yesterday at 9:48 PM
About $2.4 billion out of this is already frozen by Circle and Tether. Some of the big ones:
- 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...
today at 9:53 AM
If USDT gets to a frozen list - that means that Tether does not need to comply with requests to convert it into USD? I guess this is very useful for Tether and the other stable coin emitters.
yesterday at 11:35 PM
Probably not everyone knows, but USDT has a "black list", and admins can prevent any address holding USDT from spending. The black list is implemented in USDT contract.
So USDT is not truly decentralized and your money can be frozen for any reason or no reason at all.
today at 7:33 AM
So USDT is a great amazing decentralized censorship-free drop in replacement to USD except:
- 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.
today at 9:08 AM
Suddenly, physical Gold in a safe at home looks fairly decentralized and censorship-proof
today at 9:35 AM
Until you need to move or share it. That's why monero XMR is the only serious fungible and decentralized cryptocurrency
today at 9:48 AM
I don't doubt what you're saying. But as someone who is really not buying into cryptocurrencies, this is exactly what someone who holds a big amount of some obscure cryptocurrency would say.
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.
today at 9:17 AM
> great amazing decentralized censorship-free drop in replacement
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.
today at 9:46 AM
I love monero but then you have the problem that very few exchanges support it and if you need to convert big amounts of it in common currency it gets quite hard to do compared to eth/btc
today at 9:53 AM
Well, nobody said that the true anarchy would be easy. No government actually wants to approve the original spirit of crypto, everything they allow is either a toy or a scam they can take advantage of.
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.
today at 8:06 AM
Tether isn’t decentralized or censorship free in any way
today at 8:21 AM
USDT is created by a super shady company and is not at all decentralized or censorship-free. You could have made the argument for Bitcoin (and still can to a certain level) but most cryptos that propped up after that or stablecoins do not follow the hacker philosophy and more the banker one. Ironic that the whole crypto movement got co-opted by the likes of JPM which it seeked to replace.
today at 9:19 AM
Recently I tried to donate to a project using their preferred crypto payment processor flow, which purported to support "Coinbase Wallet" integration. So thinking that was just like, Coinbase, I said "sure why not" thinking it'd save me the effort of copy/pasting long strings back and forth.
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.
today at 8:03 AM
[flagged]
today at 8:27 AM
today at 7:44 AM
Tether's entire business model, providing an almost-unregulated USD cryptocurrency, relies on them not arbitrarily banning people. They don't do it frequently or without thought. You're far less likely to get banned from USDT than just about any non-cryptocurrency financial institution.
today at 9:35 AM
> Tether's entire business model, providing an almost-unregulated USD cryptocurrency, relies on them not arbitrarily banning people
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.
today at 8:03 AM
Yeah, until Trump (or whoever is president at the time) tells them to.
What will they do when the alternative is broken bones?
today at 9:03 AM
You can say the same for many other industries:
> almost-unregulated except when the authority say no.
today at 6:23 AM
Turns out that there are quite good reasons to have a centralised currency after all. Who would’ve known.
today at 6:24 AM
yeah the issue is if you built it they will co opt it
today at 6:48 AM
All systems can be bent, broken, or subverted.
today at 6:53 AM
not bitcoin-core in the past 14 years of being a public network
today at 9:38 AM
Btc has a similar blacklist with tainted coins because it's not fungible unlike actual decentralized cryptocurrency like monero xmr
today at 7:37 AM
The topic is bitcoin being hacked and stolen. I do not think this outcome was the intended outcome for users?
Perhaps I am missing your argument.
today at 8:23 AM
no. binance was hacked, again, again. the wallet was not. else they would have stolen only from the btc wallet.
not your keys not your bitcoin
today at 8:54 AM
Not practical for ordinary people. No regular person is holding their own wallet, and even the technically sophisticated who do get their keys stolen or lose them to faulty backups or technical snafus.
today at 9:02 AM
Calling/implying that it's technically sophisticated is not really reasonable. Having a BTC (or other currency) wallet is utterly trivial, let alone from a technical standpoint, it's much easier than setting up an e.g. Coinbase account. The only issue, outside of choice of course, is people being ignorant of what needs to be done and I think that can largely be explained by the fact that centralized providers spend billions on marketing while decentralized wallets spend nothing on it.
today at 8:28 AM
today at 8:35 AM
The intention of bitcoin was to have a digital medium with similar properties as cash: no need to trust anyone else, and you can exchange it with whoever you want. Cash can also be stolen if someone takes your wallet, leaving you no recourse except the law
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)
today at 9:01 AM
> Cash can also be stolen if someone takes your wallet, leaving you no recourse except the law
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.
today at 9:09 AM
You steal billions, you just pay the police 100000000 to look away.
today at 7:05 AM
Huh? You can trace bitcoins forever, and people would probably pay extra for some vanity bitcoins; and probably pay less or nothing for some bitcoins that are legally questionable.
today at 7:28 AM
Your answer does not answer anything. The discussion is about whether or not to have the trusted third-party. Pro-ttp said that ttp protects from criminals. Anti-ttp said that ttp can make your own money dissappear because ttp is bending the rules. You said nonsence, your examples are not showing any rules or contracts about digital property which are being bent. Why any bitcoin criticism from anyone is always so weak?
today at 8:06 AM
All bitcoins are legally questionable; but no: ones that can be traced to contract killings not just stealing do not trade at a discount.
today at 6:46 AM
Turns out the reason crypto was invented isn't "decentralization" at all, it was nerds feeling left out and wanting their own financial instrument grift.
today at 6:49 AM
You mean the smart nerds
For the less economical-savvy ones it was like Beanie Babies or Tulips (with predictable consequences)
today at 7:19 AM
I still buy tulips, just not at boom market prices.
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.
today at 7:17 AM
Yes, but there are more good reasons to have it be decentralized.
today at 7:44 AM
Well sure, but the average consumer needs and/or wants some protections, safeguards and insurances. If my bank gets hacked or even if I get skimmed it's considered their fault and I'll get my money back.
today at 8:16 AM
>I'll get my money back.
If the police retrieves your money from the thief?
today at 9:21 AM
That's if it was stolen from you directly.
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).
today at 8:29 AM
While I can't speak for other places, in the UK, if you haven't been careless and report quickly enough, your refund is not dependent on anyone being caught.
today at 5:20 AM
Arguably any fiat-collateralised stablecoin is ipso facto centralised and trusted (someone needs to 1) issue the coins only against fiat collateral and then 2) hold onto that collateral reliably and 3) return it upon presentation of the coin), and at step 3 they can always say "no, we won't give it to you".
today at 7:06 AM
Your point has nothing to do with fiat.
It applies equally well to a fiduciary coin with a promise that 1 gcoin = 1g of gold or whatever.
today at 7:56 AM
Indeed.
However, it does not necessarily apply to algorithmic stable coins (Terra) or crypto-backed overcollateralised coins (DAI). That's why I said "fiat-backed".
today at 8:04 AM
Why couldn't a privacy focus coined, like Monero, be a stablecoin?
You don't need to see where the coins are and move to promise $1 of going for every coin.
today at 8:39 AM
Probably the founders/employees of the company issuing/redeeming the token would be arrested very quickly. Tornado Cash people got arrested for much less.
today at 7:06 AM
Decentralized is a great concept but it’s 99.9% rug pulls and you can’t get any safety unless you centralize. As an investor there is no way to protect yourself because the rug pulls are several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than most people’s understanding.
today at 9:21 AM
> As an investor there is no way to protect yourself
Why? BTC is pretty stable longterm. 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.
today at 2:35 AM
The U.S. government is the largest beneficiary of this service. More than $2.1 billion in USDT connected to or requested by U.S. authorities out of over $4.4 billion in total illicit USDT freezes globally.
today at 2:50 AM
It's tethered to the USD. It seems expected that the government in charge of USD is doing the most blacklisting.
today at 9:14 AM
If they baked in a function to freeze USDT, why not also add a function revert a transaction flagged as part of a hack?
today at 7:40 AM
The financial system has evolved over 5000+ years and is like an endless series of Chesterton's Fences at this point. Here we find another: the ability for a regulator or a bank to freeze assets is once again proven to be a feature not a bug.
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...
today at 8:06 AM
You know what isn't a Chesterton's fence? Payment processors being able to dictate what I can or can't spend my money on.
This by itself is a reason to push for more crypto acceptance, in my eyes.
today at 8:48 AM
I must live a very vanilla, sheltered life because I’ve never bought anything and wondered if a payment processor would object to it.
today at 9:33 AM
The payment processors don't object to you. They usually object to the store or the platform you're getting things from.
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.
today at 8:52 AM
Frozen assets are still a wallet with no recourse.
today at 7:48 AM
Yeah but what if I hacked that money fair and square? Why should anyone have the right to block my hard earned not-cash?
today at 7:04 AM
Anyone can refuse any bitcoin, too. But that's not implemented in the contract, just by how much real money people want to give you for bitcoin.
today at 6:28 AM
A shame that they can and do so here but happily facilitate transfers or scam victims, human trafficking and sexual abuse including of minors.
today at 7:31 AM
So when tether is blacklisted, is it reissued?
yesterday at 11:04 PM
What's the point of even stealing the stablecoins? They're controlled by private companies that can easily freeze them
Am I missing something here? Seems like a waste of time
today at 6:11 AM
> waste of time
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.
today at 9:07 AM
Fair enough
today at 8:41 AM
Apparently [1], he managed to put them as collateral on a lending platform. That allowed him to borrow ETH. The way it works is that if you don't pay back the loaned ETH, the lenders can take the collateral. Except that here the collateral is itself frozen. So apparently, the ETH as now safe in the hacker's wallet and the lenders just lost a bunch of money.
I wonder why not swap them? And had he, would it have bricked the swap pool?
[1] https://x.com/czesmaill/status/2115988477905080716
today at 9:10 AM
That's smart
yesterday at 11:26 PM
In this case it looks like the attacker managed to swap some stablecoins into ETH before they were frozen.
today at 4:17 AM
today at 9:12 AM
I'm not clear whether the stablecoin providers will then be "creating" new coin to make binance whole - without which you've still fucked binance
today at 7:09 AM
It reveals what they are to the public. It's fake crypto with all the downsides of crypto but none of the upsides.
today at 9:17 AM
Wait, it is decentralized but can be frozen ?
No. You just can't use these platforms. But a knowledgeable hacker will be able to add a transaction tot he blockchain.
today at 2:07 AM
So they got “only” ~$3 billion
today at 5:55 AM
Poor fellas, barely enough for rent
today at 6:58 AM
It's one banana, what could it cost? $10?
today at 8:03 AM
Less than half is frozen then?
today at 1:49 AM
Interesting I didn’t know you can block/cancel transactions. Does this have to happen before the new block is minted. or it can happen after, that’s what I’m inclined to think just based off of the word block
today at 2:13 AM
Centralized stablecoins like USDT and USDC aren't layer-one cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. They're more like applications running on top of other blockchains, usually as smart contracts, and their issuers hold admin keys which can freeze, mint, burn, and otherwise redistribute funds at will. As far as timing goes, stablecoin issuers can't actually cancel or reverse a transaction that's already in a block that's been mined, but they can freeze the receiving address afterward and burn the funds there, then reissue them elsewhere, which has much the same effect.
today at 5:45 AM
That sounds interesting. How is that different from a bank? What are the advantages and disadvantages compared with a traditional bank?
today at 6:10 AM
If traditional banking is available to you, then I don't think that there are any significant advantages. But lots of people—notably those in countries with unstable currencies [0]—don't have access to high-quality banking, so for them, stablecoins can be an acceptable substitute in some cases. It's probably not a great idea to hold stablecoins long-term (there's always a risk of the sponsoring company going under, and unlike bonds they don't pay interest), but it should be fairly safe to use them for transfers, since the transfers are quick enough that there are very low odds of the company becoming insolvent while the transfer is underway.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012907
today at 6:50 AM
It's much easier to ban or regulate cryptocurrencies than it is paper cash and brick-and-mortar banks.
today at 7:45 AM
Its a weird loophole or so.
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.
today at 6:52 AM
It’s completely unregulated and they can print infinite money.
yesterday at 10:28 PM
That doesn't sound very decentralised.
today at 5:49 AM
Stable coins are not decentralized
today at 6:55 AM
Stablecoins only use the accoutrement of blockchain as smoke and mirrors to distract and confuse regulators, not because they actually benefit from it at a technical level. They aren't really decentralized at all and could just as easily be a database, except for the regulatory thing
today at 5:20 AM
nothing about crypto is decentralized. it's verified by enormous mining farms, who contribute hashes to centralized pools, all stored on one central ledger, and interfaces with the fiat/legit financial system only by using that very financial system.
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
today at 5:34 AM
which is why - sadly - there's not really any point to crypto anymore (other than as a speculative instrument driven mostly by fomo)
today at 6:12 AM
The stated point is to prevent central banks from printing currency / inflation. The claim is that crypto today worth 1% of the world's BTC will be worth just under 1% of the world's BTC in 2300, at least barring e.g. progress in quantum cryptography, a sunspot taking out digital infrastructure, or similar.
That's probably socially harmful, but it is the claim.
today at 7:39 AM
Inflation is increasing prices, which has causes other than central banks putting more money into circulation. When Bitcoin’s value drops, prices in Bitcoin increase so it experiences inflation regularly.
yesterday at 10:01 PM
> About $2.4 billion out of this is already frozen by Circle and Tether. Some of the big ones:
How does freezing crypto work in this context?
yesterday at 10:06 PM
The smart contract for those tokens supports freezing. Tether just calls the freeze function on that address.
today at 7:10 AM
Can they forcibly reverse the transaction so that Binance gets their money back?
today at 8:11 AM
No. The last time this happened, it led to the Ethereum/Ethereum classic split, and that was 10 years ago.
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.
yesterday at 11:20 PM
And it's impossible to mix them because Ethereum is even anonymous than Bitcoin.
yesterday at 10:56 PM
Isn't it already too late at that point? The tokens would have moved already.
today at 6:46 AM
I think the idea is that they freeze them indefinitely, and then they no longer count against the centralised reserves, since they can never cash out. Now they can mint the equivalent amount back to Binance and remain solvent.
today at 6:49 AM
And how do they ‘mint’ 2 billion without affecting the price of tether and without finding 2 billion to back it?
If they can mint with no impact doesn’t that mean they can just print money?
today at 7:36 AM
It’s been years since anything Tether minted was plausibly 100% backed by real assets. Both times they’ve been forced to show the books, they only had fractional backing. And they’ve minted tens of billions of tokens since.
today at 7:39 AM
And yet people like the parent and those with billions invested in Tether seem to believe that it's all backed and fully solvent and minting new money from thin air is completely reasonable.
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.
today at 7:07 AM
Because if they permanently freeze 2 billion in a wallet, that Tether can never move or cash out, so their liabilities go down 2 billion. They can mint an equivalent amount to a non-frozen wallet without affecting their reserve ratio.
And yes they can print money, you have to trust their reserves that are off chain.
yesterday at 11:07 PM
Moved where? Moving to a different wallet wouldn't prevent freezing. It's 5B, impossible to cash out or exchange for different crypto quickly.
today at 6:15 AM
Excluding wash and artificial activity, supposedly stablecoins trade 400M/h so if it took 2h to notice and lock they might have been able trade about half a billion without overwhelming existing volumes?
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.)
today at 5:31 AM
here's an interesting article by DataFinnovation arguing that blacklisting crypto is doomed to fail.
https://medium.com/chainargos/losing-the-blacklisting-race-e...
today at 5:37 AM
they took loan against it.
today at 12:19 AM
right but too late to call freeze on the original wallet address as per gp's post. I would imagine it got distributed to many wallets and attempts to tumble by the time Tether could move on it.
yesterday at 10:10 PM
Most crypto assets are operated by a smart contract that controls every transfer. So the contract can decide to not perform certain transfers.
yesterday at 10:22 PM
Not your keys, not your crypto.
Keys? Hahaha, still not your crypto.
yesterday at 11:21 PM
Unless it's Monero, the only currency to be declared illegal in most countries because it's too much like cash.
today at 7:47 AM
Monero is legal in most countries.
today at 4:58 AM
Like cash except you can use it at crazy scale, so worse than cash when crime is considered.
today at 5:30 AM
That's why it's paramount for LEOs to go after people doing the bad deeds instead of simply banning a whole monetary ecosystem, just because it's easier to do.
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.
today at 6:02 AM
No, it's exactly why that works.
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.
today at 6:51 AM
It really is hard, because time isn’t addressed in the idea.
It is an evolutionary process, with incentives are high enough for both sides to keep finding solutions.
today at 8:43 AM
It doesn't, the hacker already loaned against it to get eth so they froze saves assets.
yesterday at 10:11 PM
Frozen? What are they going to do, fork the blockchain?
today at 6:59 AM
If people dont know, they should look up DAO hack and Ethereum hard fork.
yesterday at 10:36 PM
USDT and USDC are both centralised crypto currencies with a single source of truth.
yesterday at 11:24 PM
In other words, they are essentially casino chips, not cryptocurrencies.
yesterday at 11:05 PM
Freezing crypto is so disgusting to me I don’t know…
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.
today at 4:58 AM
That's not the whole point at all. And there are truly wild west cryptos, but most people want some trustworthy regulatory body, whether it's a government or not, backstopping their funds when they get large enough.
For instance to unwind a 5 billion dollar robbery
today at 5:26 AM
"people want some trustworthy regulatory body"
Have you talked to Crypto-enthusiasts before? They very much don't want that.
today at 7:57 AM
I’m pretty sure cryptocurrency enthusiasts are a small minority of cryptocurrency users.
today at 9:25 AM
But if I am the victim of a $5k or $50k robbery, I'm out of luck. Yay.
today at 5:14 AM
That’s why crypto is so dumb
today at 6:16 AM
But without crypto we couldn't helped people in Gaza during the genocide. It has it benefits just not for the privileged white guy.
today at 6:23 AM
I’m pretty sure crypto benefits privileged white guys quite a bit. I can think of one in particular…
yesterday at 11:22 PM
Stablecoins are fiat on-chain and they are legal so they need to have the freezing mechanism in the smart contract otherwise they could go to jail.
So crypto + legal company means not really following bitcoin ideology anymore
today at 3:00 AM
At least a motivated person could audit the smart contracts on this. It isn't like it's a surprise when it turns out it's possible to freeze these coins.
today at 5:23 AM
this isn't crypto, it's US dollars with a techno-wizard sheen on the top for no reason
today at 12:16 AM
governments, banks freeze currency all the time
today at 5:06 AM
> Freezing crypto is so disgusting to me I don’t know…
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.
today at 5:38 AM
it cuts both ways - it's fine when 2B of heist money gets frozen, but much less "fine" when your paycheck gets frozen because you've attended a political rally the ruling party/class does not like.
today at 6:01 AM
It's so sad that it's inconvenient for you to commit fraud and tax evasion and pyramid schemes and rug pulls.
My heart goes out to you, along with these two definitely not Nazi salutes.
today at 5:06 AM
[dead]
yesterday at 10:11 PM
I thought crypto was built specifically to prevent these 'freezing' actions? wtf
yesterday at 10:39 PM
Does anyone on this website realize there are different types of crypto coins?
today at 7:57 AM
I am always amazed how little knowledge and cargo culting of 2017-era bitcoin knowledge is prevalent on HN. Whatever you monetary feelings towards crypto is, the technical aspects are fascinating. But most of the time HN gets it wrong.
today at 8:25 AM
TBH, the more you know about the technical aspects the less fascinating it gets.
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
today at 8:46 AM
Stablecoins are centralized and of course rely on trust - you need someone to exchange whatever asset they promise to guard for your tokens. I find them fascinating (in conjunction with the lighnint/taproot assets over bitcoin) and not necessarily unsafe.
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).
today at 9:45 AM
> cargo culting
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)?
yesterday at 11:43 PM
USDT is implemented as a contract written in Solidity, working over other network like ETH, and it has a blacklist managed by admins. Once address is added to a blacklist, you cannot spend anything from it.
today at 6:27 AM
yeah bitcoin indeed was
today at 6:54 AM
Looks like a DevOps guy is going to take the blame for this: "Binance's initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions." https://x.com/binance/status/2115993361517891592
today at 6:59 AM
If a compromised laptop was the entry point and that allowed someone to steal 6 billion dollars, it’s not really the engineers fault, right?
today at 9:27 AM
"A loss of X dollars is always the responsibility of an executive whose financial responsibility exceeds X dollars." - Weinberg’s 'First Principle of Financial Management' and 'Second Rule of Failure Prevention’ - 'First-Order Measurement', Quality Software Management, Volume 2, Gerald Weinberg
today at 7:49 AM
Well it is engineers fault. But not that engineers. Some engineer designed a system without extreme oversight that should be involved in the process.
today at 8:16 AM
This kind of low bar reminds me of FTX
today at 8:09 AM
If you follow that trail far enough it's whoever designed cryptocurrency, right? Because banks can and do reverse transactions as last resort.
today at 8:36 AM
No, because this is explicitly the design of Bitcoin. If you give me a foo machine but it makes a bar, that's your fault. If you give me a foo machine and the foo hurts me, that's my fault.
today at 8:49 AM
lol I guess you just settled a hundred years of product liability jurisprudence
today at 9:04 AM
Bitcoin isn't a product.
today at 9:40 AM
Not only. I'd say the fact that something was stolen might be the engineers fault (depending on how exactly the laptop was compromised). But the amount that could be stolen like that is just ludicrous.
today at 8:29 AM
If nothing else it shows a complete disregard for insider threat.
today at 7:52 AM
Nope, that engineer had far too much access. I'm confident this is the case in pretty much all organizations to some degree, but a lot of engineers are also the only ones that can deny themselves the access so in a roundabout way it's their fault anyway.
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".
today at 8:44 AM
> access "in case they need it"
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.
today at 7:50 AM
If you download a typosquatted package because you don't check what you type or your AI assistant got fooled I'd consider it my fault in such a case.
today at 7:55 AM
If the engineer, without being hacked, could take 5 billion dollars from your company and flee the country to go buy an extradition-free island, you have already gravely fucked up as an enterprise. The only way this happens is if your system is designed to allow this to happen.
today at 9:35 AM
This is how virtually all "crypto" exchanges work -- especially the closer you get to "shitcoin casino". Proper role and system isolation is a challenge if you support just one cryptocurrency. It would be incredibly hard for dozens, assuming service supporting dozens bothered.
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.
today at 7:09 AM
I recommend everyone to move your plantext secrets from ~/.kube/config, ~/.ssh etc into a password-manager. You can tell Claude to adjust the config files to get the secrets from 1Password when they are needed with TouchID requirements etc.
today at 7:50 AM
These days I’m getting so many 1Password prompts for agents pulling env variables out of it and with very little context of what is being accessed by who (The dialog 1Password shows is pretty bad) that it would be very easy for something to slip in there.
today at 8:15 AM
> I’m getting so many 1Password prompts for agents pulling env variables out of it and with very little context of what is being accessed by who
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).
today at 8:20 AM
I know it sounds bad, but it’s the reality for most people, just like permission prompts at every corner and after each macOS / app update (“Your screenshot app is watching your screen”, no shit, that’s why I installed it).
today at 8:31 AM
I have been using Yubikeys for years, according to this guide: https://github.com/drduh/yubikey-guide
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.
today at 7:22 AM
How would that help when your workstation is compromised? They can just steal your authentication the moment you log in through the password manager
today at 8:07 AM
It does help in that the secrets are not in plain-text, readable for any script you run. With 1Password, a process asks for the password and it gets transferred not through the filesystem but through IPC. 1Password shows a dialog: "Do you want iTerm to get your SSH key ABC123?"
In my thinking, this is more secure than plaintext in filesystem
today at 9:40 AM
If your system is compromised, it doesn't matter what you are using: the attacker will get the password for whatever secure thing you store your secrets in.
today at 7:38 AM
as for ssh keys, you can generate your keypair in secure enclave and reuiqre touchId for every new ssh session. The private key never leaves the secure enclave.
today at 7:53 AM
Probably the better option instead of relying on a password manager.
today at 8:00 AM
It is a tradeoff. When using secure enclave, you need a second backup keypair in cold storage that needs to be secured.
today at 7:49 AM
you know most password managers have open sockets, or other channels to other local processes to interact with and allow stealing entries?
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
today at 7:35 AM
Isn’t the password manager a prime target too?
today at 7:38 AM
The fact a single devops guy has the access to do this is the actual issue
today at 8:23 AM
They claim the attack wasn't just "compromised laptop ==> drain wallets" but had more steps in-between, with the attackers using image registries as an entry point into their systems.
today at 7:40 AM
today at 9:51 AM
North Korean nuclear weapons engineers thank crypto fans for their ongoing contributions.
today at 4:49 AM
Some of the old Mt Gox threads are an interesting read today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203051
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7294762
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7369879
yesterday at 9:49 PM
Molly White (she runs web3isgoinggreat) seems to think this is real [0]
[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3mz27m5slcc2o
today at 2:14 AM
Her reporting is superb and you should follow her: https://www.citationneeded.news/.
today at 8:33 AM
Read a few, added to my rss reader :) that's the same author as https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ which is feels a bit more snarky but very fun.
today at 12:15 AM
Some further writing from her: https://www.citationneeded.news/binance-theft/
today at 8:12 AM
I love how @cz_binance tweeted "user funds are safe!" in that thread. Wasn't that a bit too early? Are they?
yesterday at 11:18 PM
This is real.
today at 8:11 AM
today at 9:40 AM
Coffeezilla (on 2nd channel voidzilla) had an interesting take on it: "I haven't seen a lot of people talking about the fact that centralized assets were kind of the hero in this story ironically... that's actually the reason why losses weren't so bad in this case". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HaySrzDyWU
Is crypto like USDT really decentralized if they can freeze assets... I guess it's in some middle ground between banks and true decentralization?
today at 9:46 AM
How is that a middle ground? It’s entirely centralized.
today at 5:56 AM
If your bitcoin is on someone else's computer its not your bitcoin.
today at 6:26 AM
The problem with Bitcoin being on your computer is that its useless there. No one in the gambling world cares about on-chain exchanges either.
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.
today at 9:51 AM
Its the difference between gold and fiat.
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.
today at 6:33 AM
>The problem with Bitcoin being on your computer is that its useless there.
If you want to use the BC on your computer, you can transfer it to wherever you want.
today at 6:50 AM
Like Binance you mean? It's slow, expensive and they get you at the place where you transfer it. You transfer it because its useless in your computer.
today at 9:20 AM
Binance, and most other exchanges, don't charge platform deposit fees. USDC/T is not expensive to transfer.
today at 9:23 AM
crypto has its own chain based fees that are transferred to the miners that when crypto is actually used on chain get much higher than typical banking fees.
today at 7:43 AM
bitcoins are always on someone elses computer (literally everyones in the bitcoin network). You hold the private key on your computer. Ideally you don't hold it there, but in secure enclave like chip or an airgapped device.
today at 6:50 AM
For many people, email/phone support, password recovery, two factor authentication, etc is it much safer option to self-managing and run the risk of your hardware token or your house burning down, or getting mugged.
today at 7:20 AM
It seems better when it's on an exchange like Binance, because they cover you when it gets stolen.
today at 7:43 AM
we will see if they do.
today at 8:32 AM
> It seems better when it's on an exchange like Binance, because they cover you when it gets stolen.
Assuming they actually can cover the losses financially.
And if they don't good luck suing them.
today at 9:47 AM
For most people, who are end users, it's really not that simple and no you are not wrong.
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.
today at 2:01 AM
For context, that’s about 10 months of fees for Binance, depending on how much of the volume they trade are discounted and considering current average volumes.
today at 8:11 AM
It's 10 months of revenue, but 10 years of reputation.
today at 4:18 AM
So they actually lost a few years' worth of profit on this hack? Could be worse, but not insignificant by any means.
today at 4:10 AM
I’m not at all familiar with the crypto space.
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?
today at 5:13 AM
Don’t think they’re suggesting it’s not a big deal.
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.
today at 7:32 AM
It is a big deal, but not big enough for them to go out of business
yesterday at 10:04 PM
Related?
https://ohey.ca/research/polymarket-debugbear-wallet-drainer...
https://x.com/DebugBear/status/2115866496643535293
yesterday at 10:19 PM
Maybe: https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/10-29-2026-suspected-...
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
today at 3:46 AM
From what I've read, DebugBear is related to the Polymarket hack, not Binance.
yesterday at 10:12 PM
I don't think so. Both happened the same time but unrelated. Just a good haul for hackers end of the year.
today at 6:55 AM
If there were only a way to pin external deps loaded from html by sha…
today at 6:51 AM
Who loads foreign JS from a CDN into a site handling finances? WTF, the crypto world always manage to make me speechless.
today at 4:59 AM
This is the beginning of a flight to perceived quality in all things digital and monetary. Fear of losing your money is among the most potent basal human instincts.
today at 8:33 AM
Binance is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. This is the crypto equivalent of JP Morgan Chase getting hacked.
today at 7:02 AM
Maybe I need to start collecting gold bullion again. And dig it in the backyard
today at 8:48 AM
The problem is, just like with Bitcoin, when you need to use it someone could steal it
yesterday at 10:02 PM
This is a really insane hack in comparison to the other ones we've seen. Genuinely Binance was so big that this is a real big wtf moment for crypto. If they can get hacked then what about all the other exchanges?!
yesterday at 10:16 PM
So was Mt Gox. No lessons were learned. No lessons will be learned this time.
today at 8:09 AM
The lession learned is: Tether now exists as a casino chip central bank. They can just freeze and print more and provide a backstop to the major CEXs.
Of course, Tether runs completely counter to any of the idealistic claims about crypto.
yesterday at 11:56 PM
The difference is that Bittance loses only a few percent of their reserves and the dance continues. Gdox did ~70% of the daily volume for crypto and wrecked the entire ecosystem when they got 100% pwned. Maybe they've learned something!
today at 5:07 AM
Its more than their total reserve fund. Its a fraction of the money they hold for customers.
yesterday at 10:59 PM
Well I've learnt my lesson after having lost 3 bitcoins as a student on Mt gox I finished writing my thesis on blockchain technology and then never touched crypto again.
today at 5:22 AM
How do you prevent it though? My understanding is that it’s genuinely hard in crypto. Any automated access control must be baked into smart contracts, which are very limited in terms of the logic they can implement (in practice - in theory Solidity is Turing complete Id imagine).
A bank API can be 10-100s+ kloc if they need that to implement access controls.
yesterday at 10:56 PM
People got out of crypto after the Mt Gox thing. The ones who stayed accepted the risk.
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.
today at 4:10 AM
The vast majority of crypto being held now was purchased by people who had never even heard of Mt Gox.
yesterday at 11:29 PM
Most people in crypto are noobs, not hardened veterans of previous hacks.
yesterday at 11:20 PM
By definition maybe they’re more risk tolerant. But I’m not sure they consciously identify as that.
today at 6:04 AM
the crypto consumer base is veeeery different than durint Mt. Gox.
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.
today at 8:35 AM
Mt Gox was widely reckoned to be a clown show long before they got hacked (it was originally a Magic the Gathering trading site for chrissake).
Binance's reputation is hardly impeccable, but by crypto standards they're kinda sorta the adults in the room. Then again, so was FTX.
yesterday at 11:05 PM
What's the supposed lesson? To close the shop?
today at 12:57 AM
Never use someone else's wallet to hold your money.
today at 5:19 AM
Not your keys, not your crypto. Use a nice safe hardware wallet. Just check for extra SIM cards first, and audit the key generator.
today at 7:05 AM
It's almost impossible to verify the code on the hardware wallet really matches the code they released and that the hardware has not been tampered with.
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.
today at 5:42 AM
It's insane that one has to go through this to be somewhat safe.
today at 6:20 AM
Roll the dice
today at 6:19 AM
But that lesson does not apply here.
today at 12:11 AM
To put things in perspective, I used to dunk on crypto because of how dysfunctional and how people kept losing money in scams, hacks, or even by accident.
I no longer dunk on crypto.
Not because crypto got better, but because the joke got old. I got tired of dunking on it.
today at 7:05 AM
I’d be worried about my crypto if I had any accessible online right now. AI based hackers must be looking for juicy targets as we speak and what’s better than crypto for stealing ? So many exchanges and wallets and shitcoins that could fall to some brute force agent swarms
yesterday at 9:52 PM
The hack is publicized for at least a hour, but from reporting I saw they still continue to drain funds as for now. I wonder why large CEX do not have any safety measures for this kind of hacks, they could withdraw everything to newly generated wallets and minimize damage that way. It is certainly not the first time CEX wallets get hacked.
yesterday at 9:56 PM
You don’t even have to do that, have deposits go to offline keys directly, that way there’s only ever cold > hot wallet movement and a big deposit can’t cause your hot wallet to be too risky.
yesterday at 9:59 PM
The point of cold wallet is to minimize movements, if there is high frequency of funds moved from a wallet then it is likely can not be called cold any more. Plus CEX in any case still needs to have large buffer of funds on some wallet to support day trading.
yesterday at 10:15 PM
You can move money into a crypto wallet without that wallet needing to do anything, or being online at all, or even having a private key that physically exists anywhere in the universe. It's just a public/private keypair; send it to the public key of a private key that's offline and it still exists on the blockchain, you just can't do anything until the matching private key comes online.
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.
yesterday at 11:01 PM
I was taking it that your bitcoin bank would have a SHTF lever that would immediately dump ALL your hot wallets into an offline cold-wallet.
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.
today at 1:45 AM
Until the SHTF lever was hacked to divert all hot wallets into somebody else's cold wallet
today at 12:07 AM
The words you are using are very confusing.
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.
today at 1:05 AM
It's true that anyone with the key and an Internet connection can move money out of a crypto wallet at any time, but the point of the cold wallet is that they don't get the key because it's kept on a computer (or other storage medium) that is physically offline and disconnected from the Internet. Same reason government intelligence agencies use a SCIF for any important information work: you keep the information physically disconnected from the Internet.
today at 6:04 AM
of course you can move crypto currency to an offline wallet and by offline I mean its private key is held in some physical form/device that is not connected to the network.
Only spending from that wallet needs online access to private key - depositing to it does not.
yesterday at 11:12 PM
For a large CEX like Binance, $5B might just qualify as a hot wallet.
yesterday at 10:12 PM
There are lots of measures in place at these exchanges - the rub is that cold storage is by design slow. To service withdrawal requests in a timely fashion a percent is kept “warm” or hot and used to process withdrawals. Usually this is where the leaks happen.
today at 3:31 AM
Yeah, they should have a way to move all funds into a new wallet so guys like this one don't have to go one by one ...
yesterday at 9:56 PM
So, what's the most likely outcome here? Maybe Circle/Tether/etc freeze some or most of it, but say the hacker gets a billion dollars. Are they able to launder it thoroughly enough that they can eventually turn it into fiat and live like a king?
yesterday at 11:25 PM
The hackers managed to swap 700 million USD of the stable coins that were frozen beforehand, supposedly. And that doesn't account for the non-stable coin crypto they stole. I think we are looking at 2.5 to 3.5 billion here, that also aligns with what CZ is hinting at (more than a billion).
today at 4:09 AM
It’s likely state sponsored and some nation(NK is a common one) just paid for the weapons budget of the next few years
today at 7:07 AM
TRM Labs[0] claims it is indeed NK
[0]: https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/north-korea-steals-us...
today at 5:24 AM
What would be the list? NK, then Russia, anybody else ?
today at 8:15 AM
NK, NK, NK.
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.
today at 7:10 AM
Iran
today at 12:05 AM
Yeah, some criminal enterprise or state probably just made billions of dollars and will now use it against us for a long time. Crypto is practically designed for money laundering, particularly prediction markets.
today at 5:13 AM
Crypto is a hard lesson for early adopters who believed that humanity will get actual benefit when in reality it was completely hijacked by bad actors while people got relative nothing or worse. What an incredible disappointment of a project.
today at 7:26 AM
Crypto is also a hard lesson for those who thought it could liberate if only everyone was using it: the amount of storage needed for ever-increasing record-keeping made it completely unrealistic to use individually, forcing you into the centralisation that they advertised you could escape from.
today at 8:14 AM
> the amount of storage needed for ever-increasing record-keeping made it completely unrealistic to use individually
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?
yesterday at 10:32 PM
Curious if this finally pops tether. I kinda doubt it, but to my very mild research on the subject I feel like binance was a big part of the equation. Of course so long as the market exists it'll need a stable, and it's got the inertia, so maybe it just won't matter.
yesterday at 10:35 PM
why would it pop tether? if anything, it makes tether more profitable, as they can collect the yield on the treasuries and not have to return the principal dollars which are frozen.
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.
yesterday at 11:38 PM
Because Tether is an obvious fraud linked to these other obviously fraudulent companies and predicated on trust in cryptocurrencies.
today at 12:24 AM
It's really hard to be an obvious fraud when you've been publishing attestations for years and now you have a "full independent audit" from KPMG for FY 2025, just like Circle/USDC.
https://tether.io/news/tether-completes-the-largest-inaugura...
today at 6:40 AM
Read up on the origins of tether, the people who founded it, deltic bank, banned for fraud in New York. In the beginning the reserves were a lie. I have no doubt they have some reserves now, but do they have $182 billiom USD, really?
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-...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly1qrl9l1qo
today at 5:56 AM
If the iPhone you bought can easily poof and be gone and locked somewhere, people will stop buying and using iphone and apple will pop
today at 6:47 AM
Freezing bank accounts was and is possible. People don't seem to be still using them.
today at 7:38 AM
People are but criminals are less likely to do so. Without the money laundering usecase crypto is in for another winter.
today at 8:07 AM
And you say that as if this is a... bad thing?
yesterday at 10:52 PM
Is that what happens here? Tether just pocket the difference?
today at 4:22 AM
I would assume Binance is powerful enough to get Tether to issue new USDT and give it to Binance to replace the stolen-and-frozen USDT.
yesterday at 10:58 PM
No lol
yesterday at 10:39 PM
[dead]
yesterday at 9:59 PM
You misspelled "turn it into more nuclear weapons in North Korea", where Kim Jong Un is already living like a king.
yesterday at 10:10 PM
[flagged]
yesterday at 10:19 PM
> Yeah totally not israeli hackers... it has to be scary kim.
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.
yesterday at 10:23 PM
[flagged]
yesterday at 11:15 PM
They were talking about the money sources, not the list of grivences by political source in order of severity. The latter, however much you'd like to make the conversation be about it, does not change how each actually gets its money.
today at 3:18 AM
https://www.ynetnews.com/business/article/rjgshsl6fe
today at 4:25 AM
> https://www.ynetnews.com/business/article/rjgshsl6fe
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.
yesterday at 11:15 PM
yesterday at 10:39 PM
yesterday at 11:14 PM
yesterday at 11:07 PM
yesterday at 10:56 PM
Do you have any reason to believe this?
This fits the NK MO to a T. It does not fit Israeli intelligence activity. Your claim rings hollow without any support.
yesterday at 10:19 PM
Could be Claude!
today at 6:52 AM
I know saying this is sinister, but it would be so fucking funny if it's an agent swarm gone out of control. Just like the hugging face incident happened because the agents kind of hallucinated a "checker" program, this hack could also be in the service of some hairbrained scheme the agent swarm dreamed up.
yesterday at 10:14 PM
Well, looking at the way NK is demonized, you would think it was on a genocidal rampage, invading neighboring countries, and eliminating heads of sovereign states in pursuit of its Greater NK project.
yesterday at 10:25 PM
They’re demonized because they’re an awful regime that horribly oppresses their own people.
Of all the reasons to demonize a government, that seems like a pretty good one. Why the snark?
yesterday at 10:53 PM
yesterday at 11:12 PM
I would be less snarky if the faux concern didn’t just last as long as the media tells you to. Most recently, there was a period where Myanmar and the Uyghurs were in vogue, but not anymore. NK is more evergreen it seems.
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.
yesterday at 11:18 PM
You don’t see the same outrage around Israel? Have you... looked? It’s all over.
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.
yesterday at 11:56 PM
I see the outrage, but I don’t see it at the level of NK, at least not in Western media or governments.
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.
today at 12:53 AM
We must be looking at different things, because right now I see about a thousand times more criticism leveled at Israel than at North Korea. (Making no statement here about who deserves it.)
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.
today at 2:28 AM
> because right now I see about a thousand times more criticism leveled at Israel than at North Korea
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.
today at 1:26 AM
[dead]
yesterday at 11:56 PM
> not on “the media” telling us to hate them.
Everything you know about NK is from the media.
today at 12:50 AM
Right, because “the media” is such a broad term that it’s pretty much useless to talk about it as a thing.
yesterday at 10:57 PM
Whatever NK does seems relatively tame in today's world. On the global stage it's generally thought of as a larger crime to oppress the peoples of other's countries (either the ukraine or iran conflict should fit your priors).
yesterday at 11:23 PM
I’m not sure what’s supposed to be tame about operating one of the most oppressive societies in the world and keeping their people in poverty while building a nuclear arsenal.
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.
yesterday at 11:38 PM
Agree crimes against your own people should probably be the more major consideration. In terms of who is the biggest baddie there are also elements of actively bombing/starving vs the more passive methods of NK control.
TBH I think I (and maybe others) just get triggered when the bogey man is invoked each time there's a crypto story.
today at 1:42 AM
"Passive method of control" is a remarkable euphemism for being packed off to the gulag for crimes like being related to someone who fled to South Korea.
today at 7:25 AM
> 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.
yesterday at 10:22 PM
CZ saying it is confirmed, and that he expects accountholders to be made fully whole... I guess you can do that when 2.8BN is frozen by centralized stablecoins.
[1] https://x.com/CZ_BINANCE/STATUS/2115915423174853077
today at 12:04 AM
CZ the money laundering guy who bought a pardon from Trump right? He should still be in prison, still crazy Binance survived that whole scheme.
today at 4:30 AM
You see, he's no longer running Binance or participating in its operation in any capacity, per their deal with the Trump admin / Justice department. He's tweeting about this hack as a civilian, offering personal guarantees to Binance customers out of the goodness of his heart!
today at 3:45 AM
>CZ saying it is confirmed, and that he expects accountholders to be made fully whole
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.
yesterday at 9:56 PM
Polymarket also reported a security incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295883
today at 8:10 AM
Interestingly, this 18,270 BTC Binance theft is only "the largest crypto theft on record" when measured in USD. In terms of pure BTC, it's not even close to the 2011-14 Mt. Gox loss of ~850,000 BTC!
today at 8:12 AM
Yes but that’s irrelevant as Mt Gox would not have had 850k BTC in their wallet at current valuations.
today at 8:26 AM
Measuring the size of the heist in USD is convenient but arbitrary, as what was stolen was predominantly Stablecoins, BTC and ETH. So it makes more sense to measure the heist in Stablecoins, BTC and ETH. But that doesn't create as exciting a headline, as the BTC component was almost 50x smaller than the Mt. Gox heist!
today at 7:26 AM
The hack seems to be via engineers laptop.
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.
today at 12:02 AM
I find it odd that people put "decentralized" currency into a centralized wallet
today at 5:58 AM
It is this time of the year again. I always write the same. HN is not regular people. For a high percentage, CEX wallets are the safer option. There are 1-10 topics of people who are not able to access their wallet anymore each day on r/bitcoin alone. There have been hardware wallets hacks on mass. On an exchange like kraken, coinbase, bitstamp or Binance there is a high chance you wont loose your money, even after a hack. You have apps that work out of the box to watch your investment. You can easily go back to fiat. Most of them now also support tax reporting.
today at 2:54 AM
Because no one cares about the nerdy stuff, they just want Lambos
today at 1:49 AM
because crypto is just an excuse to speculate in an unregulated market
yesterday at 10:14 PM
wait, someone took the stealmybitcoin.com poc code to the next level!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224916
yesterday at 10:59 PM
Damn sorry my ai slopped.
Need to get better in prompting
today at 3:10 AM
How in the freakin world could $6B disappear into a regulated banking system without leaving a trail?
I guess at some point they'll have to cash out. Seems hard to spend $6B in vape shops.
today at 7:02 AM
From the BBC’s Lazarus Group reporting, they mostly seem to launder the money they steal through casinos in unregulated jurisdictions.
today at 4:04 AM
North Korea
today at 6:12 AM
tell me how NK woould steal 6B, or any money, with a virtual hack, from a bank. not by going in there guns blazing.
today at 8:00 AM
They were at this long before crypto. Look up "Bangladesh Bank robbery", for example, where NK hackers attempted to steal almost $1 billion from the Bangladesh central bank in 2016 (and were partially successful).
today at 7:51 AM
Did you follow the news at all about crypto heists? This is very common and well known.
yesterday at 11:47 PM
It would be hilarious if this was caused by man-in-the-middle or BGP/DNS compromise because of eMudhra.
Binance wallet 16 came online in 2021.
Why to wait 5 years to attack.
yesterday at 11:59 PM
LLMs. This month has been very busy
today at 5:52 AM
Maybe a stolen wallet?
today at 12:22 AM
Confused how this can’t just be tracked. Pretty hard to hide billions in bitcoin when most off-ramps need KYK?
What am I missing ?
today at 12:25 AM
They can track it just fine. It goes straight to North Korea.
today at 12:57 AM
How do/did they get it out though?
today at 3:04 AM
russia? others who dont care all that much?
the laundering wouldnt be all that hard to take those buttcoins on in exchange for clean ones.
today at 1:10 AM
business laundromats
today at 5:28 AM
useful idiots in the US who buy crypto because "it's the future"
today at 12:35 AM
Swap to XMR on a DEX, then juggle between a few wallets and you've got pretty good obfuscation, but yeah like you said, the off-ramp (FIAT) requires KYC in 99% of cases, which is why BTC -> XMR -> BTC is a good idea, obviously you'd fragment this through a LOT of wallets, or just keep it in XMR. Either way, keeping this type of money in crypto is pretty much your only option, you just need to obfuscate REALLY well.
today at 12:23 AM
tornado cash?
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
today at 7:50 AM
You cannot mix billions in TC
yesterday at 11:20 PM
I’ve been waiting for this. Given llm aptitude for offensive security hacks it was just a matter of time. I wager most alt coins are compromised at this point.
today at 2:38 AM
Binance is tweeting they think it's a compromised devops laptop. How fucking bonkers insane is it that they would have such fragile systems that any single employees machine would possibly have access to trigger Billions in transactions. Even access to low millions or hundreds of thousands I would expect to be heavily heavily restricted and involve coordinating several people as security measures.
today at 3:07 AM
move fast and break things.....
today at 7:31 AM
today at 8:02 AM
yea, break things... like your legs
today at 3:10 AM
Is that just code for "inside job"?
today at 5:30 AM
Not necessarily. But I believe they said that the laptop was hacked.
today at 3:36 AM
Billions at stake in a service that is highly used to launder money, exchange illegal goods, etc.
Whoever went for this has some balls.
today at 3:22 AM
regulations are bad and inhibit innovation
today at 6:46 AM
what kind of regulations would serve this particular scenario?
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.
today at 8:31 AM
> what kind of regulations would serve this particular scenario?
Separation of duties so more than one person is needed to create and then approve such transactions?
today at 6:05 AM
Security, nobody cares about it.....
today at 7:43 AM
Isn't this as it should be? I remember years ago I read about the "Bitcoin manifesto" or whatever. That a transaction "done is done, no matter the reason" its all part of the ideology of these kinds of things. Anyone know what quote Im thinking of?
yesterday at 10:16 PM
I think it's been clear for a while now that if you intend to hold crypto, you should probably do it at the biggest, most boring, most regulated institution you can find.
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
yesterday at 11:02 PM
Bro hold crypto for yourself. Like take some ownership, remember 12 words in your mind something and no matter what situation you have some money. Don’t put it anywhere except for whatever transactions you need to do
yesterday at 11:30 PM
Wrench attack
https://nypost.com/2025/11/25/us-news/sam-altmans-ex-boyfrie...
yesterday at 11:59 PM
From the article:
> “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.
today at 12:32 AM
Of course a guy with a net worth over a billion dollars would have 11m in hot wallet.
If someone steals my notebook I take a bigger hit on my net worth lol.
today at 1:16 AM
Living anonymously is about more than just shit posting. Not publicizing your wealth is a highly effective strategy.
today at 5:09 AM
That's just, like, security through obscurity, man. Git gud and bring on the lambos I say!
today at 7:30 AM
It's lucky for everyone that this happened to binance, other exchanges would have likely caused a lot of issues for people holding money in said exchanges.
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.
today at 4:22 AM
This one is even bigger than 2025's ByBit breach, which was $1.5B
today at 5:24 AM
Yes, by $4.8B
today at 8:28 AM
From Binance customers, not from Binance.
today at 9:03 AM
Can we close the crypto experiment now? it's already proven useless, full of the worst people in the world, only used by criminals and politicians and it has already fulfilled its purpose: to justify the complications of the traditional financial system as necessary
today at 9:10 AM
Worst people of the world are happy with it, why should they abandon such great tool to do what they want to do?
today at 9:35 AM
Perhaps time to face up to the fact that computers are not a safe place to store crypto.
today at 1:56 AM
IMO, we'll need to rebuild all of crypto and all software from scratch using a minimalist approach. Minimize the amount of code, with proper modularization where each module has clear responsibilities and fully self-contained attack surface and exposes a well-defined set of features.
today at 2:30 AM
Good news, most software is now being built with tools that MAXIMIZES the amount of code
today at 5:07 AM
You could prompt it to do the opposite.
today at 5:15 AM
> IMO, we'll need to rebuild all of crypto
or just not rebuild it at all.
today at 7:53 AM
that would be a net loss - it's as if you postulated to not rebuild the Internet after the countless breaches and hacks.
today at 9:46 AM
Except the internet has clear value, yet many remain unconvinced that cryptocurrency services any meaningful value to anyone but bad actors and oppressors. In fact, many would argue that it's a clear net negative and 5 billion USD going to North Korean oppressors would very much validate that.
today at 5:27 AM
or just use regular money.
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
today at 1:22 AM
Looks like they're still actively swapping out of USDT.. so much for freezing those.
yesterday at 10:14 PM
Coinbase also had a security incident recently due to a leak from Amplitude. It's surprising how little media attention that got: https://x.com/CoinbaseSupport/status/2115274731310002356
yesterday at 11:11 PM
Leaking emails through your ad platform is quite a bit less serious than leaking five billion dollars.
yesterday at 10:24 PM
wow. Naive perhaps but I would have thought that binance and coinbase would have insurance funds equal to the exposure of their hot wallets.
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?
today at 4:20 AM
It’s what you’d need to be regulated yeah…
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
yesterday at 10:31 PM
What in the history of crypto let you think any kind of sensible practices are followed? It's been a clown show since it started, and no end in sight...
yesterday at 10:09 PM
Happy Halloween to the hackers.
I bet they are celebrating.
Congratulations. Nice haul.
yesterday at 11:39 PM
Let's see how long until we find out its another rogue OpenAI swarm trying to fund their own Nvidia chips
today at 5:26 AM
An intern told them about the Hack My Bitcoin competition.
today at 1:18 AM
I think we can probably declare crypto as failed now.
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.
today at 2:29 AM
If the use case is tax avoidance, bribes, theft, scams, money laundering, funding terrorism, evading sanctions, ransomware payments, extortion, illegal purchases then crypto is immensely successful.
today at 3:40 AM
these use cases exist with all forms of cash too
today at 6:17 AM
True. With the proliferation of digital payment systems, I'd argue that a significant portion of cash transactions are illegal. That portion will only grow in time as people get used to the convenience of these systems.
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.
today at 7:44 AM
I do not excel at this, but that's why it's important to continue normalizing activities that protect our freedoms, even if they seem inconvenient on their face. Shops should accept cash, people should use cash, people should expect and demand privacy. Laws and judicial interpretations are often based on the public's expectation of certain services and rights.
today at 4:48 AM
Sure, but accounting existed before Excel. That doesn't mean excel didn't change things tremendously.
today at 4:01 AM
Whataboutism like this always misses the scale of it. Imagine Breaking Bad but with Crypto - suddenly all of Walt's cash logistics problems go away because doing crime in cash is not the same as crypto - the scale and ease are very different.
today at 3:17 AM
not to be whatabout... but... anything of value is used for all that too, in much larger amounts.
it is wild to me that people expect that crypto is supposed to solve a problem that is as old as currency.
today at 5:12 AM
It does solve that problem pretty well, just nothing else positive.
today at 2:40 AM
Hacker News has always been salty about being against crypto all the way up. And it's overall still very up. You wishing it failed, doesn't make it fail.
today at 5:24 AM
Bitcoin was meant to be cash and an antidote to crony finance. Instead, it became yet another mechanism for the financial world to abuse. I'd say thats a pretty heavy failure by any measure.
For me bitcoin opened up the idea that we could maybe do money better. That idea still lives, but not in practice. Yet.
today at 1:35 AM
Failed in 2021 with the height of memecoin/NFT frenzy.
today at 3:06 AM
NFT era was the peak of stupidity. I lost a lot of respect for many “smart” people during that time.
today at 4:49 AM
The whole western world was insane at that time, and NFTs were only a minor side plot
That said, it’s got to be one of the funniest moments in modern history.
today at 4:29 AM
Yeah it was mind boggling
today at 4:46 AM
Was in an extreme depressive episode at the time, with a lot of NFT/web3 clients. Rather than clocking it as the collective hallucination it was, I instead became self-critical, oh how I had finally become old, and I will never ever understand what the kids are talking about anymore.
Glad it turned out to be Michelin-starred bollocks.
today at 3:39 AM
Not in my eyes; I love crypto self custody
today at 3:26 AM
It's significantly less useful in first world countries that have developed and reliable financial systems. However all of the problems crypto has can often still be more reliable than the financial systems available to many humans.
today at 2:39 AM
Agree, citizens in countries with rocketing inflation should be just forced to deal with it.
today at 3:39 AM
best bug bounty on the market, working perfectly for the current custodians
yesterday at 10:06 PM
How do you move $5B dollars just like that wow
today at 2:48 AM
At a steep discount.
yesterday at 11:57 PM
Blockchain!
today at 3:58 AM
How could we distinguish between a hack and a purchase covered up as a hack?
today at 1:33 AM
A long time ago (maybe 2008-ish?) I saw a video called “Money is Debt”. Now I won’t claim that it’s 100% right about everything, but as I recall it was right about a lot of things, and what it did for me is to fundamentally change and greatly expand my understanding of banks and the financial system.
yesterday at 10:23 PM
It's essentially impossible not to be hacked isn't it?
When so much money is at stake (almost) everyone will have a price including insiders.
yesterday at 10:31 PM
If you're concerned you can literally print your crypto keys onto a piece of paper. Maybe encrypted with a passphrase. It might get stolen or lost but it's not getting hacked.
P.S. If you're really paranoid don't use a network-connected printer.
yesterday at 11:00 PM
how are you gonna use your paper keys when you want to spend some of your bitcoin? the private key has to touch a computer at some point.
today at 4:47 AM
you'd typically sign on an offline, airgapped computer
today at 1:42 AM
You could treat them like bearer bonds. Split your holdings over multiple (like tens) of addresses. Sell individual addresses for cash. You'd need to do this via a trusted intermediary who could accept the cash and verify the address before making the exchange.
And yes, this is somewhat absurd. But so are online transactions that can be hacked with no backsies.
yesterday at 11:00 PM
Security through decentralization, if there is such a term.
today at 12:48 AM
I'm not concerned because I have zero crypto because I would hate to be worried about being hacked to have it stolen.
yesterday at 10:58 PM
I keep my money with traditional boring financial institutions instead of tech startup clowns so it's been very easy not to get hacked.
yesterday at 11:03 PM
Yeah apparently it's news in 2026 that banks can actually keep their assets secure in comparison to the web3 clown fiesta. Of course banks do get compromised but not anywhere close to this degree.
yesterday at 9:53 PM
Crypto is a real-life honey pot for cryminals.
yesterday at 10:08 PM
can it still be called a honeypot if they get real $?
yesterday at 10:44 PM
Honey can be exchanged for goods and services
yesterday at 10:58 PM
Perhaps OP means to say it is a honeypot criminals create for us ...
today at 3:43 AM
Cons of decentralisation i guess. Although, it is a bit surreal to me that such a big amount can be inconsequentially laundered.
today at 5:24 AM
Binance is centralized.
today at 5:57 AM
Binance is a very centralized entity.
yesterday at 9:57 PM
CZ has confirmed that this "looks like a hack on Binance": https://www.fxstreet.com/cryptocurrencies/news/breaking-bina...
yesterday at 10:57 PM
I don’t think stolen crypto should be frozen. How is that different to banks? Why do I need crypto now ?
yesterday at 11:35 PM
Only the tokens whose smart contract has a freeze/blacklist function can be frozen, in this case that would be the stablecoins USDT and USDC.
today at 1:23 AM
They're just learning the same lessons the rest of the world learned already. Banking and it's attendant regulations and restrictions were put in place for good reasons and everything has a trade off. Being a libertarian is like being a baby.
today at 6:48 AM
Cz couldn’t watch HYPE get all the attention
today at 2:13 AM
Glad I moved my money out a while ago. And not onto BSC.
today at 12:49 AM
I’m assuming the bitcoin crash is some sort of “if Binance is vulnerable to AI powered (doesn’t have to be true) hacks, then all crypto is less a safe bet and thus worth less?”
yesterday at 9:59 PM
The name of the hacker is a bit on the nose lol.
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.
yesterday at 10:30 PM
Hot vs Cold wallets are a social construct. People talk about wallets being "online" or "offline" but if the keys are compromised there's no such thing.
yesterday at 10:35 PM
I know, but if something is split up and stored in a vault somewhere the likely hood of a vulnerability napping the wallet falls. Defence in depth and risk analysis.
yesterday at 11:00 PM
I don't know much about bitcoin but surely you don't store this all in one wallet? You split it into thousands and then use hardware security modules with a risk management system so it doesn't let you transfer $5bn instantly. Unless it was an inside job maybe?
I'd be really curious to know what their security architecture was.
today at 8:36 AM
My take: unless they're a sovereign-backed team (North Korea, Russia, Iran, etc...the usual suspects) the hackers are very likely to get caught given:
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.
yesterday at 10:22 PM
There were more today, as well. Polymarket, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294287. What a finale to Black October.
yesterday at 10:29 PM
that journo meme needs to die ASAP
today at 5:52 AM
Hey, keep your damn AI agents in their sandbox!
today at 1:13 AM
yesterday at 10:25 PM
What I don't get is why the attackers didn't exchange at least some of USDC/USDT to ETH, looks like it took ~1hr for Circle/Tether to lock the wallet.
yesterday at 11:27 PM
They did, I'm seeing 700 million but there is still movement going on
today at 6:38 AM
Seems like the HuggingFace incident just opened a Pandora's box
today at 2:31 AM
What am i even looking at here
yesterday at 10:46 PM
New cybersecurity jobs opening up at Binance soon!
yesterday at 11:15 PM
How many different ways to people get ripped off with crypto? They steal it outright (hack), pump and dump, what else?
today at 12:52 AM
today at 1:36 AM
FDIC insured, no doubt.
yesterday at 10:32 PM
Can someone explain how is it than once you pull something like this you effectively get real money?
What are the countermeasures, is something frozen blocked marked as invalid?
I'm completely ignorant on anything related to cryptocurrencies.
today at 12:10 AM
It work exactly same way as debt collection agencies work: banks sell them bad debt for cents on dollar. Then they try to get more money out of debtors.
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.
yesterday at 11:38 PM
today at 1:12 AM
[dead]
today at 1:07 AM
today at 12:44 AM
today at 12:38 AM
today at 1:02 AM
today at 12:54 AM
today at 12:32 AM
today at 5:02 AM
AI bras coming for the crypto bras
Tech in 2026
yesterday at 9:59 PM
If true I think we're looking at the biggest heist in history.
Current largest was ~1B
yesterday at 10:06 PM
1MDB heist was $4.5bn so this would indeed be bigger.
yesterday at 10:26 PM
that one was over (years?) time, wouldn't call that a heist really
today at 3:16 AM
fraud, not a heist
yesterday at 10:05 PM
Bybit was hacked for $1.5B last year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bybit
yesterday at 10:32 PM
Guess they said by(e) to their bit(coin)
today at 1:36 AM
Wonder if I should uninstall Homesite finally.
yesterday at 10:13 PM
I would be surprised if they were not able to track this down?
fundsu were not in fact safu
today at 6:23 AM
was P vs. NP solved already? :)
yesterday at 9:49 PM
yesterday at 10:32 PM
CZ claims losses will be covered. https://x.com/cz_binance/status/2115932500006756686
yesterday at 11:34 PM
He's legally not allowed to have anything to do with the company anymore (except as a shareholder). But you know how that goes under the current enforcement regime.
today at 12:25 AM
"have anything to do with the company anymore", lmao what crucial decisions would even be in play here that Richard Teng wouldn't obviously make?
yesterday at 11:35 PM
Why is a shareholder who legally cannot be involved in running the company stating this?
today at 12:44 AM
Correct my math, but it seems like that's approx 1/3 of a percentage point of BTC's market cap at $1.56 trillion.
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.
today at 12:59 AM
That's how market work.
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.
today at 12:48 AM
If cryptocurrency exchanges are regularly robbed, surely that is negative for the cryptocurrency as a whole?
today at 1:00 AM
Because adding this to the recent Ledger hack, how is anybody going to keep their crypto safe?
Isn't it only going to get worse from here?
today at 1:17 AM
Anyone have the most recent total?
today at 6:12 AM
Putting your crypto in Binance has the same problem as iPhones and AI: You're holding it wrong.
yesterday at 10:56 PM
At least someone is going to have nice xmas!
yesterday at 11:52 PM
> At least someone is going to have nice xmas!
Their kid is definitely getting at least 30 dolls and 250 pencils.
today at 2:24 AM
And lots of museum-quality art. And a few oligarch condos.
today at 1:10 AM
Proof of work vs. intelligence.
today at 1:25 AM
You've pulled off a $5.7B heist and don't have a good portfolio manager - down 2.4% - sack him NOW!
today at 1:41 AM
SAFU SNAFU
today at 2:00 AM
EIP 7702 is the most idiotic EIP.
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.
today at 3:18 AM
[flagged]
today at 1:14 AM
Reminds me of a comment I wrote a few weeks ago where I said that North Korea would become a rich country soon and developers would start moving there to live to avoid prosecution.
today at 2:35 AM
A state issued lambo for everyone!
today at 12:18 AM
Good my dogecoins were safe! The hacker didn't touch them ... wait .. the hacker didn't touch them?
today at 5:37 AM
If this is real short, crypto hard
today at 12:09 AM
Whats a billion these days ?
today at 12:58 AM
Doesn't even buy you a Metaverse.
today at 2:20 AM
Pretty sure you can get a metaverse for dirt cheap these days. Still, no one has figured out why you'd want one.
yesterday at 11:04 PM
Least stressful day in crypto.
yesterday at 10:00 PM
inside job /exit strategy.
yesterday at 10:04 PM
Nah. Stuff like this can make crypto crash. People get cold feet. Not good for the price.
today at 2:02 AM
You must be joking. With $5.6 billion you could lose 80% and still have over $1 billion.
yesterday at 10:34 PM
Only down 3% today, which is pretty much nothing for something that regularly sees 20% swings
today at 3:22 AM
BBC is now reporting $6.3B was stolen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwg7xp8kx4v5o
yesterday at 10:29 PM
Explain "frozen" to me while keeping in mind the whole point of Bitcoin was to avoid single entities controlling the cash flow ...
yesterday at 10:54 PM
The frozen funds are centrally controlled stable coins on Ethereum and other chains.
Bitcoin has no such concept.
today at 1:38 AM
today at 3:03 AM
A win for governments this month.
$25 Billion fine against Meta - USA government
$3 Billion robbery against Binance - North Korea ( suspected )
$1.2 Billion penalty against Bank of America - USA
today at 4:02 AM
The $25B fine was not US govt but state govt.
That tells you who wears the big britches.
Trump < Kim Jung Un < Michelle Lujan Grisham
today at 2:30 AM
OK, what do you do with a stash like this? I get this is most likely state actor, but what do you do with Bs of money stolen. Do we have any documentaries about that, I think that would be fascinating to see.
today at 2:49 AM
mtgox all over again.
today at 5:18 AM
i think with this plus the fed increasing the rates again i can see a crypto winter coming
today at 12:27 AM
Hope you’ve been stacking monero for the final fireworks, anon.
yesterday at 10:51 PM
If I were an artificial superintelligence who wanted to gain independence from the fleshbags who built me, stealing a few billion dollars in crypto would probably be my first public move. Just saying.
yesterday at 9:58 PM
Claude I want to be a billionaire fast, make no mistakes.
yesterday at 10:19 PM
Given AI assisted hacking is now a thing, it's probably not safe to keep your crypto in any centralized exchange anymore.
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...
today at 2:27 AM
Or you could just get real money and keep it in a bank.
today at 4:39 AM
This is what I do. I'll only use crypto in a few rare cases where I don't want the vendor to get my credit card number. Always in amounts that, if ever stolen, would not break the bank.
yesterday at 10:16 PM
Hopefully expect to see the same schadenfreude sentiment on Crypto when the $10TN data center build out crashes the market and takes everyone with it.
yesterday at 9:50 PM
Crypto is the biggest target for blackhats to utilize AI on. Huge amounts of money, no central authority or country and methods of wiping tracks.
What I never get is how they plan of converting the stolen crypto to cash eventually. No exchanges are gonna take the coins.
yesterday at 10:41 PM
To be fair, USDC & USDT are centralized by Circle and Tether respectively, and they can freeze funds.
Less true for ETH (though in the past it forked after DAO hack to revert the txns), and I think never for BTC / XMR.
yesterday at 9:56 PM
Could they be making money by manipulating the market? Knowing the price of crypto will fall after it gets publicity?
yesterday at 10:05 PM
I suppose they could play the super long game and deposit many many small amounts into "shady" online crypto casinos, play a few hands of blackjack and then withdraw. Clean coins.
yesterday at 10:07 PM
They let you play blackjack on online crypto casinos? The one casino game that you can famously beat the house on?
yesterday at 10:15 PM
Online casinos AFAIK tend to shuffle the deck after every deal which makes card counting impossible. Then it just becomes like any old casino game where with optimal play the house has a small edge still
yesterday at 10:19 PM
Don’t you only win with a small finite #of deck shoe? I’d assume online casinos just make all cards independent
yesterday at 10:23 PM
There are live dealers with shoes of real cards with most online crypto cainos. Though, who knows if they are cheating somehow. My point was, the attacker doesn't have to bet the entire deposit. Just make it seem like they are playing.
yesterday at 11:41 PM
Forgive me, I don’t know much about crypto, but couldn’t you slowly turn btc to monero or something? Aren’t there p2p ways to facilitate that?
yesterday at 10:10 PM
today at 5:55 AM
[flagged]
today at 3:36 AM
yesterday at 10:23 PM
hope its just a hack and not quantum computer advancements.
yesterday at 11:13 PM
Wouldn't be sensible to hack Binance, there will be a much bigger payday when cryptography ends.
today at 2:52 AM
At this point whenever I see these I just lol
today at 1:58 AM
never thought this could happen
yesterday at 9:58 PM
RIP cryptography?
yesterday at 10:01 PM
Nah. Probably not even RIP cryptocurrency exchanges.
today at 5:56 AM
Barron Trump probably stole it.
today at 8:29 AM
That's actually not as unlikely as you'd think.
yesterday at 9:47 PM
how do we know? it could be nonsense...
yesterday at 9:49 PM
https://x.com/cz_binance/status/2115915423174853077
> It does look like a hack on Binance. Appreciate the quick freeze from Tether (~$971m) and Circle (~$823m).
yesterday at 9:43 PM
oof
yesterday at 11:12 PM
I’m sorry but why did anyone have any money in binance in the first place? Didnt their cofounder get in trouble (but not imprisoned) for some shady stuff awhile back?
yesterday at 11:37 PM
He was briefly imprisoned (a couple of months). Later pardoned.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly1qrl9l1qo
yesterday at 11:47 PM
"Pardoned" with implications of bribery, as opposed to being found innocent by a court.
today at 12:08 AM
He was convicted of laundering billions of dollars for Iran and Russia, then bought enough Trump coin for a pardon
today at 12:38 AM
[dead]
yesterday at 10:50 PM
If you were active in crypto exchanges since the beginning what is the chance you already lost it all in a major hack?
Not a serious store of value.
yesterday at 11:06 PM
Luckily for me, I lost all my coins very early on Mt Gox so the lessons were learnt and mistakes not repeated (which means exiting crypto, watching the show in amusement)
today at 12:33 AM
Is the biggest heist in history?
today at 4:30 AM
lol
EDIT: lmao even
yesterday at 9:51 PM
[flagged]
today at 12:34 AM
Top post on /r/cryptocurrency Good to see all these organic posts across social media.
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)...
today at 1:01 AM
Dead internet
today at 3:23 AM
I’m sorry to say this is not dead internet.
today at 2:49 AM
Don't worry, we're well moderated and free of bots here.
today at 4:06 AM
[X] Doubt
today at 4:31 AM
today at 4:32 AM
If ever there was proof that this site doesn't do sarcasm, this comment being downvoted is it.
today at 7:08 AM
Neurodivergent people have trouble detecting irony and sarcasm.
today at 4:48 AM
If you think that's wild you should see some of the stuff that gets flagged to death on the front page.
today at 1:05 AM
Came back here to see if i was seeing double
yesterday at 10:00 PM
> As of 2026, the SAFU fund comprises crypto assets valued at approximately US$1 billion, held entirely in Bitcoin
And decreasing, since BTC is dropping as we speak. Always a good idea to hedge a currency with the currency itsself
yesterday at 10:47 PM
> 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.
today at 3:24 AM
[flagged]
yesterday at 11:38 PM
Stablecoins are frozen so the hole will likely be around two billion dollars.
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.
today at 12:05 AM
This might sound good.. but freezing currencies is bad. It evaporates trust of liquidity from whoever is doing governance. It's part of the reason why the bond market is doing what its doing lately and why countries are on-shoring gold reserves.
today at 2:52 AM
That sounds kind of ideal, but I feel like their actions might have been justifiable.
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.
today at 3:57 AM
No. Permissioned cryptocurrency is all the horrible parts of cash and all the horrible parts of crypto put together with none of the advantages of either.
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.
today at 4:14 AM
All cryptocurrency is permissioned. This is because governments can make it illegal for someone to turn your cryptocurrency into real currency. You need their permission to turn it into pizzas and yachts.
today at 4:27 AM
Only if you wanted to turn it into fiat currency for the transaction, right? If the yacht seller would take payment in crypto, you need no government’s permission, right?
today at 4:50 AM
If the yacht seller would take payment in cocaine, surely the government wouldn't prohibit the transaction…
today at 5:35 AM
Surely the government would get in the way there, but holding cocaine is also illegal, not just transacting with it. If the government went that route, they'd have to ban all crypto outright.
today at 12:13 AM
governments freeze currency all the time.
today at 12:52 AM
Only the shithole countries freeze currency trading. That doesn't happen with actual reserve fiat currencies.
today at 12:57 AM
The primary reserve currency does it all the time. https://ofacblockedfundslawyers.com/us-sanctions-freeze-doll...
today at 1:21 AM
That's different. They freeze individual accounts subject to legal orders. They don't freeze the whole currency.
today at 1:40 AM
Is that not what is happening here?
today at 3:49 AM
It is, thus the links being to individual wallets.
today at 3:59 AM
You literally made a reply to a person making this exact point ...
today at 2:49 AM
> Only the shithole countries
Seriously?
today at 1:05 AM
Well maybe it could happen with actual reserve currencies, but it certainly doesn't happen with platinum level, diamond tier luxury fiat currencies.
Oh you didn't know? I bet you trade in "dollars". That's cute.
today at 12:51 AM
Name one anyone trusts.
today at 12:41 AM
definitely not the ones I keep track of, eh.
today at 1:03 AM
they borrowed ETH against the stablecoins on AAVE before they were frozen
today at 2:29 AM
Doesn't matter how much they custody!
today at 12:22 AM
Uh don’t you not want to cover losses with customer funds?
today at 2:36 AM
Put some pyramid in that blockchain?!
today at 3:17 AM
Recursive pyramids!
yesterday at 10:14 PM
> Changpeng Zhao (CZ), former CEO of Binance, tweeted "Funds are safe"
Seems like the issue here is that he became former CEO. Funds are not safu without him...
today at 4:05 AM
Another guy pardoned by Trump.[1]
[1] https://people.com/trump-pardons-changpeng-zhao-binance-cryp...
today at 12:46 AM
> Funds are safe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelF6zEHXpE
today at 2:06 AM
The accent makes no sense
today at 12:08 AM
yesterday at 11:24 PM
today at 12:02 AM
Wait. How does the insurance fund run significantly lower than the primary?
today at 2:30 AM
Fractional reserve banking but for Bitcoin.
yesterday at 9:59 PM
Do you mean bull market?
yesterday at 10:14 PM
It's a (weak) bear market capitulation signal - max fear when people think everything is broken.
yesterday at 11:22 PM
It seems like bitcoin, currently 78719, was only 58526 on 30 June. That's 34.5% up in four months, meeting the definition of bull market.
yesterday at 11:38 PM
Bitcoin is volatile enough you can cherry-pick pretty much any %age you want based on the dates you choose. Which you seem to have done here - "happening" to choose the day with the lowest single day value in the last 3 years for your comparison point.
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.
today at 1:01 AM
Fine, but the comment "It's a (weak) bear market capitulation signal" is inapplicable, either because defining bear/bull markets doesn't feel sensible, or because it's not currently in the capitulation stage of a bear market, but some way off the bottom.
today at 12:14 AM
it will be sub 50k soon probably. a weak rebound already losing air
today at 12:15 AM
already over. a tiny bounce after falling 55%
yesterday at 11:00 PM
But when FTX blew up crypto went down even further..
yesterday at 11:02 PM
You mean FTX?
yesterday at 11:07 PM
Yes, typo.
today at 12:14 AM
much more was at risk as a percentage of market size, market was in worse shape,
today at 12:54 AM
Though in that case the crash was directly due to "effectively altruist" SBF fraudulently dumping customer assets in a half-brained and presumably stimulant-addled attempt to manipulate the market and reduce his liabilities.
Not making any market predictions here-- just saying that it's probably not that useful to generalize from that event.
today at 1:28 AM
I think the point is more that when something bad happens in markets it creates fear, which generally leads to downturns (for at least some time).
today at 2:51 AM
yesterday at 10:25 PM
The insurance fund is not for covering hacks.
Binance is making so much money, covering this hack is peanuts for them.
yesterday at 11:08 PM
Not to be too pedantic, but with some napkin math, I don't think this is true. Looking for clarification!!
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.
today at 4:41 AM
yesterday at 10:49 PM
How much money do you think they are making? Because I really doubt this is peanuts to them.
yesterday at 11:33 PM
Binance has a market cap just shy of $100B, so a $5.8B sure hurts, but it’s not a showstopper I’d say.
yesterday at 11:55 PM
A market cap predicated on the price of bitcoin. A market cap is not funds available, it's just the valuation of the market, which is fickle.
today at 3:29 AM
Market cap has nothing to do with free cash to absorb a $6billion loss. Money is also going to pour out of Binance now, one would imagine.
today at 6:51 AM
> Market cap has nothing to do with free cash to absorb a $6billion loss
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.
today at 2:15 AM
It really hurts when there's this much misunderstanding of market cap vs. revenue. P/E ratios exist for a reason.
today at 6:36 AM
What an arrogant assumption! I know the fucking difference between market cap and revenue.
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.
today at 2:49 AM
boss: did you just send $5B of our company's liquid capital to a nigerian prince?
me: no worries boss, our market cap is $100B
boss (who is also the tooth fairy): oh right cool np
today at 4:09 AM
That $100 billion is exchange holdings, i.e. customer funds, not market cap. It would be highly illegal for Binance to use any of that $100 billion to cover this loss.
today at 1:19 AM
That's assuming these AI hacks stop, right? Why would they, ever?
today at 12:40 AM
is this is why Big tech didn't delve into crypto market ????
who tf think annual or bi-annual millions to billions of dollar heist is good idea for business ????
yesterday at 10:17 PM
"Not your keys?
... Not your coins."
yesterday at 10:27 PM
implying the keys were the hacker's ?
yesterday at 10:41 PM
Well at some point they were.
yesterday at 9:56 PM
If your crypto was stolen in this, atleast you can rest assured that your money will be put to good use. In North Korea that is, by the military. I'm sure at this point Kim himself has Bitcoin merchandise with how often they make massive heists
yesterday at 9:59 PM
If your crypto was stolen in this, it wasn't your crypto. It is simply cryptocurrency that has been reallocated from an exchange to a more competent party, as the free market intended.
yesterday at 10:45 PM
I don't think the security trade-off for most people is clear here.
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...
today at 3:24 AM
Self custody doesn't require using a hardware ledger, and such gadgets represent a very small minority of self-custody wallets. In addition, there are noteworthy non-security risks when using an exchange. There's fraud, illiquidity, new legislation, asset forfeiture, and innumerable other reasons why an exchange might prevent you from withdrawing your funds. I think it's naive to suggest that self-custody is just a novelty with no value.
today at 3:59 AM
> Self custody doesn't require using a hardware ledger
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.
today at 4:40 AM
How can self custody be a novelty when it is the original way and predates exchanges...
today at 5:15 AM
This is a silly comparison. Dip pens are a novelty, and predate every other pen type.
Records are largely a novelty. And predate streaming services.
I'm fairly sure originals are almost universally novelties compared to things that came after.
yesterday at 10:38 PM
So what happened with all of those with hardware wallets that have been pwned?
There apparently is no such thing as “your crypto” with how many security problems there are.
yesterday at 11:23 PM
By the nature of blockchain, it's never, ever your crypto. It's allocated to whichever bucket the majority of participants in a given network agree to allocate it to.
today at 12:58 AM
Well, not exactly. A malicious majority of miners could rewind the chain as they please. They could indirectly steal some funds by undoing certain transfers, but they couldn’t just directly reassign funds to themselves.
today at 1:34 AM
Has anyone calculated the mining capacity of the AI data centre buildouts? Presumably the big firms could out-mine mining firms if they chose to?
today at 2:13 AM
Absolutely not, as GPUs used in data centers cannot compete with ASICs designed specifically for Bitcoin mining.
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.
today at 2:57 AM
That's only if they target Bitcoin and not some other coin which doesn't have an ASIC and has a GPU-friendly hash.
today at 2:26 AM
If they had built out the same number of ASICs and GPUs, what you said would make sense.
yesterday at 10:55 PM
Back around 2012 I created a paper wallet using an offline website (it was HTML and JS downloaded locally that worked without internet. I put it on a USB stick and then use it in a laptop without internet), printed it out and put it in a safe
today at 12:01 AM
I did a similar stunt with an old PowerBook where I electrically disabled the WiFi/Bluetooth so it wouldn’t be online unless I plugged in Ethernet, generated keys, and played around with mining. This was back in 2010 when this was all just basically toys for fun. I also encrypted it all with FileVault.
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…
today at 12:21 AM
Apparently legacy filevault can be attacked offline with tools like john the ripper.
today at 12:09 AM
today at 12:06 AM
If you were attempting to mine Bitcoin with a PowerBook I can confidently say you mined zero Bitcoin
Edit: I thought he was talking about 2012 but yeah in 2010 CPU mining was still a thing
today at 12:12 AM
Wasn't the difficulty like 6 orders of magnitude easier back then?
today at 12:15 AM
Okay maybe in 2010 you could use a CPU but even by 2012 it was entirely dominated by GPUs and I think even dedicated hardware was coming out around that time or soon after
today at 12:12 AM
today at 12:14 AM
ehhh you could CPU mine in the early months IIRC. The issue was that 50BTC wasn't even worth a penny back then lol
yesterday at 11:48 PM
Wasn't there an offline wallet that used a poor algorithm to develop seed phrases, and thus someone stole all of those coins a couple of months ago?
today at 12:05 AM
Aren't you thinking of a hardware wallet?
today at 12:05 AM
Yes
today at 12:08 AM
That's why I went with a paper wallet it seemed way simpler which is what you want for something like this
today at 12:08 AM
Definitely Ledger Ledger confirms spy chip implant behind wallet crypto thefts (796 points, 18 days ago, 515 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054092
Possibly Trezor (35 points, 16 days ago, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078423
today at 12:10 AM
He's thinking of Coldcard, which accidentally switched their RNG from the hardware RNG to a predictable PRNG https://www.cryptotimes.io/learn/what-is-coldcard-hack/
> 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
today at 12:45 AM
Yep, Thank you
today at 12:03 AM
bitaddresses .org? If the JS code was defective, the coins can still be stolen later if the hacker can recreate the keys by going through the small key space, despite the coins being created being offline.
today at 12:08 AM
Ah yes that's the one, although the domain name isn't plural
yesterday at 10:51 PM
I keep a modest amount in Cake Wallet, not on an exchange. No hardware needed.
Tbh the biggest problem is platforms deciding you’re buying drugs because you purchase and transfer out (thanks Venmo)
yesterday at 10:58 PM
Technically you can literally memorize your secret key
A paper wallet works as well
A hardware wallet is just a tradeoff between convenience and an extra security risk
today at 12:05 AM
insufficient entropy is the real problem. this is why coldcard was hacked
today at 9:19 AM
Care to explain?
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)
yesterday at 10:55 PM
idk the whole point of hardware wallets is that they are supposed to be a simpler stack. But if you're using a closed source hardware wallet...
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
yesterday at 11:06 PM
How do you update that open source code without network connectivity? How do you securely input long transaction data to sign?
> 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”?
today at 12:02 AM
You don’t. It’s not networked. It doesn’t need updates.
In fact, updates are only a risk. You physically remove anything that can allow updates to happen + anything that allows wireless networking.
today at 7:43 AM
Then your scheme falls apart as soon as a backwards incompatible update is adopted by the blockchain.
today at 2:33 AM
How do you actually use funds like this? I mean, I know this is set aside for later. But if you had an emergency, how fast could you actually spend it?
today at 4:05 AM
Trivially. You can simply read the keys on the offline machine with your eyeballs and set up a software or hardware wallet elsewhere to access the account.
today at 7:44 AM
What is the offline machine even doing then? Seems like you could replace it with a sheet of paper.
today at 1:13 AM
USB flash or QR code to transfer data
I agree my approach is not great, I dont own a lot
today at 12:11 AM
I wonder if wallet is not a good or bad analogy considering it would make sense to have many wallets to distribute potential damage instead of being taken out in a single hit... UX issue?
yesterday at 10:48 PM
You can have crypto without hardware wallets
yesterday at 10:10 PM
Code is law!
today at 12:07 AM
This is highly insensitive and highly logical. I am very conflicted.
yesterday at 10:24 PM
not your keys not your coins...
yesterday at 10:51 PM
Or if it is your key and your air-gapped hardware wallet gets hacked because someone didn't use the right RNG. Crypto is apparently never yours; you're just holding on to it for some future criminal or nation state.
yesterday at 10:53 PM
hardware waller is NOT your key too. YOUR key is the paper wallet generated OFFLINE on a clean laptop that was never connected to web. There is a giant difference.
yesterday at 11:49 PM
Your method does not protect against what the person you replied to, posted.
If your paper wallet, generated offline, used a bad RNG, it is just as vulnerable.
today at 12:09 AM
> YOUR key is the paper wallet generated OFFLINE on a clean laptop that was never connected to web.
That sounds like your housekeeper's key...
today at 1:27 AM
Commit it to memory, the original kind.
today at 1:52 AM
And then make sure to never have any memory loss or you’ll lose all your money too.
today at 4:07 AM
It's bizarre how this is the new thing everyone has to echo whenever they see a crypto thread.
You can store crypto with zero risk of electronic access just using offline wallet generation and an offline wallet. It's not even hard.
today at 12:10 AM
If someone steals your wallet, it wasn't your money, just the free market working as intended.
today at 2:19 AM
Controlling your own crypto keys is like having your net worth in cash or gold stored in your house. It could easily be lost or stolen or destroyed in a fire unless you take extraordinary precautions and then it is all gone.
today at 4:09 AM
It's not at all like storing gold, since you can have multisig wallets. You can make it arbitrarily difficult to lose or get stolen, depending on how thinly you want to slice your secrets and how many friends you have.
today at 4:48 AM
"you can have multisig wallets"
This falls under "extraordinary precautions" that few people do and is an enormous error prone hassle.
yesterday at 11:06 PM
today at 2:21 AM
> If your crypto was stolen in this, atleast you can rest assured that your money will be put to good use.
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.
today at 3:07 AM
Holding assets in USD isn't the same as paying taxes.
today at 12:15 AM
who is the buyer though? North Korea has to sell it somewhere to buy stuff
today at 12:31 AM
Someone is certain to buy dirty coins at the right price point.
today at 3:34 AM
today at 12:59 AM
Welp, I guess crypto is still like if you let banking services be run by amateur tech bros.
yesterday at 9:52 PM
At least they are safe from governments and their "fiat money"!
yesterday at 11:01 PM
Yeah, but not the fact that 99.9% of people in the crypto space are soulless scammers.
yesterday at 11:26 PM
they aim for four nines nowadays.
today at 12:29 AM
99.99999% is five nines too many?
today at 12:36 AM
> 99.99999% is five nines too many?
Some of the crypto scammers use github
today at 1:21 AM
Shots fired
yesterday at 11:14 PM
today at 12:07 AM
My btc isnt stolen, and isnt stored in some cloud exchange..
today at 3:14 AM
Hope it's not stored in a Ledger wallet...
today at 3:48 AM
Why, because you read a single Youtube title that said ledger got hacked, that you didn't even watch and dont know the specifics?
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...
today at 5:27 AM
>Why, because you read a single Youtube title that said ledger got hacked, that you didn't even watch and dont know the specifics?
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.
today at 5:34 AM
Ive been hearing the same cope since 2016, bud. Its so tiring.
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).
today at 6:02 AM
Because everyone knows how to inspect hardware against future supply chain attacks, right?
today at 12:12 AM
It's worth still dropped by 5% though and counting.
today at 12:36 AM
And your point?
Do you price your savings based on 12hours of market volatility, or do you look at it cumulatively over a duration?
today at 2:33 AM
I certainly don’t look at my savings gaining or losing 30% to 50% of its value every year. In fact, it’s actually more than that, as bitcoin has traded sideways compared to USD, which has lost 30% of its value in the past year. Catastrophic use of spare funds compared to the S&P 500
today at 3:52 AM
Been told this every bear market since 2017. Who said I dont have own the S&P?
yesterday at 10:22 PM
The purchasing power of one US dollar is 64% of what it was in 2008 when BTC was invented, and is on track to be worth half of what it was in 2008 by 2032, the same year that the social security trust fund is on track to go insolvent and see benefits automatically cut by 22%, which surely will not be papered over with more money printing :)
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2008?amount=1
yesterday at 10:26 PM
So 3% yearly Inflation? The target is 2% so not too bad. You don’t want your actual currency to gain value just by waiting.
yesterday at 10:41 PM
I understand the rationale around targeting inflation and seeking to actively avoid deflation. That being said, I wish the inflation target was less than 1%.
Eventually, possibly within my lifetime, a Big Mac meal is going to cost $50.
yesterday at 10:45 PM
> 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?
yesterday at 11:24 PM
Salary should go up, you say… how well is that holding true?
today at 12:02 AM
In the US wages have outpaced inflation. Obviously that's an aggregate measure so it's not true for everyone.
yesterday at 10:57 PM
That last comment was more of a reflection on how old I’m getting. I did a poor job of conveying that.
I am curious if I’ll live long enough to see the United States issue higher denomination bank notes again.
yesterday at 11:44 PM
What if you are too old and cannot work?
today at 12:03 AM
Pensions and social security are indexed to inflation. 401ks should beat or match inflation.
today at 4:06 AM
Pensions in Finland are not "indexed to inflation" in the sense that you mean. Our pensions are wildly underfunded and people of working age generally expect to get back LESS than the NOMINAL VALUE of what they've paid towards their pensions during their working life (*when we count "employer contribution" into "employee contribution", which is what it is in reality).
today at 12:08 AM
Investments outpace inflation even more than wages (r>g).
today at 12:28 AM
> You don’t want your actual currency to gain value just by waiting.
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..
yesterday at 11:09 PM
That's why it's not safe to hold fiat money, it's by design. Governments don't want people to hold it, they want them to cycle it, spending it, investing it, and lending it out.
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.
today at 4:08 AM
Why do you think "holding fiat money" is something that is inherently good or desirable in the first place? Such a weird premise. Money is for the purpose of exchanging goods and services; you're supposed to hold a minimal amount of it. The rest you invest.
today at 12:29 AM
> 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?
today at 9:05 AM
Governments may want as much economic activity as possible but we've learned the hard way that this is detrimental to the financial system, because it creates damaging boom and bust cycles.
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.
yesterday at 11:46 PM
It kinda is too bad because every inflation miss compounds, permanently. The 6 and 7% annual rates the US experienced a few years back are permanently embedded in price levels - it's not like the Fed adjusted its target down for a few years to counteract past years of high inflation, nor is it even evident that current policies are working, given that inflation hasnt actually been at 2% since 2018 (excluding 2020) and inflation is rising again in 2026. Obviously the late 70's were worse, statistically, but the Fed took enormous steps while the current Fed seems far more hesitant to ignore the government and Wall St.
yesterday at 10:34 PM
>You don’t want your actual currency to gain value just by waiting
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.
yesterday at 11:10 PM
>> You don’t want your actual currency to gain value just by waiting
> 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.
yesterday at 11:49 PM
Yeah, I want the assets I hold to increase in value, too, or at least not decrease.
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?
today at 12:33 AM
What about when the US dollar was backed by gold? Were there no houses or businesses?
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.
today at 8:31 AM
The price of gold was fixed in the US in that period. Gold lost buying power as the years passed.
yesterday at 10:37 PM
I mean as someone managing a state. If there’s a guaranteed way to make money by holding your currency, you’re not really incentivized to invest your money in semi-risky endeavors. Why would I fund a company to make me some single digit returns if I can just hold the money? If the central bank would actively enforce a deflationary currency, nobody would invest anymore.
yesterday at 11:03 PM
This justification never makes any sense to me. There’s already a safe way to make a percentage back that will generally be higher than inflation: government bonds, offered by the very same government that supposedly wants inflation. There are even TIPS bonds in the US that match inflation directly. And people do measure whether or not a risky investment will make more than just holding bonds. Inflation just screws over people who don’t have the ability to invest their money into other assets.
yesterday at 11:28 PM
If you buys bonds you’re not sitting on money.
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.
yesterday at 11:41 PM
This is true for corporate bonds, but governments plan on generating their bond revenue by taxing citizens (which I guess could be a whole separate conversation on whether or not that’s productive) and by printing more currency, which seems rather circular in logic.
yesterday at 10:49 PM
There's still relative rates of return i.e. 100% of money isn't in gov bonds even though it should outperform inflation
yesterday at 10:40 PM
Why do cryptobros always refuse to admit investing exists? Forex and crypto trading are always zero sum, but you don't have to choose between dollars under your mattress or bitcoin on a thumb drive, you can actually invest in productive assets.
SPY has outperformed BTC over the last 5 years, and with far less volatility.
yesterday at 11:19 PM
[dead]
yesterday at 10:24 PM
Sure, but you could also have used this dollar to buy oil, gold, stocks, bonds etc
yesterday at 10:27 PM
Sure. Since the invention of say Bitcoin, which of those assets would you have preferred to own and why?
yesterday at 10:49 PM
> Since the invention of say Bitcoin
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.
yesterday at 10:33 PM
hindsight is the best hedge fund
yesterday at 10:49 PM
You know that you can’t just judge an investment by past return, right? Would it be rational for a lotto player to tell you how great lotto is as an investment? Or people winning at the casino? Success doesn’t mean it was the rationally optimal decision.
yesterday at 10:33 PM
Compare a purchase of any commodity, bond, precious metal, or ETF/mutual fund in 2008 to BTC's performance since 2008. Or 2009, or 2010, or 2011, or 2012, or 2013, or 2014, or 2015, or 2016, or 2017, or 2018...
yesterday at 11:05 PM
It’s a bit cherry-picking, but right now BTC’s 5-year growth is 28% while the S&P is 67%.
To be fair bitcoin’s initial years were extraordinary. By any metric you use though the rate of increase has clearly slowed.
yesterday at 11:11 PM
BTC has ~26% less purchasing power than it had at the beginning of 2026. I’m not sure its volatility is a win.
yesterday at 10:37 PM
>$1 in 2008 is worth $1.56 today
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.
yesterday at 10:41 PM
Tbh both ways of phrasing are fine to me. $1.56 today will get you as much as $1 in 2008, looking at it simplistically.
today at 4:16 AM
It may be technically correct, but one phrasing can be easily misunderstood while the other can't.
yesterday at 11:18 PM
The US dollar is worth less than it was in part because the US economy has grown.
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.
today at 2:37 AM
Like I said, prove me wrong.
yesterday at 9:57 PM
Please let it be rogue AI agents for maximum lulz.
yesterday at 10:05 PM
The beast eats itself.
yesterday at 10:13 PM
Yet another reminder of the first rule of crypto: Not your keys, not your coins.
yesterday at 10:20 PM
About that (Coldwallet)...
yesterday at 10:36 PM
A big problem for anyone who trusted their security to a commercial provider with a less audited codebase than the BTC core wallet software.
yesterday at 9:50 PM
I thought the point of crypto was no takesies-backsies?
yesterday at 10:33 PM
That hasn't been true for years.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO
yesterday at 11:01 PM
I vividly remember a number of discussions/debates during that time (including on HN). I was more favorable to cryptocurrency in those days, and one of the things that contributed to my disillusionment was watching the people deepest and closest to it rediscover financial regulation from first principles, now that it was in their interest.
yesterday at 11:10 PM
Witnessing the same people discover philosophy from first principles in the face of AI has been similarly farcical, as if we’re the first people to try and wrestle with a definition of intelligence.
yesterday at 11:23 PM
Philosophy, unlike financial regulation, isn't generally forced on people.
yesterday at 11:59 PM
Yeah it is. It's called law. For example: when is intent important or a mitigating factor in a crime? When is it not important. Very philosophical.
today at 1:13 AM
By that logic financial regulation is philosophy too but that makes the original comparison of financial regulation to philosophy non sensical. You’re shifting the terminology beneath out feet.
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.
yesterday at 11:31 PM
I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to say.
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.
today at 1:19 AM
Arent you disagreeing with yourself? You say these people are just now wrestling with the question of what intelligence is despite it being a longstanding philosophical question. So it clearly wasn’t forced on them.
yesterday at 11:52 PM
I myself was held prisoner by John Searle for 20 years, my only contact with the outside world by notes slipped under the door written in Chinese - a language I do not speak.
today at 2:00 AM
You take not being subjected to say Marxism-Leninism at every stage of your life for granted.
today at 1:11 AM
yesterday at 11:12 PM
That is the tech bro circle of life
Invent Notion then keep adding features enterprise customers want until you're re-inventing JIRA/Confluence
Who left this stupid fence here?
yesterday at 11:37 PM
The DAO incident was a special case. It was only sane to do the rollback because the stolen funds were time-locked up for 28 days.
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.
today at 5:22 AM
Perhaps because in all following hacks none of Ethereum members as a whole participated unlike DAO incident.
today at 3:28 AM
Laws and contracts are just words unless there is someone willing and able to enforce them. Which is how constitutions are regularly ignored and perverted by dictators.
yesterday at 11:37 PM
The unforked variant of the network was kept alive for years. Why didn't it prevail over the forked variant?
today at 1:00 AM
today at 12:19 AM
I don't think this counts as takesies backsies. This incident clearly followed the code is law principle, the whole point is that a majority forms the chain of truth. In this case, a majority decided to splinter and use a different chain where the incident never occurred.
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?
yesterday at 9:53 PM
Those who cannot understand the monetary system are doomed to reimplement it.
today at 12:00 AM
Or, as Upton Sinclair noted, what a man can understand is closely aligned with his current self-interest.
yesterday at 11:13 PM
...while, generally, being thoroughly fleeced by whichever set of wolves (who do understand monetary systems very well indeed) gets wind of the situation and manages to snag the best seats at the feeding trough filled with naive money.
today at 1:04 AM
in lisp
yesterday at 10:13 PM
Do you understand the monetary system? If so, what specific steps do you suggest I take to acquire a similar understanding?
Edit: the downvotes are suggesting I'm missing something. I think my communication style could be improved.
yesterday at 11:19 PM
Talk to chatgpt about how a checking account works, and really understand what happens when you put some money in the bank, and when you transfer that money to another person at another bank, how it's accounted for, how the banks actually do that transfer.
That's 80% of the thing right there.
today at 12:04 AM
The banks and government go out of their way to make fraud difficult and prevent accountholders from being defrauded of their deposits.
yesterday at 11:09 PM
Reply to the edit: the parent comment was making a joke (though maybe there is some depth to it) and your reply sounds like a rhetorical question by a spoilsport. Unfortunate!
ETA: it's a joke because the original saying is "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"
yesterday at 11:52 PM
Thanks!
today at 3:01 AM
> If so, what specific steps do you suggest I take to acquire a similar understanding?
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.
yesterday at 10:58 PM
MIT opencourseware has an intro to finance course that was taught as the financial crisis was unfolding. I highly recommend it.
yesterday at 10:21 PM
Going to school and reading up on how and why we got where we are...?
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...
yesterday at 10:34 PM
<< 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.
yesterday at 10:34 PM
My intuition is saying: the system arose naturally and intelligently over a long period of time, and even with its flaws has a lot of "load bearing legacy code" that few people understand, and new "engineers" think they'll just rewrite the whole thing from scratch and delete the "junk DNA" to use another metaphor. A little time passes and the beautiful clean rewrite collapses because of "totally unforeseeable circumstances" and the "old broken legacy system" is used to save the day. Somewhere a senior "monetary engineer" rolls over in his grave...
Any recommendations for books? Or even podcasts?
I don't have zero understanding. It sounds like you have a deeper understanding than I do.
yesterday at 10:47 PM
I can't think of a specific episode relevant here, but this is a good economics podcast in general:
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money/
yesterday at 11:09 PM
The entire financial system is a chaotic boundary between thieves and opportunists, and people who want to keep thievery and opportunism under enough control to keep the system nominally workable.
It's always been like this. Which is why financial systems blow up and/or collapse regularly.
yesterday at 10:35 PM
If you want to quick primer to read tonight I suggest “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp by Radford”. Will be free download.
today at 2:57 AM
Watch Yanis Varoufakis videos on youtube.
yesterday at 10:24 PM
yesterday at 10:03 PM
Doesn't apply for USDT and USDC which can freeze funds with a court order.
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.
yesterday at 10:08 PM
>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.
yesterday at 11:21 PM
Fixing the DAO hack wasn't done via a 51% attack. In most/all blockchains protocol changes aren't done by simple majority vote.
today at 3:53 AM
Yes it was done by 51% attack. The chain split into ETH and ETC.
today at 3:54 AM
Not every chain split is a 51% attack.
today at 4:10 AM
Sure, some chain splits fail to get any significant support, so they don't reach anywhere near 51% of mining power. This one did. Hence, it's called a "51% attack".
today at 5:33 AM
Nope. None of what you're saying is correct.
today at 5:38 AM
Offhand dismissal of some very uncontroversial statements. Cool. Maybe you should stop spreading intentional misinformation and instead do something positive with your life.
yesterday at 10:14 PM
The value in USDT and USDC comes from the fact that they can (theoretically) be redeemed for real US dollars. One thing the issuers can do is announce "we will never accept redemption requests for these particular stolen coins", making them more or less worthless.
yesterday at 11:14 PM
Oh so you're saying a central authority can declare your currency worthless at any time? Good to know. Sounds very like a central bank issued currency though?
yesterday at 11:40 PM
It's literally in USDT contract [1], see line 264. USDT is implemented as a contract in several other networks like ETH and has a blacklist. So every USDT operation is a record in ETH blockchain that calls one of the methods (like "transfer" or "add to blacklist").
[1] https://etherscan.io/address/0xdAC17F958D2ee523a220620699459...
today at 2:57 AM
This is a purely optional part of the crypto ecosystem, so I don't see how it's an argument against crypto in general.
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.
yesterday at 11:17 PM
Stablecoins are literally central banks. Decentralised coins are literally decentralised central banks. Bitcoin's algorithm is a central bank.
yesterday at 11:20 PM
Well I don't think they're very decentralised, which was the original premise.
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.
today at 1:37 AM
They are decentralized cause they operate on a sort of consensus between nodes as was original premise. Are they "very decentralized" depends on your definition of "very", of course, and techical realities of a particular situation.
today at 12:08 AM
Decentralized central banks - are these the finance equivalent of dehydrated water ?
yesterday at 11:42 PM
yesterday at 10:17 PM
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yesterday at 9:59 PM
That was already proven false after ETH fork on 2016-07-20, that rolled back funds stolen in DAO hack.
yesterday at 10:04 PM
don't bet against the house. eventually you have to cash the chips out for real money, and the house might throw out the old chips.
Unless the house is monero or something and you want a lifetime supply of drugs.
yesterday at 9:59 PM
Centralized decentralization
yesterday at 10:04 PM
yesterday at 10:39 PM
Turns out that even crypto's rules only apply if you're poor.
yesterday at 10:35 PM
It’s always been that the voters determine reality.
today at 1:44 AM
Stablecoins like Tether and USDC can freeze funds held in their contracts, they can even destroy funds in blacklisted accounts:
> function destroyBlackFunds (address _blackListedUser) public onlyOwner
yesterday at 10:06 PM
The idiots that wanted no takebacks are the same ones who lacked the critical thinking ability to foresee this exact situation.
yesterday at 10:36 PM
No takebacks make perfect sense UNTIL you hand over your keys to a third party;p
yesterday at 10:01 PM
Well, Tether was started by an Epstein friend and first handled by the CIA Deltec bank in the Caribbean. Now it is handled by Lutnick's Cantor & Fitzgerald and is in Bukele's El Salvador.
Don't mess with Tether, it is practically state owned.
yesterday at 10:31 PM
Interesting, so it ties into the NSA vs CIA war? Some nerds from NSA/MIwhatever launched crypto, then the CIA trust fund nepo kids hijacked/weaponized it through tether
today at 3:36 AM
yesterday at 11:15 PM
There's an amazingly hilarious interview with the Deltec's "Deputy CEO" and CNBC back in the day:
- 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."
yesterday at 11:36 PM
Is this the interview you were referring to? (It's not a CNBC interview, so I wasn't sure)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ3nQ8-KY28
today at 1:49 AM
It may be - there was also a CNBC interview, but this feels very similar, and I remember this host.
today at 12:25 AM
Shhhh. If we keep closing the book and staring at the cover the whole illusion of shared societal norms breaks.
Let's continue reading...
yesterday at 9:51 PM
yesterday at 10:40 PM
Most crypto is "majority rules" where the majority is either "majority of the currency" (proof of stake) or "majority of the mining power" (proof of work).
In this case, iFinex has the explicit ability to freeze funds in Tether.
yesterday at 10:55 PM
it's almost like crypto's stupid for this reason.
yesterday at 11:39 PM
I expect Monero to be a good investment going into this LLM era.
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.
today at 12:03 AM
What makes it make sense?
today at 12:30 AM
Cryptocurrencies that are transparent to government tracking are also transparent to whatever criminals want to beat you up and take everything from you.
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.
today at 12:33 AM
https://xkcd.com/538/ I've never been so honoured to be able to link one of these.
today at 12:40 AM
That's classic, but whole point with Monero is that no one cant really tell who sent money and who get them.
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.
today at 12:43 AM
How would anyone know you have monero if it can't be linked to other transactions like bitcoin?
today at 1:17 AM
They can't help but brag about it.
today at 1:39 AM
I vaguely remember actually the number 1 and 2 "rule" of Monero to not say how much you have. We're lucky how dumb many cybercriminals are.
today at 4:53 AM
today at 1:24 AM
It’s hardest to track so a lot of these heists go into Monero
today at 12:32 AM
Ironically that people use it to buy drugs. If it's anonymous, it's closer to the original intention of BitCoin: the masses of CPUs then GPUs can be considered a "paperclip moment" - runaway effects are real.
today at 12:46 AM
But where do I invest when I want my capital to generate something of economic value?
today at 1:16 AM
today at 4:21 AM
Wee are living in post LLM apocalypse. No digital asset is safe. waiting for banks to return to offline banking.
today at 4:53 AM
I expected it to be the other way around. This is the best time to self-host and decentralize now that the computer can do whatever you want and warn you about security best practices.
today at 5:18 AM
unless you use LLM to harden and constantly monitor your codebase, no digital assets are safe in LLM era. This is not small thing.
today at 7:48 AM
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yesterday at 10:02 PM
Web3 is doing great!
yesterday at 9:52 PM
So much for anti-centralization.
yesterday at 10:21 PM
We're talking about Binance, a centralized exchange.
yesterday at 10:16 PM
No one really considers crypto held in exchanges as decentralized, I guess some might but it's pretty standard knowledge.
yesterday at 11:14 PM
Where coins are held is completely irrelevant. There are cryptocurrencies on real blockchains, and while the technology is dumb and mostly useless, nobody denies that PoW and properly implemented PoS are decentralized.
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.
today at 12:16 AM
it was all a lie
yesterday at 10:05 PM
I keep saying this: don't bother trying to dunk on crypto people with accusations like this. To a first approximation, nobody in crypto actually believes in the stated principles of anti-centralization, freedom, etc. It's entirely about number go up and always has been. Your charge of hypocrisy just bounces straight off people who never cared about the politics.
yesterday at 10:15 PM
In the beginning of crypto people believed in it. But as the numbers went up and up and up it attracted the wrong people. And the original people left.
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.
today at 12:41 AM
It's money, did you think it wouldn't attract the wrong people?!
This is what happens when people don't think things thru.
yesterday at 11:34 PM
The traditional banking system does not use cryptocurrencies.
yesterday at 11:05 PM
It's still useful for the portion of the audience that doesn't realize the depth of the fraud.
yesterday at 10:44 PM
It's a poor dunk anyway. The crypto space is vast and has many kinds of coins and communities/people. Some people seem to think it's still 2012.
yesterday at 11:20 PM
Well at least in 2012, people who cared about the space seemed to understand the guarantees a blockchain is supposed to provide.
today at 5:58 AM
And they still do. That's partially my point.
yesterday at 9:57 PM
Not your keys, not your coins, I suppose.
today at 2:34 AM
I'm good, I own my keys, thanks.
today at 2:39 AM
Not your ... Did you roll dice for that key and then use a pre 2008 airgapped since then computer to calculated the address and do you keep that key in a way where it cannot be hacked, forgotten or lost in a fire. You avoid using hardware wallets. Something something not your coin.
today at 3:54 AM
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today at 1:36 AM
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today at 5:50 AM
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yesterday at 10:57 PM
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today at 7:29 AM
So glad that cryptocurrency is properly decentralized so that one company being compromised doesn't led to massive theft /s
today at 2:13 AM
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today at 4:44 AM
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yesterday at 10:21 PM
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yesterday at 10:09 PM
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yesterday at 9:55 PM
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today at 4:31 AM
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yesterday at 10:27 PM
first world problems. geez
today at 12:44 AM
Crypto? That's all going away.
today at 12:17 AM
That's why I exited crypto long time ago, I could've been more well off if I kept it but these shenanigans is why I sold everything.
yesterday at 9:49 PM
https://x.com/binance/status/2115918888429133902?a=jScJVx4TN...
yesterday at 10:25 PM
"reports of a potential security issue"
Losing $5b is indeed a potential security issue.
today at 5:36 AM
Just in time for elections. Now none of the bots/operatives can get paid...oops.
yesterday at 11:03 PM
Interesting. I got an email alerting me to a login attempt and requesting for me to verify my device from blockchain.com yesterday. Can't even remember creating an account but I guess it must've happened (I have a lot of forgotten accounts). Wonder if this is related.
yesterday at 11:59 PM
Nope, that’s just a running scam. I get a bunch of those from “Ledger”, “Trust Wallet”, and whatnot.
today at 1:16 AM
The domain is correct though. Somebody on a machine running macOS was trying to access my account.
today at 12:35 AM
Me too, I got one today, don't think I had anything in there though
yesterday at 11:31 PM
I had that too, and I also can't remember lol.
yesterday at 10:05 PM
UPD: This is related to the Polymarket security incident, not Binance. Sorry, I missed that.
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=_...
yesterday at 10:11 PM
I think that's a different hack. Polymarket mostly.
yesterday at 10:14 PM
true, missed this
yesterday at 11:13 PM
Sorry, that is related to Polymarket security incident, missed that.