agreeing that the new way forward is just to have a single plain text file because you’re sure all that overhead was just nonsense
I bet they are celebrating.
Congratulations. Nice haul.
Note that I was one of the folks early on that bought into the idea (but not as much of the coins sadly) and I still think the Bitcoin white paper is a beautiful intellectual exploration (as is the concept of blockchains).
But the centralized entry and exit points in practice mean all the theoretical benefits aren't really in play.
If governments ban crypto then they will without fail ban cash as well.
Edit: For additional context, I live in a country where fees and transactions related to government and regulated services (including telecom) are required by law to use our national payment system exclusively, and it is hell for people who fall through the cracks (e.g. problems national ID that blocks payment systems). I've seen first-hand on multiple occasions people standing outside government buildings begging others to pay their fees in exchange for cash so that they can get unblocked from the payment system.
Whether through malice or incompetence, human institutions can never and will never be perfect. Cash and cash-like systems (inc. crypto) must remain or a lot of innocent people will get hurt, even if it enables criminals.
it is wild to me that people expect that crypto is supposed to solve a problem that is as old as currency.
For me bitcoin opened up the idea that we could maybe do money better. That idea still lives, but not in practice. Yet.
That said, it’s got to be one of the funniest moments in modern history.
Glad it turned out to be Michelin-starred bollocks.
When so much money is at stake (almost) everyone will have a price including insiders.
P.S. If you're really paranoid don't use a network-connected printer.
And yes, this is somewhat absurd. But so are online transactions that can be hacked with no backsies.
I can't understand how you could let this happen. If they stored everything in fat hot wallets, that just seems like a recipe for disaster. Especially with the "features" of crypto. Math for the most part, doesn't care about your feelings, or money for that matter.
I'd be really curious to know what their security architecture was.
a) The amounts stolen
b) The very poor uncensorability and anonymity guarantees offered by the kind of crypto they stole
Regarding uncensorability, some of these cryptos score so bad on that axis that the stolen goods can likely be recovered by a simple decision from the folks who manage/own the chain.
What are the countermeasures, is something frozen blocked marked as invalid?
I'm completely ignorant on anything related to cryptocurrencies.
Imagine someone offered you to buy $1,000,000 of that dirty money for $100,000? $10,000? $1,000?
At some point there will be people who would buy it and deal with money laundering.
Current largest was ~1B
Tech in 2026
fundsu were not in fact safu
And the money didn't disappear; it still exists.
So: why did BTC (overall) drop by 15,000% of the actual loss (which actually isn't a loss at all to BTC as a whole)
Seems like markets are really driven more by emotion and perception than fundamentals, but I'm neither a psychologist nor a trader.
Let's say you magically come into possession of 1% of SpaceX and want to sell it quickly. The selling pressure would nosedive the price by way more than 1%. And the more the value of something is 'thin air', the bigger the effect.
I can only suppose that the people that stole these BTC will try to sell at least part of it quickly.
Isn't it only going to get worse from here?
Their kid is definitely getting at least 30 dolls and 250 pencils.
It's the main weak point used in these hacks.
It allows a counter party to withdraw money from your wallet any time.
Just don't "connect" you wallet.
Bitcoin has no such concept.
$25 Billion fine against Meta - USA government
$3 Billion robbery against Binance - North Korea ( suspected )
$1.2 Billion penalty against Bank of America - USA
That tells you who wears the big britches.
Trump < Kim Jung Un < Michelle Lujan Grisham
Better general security yes, but the incentive to hack them is quite large and now more hackers have the ability to pull it off.
Same with any purpose built wallet you didn't make yourself: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/10/23/ledge...
What I never get is how they plan of converting the stolen crypto to cash eventually. No exchanges are gonna take the coins.
Less true for ETH (though in the past it forked after DAO hack to revert the txns), and I think never for BTC / XMR.
> It does look like a hack on Binance. Appreciate the quick freeze from Tether (~$971m) and Circle (~$823m).
Not a serious store of value.
EDIT: lmao even
MelangeBot OP • 2h ago Their insurance fund (SAFU) is completely wiped out, it's only $1 billion in BTC
The name of the fund was originally inspired by this meme
FWIW, at the end of every crypto bear market, a CEX usually blows up (eg FTX)...
And decreasing, since BTC is dropping as we speak. Always a good idea to hedge a currency with the currency itsself
Depends on what you’re insuring, no? For theft, it actually makes senses, right? That way, you’re insuring a constant number of coins, no matter what the market is doing. If you’re insurance currency would tank during a bitcoin heist, you would lose the insurance effect.
Binance has equity and cash flow cover this, outside the insurance fund.
They custody $150B.
FTX was larger in dollar terms and ecosystem was smaller back in a day.
If a massive heist like this triggered a run on one of the largest exchanges (Binance), potentially leading to a liquidity crisis, the consequences for the ecosystem could be far worse than temporarily freezing specific addresses holding stolen stablecoins.
Not saying that's what would have happened, but it seemed like a real possibility. And I'm not saying freezing assets is good in general, but in this particular case, maybe it was the lesser evil.
I want crypto because I don't trust nation states with the leverage and dials of fiat currency. All we've done is replace government with trusting whoever made a particular stablecoin.
Permissionless crypto is the only real crypto.
Seriously?
Oh you didn't know? I bet you trade in "dollars". That's cute.
Seems like the issue here is that he became former CEO. Funds are not safu without him...
[1] https://people.com/trump-pardons-changpeng-zhao-binance-cryp...
For another narrative, it was 83,038 a month ago on Sept 29th, so is down 5% in one month. And one year ago it was 112,562 on Oct 29th 2025 - down over 30% in one year. Well into "bear market" territory.
Using "traditional" market indicators and definitions for things like bear/bull markets doesn't feel sensible for such a volatile market.
Not making any market predictions here-- just saying that it's probably not that useful to generalize from that event.
Binance is making so much money, covering this hack is peanuts for them.
I downloaded Binance's self published market data (https://data.binance.vision/), calculated spot and futures volume for the past year, and then applied their *highest fee tier* on both sides of the volume (for every $1 traded, they generate a fee on the taker and the maker. the fee rate is asymmetrical).
Spot revenue worked out to $7.6B USD, perps revenue worked out to $13.8B
This is an upper bound on the fees charged on volume. Binance also scams their users with a b-book, has DMM deals, etc.
I don't want to get into all that today.
But the final result is that they print somewhere in the range of $20B per year on fees. I guess CZ also has huge stockpiles of BTC and stuff. A 1% rise in BTC price probably means more for them than their actual fees, LOL.
All this to say, I think $5.6B significantly hurts.
See Google's stock price today. Their ads business slowed down a bit, and their stock tanked 10%. If binance was publicly traded, I imagine a similar affect would be demonstrated on their price.
I agree. My wording was imprecise. I was trying to give an idea of the size of the company/ecosystem, using BNB’s market cap as a proxy.
As Binance doesn’t publish their financial statements, it’s difficult to get the more relevant metrics, like FCF.
I also know Binance is a privately held company that doesn’t publish financial statements. If you can tell me their P/E, go right ahead.
Not that I think P/E would have much use here. P/E is a relative valuation metric (how cheap/expensive).
The relevant metric would be something like FCF, as gizajob wrote, but again: not available.
I was trying to give an idea of the size of the company, that is all.
me: no worries boss, our market cap is $100B
boss (who is also the tooth fairy): oh right cool np
who tf think annual or bi-annual millions to billions of dollar heist is good idea for business ????
... Not your coins."
Given things like the ledger hardware attack[1] I think the time indexed risk of using a centralized exchange is probably lower than doing self-custody.
I understand that many people do self-custody for philosophical reasons, but I think trying to disguise this as a security decision ("If your crypto was stolen in this, it wasn't your crypto.") is arguable at best.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/70f69253-6017-4259-95c9-48bf0e088...
Does this mean you recommend not using one? Because that goes against all the common best practice recommendations from when I did a couple of years working in Web3 stuff a few years back.
> I think it's naive to suggest that self-custody is just a novelty with no value.
That's not what I suggested.
I suggested that it is less secure over time than centralized exchanges, even with the things you listed.
Records are largely a novelty. And predate streaming services.
I'm fairly sure originals are almost universally novelties compared to things that came after.
There apparently is no such thing as “your crypto” with how many security problems there are.
The Bitcoin mining network is somewhere around 1000 EH/s, while the (AI assisted research ahead) 34.5 million H100-equivalent GPUs globally would yield about 0.435 EH/s. They'd represent less than 0.05% of the Bitcoin network.
Then I forgot my pass phrase and have never been able to recover any of it. I don’t even know how many btc were mined/lost.
Before anyone asks, no, there aren’t any usable exploits / vulns found for the encryption methods used. And from what I can tell the coins in question have still sat frozen for going in a decade and a half now. I suspect many other hackers did the same thing…
Edit: I thought he was talking about 2012 but yeah in 2010 CPU mining was still a thing
Possibly Trezor (35 points, 16 days ago, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078423
> Coldcard’s software is built on MicroPython, and Coinkite supplies its own hardware-RNG wrapper for the device’s STM32 chip. To avoid conflicts, Coinkite deliberately disabled MicroPython’s built-in RNG path by setting a configuration flag, MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG, to zero. The problem: the underlying library checked only whether that flag was defined, not whether it was enabled (set to a non-zero value). Because a flag set to zero is still “defined,” the build silently compiled against the wrong code, and seed generation fell back to a deterministic software pseudo-random number generator called Yasmarang
Tbh the biggest problem is platforms deciding you’re buying drugs because you purchase and transfer out (thanks Venmo)
A paper wallet works as well
A hardware wallet is just a tradeoff between convenience and an extra security risk
Let's say I use an open source wallet, generate the keys, send there a few Bitcoin and then I print the wallet
Now the Bitcoin is on a paper wallet, where's the vulnerability here? (except a crazy ex burning it down, but that's besides the point haha)
An old laptop with the wifi card taken out is more transparent and auditable. It just runs the ordinary open source code
But I just keep all my funds in a hot wallet, no multisig. And if I get hacked I lose it all. I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked. The risk of losing cryptocurrency will encourage security advances across the whole ecosystem. I think I will set up multisig eventually
> I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked.
So you proposed a way to be more secure, only to discard it yourself in favor of “just having good security”?
In fact, updates are only a risk. You physically remove anything that can allow updates to happen + anything that allows wireless networking.
I agree my approach is not great, I dont own a lot
If your paper wallet, generated offline, used a bad RNG, it is just as vulnerable.
That sounds like your housekeeper's key...
You can store crypto with zero risk of electronic access just using offline wallet generation and an offline wallet. It's not even hard.
This falls under "extraordinary precautions" that few people do and is an enormous error prone hassle.
You could put it in USD and you'd be financing the bombings of schoolgirls in Iran in a pointless and no-end-in-sight war... not saying either is better, but one of them is optional for US citizens, while the other isn't. And the optional one also lets you avoid third-party custodians like Binance.
Some of the crypto scammers use github
Sorry, the likelihood of my banking creds, or other important accts getting hijacked via an infostealer or some other method is about 100x more likley than me buying a tampered ledger device.
A hardware supply chain attack is easily mitigated by inspecting your hardware and buying from a reputable source and not a singular random malaysian shopify site selling hardware wallets...
No, because there was global news and retailers in Germany taking devices off the shelves:
https://x.com/0xJohannes_/status/2109240472933671125
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Crypto-thieves-sell-hardware-wa...
>Sorry, the likelihood of my banking creds, or other important accts getting hijacked via an infostealer or some other method is about 100x more likley than me buying a tampered ledger device.
Sorry, the likelihood of my banking creds, or other important accts getting refunded via any bank or some other method is about 10000x more likley than me getting my buttcoins back.
>A hardware supply chain attack is easily mitigated by inspecting your hardware and buying from a reputable source and not a singular random malaysian shopify site selling hardware wallets...
People bought compromised devices from reputable sources and still lost all their buttcoins.
Im not saying its for everyone, its definately not for normies like yourself
Ive had more money stolen, and not refunded in traditional bank accounts (thousands) than Ive ever had stolen in crypto (none).
Do you price your savings based on 12hours of market volatility, or do you look at it cumulatively over a duration?
Eventually, possibly within my lifetime, a Big Mac meal is going to cost $50.
Is the problem the number or the concept?
Your salary should also go up so the only thing affected is the cash you hold. Would it be better if the currency would be version-bumped every 10 years and rescaled to remove the inflation?
I am curious if I’ll live long enough to see the United States issue higher denomination bank notes again.
Relative to what? Talk of BTC gaining value is primarily wrt USD; I'd be perfectly happy with my actual currency (GBP) gaining value wrt USD.
I suppose BTC can only 'deflate' in the long-run (and with an assumed supply of goods and services available in exchange for it) since the mintable volume is fixed. But perhaps it exposes that talking of currencies inflating is a bit sloppy, as it doesn't really make sense for BTC, and it's the economy or banking system that inflates really..
The existence of harder forms of money (gold, bitcoin, etc) is an expected consequence of how the system is designed, and not in any way a subversion of it. Somehow, both sides seem to miss this point.
Can you expand here? Governments don't want to incentivize storing value in order to encourage spending, but people want to be able to store value because that's what we've been doing since farming.
Is it because money is a medium of exchange and not a store of value?
So we empower central banks to intervene in various ways in the monetary system in order to achieve low inflation and system stability.
Activity is only the secondary objective. System stability is the first. Stability doesn't mean that markets cannot go up and down even violently. It means that when they go violently up and down, there remains faith in the currency and people are not suffering from mass unemployment, etc.
When a currency is healthy and has low inflation, hard assets are not a threat. Gold doesn't pay any interest, it doesn't have any earnings. You don't need to convince people to buy stocks and bonds instead of gold, they do that by themselves.
When a currency is unhealthy, hard assets can become a threat to it, but notably it's usually other fiat currencies that are the biggest threat.
Hard assets are useful tools for the financial system because they are less correlated with the market. You can criticise Bitcoin in various ways but the criticism that it is a hard asset with a fixed supply that by not inflating somehow damages the financial or monetary system doesn't land. Fiat money is intended to facilitate the existence of markets in other things, including hard assets.
You might not, I do.
Tell you what: you go short btc/usd, I'll go long btc/usd, and let's circle back in 10 years and see who did better.
> You might not, I do.
Then you don't want a currency. For something to be money it needs to (among other things) be a medium of exchange, and nobody really wants to trade away a thing today if they know it will be more valuable tomorrow.
Suppose you have some control over currency. You run a country. I'm that case, so you still want the currency to gain value compared to the alternatives?
Your choice is basically: holding currency is more profitable than building a house or running a business (or lending to those who do), or else less profitable. If you run a country, do you want houses and jobs and all that kind of thing, or do you want people to do better if they choose to hoard currency?
If I need a house today I'll buy it. I might not invest in real estate or stocks as much if my currency will be worth more tomorrow but I'll still buy stuff I need or want badly enough.
The bond seller is intending to put it to productive use to generate the yield.
This differs from deflation where people will (more the before) actually sit on money and not buy bonds. Then people who need liquidity cannot get it as the money supply drys up.
SPY has outperformed BTC over the last 5 years, and with far less volatility.
Convenient date to pick there.
> which of those assets would you have preferred to own and why?
NVDA.
It's a productive use of resources, not a last-fool-standing pyramid scheme.
To be fair bitcoin’s initial years were extraordinary. By any metric you use though the rate of increase has clearly slowed.
That's an odd way of phrasing it, since the $1 is still worth $1, and a naive reading would make you think it's "worth more" when the buying power has actually reduced.
Wouldn't it be clearer to say $1 today only buys you 64% of what you could have bought in 2008.
This is mathematically provable:
1. A dollar in 2008 could buy 1/14tn of the value created by the US economy (the GDP) in 2008.
2. A dollar today can only buy 1/32tn of the value created by the economy in 2025.
It's obvious a 2025-2026 dollar is worth less than a 2008 dollar. That's just math.
But. A dollar in 2008 could buy 230% more of the economy than it can today. And you say its purchasing power has only eroded 64%. That means the dollar is actually worth more today, compared to the size of the economy it's in. Weird, I know.
EDIT: I'm fine with downvotes but tell me why I'm wrong.
Back in 2016 a then-huge Ethereum smart contract called "The DAO" [1] had a loophole that let an attacker extract a third of all the funds.
But a lot of the developers and miners had either lost money themselves, or had friends who'd lost money, or felt the embarrassing incident was devaluing their own Ethereum holdings. So they decided to allow takesies-backsies.
There's probably a philosophical lesson there about power and who the rules really apply to.
Law is downstream of philosophy. Youre forced to deal with conclusions that may be based in philosophy (or they may be arbitrary or self interested). Nobody makes you hold a position on mens rea. In that way you can ignore the philosophy.
In the literal sense, people have been forcing their philosophy on other people for at least as long as we’ve had societies, so I assume it’s not that.
Invent Notion then keep adding features enterprise customers want until you're re-inventing JIRA/Confluence
Who left this stupid fence here?
Ethereum never did it again, rolling back hacks didn’t (and couldn’t) become normal policy. IMO, they shouldn’t have made an exception, as it set a bad example.
I’ve seen a few other small projects attempt to do rollbacks since, but it usually turns into some kind of mess. In most hacks, the coins aren’t time-locked and quickly get laundered through smaller exchanges (and other services) which act as mixers. The stolen coins end up in the hands of a bunch of innocent people, and the rollback then causes way more harm as those users lose their coins.
As far as I understand blockchain, that is the system working as intended. Some nodes choose to run Ethereum Classic and some choose to run Ethereum. Isn't that the whole point? Decentralisation?
Edit: the downvotes are suggesting I'm missing something. I think my communication style could be improved.
That's 80% of the thing right there.
ETA: it's a joke because the original saying is "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"
School! Teachers! Classes!
Seriously, the traditional higher ed system is still a very good place to learn things like this. (I honestly tend to forget about it since academia hasn't really caught up at teaching software engineering, but that's really the exception rather than the rule ...). For traditional subjects like finance/economics, you can absolutely find inexpensive extension courses taught by people who care about pedagogy.
Some people (particularly criminals and oligarchs) might not like them, but most of the structures around financial movements exist for very practical reasons, often stemming from the will to uphold the rule of law. Obviously nothing is perfect (the US have an excessive level of control, VISA/Mastercard are de-facto monopolies, etc etc), but one cannot seriously think that the way to fix things is to reimplement everything from scratch in a wild west of shady unaccountable operators...
One absolutely can, but I think things have to first get sufficiently difficult for ordinary folks to even notice. Fortunately ( sarcasm tag here for otherwise perfectly normal individuals, who may be missing some caffeine in their organism ), given that the war is coming along with various related national security restrictions, we may soon be able to experience that particular slice of fun.
Any recommendations for books? Or even podcasts?
I don't have zero understanding. It sounds like you have a deeper understanding than I do.
It's always been like this. Which is why financial systems blow up and/or collapse regularly.
And like the DAO hack on Ethereum showed, if most people who run blockchain software decide that something never happened, they can revert transactions that way.
Isn't that a pretty integral part of the blockchain? 51% attacks were even featured on the HBO show Silicon Valley.
[1] https://etherscan.io/address/0xdAC17F958D2ee523a220620699459...
One can also burn tokens, just as one can burn cash, but we don't tend to hold that against either systems since it's purely optional.
Any rules can and have been changed by those with leverage to do so (be that exchanges, miners or devs), in the end any system like this storing value is captured and controlled.
Unless the house is monero or something and you want a lifetime supply of drugs.
> function destroyBlackFunds (address _blackListedUser) public onlyOwner
Don't mess with Tether, it is practically state owned.
- was conducted from his gaming rig
- about Deltec's (and therefore Tether's) money movements being several times larger than all the banking in their country was due to people misunderstanding the country's two banking licenses, the names of which HE "couldn't remember right now" (the Deputy CEO of a bank who can't remember the name of the banking licenses where they operate?!?), and he "wasn't sure which [banking license] the bank has, but we might (emphasis mine) have both"
- oh yeah, said Deputy CEO's "resume": 33 years old, by his LinkedIn claimed to have graduated HEC Lausanne in Switzerland with a Master of Science at the age of 15... celebrating his graduation by immediately being named Professor of Finance at a university in Lebanon. While dividing his spare time between running hedge funds in Switzerland (called Indepedance [sic] Weath [sic] Management) and uhh... Jacksonville, FL.
Once CNBC's viewers started ridiculing and questioning both Deltec Bank and Tether and when that looked hilariously bad, they removed his info from the bank's website.
And when that looked bad, they added it back.
And when that looked bad, they removed the bank's whole website, and replaced it with a broken WP template with no working links.
Hey, look, several years after that, go to Deltec's website. "Ultra sophisticated private banking" running on a different WordPress site. "Client login"? "This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in ebanking.deltecbank.com. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN". Just as has been the case for years.
... and then the entire bank website was replaced with a low-effort WordPress template. Their online banking was Javascript hard coded to refuse all login attempts.
"Sounds legit to me", said the crypto bros. "Fuck the regulatory system. This is the new era."
Let's continue reading...
In this case, iFinex has the explicit ability to freeze funds in Tether.
It always pumps after hacks when they swap to clean it. But it is also just the only crypto that makes sense to be used by regular people.
Your usual non-crypto millinare likely have less money to steal on them than average grandma. Fiat millionare likely have two credit cards and $100 in a pocket. Or useless iPhone with Apple pay. So there is zero profit in trying to rob fiat millionare or billionare and tons of downsides.
And moving any amounts of transparent crypto over $100,000 just paints huge "rob me" target on your person.
It doesnt exactly solve on-ramp / off-ramp, but it hides very well how much you actually have in total.
With nornal crypto you create direct track from a CEX to every place where you spend the money.
And then there are centrally issued and controlled coins on private, permissioned ledgers a.k.a. databases. But most cryptobros never cared about the technology nor the political goal, so anything can be called a cryptocurrency as long as it's a medium for gambling and speculation outside the regulated financial framework.
Now the traditional banking system is basically rebuilt in crypto. The banks are busy the exchanges. The EU even talk about making it illegal to store money in your own wallet.
This is what happens when people don't think things thru.
Losing $5b is indeed a potential security issue.
Per Changpeng Zhao (former Binance CEO):
This seems to be caused by DebugBear compromise: https://x.com/debugbear/status/2115866496643535293?s=46&t=_R...
it appears to be an injection attack on the front end. injecting incorrect tx, but showing a valid tx for the user to sign.
Link: https://x.com/cz_binance/status/2115880474375749834?s=46&t=_...