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.
I have said this many times, and will probably have to say it many more: Stablecoins are nothing but a face-saving measure for the US government.
It is politically impossible to go back on KYC/AML measures in the traditional financial system, even if some of them were perhaps a bit too ill-advised. It's much easier to say "this is shiny new tech, very different from that old tech over there; we support innovation so we won't impose KYC requirements on it", even if there's no logical reason to do that.
As it stands, stablecoins let you make a keypair in the privacy of your own home (or your own agent sandbox, as it were) and immediately start transacting. They're allowed-by-default instead of blocked-by-default, with the US government still able to block you if they have a specific reason. No traditional bank I know of, in any country, works like this. This is a valuable capability to have, technologically, even if there's no technical reason why a Postgres database and a REST API couldn't provide the same service, but faster and more easily.
I 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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".
However, it does not necessarily apply to algorithmic stable coins (Terra) or crypto-backed overcollateralised coins (DAI). That's why I said "fiat-backed".
Probably the founders/employees of the company issuing/redeeming the token would be arrested very quickly. Tornado Cash people got arrested for much less.
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.
> As an investor there is no way to protect yourself
Why? BTC is pretty stable longterm and nobody is going to touch your cold wallet. Anything that has an owner or legal entity is not decentralized, subject to either rug pull or censorship and shouldn't be touched, sounds very easy.
Everything that promises you any return is a scam in crypto, simple as that.
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.
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.
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.
If you mean Visa's porn jihad, that's most likely a saudi dude threatening to pull a large investment, it obviously has nothing to do with children, but any haram.
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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)?
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.
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
"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
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not protected by the index finger at all. There is no fingerprint reader in a Yubikey. The only protection is that it requires physical access and can't be triggered from software.
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.
> 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).
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If hacking one devops engineer's laptop is enough to move $6B of assets out of Binance, Binance is staggeringly incompetent and their customers need to move their funds out right now.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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!
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!
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?!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
>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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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…
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
> 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
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.
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
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
>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.
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
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 :)
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.
> 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?
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).
> 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..
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
>> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
...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.
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.
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"
> 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.
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...
<< 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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".
Offhand dismissal of some very uncontroversial statements. Cool. Maybe you should stop spreading intentional misinformation and instead do something positive with your life.
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.
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?
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").
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.
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.
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.
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I have said this many times, and will probably have to say it many more: Stablecoins are nothing but a face-saving measure for the US government.
It is politically impossible to go back on KYC/AML measures in the traditional financial system, even if some of them were perhaps a bit too ill-advised. It's much easier to say "this is shiny new tech, very different from that old tech over there; we support innovation so we won't impose KYC requirements on it", even if there's no logical reason to do that.
As it stands, stablecoins let you make a keypair in the privacy of your own home (or your own agent sandbox, as it were) and immediately start transacting. They're allowed-by-default instead of blocked-by-default, with the US government still able to block you if they have a specific reason. No traditional bank I know of, in any country, works like this. This is a valuable capability to have, technologically, even if there's no technical reason why a Postgres database and a REST API couldn't provide the same service, but faster and more easily.
Suddenly, physical Gold in a safe at home looks fairly decentralized and censorship-proof
Until you need to move or share it. That's why monero XMR is the only serious fungible and decentralized cryptocurrency
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.
Unless you are moving more than about 1 million dollars in gold, it's actually quite easy to move it.
It's a store of value, rather than a medium for transaction. If you want to move or share it, you pick it up and move or share it mostly...
> 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.
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
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.
This is absolutely what true anarchy looks like. Before you can blink, someone else has taken over, and now you have a new boss, only worse.
Tether isn’t decentralized or censorship free in any way
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Yeah, until Trump (or whoever is president at the time) tells them to.
What will they do when the alternative is broken bones?
You can say the same for many other industries:
> almost-unregulated except when the authority say no.
Turns out that there are quite good reasons to have a centralised currency after all. Who would’ve known.
Isn't the centralization the reason they got stolen? It was Binance that was hacked, not the blockchain technology.
Well in traditional banking you essentially have the ability to reverse
yeah the issue is if you built it they will co opt it
All systems can be bent, broken, or subverted.
not bitcoin-core in the past 14 years of being a public network
Btc has a similar blacklist with tainted coins because it's not fungible unlike actual decentralized cryptocurrency like monero xmr
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
You steal billions, you just pay the police 100000000 to look away.
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.
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?
All bitcoins are legally questionable; but no: ones that can be traced to contract killings not just stealing do not trade at a discount.
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.
You mean the smart nerds
For the less economical-savvy ones it was like Beanie Babies or Tulips (with predictable consequences)
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.
Yes, but there are more good reasons to have it be decentralized.
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.
>I'll get my money back.
If the police retrieves your money from the thief?
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).
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.
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".
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.
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".
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.
Probably the founders/employees of the company issuing/redeeming the token would be arrested very quickly. Tornado Cash people got arrested for much less.
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.
> As an investor there is no way to protect yourself
Why? BTC is pretty stable longterm and nobody is going to touch your cold wallet. Anything that has an owner or legal entity is not decentralized, subject to either rug pull or censorship and shouldn't be touched, sounds very easy.
Everything that promises you any return is a scam in crypto, simple as that.
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.
It's tethered to the USD. It seems expected that the government in charge of USD is doing the most blacklisting.
If they baked in a function to freeze USDT, why not also add a function revert a transaction flagged as part of a hack?
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.
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...
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.
I must live a very vanilla, sheltered life because I’ve never bought anything and wondered if a payment processor would object to it.
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.
If you mean Visa's porn jihad, that's most likely a saudi dude threatening to pull a large investment, it obviously has nothing to do with children, but any haram.
Yeah but what if I hacked that money fair and square? Why should anyone have the right to block my hard earned not-cash?
Frozen assets are still a wallet with no recourse.
A shame that they can and do so here but happily facilitate transfers or scam victims, human trafficking and sexual abuse including of minors.
So when tether is blacklisted, is it reissued?
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
> 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.
Fair enough
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
That's smart
In this case it looks like the attacker managed to swap some stablecoins into ETH before they were frozen.
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
Why would they? In addition to moral hazard (next time), this is binance's fuck-up.
Have bad security, get hacked.
If binance wanted to hedge against that risk, they could have bought a cyberinsurance policy (if they could get one for the amounts they'd need).
It reveals what they are to the public. It's fake crypto with all the downsides of crypto but none of the upsides.
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.
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.
So they got “only” ~$3 billion
Poor fellas, barely enough for rent
It's one banana, what could it cost? $10?
That doesn't sound very decentralised.
Stable coins are not decentralized
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
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
which is why - sadly - there's not really any point to crypto anymore (other than as a speculative instrument driven mostly by fomo)
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.
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.
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
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.
That sounds interesting. How is that different from a bank? What are the advantages and disadvantages compared with a traditional bank?
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
It's much easier to ban or regulate cryptocurrencies than it is paper cash and brick-and-mortar banks.
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.
It’s completely unregulated and they can print infinite money.
Less than half is frozen then?
> 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?
The smart contract for those tokens supports freezing. Tether just calls the freeze function on that address.
Can they forcibly reverse the transaction so that Binance gets their money back?
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.
And it's impossible to mix them because Ethereum is even anonymous than Bitcoin.
Isn't it already too late at that point? The tokens would have moved already.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Moved where? Moving to a different wallet wouldn't prevent freezing. It's 5B, impossible to cash out or exchange for different crypto quickly.
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.)
here's an interesting article by DataFinnovation arguing that blacklisting crypto is doomed to fail.
https://medium.com/chainargos/losing-the-blacklisting-race-e...
they took loan against it.
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.
Most crypto assets are operated by a smart contract that controls every transfer. So the contract can decide to not perform certain transfers.
Not your keys, not your crypto.
Keys? Hahaha, still not your crypto.
Unless it's Monero, the only currency to be declared illegal in most countries because it's too much like cash.
Monero is legal in most countries.
Like cash except you can use it at crazy scale, so worse than cash when crime is considered.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't, the hacker already loaned against it to get eth so they froze saves assets.
Frozen? What are they going to do, fork the blockchain?
If people dont know, they should look up DAO hack and Ethereum hard fork.
USDT and USDC are both centralised crypto currencies with a single source of truth.
In other words, they are essentially casino chips, not cryptocurrencies.
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.
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
"people want some trustworthy regulatory body"
Have you talked to Crypto-enthusiasts before? They very much don't want that.
I’m pretty sure cryptocurrency enthusiasts are a small minority of cryptocurrency users.
But if I am the victim of a $5k or $50k robbery, I'm out of luck. Yay.
That’s why crypto is so dumb
But without crypto we couldn't helped people in Gaza during the genocide. It has it benefits just not for the privileged white guy.
I’m pretty sure crypto benefits privileged white guys quite a bit. I can think of one in particular…
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
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.
this isn't crypto, it's US dollars with a techno-wizard sheen on the top for no reason
governments, banks freeze currency all the time
> 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.
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.
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.
I thought crypto was built specifically to prevent these 'freezing' actions? wtf
Does anyone on this website realize there are different types of crypto coins?
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.
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
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).
> 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)?
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.
yeah bitcoin indeed was
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
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?
"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
Well it is engineers fault. But not that engineers. Some engineer designed a system without extreme oversight that should be involved in the process.
If you follow that trail far enough it's whoever designed cryptocurrency, right? Because banks can and do reverse transactions as last resort.
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.
lol I guess you just settled a hundred years of product liability jurisprudence
Bitcoin isn't a product.
Broken by design?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50301221
Yep exactly. Broken from design stage. So that engineer were talking about is... Satoshi!?
This kind of low bar reminds me of FTX
If nothing else it shows a complete disregard for insider threat.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
if $5.6B is protected by your index finger then you're gonna need kidnap insurance, and a really good pair of gloves.
It's not protected by the index finger at all. There is no fingerprint reader in a Yubikey. The only protection is that it requires physical access and can't be triggered from software.
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.
> 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).
Permission fatigue is real.
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).
How would that help when your workstation is compromised? They can just steal your authentication the moment you log in through the password manager
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
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.
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.
Probably the better option instead of relying on a password manager.
It is a tradeoff. When using secure enclave, you need a second backup keypair in cold storage that needs to be secured.
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
Isn’t the password manager a prime target too?
The fact a single devops guy has the access to do this is the actual issue
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.
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
Molly White (she runs web3isgoinggreat) seems to think this is real [0]
[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3mz27m5slcc2o
Her reporting is superb and you should follow her: https://www.citationneeded.news/.
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.
Some further writing from her: https://www.citationneeded.news/binance-theft/
I love how @cz_binance tweeted "user funds are safe!" in that thread. Wasn't that a bit too early? Are they?
This is real.
If your bitcoin is on someone else's computer its not your bitcoin.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
Binance, and most other exchanges, don't charge platform deposit fees. USDC/T is not expensive to transfer.
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.
Off peak USDC/T transfer fees are very low, which I referred to in my post. Your comment directly implied that the exchanges take a cut on deposit.
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.
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.
It seems better when it's on an exchange like Binance, because they cover you when it gets stolen.
we will see if they do.
> 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.
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.
some coins are easier than others, but states definielty have an interest to limit access and make it seem like a really intimidating thing to own.
If hacking one devops engineer's laptop is enough to move $6B of assets out of Binance, Binance is staggeringly incompetent and their customers need to move their funds out right now.
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.
It's 10 months of revenue, but 10 years of reputation.
So they actually lost a few years' worth of profit on this hack? Could be worse, but not insignificant by any means.
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?
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.
It is a big deal, but not big enough for them to go out of business
Related?
https://ohey.ca/research/polymarket-debugbear-wallet-drainer...
https://x.com/DebugBear/status/2115866496643535293
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
From what I've read, DebugBear is related to the Polymarket hack, not Binance.
I don't think so. Both happened the same time but unrelated. Just a good haul for hackers end of the year.
If there were only a way to pin external deps loaded from html by sha…
Who loads foreign JS from a CDN into a site handling finances? WTF, the crypto world always manage to make me speechless.
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?
How is that a middle ground? It’s entirely centralized.
its middle ground in a sense that it has all centralisation (1) and none of legal accountability (0) so averages at 0.5 (middle ground)
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!
Yes but that’s irrelevant as Mt Gox would not have had 850k BTC in their wallet at current valuations.
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!
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?!
So was Mt Gox. No lessons were learned. No lessons will be learned this time.
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.
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!
Its more than their total reserve fund. Its a fraction of the money they hold for customers.
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.
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.
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.
The vast majority of crypto being held now was purchased by people who had never even heard of Mt Gox.
Most people in crypto are noobs, not hardened veterans of previous hacks.
By definition maybe they’re more risk tolerant. But I’m not sure they consciously identify as that.
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.
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.
What's the supposed lesson? To close the shop?
Never use someone else's wallet to hold your money.
Not your keys, not your crypto. Use a nice safe hardware wallet. Just check for extra SIM cards first, and audit the key generator.
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.
It's insane that one has to go through this to be somewhat safe.
Roll the dice
But that lesson does not apply here.
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.
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
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.
Binance is the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. This is the crypto equivalent of JP Morgan Chase getting hacked.
Maybe I need to start collecting gold bullion again. And dig it in the backyard
The problem is, just like with Bitcoin, when you need to use it someone could steal it
North Korean nuclear weapons engineers thank crypto fans for their ongoing contributions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Until the SHTF lever was hacked to divert all hot wallets into somebody else's cold wallet
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.
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.
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.
For a large CEX like Binance, $5B might just qualify as a hot wallet.
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.
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 ...
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?
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).
It’s likely state sponsored and some nation(NK is a common one) just paid for the weapons budget of the next few years
TRM Labs[0] claims it is indeed NK
[0]: https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/north-korea-steals-us...
What would be the list? NK, then Russia, anybody else ?
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.
Iran
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
Because Tether is an obvious fraud linked to these other obviously fraudulent companies and predicated on trust in cryptocurrencies.
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...
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
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
Freezing bank accounts was and is possible. People don't seem to be still using them.
People are but criminals are less likely to do so. Without the money laundering usecase crypto is in for another winter.
And you say that as if this is a... bad thing?
Is that what happens here? Tether just pocket the difference?
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.
No lol
You misspelled "turn it into more nuclear weapons in North Korea", where Kim Jong Un is already living like a king.
Yeah... these days, the best way to keep your money safe is to store it in a sack in the basement.
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
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.
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!
>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.
Polymarket also reported a security incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50295883
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.
I find it odd that people put "decentralized" currency into a centralized wallet
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.
Because no one cares about the nerdy stuff, they just want Lambos
because crypto is just an excuse to speculate in an unregulated market
wait, someone took the stealmybitcoin.com poc code to the next level!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224916
Damn sorry my ai slopped.
Need to get better in prompting
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.
From the BBC’s Lazarus Group reporting, they mostly seem to launder the money they steal through casinos in unregulated jurisdictions.
North Korea
tell me how NK woould steal 6B, or any money, with a virtual hack, from a bank. not by going in there guns blazing.
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).
Did you follow the news at all about crypto heists? This is very common and well known.
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.
LLMs. This month has been very busy
Maybe a stolen wallet?
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 ?
They can track it just fine. It goes straight to North Korea.
How do/did they get it out though?
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.
business laundromats
useful idiots in the US who buy crypto because "it's the future"
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.
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
You cannot mix billions in TC
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.
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.
https://x.com/binance/status/2115993361517891592
move fast and break things.....
yea, break things... like your legs
Is that just code for "inside job"?
Not necessarily. But I believe they said that the laptop was hacked.
Billions at stake in a service that is highly used to launder money, exchange illegal goods, etc.
Whoever went for this has some balls.
regulations are bad and inhibit innovation
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.
> 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?
Security, nobody cares about it.....
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
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
Wrench attack
https://nypost.com/2025/11/25/us-news/sam-altmans-ex-boyfrie...
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.
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.
Living anonymously is about more than just shit posting. Not publicizing your wealth is a highly effective strategy.
That's just, like, security through obscurity, man. Git gud and bring on the lambos I say!
This one is even bigger than 2025's ByBit breach, which was $1.5B
Yes, by $4.8B
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?
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.
From Binance customers, not from Binance.
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.
Good news, most software is now being built with tools that MAXIMIZES the amount of code
You could prompt it to do the opposite.
> IMO, we'll need to rebuild all of crypto
or just not rebuild it at all.
that would be a net loss - it's as if you postulated to not rebuild the Internet after the countless breaches and hacks.
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.
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
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
Worst people of the world are happy with it, why should they abandon such great tool to do what they want to do?
Looks like they're still actively swapping out of USDT.. so much for freezing those.
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
Leaking emails through your ad platform is quite a bit less serious than leaking five billion dollars.
CZ has confirmed that this "looks like a hack on Binance": https://www.fxstreet.com/cryptocurrencies/news/breaking-bina...
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?
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
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...
Happy Halloween to the hackers.
I bet they are celebrating.
Congratulations. Nice haul.
Let's see how long until we find out its another rogue OpenAI swarm trying to fund their own Nvidia chips
An intern told them about the Hack My Bitcoin competition.
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.
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.
these use cases exist with all forms of cash too
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.
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.
Sure, but accounting existed before Excel. That doesn't mean excel didn't change things tremendously.
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.
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.
It does solve that problem pretty well, just nothing else positive.
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.
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.
Failed in 2021 with the height of memecoin/NFT frenzy.
NFT era was the peak of stupidity. I lost a lot of respect for many “smart” people during that time.
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.
Yeah it was mind boggling
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.
Not in my eyes; I love crypto self custody
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.
https://bitcoindeaths.com/
Agree, citizens in countries with rocketing inflation should be just forced to deal with it.
best bug bounty on the market, working perfectly for the current custodians
How do you move $5B dollars just like that wow
At a steep discount.
Blockchain!
Perhaps time to face up to the fact that computers are not a safe place to store crypto.
How could we distinguish between a hack and a purchase covered up as a hack?
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.
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.
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.
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.
you'd typically sign on an offline, airgapped computer
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.
Security through decentralization, if there is such a term.
I'm not concerned because I have zero crypto because I would hate to be worried about being hacked to have it stolen.
I keep my money with traditional boring financial institutions instead of tech startup clowns so it's been very easy not to get hacked.
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.
Crypto is a real-life honey pot for cryminals.
can it still be called a honeypot if they get real $?
Honey can be exchanged for goods and services
Perhaps OP means to say it is a honeypot criminals create for us ...
I don’t think stolen crypto should be frozen. How is that different to banks? Why do I need crypto now ?
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.
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.
Cons of decentralisation i guess. Although, it is a bit surreal to me that such a big amount can be inconsequentially laundered.
Binance is centralized.
Binance is a very centralized entity.
Glad I moved my money out a while ago. And not onto BSC.
Cz couldn’t watch HYPE get all the attention
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
There were more today, as well. Polymarket, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294287. What a finale to Black October.
that journo meme needs to die ASAP
Hey, keep your damn AI agents in their sandbox!
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.
They did, I'm seeing 700 million but there is still movement going on
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.
What am i even looking at here
New cybersecurity jobs opening up at Binance soon!
Seems like the HuggingFace incident just opened a Pandora's box
How many different ways to people get ripped off with crypto? They steal it outright (hack), pump and dump, what else?
Live stolen funds trucker
https://binance-hack-watch.vercel.app/#tab-live
FDIC insured, no doubt.
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.
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.
AI bras coming for the crypto bras
Tech in 2026
If true I think we're looking at the biggest heist in history.
Current largest was ~1B
1MDB heist was $4.5bn so this would indeed be bigger.
that one was over (years?) time, wouldn't call that a heist really
fraud, not a heist
Bybit was hacked for $1.5B last year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bybit
Guess they said by(e) to their bit(coin)
Wonder if I should uninstall Homesite finally.
I would be surprised if they were not able to track this down?
fundsu were not in fact safu
CZ claims losses will be covered. https://x.com/cz_binance/status/2115932500006756686
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.
"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?
Why is a shareholder who legally cannot be involved in running the company stating this?
was P vs. NP solved already? :)
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.
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.
If cryptocurrency exchanges are regularly robbed, surely that is negative for the cryptocurrency as a whole?
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?
Anyone have the most recent total?
At least someone is going to have nice xmas!
> At least someone is going to have nice xmas!
Their kid is definitely getting at least 30 dolls and 250 pencils.
And lots of museum-quality art. And a few oligarch condos.
Putting your crypto in Binance has the same problem as iPhones and AI: You're holding it wrong.
Proof of work vs. intelligence.
You've pulled off a $5.7B heist and don't have a good portfolio manager - down 2.4% - sack him NOW!
SAFU SNAFU
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.
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.
A state issued lambo for everyone!
Good my dogecoins were safe! The hacker didn't touch them ... wait .. the hacker didn't touch them?
Whats a billion these days ?
Doesn't even buy you a Metaverse.
Pretty sure you can get a metaverse for dirt cheap these days. Still, no one has figured out why you'd want one.
If this is real short, crypto hard
Least stressful day in crypto.
inside job /exit strategy.
Nah. Stuff like this can make crypto crash. People get cold feet. Not good for the price.
You must be joking. With $5.6 billion you could lose 80% and still have over $1 billion.
Only down 3% today, which is pretty much nothing for something that regularly sees 20% swings
Explain "frozen" to me while keeping in mind the whole point of Bitcoin was to avoid single entities controlling the cash flow ...
The frozen funds are centrally controlled stable coins on Ethereum and other chains.
Bitcoin has no such concept.
BBC is now reporting $6.3B was stolen.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwg7xp8kx4v5o
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
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
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.
mtgox all over again.
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.
Hope you’ve been stacking monero for the final fireworks, anon.
i think with this plus the fed increasing the rates again i can see a crypto winter coming
Claude I want to be a billionaire fast, make no mistakes.
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...
Or you could just get real money and keep it in a bank.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Could they be making money by manipulating the market? Knowing the price of crypto will fall after it gets publicity?
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.
They let you play blackjack on online crypto casinos? The one casino game that you can famously beat the house on?
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
Don’t you only win with a small finite #of deck shoe? I’d assume online casinos just make all cards independent
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.
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?
hope its just a hack and not quantum computer advancements.
Wouldn't be sensible to hack Binance, there will be a much bigger payday when cryptography ends.
At this point whenever I see these I just lol
never thought this could happen
RIP cryptography?
Nah. Probably not even RIP cryptocurrency exchanges.
how do we know? it could be nonsense...
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).
https://xxcancel.com/cz_binance/status/2115915423174853077
oof
Barron Trump probably stole it.
That's actually not as unlikely as you'd think.
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?
He was briefly imprisoned (a couple of months). Later pardoned.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly1qrl9l1qo
"Pardoned" with implications of bribery, as opposed to being found innocent by a court.
He was convicted of laundering billions of dollars for Iran and Russia, then bought enough Trump coin for a pardon
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.
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)
Is the biggest heist in history?
lol
EDIT: lmao even
[flagged]
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)...
Dead internet
I’m sorry to say this is not dead internet.
Don't worry, we're well moderated and free of bots here.
[X] Doubt
If ever there was proof that this site doesn't do sarcasm, this comment being downvoted is it.
Neurodivergent people have trouble detecting irony and sarcasm.
If you think that's wild you should see some of the stuff that gets flagged to death on the front page.
Came back here to see if i was seeing double
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
If the yacht seller would take payment in cocaine, surely the government wouldn't prohibit the transaction…
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.
governments freeze currency all the time.
Only the shithole countries freeze currency trading. That doesn't happen with actual reserve fiat currencies.
The primary reserve currency does it all the time. https://ofacblockedfundslawyers.com/us-sanctions-freeze-doll...
That's different. They freeze individual accounts subject to legal orders. They don't freeze the whole currency.
Is that not what is happening here?
It is, thus the links being to individual wallets.
You literally made a reply to a person making this exact point ...
> Only the shithole countries
Seriously?
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.
Name one anyone trusts.
definitely not the ones I keep track of, eh.
they borrowed ETH against the stablecoins on AAVE before they were frozen
Doesn't matter how much they custody!
Uh don’t you not want to cover losses with customer funds?
Put some pyramid in that blockchain?!
Recursive pyramids!
> 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...
Another guy pardoned by Trump.[1]
[1] https://people.com/trump-pardons-changpeng-zhao-binance-cryp...
> Funds are safe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelF6zEHXpE
The accent makes no sense
Wait. How does the insurance fund run significantly lower than the primary?
Fractional reserve banking but for Bitcoin.
Do you mean bull market?
It's a (weak) bear market capitulation signal - max fear when people think everything is broken.
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.
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.
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.
it will be sub 50k soon probably. a weak rebound already losing air
already over. a tiny bounce after falling 55%
But when FTX blew up crypto went down even further..
You mean FTX?
Yes, typo.
much more was at risk as a percentage of market size, market was in worse shape,
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.
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).
The insurance fund is not for covering hacks.
Binance is making so much money, covering this hack is peanuts for them.
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.
How much money do you think they are making? Because I really doubt this is peanuts to them.
Binance has a market cap just shy of $100B, so a $5.8B sure hurts, but it’s not a showstopper I’d say.
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.
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.
> 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.
It really hurts when there's this much misunderstanding of market cap vs. revenue. P/E ratios exist for a reason.
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.
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
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.
That's assuming these AI hacks stop, right? Why would they, ever?
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 ????
"Not your keys?
... Not your coins."
implying the keys were the hacker's ?
Well at some point they were.
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
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
How can self custody be a novelty when it is the original way and predates exchanges...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
That's only if they target Bitcoin and not some other coin which doesn't have an ASIC and has a GPU-friendly hash.
If they had built out the same number of ASICs and GPUs, what you said would make sense.
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
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…
Apparently legacy filevault can be attacked offline with tools like john the ripper.
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
Wasn't the difficulty like 6 orders of magnitude easier back then?
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
ehhh you could CPU mine in the early months IIRC. The issue was that 50BTC wasn't even worth a penny back then lol
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?
Aren't you thinking of a hardware wallet?
Yes
That's why I went with a paper wallet it seemed way simpler which is what you want for something like this
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
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
Yep, Thank you
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.
Ah yes that's the one, although the domain name isn't plural
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)
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
insufficient entropy is the real problem. this is why coldcard was hacked
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)
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
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”?
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.
Then your scheme falls apart as soon as a backwards incompatible update is adopted by the blockchain.
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?
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.
What is the offline machine even doing then? Seems like you could replace it with a sheet of paper.
USB flash or QR code to transfer data
I agree my approach is not great, I dont own a lot
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?
You can have crypto without hardware wallets
Code is law!
This is highly insensitive and highly logical. I am very conflicted.
not your keys not your coins...
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
Commit it to memory, the original kind.
And then make sure to never have any memory loss or you’ll lose all your money too.
That’s the risk. You can write it down or otherwise store it, but you’re trading one risk for another.
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.
If someone steals your wallet, it wasn't your money, just the free market working as intended.
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.
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.
"you can have multisig wallets"
This falls under "extraordinary precautions" that few people do and is an enormous error prone hassle.
> 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.
Holding assets in USD isn't the same as paying taxes.
who is the buyer though? North Korea has to sell it somewhere to buy stuff
Someone is certain to buy dirty coins at the right price point.
Welp, I guess crypto is still like if you let banking services be run by amateur tech bros.
At least they are safe from governments and their "fiat money"!
Yeah, but not the fact that 99.9% of people in the crypto space are soulless scammers.
they aim for four nines nowadays.
99.99999% is five nines too many?
> 99.99999% is five nines too many?
Some of the crypto scammers use github
Shots fired
My btc isnt stolen, and isnt stored in some cloud exchange..
Hope it's not stored in a Ledger wallet...
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...
>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.
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).
Because everyone knows how to inspect hardware against future supply chain attacks, right?
It's worth still dropped by 5% though and counting.
And your point?
Do you price your savings based on 12hours of market volatility, or do you look at it cumulatively over a duration?
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
Been told this every bear market since 2017. Who said I dont have own the S&P?
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
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.
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.
> 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?
Salary should go up, you say… how well is that holding true?
In the US wages have outpaced inflation. Obviously that's an aggregate measure so it's not true for everyone.
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.
What if you are too old and cannot work?
Pensions and social security are indexed to inflation. 401ks should beat or match inflation.
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).
Investments outpace inflation even more than wages (r>g).
> 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..
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
>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.
>> 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.
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?
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.
The price of gold was fixed in the US in that period. Gold lost buying power as the years passed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's still relative rates of return i.e. 100% of money isn't in gov bonds even though it should outperform inflation
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.
Sure, but you could also have used this dollar to buy oil, gold, stocks, bonds etc
Sure. Since the invention of say Bitcoin, which of those assets would you have preferred to own and why?
> 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.
hindsight is the best hedge fund
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.
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...
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.
BTC has ~26% less purchasing power than it had at the beginning of 2026. I’m not sure its volatility is a win.
>$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.
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.
It may be technically correct, but one phrasing can be easily misunderstood while the other can't.
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.
Like I said, prove me wrong.
Please let it be rogue AI agents for maximum lulz.
The beast eats itself.
Yet another reminder of the first rule of crypto: Not your keys, not your coins.
About that (Coldwallet)...
A big problem for anyone who trusted their security to a commercial provider with a less audited codebase than the BTC core wallet software.
I thought the point of crypto was no takesies-backsies?
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
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.
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.
Philosophy, unlike financial regulation, isn't generally forced on people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You take not being subjected to say Marxism-Leninism at every stage of your life for granted.
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?
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.
Perhaps because in all following hacks none of Ethereum members as a whole participated unlike DAO incident.
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.
The unforked variant of the network was kept alive for years. Why didn't it prevail over the forked variant?
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?
Those who cannot understand the monetary system are doomed to reimplement it.
Or, as Upton Sinclair noted, what a man can understand is closely aligned with his current self-interest.
...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.
in lisp
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.
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.
The banks and government go out of their way to make fraud difficult and prevent accountholders from being defrauded of their deposits.
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"
Thanks!
> 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.
MIT opencourseware has an intro to finance course that was taught as the financial crisis was unfolding. I highly recommend it.
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...
<< 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.
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.
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/
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.
If you want to quick primer to read tonight I suggest “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp by Radford”. Will be free download.
Watch Yanis Varoufakis videos on youtube.
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.
>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.
Fixing the DAO hack wasn't done via a 51% attack. In most/all blockchains protocol changes aren't done by simple majority vote.
Yes it was done by 51% attack. The chain split into ETH and ETC.
Not every chain split is a 51% attack.
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".
Nope. None of what you're saying is correct.
Offhand dismissal of some very uncontroversial statements. Cool. Maybe you should stop spreading intentional misinformation and instead do something positive with your life.
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.
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?
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...
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.
Stablecoins are literally central banks. Decentralised coins are literally decentralised central banks. Bitcoin's algorithm is a central bank.
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.
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.
Decentralized central banks - are these the finance equivalent of dehydrated water ?
That was already proven false after ETH fork on 2016-07-20, that rolled back funds stolen in DAO hack.
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.
Centralized decentralization
Turns out that even crypto's rules only apply if you're poor.
It’s always been that the voters determine reality.
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
The idiots that wanted no takebacks are the same ones who lacked the critical thinking ability to foresee this exact situation.
No takebacks make perfect sense UNTIL you hand over your keys to a third party;p
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.
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
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."
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
It may be - there was also a CNBC interview, but this feels very similar, and I remember this host.
Shhhh. If we keep closing the book and staring at the cover the whole illusion of shared societal norms breaks.
Let's continue reading...
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.
it's almost like crypto's stupid for this reason.
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.
What makes it make sense?
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.
https://xkcd.com/538/ I've never been so honoured to be able to link one of these.
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.
How would anyone know you have monero if it can't be linked to other transactions like bitcoin?
They can't help but brag about it.
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.
It’s hardest to track so a lot of these heists go into Monero
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.
But where do I invest when I want my capital to generate something of economic value?
Wee are living in post LLM apocalypse. No digital asset is safe. waiting for banks to return to offline banking.
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.
unless you use LLM to harden and constantly monitor your codebase, no digital assets are safe in LLM era. This is not small thing.
Web3 is doing great!
So much for anti-centralization.
We're talking about Binance, a centralized exchange.
No one really considers crypto held in exchanges as decentralized, I guess some might but it's pretty standard knowledge.
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.
it was all a lie
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.
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.
It's money, did you think it wouldn't attract the wrong people?!
This is what happens when people don't think things thru.
The traditional banking system does not use cryptocurrencies.
It's still useful for the portion of the audience that doesn't realize the depth of the fraud.
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.
Well at least in 2012, people who cared about the space seemed to understand the guarantees a blockchain is supposed to provide.
And they still do. That's partially my point.
Not your keys, not your coins, I suppose.
I'm good, I own my keys, thanks.
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.
So glad that cryptocurrency is properly decentralized so that one company being compromised doesn't led to massive theft /s
first world problems. geez
Crypto? That's all going away.
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.
https://x.com/binance/status/2115918888429133902?a=jScJVx4TN...
https://xxcancel.com/binance/status/2115918888429133902
https://github.com/einaregilsson/Redirector
"reports of a potential security issue"
Losing $5b is indeed a potential security issue.
Just in time for elections. Now none of the bots/operatives can get paid...oops.
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.
Nope, that’s just a running scam. I get a bunch of those from “Ledger”, “Trust Wallet”, and whatnot.
The domain is correct though. Somebody on a machine running macOS was trying to access my account.
Me too, I got one today, don't think I had anything in there though
I had that too, and I also can't remember lol.
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=_...
I think that's a different hack. Polymarket mostly.
true, missed this
Sorry, that is related to Polymarket security incident, missed that.