Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance (arkm.com)

Moved where? Moving to a different wallet wouldn't prevent freezing. It's 5B, impossible to cash out or exchange for different crypto quickly.

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.

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.

Unless it's Monero, the only currency to be declared illegal in most countries because it's too much like cash.

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

> 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)?

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.

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 cryptocurrency enthusiasts are a small minority of cryptocurrency users.

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".

Probably the founders/employees of the company issuing/redeeming the token would be arrested very quickly. Tornado Cash people got arrested for much less.

All systems can be bent, broken, or subverted.

You mean the smart nerds

For the less economical-savvy ones it was like Beanie Babies or Tulips (with predictable consequences)

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Until you need to move or share it. That's why monero XMR is the only serious fungible and decentralized 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

I must live a very vanilla, sheltered life because I’ve never bought anything and wondered if a payment processor would object to it.

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 completely unregulated and they can print infinite money.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is a tradeoff. When using secure enclave, you need a second backup keypair in cold storage that needs to be secured.

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).

Binance, and most other exchanges, don't charge platform deposit fees. USDC/T is not expensive to transfer.

Not your keys, not your crypto. Use a nice safe hardware wallet. Just check for extra SIM cards first, and audit the key generator.

But that lesson does not apply 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.

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.

No lol

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.

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...

Freezing bank accounts was and is possible. People don't seem to be still using them.

> 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?

That's just, like, security through obscurity, man. Git gud and bring on the lambos I say!