He is still in China living with his girlfriend.
Miami, Florida – A 17-count indictment was unsealed in federal court in Miami, Florida charging Paul E. Vernon, 48, the founder, operator, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Project Investors Inc., doing business as Cryptsy
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/ceo-major-online-crypto...
The US and China do not have an extradition treaty. ie even if they wanted to do something, they can’t. The same goes for Russia
But maybe it wouldn't be that exciting to see some guys sitting at a desk.
Let me introduce you to the TV show Industry which takes you into the world of London high finance where tense phone calls, compliance violations and financial crimes are the order of the day [1]
So yeah, really not exciting ... just sad.
Not sure if I want it written and developed by North Korea or its enemies…
Cursor's security announcement was posted on Oct 29 and says that the malicious extension was live "between about 2:27am PT and 1:35pm PT today"
This article says the attack took place "on Thursday" (which means Oct 29) and began at 4pm ET (which is 1pm PT)
and Binance has been tweeting that the cause of the hack may be a compromised employee laptop. yikes
i don't have a solution.
Things like--
* Minimizing attack surfaces by not running lots of software on the same server and not bloating feature sets beyond the minimum
* Limiting access so that most things can't be done by most users, there are *no* super-users, and escalating access is temporary ans requires multiple accounts to authorize
* Encrypting data at rest
If your plan is to quickly apply upstream patches, your plan is bad.
I try so hard for this, but don't even get approval to change an internal site to use https instead of http.
I get we gotta keep the new features and workflows coming, but a single resource dedicated to low hanging fruit of security could fix a lot in a very short time.
That usually doesn't happen unless the company has suffered a large financial or reputational loss as a result of poor security practices. Sometimes not even then, if the company doesn't get scared they'll start losing money or get in some sort of legal trouble.
This used to be common before devops and cloud took over. Looks like it might make a comeback. Maybe with a new fancier job title
I've seen this a few times, and it's pretty annoying as a user, but ultimately it's not that bad usually. If you are ordering something at 3am, the physical shipment still occurs during daylight hours. Many banking operations are not actually instantaneous, they settle in a batch job overnight.
And this doesn't have to be binary. Providing a read-only interface provides lots of value while having a reduced attack surface.
That tooling should be shut off from the internet [1], and if it uses a LLM that should be at least a few years old.
[1] technically impossible if it also has the ability to veto responses, but the surface can be very small.
Easy to drop a sentence in a discussion. Harder to implement.
It's easy, if you already have teams in the US, UK, India, and Australia - it's always normal office hours in one of those location.
It has been days now.
Binance hot wallet signed 50 EIP-7702 delegations 3 minutes before the drain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50306715 - October 2026
Binance hot wallet signed 50 authorizations 3 minutes before the drain - https://808bits.com/articles/binance-hot-wallet-eip-7702-del... - October 30th, 2026
OTOH I heard that the culprits didn't steal the private keys of the affected customers. If this is true the stolen cryptocoins are worthless.
Exchanges do put most of the assets in a cold storage. Binance has $155B in assets and handles $14B of trade volume in 24 hours so not all of it are in a cold storage.
The only hope is that most of it gets frozen in some way or another, but if even only 1% gets through they'll still have made about $65M
How can you "freeze" Bitcoin transactions? If you have the private keys you can always make transfers etc.
If they get away with $6.5 Billion Binance is done for. There's no way they'll be able to repay their customers.
I don't work at Binance, but having been in that exact situation (SRE @ Crypto company with lots of assets, attacked by North Koreans), I'm guessing DevOps guy gave access to some CI/CD, `kubectl exec` what have you which allowed attackers to play with APIs, some settlement mechanic, some smart contract update pipeline. You don't really have to attack wallets if something less secure controls them. This really could stem from nothing, excessive permissions in a GitHub token can go very leveraged properly.
So that pool of wallets that stores all their customers funds needs to be managed by the exchange somehow, meaning there's going to be some sysadmins/devs/etc that have access to parts of the system that deal with those wallets, and possibly also the keys to those wallets (which it looks like was the case here).
2) You can't freeze Bitcoin transactions (well, the crypto bros running it could if their majority wanted to, but they don't want to), but some of the stolen coins were stablecoins like USDT and USDC.
And fiat-backed stablecoins are ipso facto centralised (someone needs to 1) take receipt of fiat and issue coins against that, 2) custody that fiat and hold on to it reliably, and 3) return the fiat when given back the coins). You can then with the private key send the coins back to the issuer, but the issuer can refuse to give you the fiat.
However, many stable coin smart contracts are even more powerful: they give the issuer an authorized control account that can add a wallet address to a blacklist. The contract checks that list whenever someone tries to move the token; if the address is blocked, it rejects the transfer. Then the balance can’t be moved.
There’s a small difference: USDC blocks transfers both to and from a blacklisted address. USDT generally blocks the address from sending USDT, though it may still receive USDT. Tether’s contract also has a separate function that can destroy tokens held at a blacklisted address; that is distinct from simply freezing them. Note that when they destroy tokens, Tether keeps the cash - so it's a transfer from the criminals (or whoever held the tokens) to Tether. (Tether can then re-issue the coins and hand them back to law enforcement or the victim, but that's a separate step.)
I think people here underestimate how profitable these exchanges are.
This level of targeting is really only something that nation state actors can pull off, who are also protected from actual law enforcement prosecution. Unless attackers are really in North Korea, they would 100% be caught within just few days.
Sure, it let's some people keep their savings safe from dictatorial countries. But it also fuels other dictators that are doing pretty nasty stuff to their own people. And crypto is facilitating that.
And I feel for them but 2 wrongs don't make a right. Crypto is not the answer for that problem.
And approximately none of these people's problems have been actually solved with cryptocurrency.
But more likely scenario is they have friends who let them use their bank accounts (but don’t have friends who let them use their good overseas bank accounts, so not that useful).
Did I imply that? Creating a bank account in my country is an adventure on its own. If I got 50 USD in my wallet, I can exchange it somewhere and pay for food and whatever. My crypto account requires a computer, an internet connection, and someone willing to take it (no one around here).
If you wanted to run the arbitrage, you'd buy Bitcoin cheap abroad, send them to China or Korea, sell them expensive, and now you're stuck with fiat in China or Korea which you can't take out, either. BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes was closing the loop in the early days by frequently crossing the border from China to Hong Kong with a backpack full of cash. SBF and Alameda claimed to have made their early money similarly by finding a way to close the loop on the kimchi premium.
But the end result is that crypto currencies never really delivered on their promise, because they barely work in practice, and the only reason to engage with them is for gambling or crime. Anything else is just too slow, too expensive, too cumbersome, too error-prone, and just generally far too inconvenient. What's the point of a digital currency that is best stored on an air-gapped device that must never connect to any network?
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
I would've thought the implication was kind of obvious? And I'm not sure why you mention Dodd-Frank -- there were many bailouts throughout 2007-2010 and the point of Dodd-Frank was to put an end to that scheme.
I’m also uneasy about the investment case. When you own crypto, you have a reason to want others to buy it too. That can create a cycle where demand pushes the price up, and the rising price attracts more buyers. That happens in other markets too, but productive businesses can also generate revenue and cash flow that help support their value. Many crypto assets don’t have that same kind of foundation, although some are tied to specific services or network activity.
Regular currencies have a more obvious role in everyday life (pay taxes, settle debts, and buy things). Their value is influenced by factors like monetary policy, confidence in the issuer, and the strength of the underlying economy. That doesn’t make them stable or valuable in the same way as productive assets, but it does give them a practical purpose that many crypto assets don’t have.
I realize the morality of such a thing is subjective, so I'll just say that I've known a number of individuals, especially minors, who have relied on gray market sources.
The point is to NOT have a single place with access to all the money, votes, etc. Every participant should be acting as themselves, and there should be no way to do things on behalf of others without their consent.
The point of smart contracts is to have code you can actually trust. Your bank or openAI can change their website, APIs and even their models tomorrow. That’s not great for trust. Trust is what enables things to scale.
The same way you trust other internet protocols to just “route around problems” and not have one single point of failure, that is the substrate for Web3.
Imagine a Web2 website such as a student-teacher marketplace NOT handling millions of dollars, accepting money from students and paying them out to teachers. Imagine it being simply an interface while the actual transactions are approved by the students themselves, and instead of the central site signing payouts with some keys, the teachers get paid through smart contracts and code on the blockchain. The site can still take 10% commission from everything, it would be above board, and it can never change it without the consent of the people. The business logic is in the smart contract.
(Since this comment has the keywords “crypto” and “web3”, I know what will happen in advance already.)
The stolen USDT will likely be returned because Tether can do manual freezes like a traditional financial institution.
Where code is law the funds are just gone.
Like even in your example of the marketplace I don't see the benefits over having a central authority. Who determines who is a student or teacher? Who kicks out bad actors? Who resolves disputed transactions?
A decentralized network of wallets and balances doesn’t present an attractive target for hackers specifically because the payoff per wallet is so small!
It is exactly the centralization you are defending, which is at the root of the problem. In the decentralized case, no one has to determine who is a student or a teacher. If a teacher needs to pass KYC with a marketplace, they do it once, and from then on can permissionlessly receive their small payouts.
Centralization (on Binance) made the attack appealing, but decentralization (of crypto broadly) is the only reason it's possible, and centralization (of USDT et al) is the only path to recovery.
Re: the marketplace: we'd want to be able to revoke teacher access too, and sometimes we may need to roll back transactions (Goods not delivered? Wrong goods delivered? Wrong goods purchased?), and then I have to ask... why involve a blockchain at all?
The only compelling real world use case I've seen is helping people navigate hostile governments or dysfunctional economies.
That’s very naive thing to expect from code.
Indeed, very shortly since modems were invented, there was need for error correction. They were slow and clunky. The only reasonable conclusion is that the Internet is a fad and not worth discussing. Same as this newfangled decentralized cryptography stuff.
Indeed, very shortly after the Web came out, regular script kiddies could write php websites with blink tags. Credit card numbers were sent in the clear with http. This “e-commerce” thing was a dangerous joke, only idiots would send their credit cards over the Internet. It would never catch on!
Second, the crypto bros running Bitcoin have reverted 20+ blocks on at least two occasions when it suited them to do so, and Ethereum has famously undone the DAO hack. Oh, and then of course you have all the bugs in smart contracts that can't be fixed. So the notion that "code is law" is laughable, and the notion that it's desirable is misguided, too.
Third, there's the oracle problem. Keeping track of bits in a ledger is a solved problem and has been a solved problem for a long time. The issue is correlating it with the real world. In your example, what if the student pays, then the teacher doesn't teach? How is the money flow reverted? If the student can just revert it, what happens if the student pays, the teacher teaches, and the student then reverts the payment? You need the legal system, and external adjudication, one way or the other.
Crypto adds nothing but idle speculation and the circumvention of (largely sensible) rules and regulations.
I miss the old days of decentralized networks, and smart contracts that were audited. Forget the shitcoin memecoins and zero sum games mania, the NFTs and the prediction markets. There is so much positive sum that can be done:
Being able to leverage crypto on this scale requires everyone to either A) be technical enough to understand and use smart contracts directly or B) delegate a party that handles this for you. This is where the utopian case usually falls apart, because most people are B and this requires trusting a third party, which kinda defeats the entire point of the vision.
Because most people don't want to do the work of learning and managing crypto directly, a huge industry flourished to service these people, full of its own interests, corruption and various levels of criminality. And well-intentioned crypto people have no way to reign this industry in because the entire point is to operate in a deregulated way.
Ironically, the piece that makes crypto fundamentally unworkable 20 years in is capitalism.
Specifically, you had to claim your rewards in a certain time window or they'd disappear.
Very hard sell? This is effectively how the vast vast majority of people in the US have their money handled.
The means to afford LLMs? These are services that cost pennies.
There are defenses of traditional currencies that don't hold up to scrutiny, for instance the intrinsic value of gold is way lower than it's traded value. The ability to pay taxes in a currency is only valid while the arbitor allows it to be.
The Blockchain is an impressive design to allow multiple arbitors where you can't know in advance who it is going to be so no single actor can act in advance of that knowledge nor act as if they had sustained control.
The public record combined with an international Comms network means noone is disallowed.
So the good parts are, 1. a mechanism where everyone can use it. 2. No one actor can control monetary policy.
The bad parts are, 1. Uses a lot of power (but less than often reported) 2. lack of understanding and unrealistic expectations allow fraudsters to exploit people.
It is not a stick-it-to-the-man scheme, nor is it a way to perpetually make wealth (it can create and lose wealth over varying time frames but only by guessing how people in the future will value it compared to today)
The dangers of theft of a scale like this are an artifact of there being no single arbitor saying "no you can't do that" there is actually a solution to this, but it is not really being done. It is designed to have no do single arbitor, but if you have a majority of people reaching a consensus on any issue the entire system can change rules to any paradigm they wished. You could theoretically have a majority agree to reverse all of the digits in everyone's balance and then update the system to make it so.
To prevent cases like these huge heists you could have a majority consensus to support an independent regulator that makes decisions that can involve arbitrary changes to balances. While there is a majority consensus to agree with the rulings of that regulator they could adjudicate cases like this. If the regulator started acting in the interests of any particular party that consensus would be lost and miners who disagree would not incorporate their rulings into the chain.
I think there is potential for there to be a better system there. It would likely involve governments becoming miners (or at the very least having some influence on the miners in their duristiction)
I don't think there is enough public opinion in support of doing that though.
Tldr; I can see a way in which it works, but we are not there. We might get there over a long duration (if crypto does not go away for another few decades). To get there quickly would require significant changes in public perception.
But, what I liked about the idea of crypto is for the many poor and weaker countries that realistically can't afford to float their own currency in a stable way.
Many countries have never-ending sliding currencies or highly volatile currencies. And the locals don't have a lot of choice but to hold the local currency and watch their hard-earned savings evaporate.
Or worse they can't even do business with other countries because their banking system is highly restricted (because of maybe illegal activity taking place in the country by a minority or their local government being out of favor with the rest of the world) and that prevents legitimate businesses from easily transacting.
There are so many countries in which the national currency is a daily nightmare. And individuals in those countries that are unbanked.
Crypto in the rich industrialized countries never really made sense to me. And even less so as an asset for speculation.
In rich countries, I think it's more for those who are of the criminal or conspiracy theorist variety.
Further, in the rich, industrialized countries, the ability to have a stable national currency and a national currency that is easy to transact with around the world is taken for granted.
And, for those poor weaker countries, dollar access is weaponized as we've seen in many cases. Even if a country is wealthy enough to hold significant dollar deposits, those can be frozen at any time.
In fact even within a country that wants to use the international banking system, that country's access can be frozen at any time, at the stroke of a pen, by a government far away.
And it's naive to believe that this power is consistently used in a just manner.
North Korea is a case in point regarding the value of crypto for a poor or sidelined country.
I won't get into a debate regarding whether that's a good thing or bad thing in the case of North Korea, but it does illustrate why crypto has value for countries that are extremely poor and lack access to global finance. It's not always because the country is run by an evil dictator.
Sometimes it's because the country is just run by an incompetent government.
And in an increasingly hostile world with increasing great power rivalry, crypto has usefulness for countries that want to stay out of the crossfire and transact business without having to kowtow (become subservient) to one of the great powers just to transact payments.
But yeah crypto in the industrialized world is mostly for speculators, conspiracy theorists, and criminals. That I agree with. But I do think crypto has a powerful use case in a lot of the world where the payment system isn't as developed and isn't as well integrated into global finance.
These may be perfectly legal (example xxx sites), gray at worst (like anime websites). Some anime site that had (for example) paypal for over 15+ years. Plop ... gone.
Crypto has become become the alternative payment method for those sites. So its not "dictators that are doing pretty nasty stuff" but a ton of sites and services that can be affected.
Ironically, there has been a lot of focus also in Europe regarding this issue, as much of the internet payment processors are in or linked to the US. With the focus to get a alternative to Visa/Mastercard going.
The reality is that a lot of power regarding payment processing is in the hands off one country, that has a lot of large companies with interests/powers to dictate over the entire world, what is and is not allowed. And crypto has becomes a necessary evil. In a ideal world we do not need crypto as payment processors are neutral or at minimum have very stronger requirements to kick off clients. But the reality is different...
For example, you can donate to Sci-Hub with cryptocurrency. Sci-Hub has an ideological mission which is widely supported, but it runs afoul of copyright law and is illegal in nearly every country and sanctioned in many. You cannot donate to Sci-Hub with fiat currency.
Unfortunately, I agree that in practice >99% of cryptocurrency's use is for scams.
That seems valuable, but I’m not sure how much truth there is to a story I read on the internet.
Wait you mean Venezuela didn't experience four years of hyper-inflation in a row? You mean you don't believe that story is true?
Of course, the bottleneck then becomes converting stablecoin dollars to real dollars.
In the end, maybe that friction is actually a net positive for safety.
Whener I tried to send Crypto, there were fees over fees, from wallets, transfer fees, etc., probably I was doing something wrong, but that was the most frictionless path
On the other hand, sending USDC actually moves the money for real, albeit, not totally free.
a) blockchain has no technological merit (given that permissioned systems already allowed for robust distributed consensus even in the presence of byzantine nodes back in the late 1990's).
b) the one innovation it brings (permissionlessness) is overwhelmingly negative (who really needs the "no gatekeeper" property?).
c) blockchain is good for nothing except crypto and crypto kittens (due to the oracle problem).
d) crypto is good for nothing except speculation and the circumvention of rules and regulations (which, like it or not, are mostly sensible).
Concretely for example on your point (it "let's some people keep their savings safe from dictatorial countries") - this would be trivial to offer for any bank using 1980's technology (offer an USD account just with username or password, no KYC), but it would also obviously be illegal and be shut down.
Making it harder to shut down - that's the one innovation crypto brings. But shutting it down is what we should be working towards.
It does have speculative value, as well, but I suspect that if you subtract speculative investments, the remaining total market cap of crypto is the value of criminal profit.
Bitcoin’s price volatility also seems no worse than the possibility of losses of cash due to theft.
This is why I don't particularly support most cryptocurrencies, as they don't solve these issues and feel more like a horrific version of the stock market. Monero on the other hand does pretty decisively solve these issues, I can give you an address to send money to without giving out any other information, I can send money to you without my purchase history being public (unlike bitcoin), the transaction fees are very low (unlike bitcoin), the block time is quite low. It does feel like the perfect system for daily purchases if it would be embraced, which I am aware it won't be. The issue of no recourse for keys being compromised could be slightly mitigated by putting only limited amounts of money in the wallet at a time, although I do know this isn't ideal (but it's probably a cost for having actual privacy). I really don't get most cryptocurrencies though, bitcoin was a good POC but it's been surpassed in every way by now.
I just feel like I'm being forced to give up my privacy, and Monero (or similar) is a potential solution to this that doesn't give up the convenience of digital currency. I guess though I'm seeing it from the perspective of a daily payment system, rather than a savings system (I'd pretty much always prefer my savings in an actual bank with the protections therein).
Keeping an absolutely small amount of buffer in stablecoins and swapping it for monero for actual transactions is what I do or just keeping it in monero directly (and that is also because the act of moving the money out is harder and I just buy vps's/domains with it semi-anonymously)
You can just pay fiat to buy monero when you actually have use of it.
Aside from very few use-cases (like dictatorship cases for example) I just think that it doesn't make sense for people to invest life-saving investments for money within crypto perhaps.
I think that one can use crypto for its good sides (anonymous payments) without facing its downsides by buying crypto or just having an insanely small/small buffer and using it when needed rather than life-changing savings.
So crypto is more like user-unknown rather than anonymous. I expect that normally these are about equivalent, but if you run into edge cases the difference could be catastrophic.
You can still choose to generate a proof of transaction to give to someone, which proves that you did make one specific transaction.
Monero is genuinely a really interesting, and frankly ideal as far as I can tell for my purposes, cryptocurrency. It's a shame it's associated with crime because it solves all of my issues with spending digital currency from a privacy and practicality perspective.
But I think private/permissioned chains will gain some adoption in the background of tradfi, especially for clearing and settlement, collateral management via tokenisation etc. Your bank might eventually use technology developed in crypto, but it'll be called 'distributed ledger technology' or 'tokenisation' rather than crypto because of the negative image.
X enables good things but X also enables bad things. Freedom of speech enables democracies, but it also enables mass manipulation. By definition any freedom enables any possible action resulting from that freedom. Note that this is not really the case with everything either. The same argument can’t be made (reasonably) about biological weapons for example.
IMO it’s very hard to make a proper argument pro or against crypto in lay terms. It will be a never ending argument. The fundamental is that of centralization vs decentralization and that’s a relevant reasoning despite of what the current incarnation of currencies and behaviors we’ve been seeing.
Without cryptocurrency, dictators and criminals would still be able to move money around, it would just be a bit harder for them. For ordinary people it’d be disproportionately harder and more expensive.
It would be better if it was dictators stealing from dictators or normal people stealing from normal people, but it's not that at all.
I mean, that's what the big mean government does, they monitor financial transactions and they collect taxes. But when we talk about financial privacy from the prying eyes of the government as a goal, and let's suppose people actually use crypto like was dreamed, this necessarily implies crypto being a tool to launder money. (in practice, this is better realized by privacy coins like Monero and ZCash, since Bitcoin sucks for privacy: your address is an anonymous handle but the network leak metadata. But, the desire for financial privacy was there in the Bitcoin community since the beginning).
And what else people do when they can hide their money from the government? In a lot of cases, they don't pay taxes (which is also a disposition present in the Bitcoin community since the beginning, with a rhetoric like, collecting taxes are not legitimate)
What I think was a later development was the main use case for crypto in real world, which is to collect payment for ransomware and things like this. This, I don't think it's something the early Bitcoin community envisioned.
Did it take 17 years for you to get there, or was it a while ago and you just say now that you were into crypto 17 years ago?
And I don't mean to be offending here: people routinely take years or decades on similar things. I have been observing that with climate change for 20 years now. And I see many many people who are still in that process. Actually I would argue that most people out there haven't reached the point where we can have the discussion, they seem to be in the "denial" phase still.
Analogy is holding and trading gold underground that hasn't been mined yet using securities or other representation subject to capital market regulations and the legal framework. Is it an asset? Yes, if proven, documented, etc. Is it safe? Yes. Will you get your value back if the capital market representation of the underlying is stolen? Most likely (finra, sipc, etc).
But having live value on rails that enable instant movement globally with no recourse for unauthorized transfer? You're gonna have a bad time.
> safe from dictatorial countries.
Yeah, that's definitely an argument. But it's kind of funny when the backdrop is that $6B was taken by North Korea.
It feels like a sibling to the popular attitudes towards not trusting big banks, or voting for <candidate> who demonstrably achieves the opposite of what you're seeking, or feeling that democracy ain't working out great, or that vaccines are scary and dangerous. There's just a fundamental lack of higher-order thinking. It's all vibe-based reasoning. What feels scary is what guides these behaviours. Which, I think, is why it's so unsurprising that people in these camps make such unbelievably strong candidates for exploitation.
I don't know about that. What I know is that dictators and criminals have existed since forever and the official estimates put the part of the worldwide GDP tied to criminal activities to between 3% and 5%, which is gigantic.
I don't think Bitcoin is to be blamed for that. If we're worried about dictators and criminals, a good question to ask would be: why do those exists at all? (and that's irrelevant to Bitcoin)
The unbanked, like myself. People that for any reason is being locked out of the "american" way of doing things
Stripe doesn't cover 200 countries, nor does Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, Visa, etc (all american btw). So a parallel banking system is needed, no questions about that, and Binance provides the best of all, and that's why it's being targeted by we know who (just follow the money)
Now, whether if it is crypto or not, I don't care, all I want is the possibility to pay and receive money (USD, EUR or CNY as the top currencies right now) without the draconian restrictions imposed by the hegemons trying to asphyxiate does who don't kneel
That's exactly why we need a parallel banking system, crypto or not
The original promise of crypto and blockchain was to cut out the middleman and NOT concentrate a lot of money under a few custodial keys.
If you took your crypto off exchanges when not in use, you’d be fine. Not your keys, not your crypto.
I equate it to anonymity on the internet. Yes, if everyone had to associate their real identity with everything they posted on the internet some unjustly persecuted individuals would not be able to get their stories out. And there would be a heck of a lot less other bullshit.
One of the ways this manifested was my ability to anticipate problems at work and poke holes in things. This made me incredibly unpopular. You never get thanked for this. Instead you get punished for being right too early. You are negative. You are a naysayer. You aren't a team player. And you were 100% correct and it didn't matter.
Back in 2012 I remember thinking "I don't see how crypto has any applications other than illegal stuff". And I stood by that. Note that morality and legality are two different things. Sending money to relatives in a country that disallows foreign currency transactions may be moral but it's still illegal.
What's frustrating is dealing with the same consequences of being right too early. It's muddied by true disruption. An example that was often brought up was Google. In the late 1990s, it was believed that search was a "solved" problem and there was no money in it. That's 100% true. But you can't ignore any criticism with "people once thought the world was round". It's a useless fallacy to deploy.
The absolutely dumbest people and outright scammers were attracted to crypto. A bunch of people who missed out on Bitcon's meteoric rise didn't want to miss the next meteor or they simply wanted to rug pull before they themselves got rug pulled.
The financial system is an endless series of Chesterton's Fences. So many things work the way they do because of a problem that occurred. They say that safety regulations are written in blood. People died to make those regulations. Well, financial regulations are the same way.
Being able to freeze assets and reverse transactions, for example, is a feature, not a bug.
The real story with crypto is how greed clouds people's judgment. So many people on HN thought they were going to make their bag on crypto and people like myself got shouted down as naysayers.
I really don't know what to do with this information other than those same warnings are beign ignored about AI and in 5 years I will be punished for being right too early. There's simply no market to recoup the trillions invested in rapidly depreciating assets around software with no moat.
They're not even remotely close to being comparable.
I agree. AI is useful to layoff thousands of employees as we have already seen, hacking companies and governments with agent swarms and also helping with accelerating cyber crime.
Now anyone including script kiddies can tell an AI agent to build an exploit to attack a website of their choosing the moment they find a vulnerability.
You cannot say it is useful (which it is) and it does not also accelerate and amplify all the negative consequences at the same time.
> Crypto has none except scams and get rich quick.
Stablecoins are quite useful for companies such as Stripe, Shopify, Square and others for payment of goods and one can send stablecoins around the world on the same day, 24/7 with extremely low fees.
Crypto is not the one that will cause the next financial crisis. That will be AI.
Thanks to the $3TN (and counting) debt that is now becoming a massive risk to the point where big tech companies are hiding it from their balance sheets [0] with Oracle and even CoreWeave being the most likely to default first. [1]
[1] https://siliconangle.com/2026/10/14/shares-of-oracle-neoclou...
First 10 minutes: Making a team, 2 guys or gals living a life, talk about it
11-30 minutes: Demoing how bad our security systems are, we need to patch them, day and night, can't keep up
31-40: But we need money, no one is paying our bounties
41-50: How about? They do not tell what it is
51-60: We are going to hack StarLink (they never say that, it is just the logo in the background when they are talking how easy it is to get in and out)
61-70: Dry Run, text scrolling on the screens
71-85: The Hack, split screens, zoom in and outs
86-88: Oh it was Solozzo (Binance) all along, not Starlink.
89:90: Dude fills up his car with the stolen USDT and realizes that as he is sitting in the car
I like the final twist. It would be even better if it turns out the protagonist was manipulated by the real players and he ends up with little reward (because crime doesn't pay, kids!) but with renewed faith in his abilities.
who is Barzini and who is Tattaglia, just so i can call the latter a pimp
1-90: Time needed for bathtub scene to explain this shit
Crazy that most of this gets put into North Korean weapons programs.
Isn't Binance the one that needs to be prosecuted for negligent security? How does "a compromised laptop" lead to a $6bn wipe in a matter of minutes?
This is why banks are regulated, though I have no idea if/whether these platforms are regulated in any similar way.
Next time this happens to Binance though they won't have an emergency fund and possibly they'll be in debt, and that's when the users will be very screwed.
Their terrible security certainly indicates to me that future of Binance is not going to be a pretty one unless they make some enormous changes.
Note that “crime” has a specific definition in law. You don’t have to be a criminal (commit a crime) to be rightfully sued, civil suits are a thing.
Anyway, your parent comment already answered the question, they would be sued by negligence.
Only the government (e.g., federal, state, local) may bring a criminal suit.[1] But in both civil / criminal cases they are still a suit under the law seeking some form of ordered relief from the Court.
Essentially, you can think of "criminal" as a category of law and relief (e.g., prison) that is only accessible to the government.
Both the government and citizens may bring "civil" suits. Very generally, the remedies in civil suits are a court order to 1) stop doing a thing; 2) to do a thing required by law / agreement; 3) to transfer property, usually but not always money, from one party to another; or 4) to define a set of rules governing the parties going forward.
[1] There may be some obscure exception to this, but it is true for everything I've ever seen / heard of.
No, it's not. At least not historically.