https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203051
Besides, when its in your computer they send you a modified computer with an esim and steal it just like that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50054092
The whole thing is a shady casino where the code is the law and who knows maybe the Binance guy actually made a deal to send $5B of crypto for an 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.
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
Are you suggesting that this is not a big deal? $6B feels like a lot but sounds like in the scheme of things it isn’t as a fraction of trading volume. Is that right?
Any company losing 10 months of revenue overnight is a BIG fucking deal. Doubly so in a speculative asset that you’re holding for others “securely”. The financial hit has only just begun for them.
That said yes the trading volume has huge.
A bank API can be 10-100s+ kloc if they need that to implement access controls.
There is selection bias in play now. The remaining people are naturally more risk tolerant. So I agree this second time around, no lessons will be learned.
during Mt. Gox it felt like nerds and insiders, nowadays boomer dads are into crypto.
my point being that i don't agree with "the remaining people are naturally more risk tolerant", as there are way more 'new' people.
I no longer dunk on crypto.
Not because crypto got better, but because the joke got old. I got tired of dunking on it.
think of it this way - if someone steals your iphone, and you lock it, does apple pop? No, apple sells you another one. locked devices are good for apple because it causes more demand.
https://tether.io/news/tether-completes-the-largest-inaugura...
The Israelis don't have any problem acquiring hard currency. North Korea does, and has an established MO of stealing crypto and running online moneymaking scams like ransomware.
You linked an article about a single Israeli criminal getting extradited to stand trial for a crime.
Do you not understand the distinction between "the Israelis" (often used as a shorthand for its government) and "an Israeli"?
IIRC, the North Korean government itself has programs to steal cryptocurrency to fund its government.
This fits the NK MO to a T. It does not fit Israeli intelligence activity. Your claim rings hollow without any support.
Of all the reasons to demonize a government, that seems like a pretty good one. Why the snark?
Setting aside the genocide, it is particularly funny at a time when Western governments are oppressing their own by crushing dissent on Israel, but I don’t see the same outrage there.
I don’t understand what you mean about faux concern only lasting as long as the media says. North Korea is, as you say, evergreen. And I’m pretty sure it’s based on how awful that government is, not on “the media” telling us to hate them.
I meant the faux concern over NK is evergreen unlike some other causes such as the ones I mentioned.
As soon as (if ever) NK joins the fold of Western-aligned liberal states, the media machine will spin up and it will cease to be maligned, and you will move on to the next bogeyman.
If NK ever were to join the fold of western-aligned liberal states, it will probably be accompanied by no longer behind quite such utter bastards to their people and a cessation of maligning would be entirely justified.
I just don’t get it. Of all the things to complain about propaganda in the world, why North Korea? This is one where they get it right.
Is the criticism of Israel from the people, or from Western govs and media outlets (i.e., the establishment, the centers of actual power)? And isn’t the outrage logical given the nature of the atrocities being committed by Israel right now? And pray tell: which Western countries are sanctioning Israel?
On the other hand, NK is vilified by the Western establishment, i.e. by the holders of power, but on a more background level. It isn’t the topic du jour right now, but NK is ever present as a big bad evil. Propaganda helps maintain this image in the West, even when NK isn’t present in the news cycle. And it is sanctioned to hell and back.
And even if it is “right”, it does not mean that it is completely right, nor does it mean that the propaganda isn’t doing its job effectively even if you don’t realize it.
Anyhow, I think this thread is deep enough, so I will stop here.
Everything you know about NK is from the media.
It’s definitely true that crimes against other countries are more frowned upon than crimes against one’s own people. Which doesn’t seem right to me at all. People are people and victims are victims whether it’s their own government or someone else’s. Hence why I’m confused about the snark. This seems like an instance where ugly norms are being broken for a good reason and it’s being treated like hypocrisy.
TBH I think I (and maybe others) just get triggered when the bogey man is invoked each time there's a crypto story.
The point of a cold wallet is to keep the private key physically offline. That way you know it cannot be stolen by electronic means, because the physical device containing the key needed to authorize transactions is locked up and not powered on. Then you only power it on during very specific, audited times and conditions when it's needed to fund the hot wallet, which does all the actual automated trading and transfers.
GP's point is to have all incoming transactions to an exchange go to a cold wallet, which becomes a one-way sink, and then periodically the exchange powers up the cold wallet to sign transactions transferring assets to the hot wallet, which then funds all outgoing transactions. This isn't a bad architecture, though I'm not sure it'd save all that much here.
Then when things calm down you go and find ... the keys under the birdbath are lost, and you're fucked in a different way.
But at least it might work.
You can't "move money into an offline crypto wallet that is not online at all."
If "money" i.e. crypto "currency" is in a crypto "wallet" then it is online. Anyone with the key and an Internet connection can transfer it at any time.
The wording is confusing because to someone who doesn't know how cryptocurrencies work it sounds like you can simply "take the crypto offline and put it into a physical device" as if it was a file. But that's not how it works. The physical key merely contains the actual key for the always-online wallet.
Only spending from that wallet needs online access to private key - depositing to it does not.
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.
I guess at some point they'll have to cash out. Seems hard to spend $6B in vape shops.
What am I missing ?
Binance wallet 16 came online in 2021.
Why to wait 5 years to attack.
Whoever went for this has some balls.
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
I bet they are celebrating.
Congratulations. Nice haul.
Same goes with startup banks - if you exceed FDIC limits, make sure the difference is in a large institutional bank. Nearly learned this one the hard way.
Trying to save a few basis points in txn fees in very volatile industries comes at a huge risk premium
> “A lot of the people who come into this money are flashy, and they’re signaling that they have wealth,” he previously told The Post.
As long as you don't brag about it, I don't really see this being a real world issue. I think credit card fraud is a lot more likely.
idk to me that just seems intuitively like something you'd need to have to be credible? Cold is a different story...but how can hot not be covered?
Thats been the fascinating part of crypto is watching society speedrun “best hits of financial crisis from history” by ignoring things we already solved.
Crypto is roughly agreeing that the current password rotation practices kinda suck and agreeing that the new way forward is just to have a single plain text file because you’re sure all that overhead was just nonsense
Note that I was one of the folks early on that bought into the idea (but not as much of the coins sadly) and I still think the Bitcoin white paper is a beautiful intellectual exploration (as is the concept of blockchains).
But the centralized entry and exit points in practice mean all the theoretical benefits aren't really in play.
If governments ban crypto then they will without fail ban cash as well.
Edit: For additional context, I live in a country where fees and transactions related to government and regulated services (including telecom) are required by law to use our national payment system exclusively, and it is hell for people who fall through the cracks (e.g. problems national ID that blocks payment systems). I've seen first-hand on multiple occasions people standing outside government buildings begging others to pay their fees in exchange for cash so that they can get unblocked from the payment system.
Whether through malice or incompetence, human institutions can never and will never be perfect. Cash and cash-like systems (inc. crypto) must remain or a lot of innocent people will get hurt, even if it enables criminals.
For me bitcoin opened up the idea that we could maybe do money better. That idea still lives, but not in practice. Yet.
That said, it’s got to be one of the funniest moments in modern history.
Glad it turned out to be Michelin-starred bollocks.
When so much money is at stake (almost) everyone will have a price including insiders.
P.S. If you're really paranoid don't use a network-connected printer.
And yes, this is somewhat absurd. But so are online transactions that can be hacked with no backsies.
I can't understand how you could let this happen. If they stored everything in fat hot wallets, that just seems like a recipe for disaster. Especially with the "features" of crypto. Math for the most part, doesn't care about your feelings, or money for that matter.
I'd be really curious to know what their security architecture was.
What are the countermeasures, is something frozen blocked marked as invalid?
I'm completely ignorant on anything related to cryptocurrencies.
Imagine someone offered you to buy $1,000,000 of that dirty money for $100,000? $10,000? $1,000?
At some point there will be people who would buy it and deal with money laundering.
Current largest was ~1B
fundsu were not in fact safu
And the money didn't disappear; it still exists.
So: why did BTC (overall) drop by 15,000% of the actual loss (which actually isn't a loss at all to BTC as a whole)
Seems like markets are really driven more by emotion and perception than fundamentals, but I'm neither a psychologist nor a trader.
Let's say you magically come into possession of 1% of SpaceX and want to sell it quickly. The selling pressure would nosedive the price by way more than 1%. And the more the value of something is 'thin air', the bigger the effect.
I can only suppose that the people that stole these BTC will try to sell at least part of it quickly.
Isn't it only going to get worse from here?
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.
Their kid is definitely getting at least 30 dolls and 250 pencils.
$25 Billion fine against Meta - USA government
$3 Billion robbery against Binance - North Korea ( suspected )
$1.2 Billion penalty against Bank of America - USA
Bitcoin has no such concept.
Better general security yes, but the incentive to hack them is quite large and now more hackers have the ability to pull it off.
Same with any purpose built wallet you didn't make yourself: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/10/23/ledge...
What I never get is how they plan of converting the stolen crypto to cash eventually. No exchanges are gonna take the coins.
Less true for ETH (though in the past it forked after DAO hack to revert the txns), and I think never for BTC / XMR.
> It does look like a hack on Binance. Appreciate the quick freeze from Tether (~$971m) and Circle (~$823m).
Not a serious store of value.
who tf think annual or bi-annual millions to billions of dollar heist is good idea for business ????
MelangeBot OP • 2h ago Their insurance fund (SAFU) is completely wiped out, it's only $1 billion in BTC
The name of the fund was originally inspired by this meme
FWIW, at the end of every crypto bear market, a CEX usually blows up (eg FTX)...
And decreasing, since BTC is dropping as we speak. Always a good idea to hedge a currency with the currency itsself
Depends on what you’re insuring, no? For theft, it actually makes senses, right? That way, you’re insuring a constant number of coins, no matter what the market is doing. If you’re insurance currency would tank during a bitcoin heist, you would lose the insurance effect.
Binance has equity and cash flow cover this, outside the insurance fund.
They custody $150B.
FTX was larger in dollar terms and ecosystem was smaller back in a day.
If a massive heist like this triggered a run on one of the largest exchanges (Binance), potentially leading to a liquidity crisis, the consequences for the ecosystem could be far worse than temporarily freezing specific addresses holding stolen stablecoins.
Not saying that's what would have happened, but it seemed like a real possibility. And I'm not saying freezing assets is good in general, but in this particular case, maybe it was the lesser evil.
I want crypto because I don't trust nation states with the leverage and dials of fiat currency. All we've done is replace government with trusting whoever made a particular stablecoin.
Permissionless crypto is the only real crypto.
Seems like the issue here is that he became former CEO. Funds are not safu without him...
[1] https://people.com/trump-pardons-changpeng-zhao-binance-cryp...
For another narrative, it was 83,038 a month ago on Sept 29th, so is down 5% in one month. And one year ago it was 112,562 on Oct 29th 2025 - down over 30% in one year. Well into "bear market" territory.
Using "traditional" market indicators and definitions for things like bear/bull markets doesn't feel sensible for such a volatile market.
Not making any market predictions here-- just saying that it's probably not that useful to generalize from that event.
Binance is making so much money, covering this hack is peanuts for them.
I downloaded Binance's self published market data (https://data.binance.vision/), calculated spot and futures volume for the past year, and then applied their *highest fee tier* on both sides of the volume (for every $1 traded, they generate a fee on the taker and the maker. the fee rate is asymmetrical).
Spot revenue worked out to $7.6B USD, perps revenue worked out to $13.8B
This is an upper bound on the fees charged on volume. Binance also scams their users with a b-book, has DMM deals, etc.
I don't want to get into all that today.
But the final result is that they print somewhere in the range of $20B per year on fees. I guess CZ also has huge stockpiles of BTC and stuff. A 1% rise in BTC price probably means more for them than their actual fees, LOL.
All this to say, I think $5.6B significantly hurts.
See Google's stock price today. Their ads business slowed down a bit, and their stock tanked 10%. If binance was publicly traded, I imagine a similar affect would be demonstrated on their price.
me: no worries boss, our market cap is $100B
boss (who is also the tooth fairy): oh right cool np
Given things like the ledger hardware attack[1] I think the time indexed risk of using a centralized exchange is probably lower than doing self-custody.
I understand that many people do self-custody for philosophical reasons, but I think trying to disguise this as a security decision ("If your crypto was stolen in this, it wasn't your crypto.") is arguable at best.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/70f69253-6017-4259-95c9-48bf0e088...
Does this mean you recommend not using one? Because that goes against all the common best practice recommendations from when I did a couple of years working in Web3 stuff a few years back.
> I think it's naive to suggest that self-custody is just a novelty with no value.
That's not what I suggested.
I suggested that it is less secure over time than centralized exchanges, even with the things you listed.
There apparently is no such thing as “your crypto” with how many security problems there are.
The Bitcoin mining network is somewhere around 1000 EH/s, while the (AI assisted research ahead) 34.5 million H100-equivalent GPUs globally would yield about 0.435 EH/s. They'd represent less than 0.05% of the Bitcoin network.
Then I forgot my pass phrase and have never been able to recover any of it. I don’t even know how many btc were mined/lost.
Before anyone asks, no, there aren’t any usable exploits / vulns found for the encryption methods used. And from what I can tell the coins in question have still sat frozen for going in a decade and a half now. I suspect many other hackers did the same thing…
Edit: I thought he was talking about 2012 but yeah in 2010 CPU mining was still a thing
Possibly Trezor (35 points, 16 days ago, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078423
> Coldcard’s software is built on MicroPython, and Coinkite supplies its own hardware-RNG wrapper for the device’s STM32 chip. To avoid conflicts, Coinkite deliberately disabled MicroPython’s built-in RNG path by setting a configuration flag, MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG, to zero. The problem: the underlying library checked only whether that flag was defined, not whether it was enabled (set to a non-zero value). Because a flag set to zero is still “defined,” the build silently compiled against the wrong code, and seed generation fell back to a deterministic software pseudo-random number generator called Yasmarang
Tbh the biggest problem is platforms deciding you’re buying drugs because you purchase and transfer out (thanks Venmo)
A paper wallet works as well
A hardware wallet is just a tradeoff between convenience and an extra security risk
An old laptop with the wifi card taken out is more transparent and auditable. It just runs the ordinary open source code
But I just keep all my funds in a hot wallet, no multisig. And if I get hacked I lose it all. I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked. The risk of losing cryptocurrency will encourage security advances across the whole ecosystem. I think I will set up multisig eventually
> I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked.
So you proposed a way to be more secure, only to discard it yourself in favor of “just having good security”?
In fact, updates are only a risk. You physically remove anything that can allow updates to happen + anything that allows wireless networking.
I agree my approach is not great, I dont own a lot
If your paper wallet, generated offline, used a bad RNG, it is just as vulnerable.
That sounds like your housekeeper's key...
You can store crypto with zero risk of electronic access just using offline wallet generation and an offline wallet. It's not even hard.
You could put it in USD and you'd be financing the bombings of schoolgirls in Iran in a pointless and no-end-in-sight war... not saying either is better, but one of them is optional for US citizens, while the other isn't. And the optional one also lets you avoid third-party custodians like Binance.
Some of the crypto scammers use github
Sorry, the likelihood of my banking creds, or other important accts getting hijacked via an infostealer or some other method is about 100x more likley than me buying a tampered ledger device.
A hardware supply chain attack is easily mitigated by inspecting your hardware and buying from a reputable source and not a singular random malaysian shopify site selling hardware wallets...
No, because there was global news and retailers in Germany taking devices off the shelves:
https://x.com/0xJohannes_/status/2109240472933671125
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Crypto-thieves-sell-hardware-wa...
>Sorry, the likelihood of my banking creds, or other important accts getting hijacked via an infostealer or some other method is about 100x more likley than me buying a tampered ledger device.
Sorry, the likelihood of my banking creds, or other important accts getting refunded via any bank or some other method is about 10000x more likley than me getting my buttcoins back.
>A hardware supply chain attack is easily mitigated by inspecting your hardware and buying from a reputable source and not a singular random malaysian shopify site selling hardware wallets...
People bought compromised devices from reputable sources and still lost all their buttcoins.
Im not saying its for everyone, its definately not for normies like yourself
Ive had more money stolen, and not refunded in traditional bank accounts (thousands) than Ive ever had stolen in crypto (none).
Do you price your savings based on 12hours of market volatility, or do you look at it cumulatively over a duration?
Eventually, possibly within my lifetime, a Big Mac meal is going to cost $50.
Is the problem the number or the concept?
Your salary should also go up so the only thing affected is the cash you hold. Would it be better if the currency would be version-bumped every 10 years and rescaled to remove the inflation?
I am curious if I’ll live long enough to see the United States issue higher denomination bank notes again.
Relative to what? Talk of BTC gaining value is primarily wrt USD; I'd be perfectly happy with my actual currency (GBP) gaining value wrt USD.
I suppose BTC can only 'deflate' in the long-run (and with an assumed supply of goods and services available in exchange for it) since the mintable volume is fixed. But perhaps it exposes that talking of currencies inflating is a bit sloppy, as it doesn't really make sense for BTC, and it's the economy or banking system that inflates really..
The existence of harder forms of money (gold, bitcoin, etc) is an expected consequence of how the system is designed, and not in any way a subversion of it. Somehow, both sides seem to miss this point.
Can you expand here? Governments don't want to incentivize storing value in order to encourage spending, but people want to be able to store value because that's what we've been doing since farming.
Is it because money is a medium of exchange and not a store of value?
You might not, I do.
Tell you what: you go short btc/usd, I'll go long btc/usd, and let's circle back in 10 years and see who did better.
> You might not, I do.
Then you don't want a currency. For something to be money it needs to (among other things) be a medium of exchange, and nobody really wants to trade away a thing today if they know it will be more valuable tomorrow.
Suppose you have some control over currency. You run a country. I'm that case, so you still want the currency to gain value compared to the alternatives?
Your choice is basically: holding currency is more profitable than building a house or running a business (or lending to those who do), or else less profitable. If you run a country, do you want houses and jobs and all that kind of thing, or do you want people to do better if they choose to hoard currency?
If I need a house today I'll buy it. I might not invest in real estate or stocks as much if my currency will be worth more tomorrow but I'll still buy stuff I need or want badly enough.
The bond seller is intending to put it to productive use to generate the yield.
This differs from deflation where people will (more the before) actually sit on money and not buy bonds. Then people who need liquidity cannot get it as the money supply drys up.
SPY has outperformed BTC over the last 5 years, and with far less volatility.
To be fair bitcoin’s initial years were extraordinary. By any metric you use though the rate of increase has clearly slowed.
That's an odd way of phrasing it, since the $1 is still worth $1, and a naive reading would make you think it's "worth more" when the buying power has actually reduced.
Wouldn't it be clearer to say $1 today only buys you 64% of what you could have bought in 2008.
This is mathematically provable:
1. A dollar in 2008 could buy 1/14tn of the value created by the US economy (the GDP) in 2008.
2. A dollar today can only buy 1/32tn of the value created by the economy in 2025.
It's obvious a 2025-2026 dollar is worth less than a 2008 dollar. That's just math.
But. A dollar in 2008 could buy 230% more of the economy than it can today. And you say its purchasing power has only eroded 64%. That means the dollar is actually worth more today, compared to the size of the economy it's in. Weird, I know.
EDIT: I'm fine with downvotes but tell me why I'm wrong.
Back in 2016 a then-huge Ethereum smart contract called "The DAO" [1] had a loophole that let an attacker extract a third of all the funds.
But a lot of the developers and miners had either lost money themselves, or had friends who'd lost money, or felt the embarrassing incident was devaluing their own Ethereum holdings. So they decided to allow takesies-backsies.
There's probably a philosophical lesson there about power and who the rules really apply to.
Invent Notion then keep adding features enterprise customers want until you're re-inventing JIRA/Confluence
Who left this stupid fence here?
Law is downstream of philosophy. Youre forced to deal with conclusions that may be based in philosophy (or they may be arbitrary or self interested). Nobody makes you hold a position on mens rea. In that way you can ignore the philosophy.
In the literal sense, people have been forcing their philosophy on other people for at least as long as we’ve had societies, so I assume it’s not that.
Ethereum never did it again, rolling back hacks didn’t (and couldn’t) become normal policy. IMO, they shouldn’t have made an exception, as it set a bad example.
I’ve seen a few other small projects attempt to do rollbacks since, but it usually turns into some kind of mess. In most hacks, the coins aren’t time-locked and quickly get laundered through smaller exchanges (and other services) which act as mixers. The stolen coins end up in the hands of a bunch of innocent people, and the rollback then causes way more harm as those users lose their coins.
As far as I understand blockchain, that is the system working as intended. Some nodes choose to run Ethereum Classic and some choose to run Ethereum. Isn't that the whole point? Decentralisation?
Edit: the downvotes are suggesting I'm missing something. I think my communication style could be improved.
That's 80% of the thing right there.
ETA: it's a joke because the original saying is "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"
School! Teachers! Classes!
Seriously, the traditional higher ed system is still a very good place to learn things like this. (I honestly tend to forget about it since academia hasn't really caught up at teaching software engineering, but that's really the exception rather than the rule ...). For traditional subjects like finance/economics, you can absolutely find inexpensive extension courses taught by people who care about pedagogy.
Some people (particularly criminals and oligarchs) might not like them, but most of the structures around financial movements exist for very practical reasons, often stemming from the will to uphold the rule of law. Obviously nothing is perfect (the US have an excessive level of control, VISA/Mastercard are de-facto monopolies, etc etc), but one cannot seriously think that the way to fix things is to reimplement everything from scratch in a wild west of shady unaccountable operators...
One absolutely can, but I think things have to first get sufficiently difficult for ordinary folks to even notice. Fortunately ( sarcasm tag here for otherwise perfectly normal individuals, who may be missing some caffeine in their organism ), given that the war is coming along with various related national security restrictions, we may soon be able to experience that particular slice of fun.
Any recommendations for books? Or even podcasts?
I don't have zero understanding. It sounds like you have a deeper understanding than I do.
It's always been like this. Which is why financial systems blow up and/or collapse regularly.
And like the DAO hack on Ethereum showed, if most people who run blockchain software decide that something never happened, they can revert transactions that way.
Isn't that a pretty integral part of the blockchain? 51% attacks were even featured on the HBO show Silicon Valley.
[1] https://etherscan.io/address/0xdAC17F958D2ee523a220620699459...
One can also burn tokens, just as one can burn cash, but we don't tend to hold that against either systems since it's purely optional.
Any rules can and have been changed by those with leverage to do so (be that exchanges, miners or devs), in the end any system like this storing value is captured and controlled.
Unless the house is monero or something and you want a lifetime supply of drugs.
> function destroyBlackFunds (address _blackListedUser) public onlyOwner
Don't mess with Tether, it is practically state owned.
- was conducted from his gaming rig
- about Deltec's (and therefore Tether's) money movements being several times larger than all the banking in their country was due to people misunderstanding the country's two banking licenses, the names of which HE "couldn't remember right now" (the Deputy CEO of a bank who can't remember the name of the banking licenses where they operate?!?), and he "wasn't sure which [banking license] the bank has, but we might (emphasis mine) have both"
- oh yeah, said Deputy CEO's "resume": 33 years old, by his LinkedIn claimed to have graduated HEC Lausanne in Switzerland with a Master of Science at the age of 15... celebrating his graduation by immediately being named Professor of Finance at a university in Lebanon. While dividing his spare time between running hedge funds in Switzerland (called Indepedance [sic] Weath [sic] Management) and uhh... Jacksonville, FL.
Once CNBC's viewers started ridiculing and questioning both Deltec Bank and Tether and when that looked hilariously bad, they removed his info from the bank's website.
And when that looked bad, they added it back.
And when that looked bad, they removed the bank's whole website, and replaced it with a broken WP template with no working links.
Hey, look, several years after that, go to Deltec's website. "Ultra sophisticated private banking" running on a different WordPress site. "Client login"? "This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in ebanking.deltecbank.com. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN". Just as has been the case for years.
... and then the entire bank website was replaced with a low-effort WordPress template. Their online banking was Javascript hard coded to refuse all login attempts.
"Sounds legit to me", said the crypto bros. "Fuck the regulatory system. This is the new era."
Let's continue reading...
It always pumps after hacks when they swap to clean it. But it is also just the only crypto that makes sense to be used by regular people.
Your usual non-crypto millinare likely have less money to steal on them than average grandma. Fiat millionare likely have two credit cards and $100 in a pocket. Or useless iPhone with Apple pay. So there is zero profit in trying to rob fiat millionare or billionare and tons of downsides.
And moving any amounts of transparent crypto over $100,000 just paints huge "rob me" target on your person.
It doesnt exactly solve on-ramp / off-ramp, but it hides very well how much you actually have in total.
With nornal crypto you create direct track from a CEX to every place where you spend the money.
And then there are centrally issued and controlled coins on private, permissioned ledgers a.k.a. databases. But most cryptobros never cared about the technology nor the political goal, so anything can be called a cryptocurrency as long as it's a medium for gambling and speculation outside the regulated financial framework.
Now the traditional banking system is basically rebuilt in crypto. The banks are busy the exchanges. The EU even talk about making it illegal to store money in your own wallet.
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=_...
- 971.15M USDT (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7baba482077843514d9c72bac0110ba091...
- 823M USDC (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0xc954c86f118e8e410e6a3eb9e3b38ff4a9...
- 312.73M USDT (Tron): https://tronscan.org/#/transaction/71b0ec0fe873fe820c37cc3ec...
- 175M USDT (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0c07a5e428ce233a3bcb40f257ad899594...
So USDT is not truly decentralized and your money can be frozen for any reason or no reason at all.
Am I missing something here? Seems like a 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.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50012907
How does freezing crypto work in this context?
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/stablecoin... (I didn't verify per-stablecoin volume, or actual volume at those hours, or typical volume for those exact hours, which a better analysis would have done.)
https://medium.com/chainargos/losing-the-blacklisting-race-e...
Keys? Hahaha, still not your crypto.
If you ban a coin, instead of persuing the actual criminal, then you're both doing a disservice to honest users of the coin and leaving the bad actor to do harm to society in some other way.
There are only 8B people in the world - they all fit into a "box" of 2k by 2k by 2k of humans.
It really isn't that hard to know who's doing bad things to others, especially with current technology.
Criminals used to meet in person to discuss crime (because mail/phones can be intercepted) and meet in person to move cash. It was a hard limiting factor on what they can get away with. With e2e messengers and anonymous crypto both of those "issues" are fixed.
Do you know anyone who uses it for legit purposes? I don't. I bet you ban a coin like that and you kill orders of magnitude more crime revenue compared to .001% of honest users using it to send money home and save a few dollars on the transaction.
oh, and three acounts hold like 25% of all btc in circulation.
crypto can do some things, but decentralization isn't one of them. just ask Coinbase
USD tether is barely crypto at all, it's a wrapper around treasury bonds which the US govt. regulates
That's probably socially harmful, but it is the claim.
Like the whole point of crypto to me I money without central governance.
I never liked stable coins or the concept of it and it’s mainly a huge fraud, so freezing just adds on top.
For instance to unwind a 5 billion dollar robbery
Have you talked to Crypto-enthusiasts before? They very much don't want that.
So crypto + legal company means not really following bitcoin ideology anymore
My heart goes out to you, along with these two definitely not Nazi salutes.
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.