[HN Gopher] Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it...
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Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it tries to rally
confidence
Author : joenathanone
Score : 251 points
Date : 2022-12-19 17:48 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| joenathanone wrote:
| I think these Bitcoin exchanges need to be regulated the same way
| banks are, or we are going to see a repeat of the early days of
| banking where banks would disappear overnight along with people's
| life savings.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I think these Bitcoin exchanges need to be regulated the same
| way banks are, or we are going to see a repeat of the early
| days of banking where banks would disappear overnight along
| with people's life savings.
|
| What is the gift of predicting events that have already
| occurred called?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > What is the gift of predicting events that have already
| occurred called?
|
| Retroactive precognition?
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Recognition
| worik wrote:
| > What is the gift of predicting events that have already
| occurred called?
|
| Learning from your mistakes.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Why use the future tense when you can use the past and the
| present?
| notRobot wrote:
| We could even call it something else! Like, uh, cash!
| _the_inflator wrote:
| This is part of the fraud: Convert fiat into something
| virtual, steal the virtual stuff, convert it back into money.
| Rinse and repeat.
|
| So everybody can say: Hey, it was crypto, not money.
| kodah wrote:
| Having something cash-like that's digital I think would be
| good. Bitcoin ain't it though.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| Monero does the job fairly well, the only issue is that the
| floating exchange rate can make it difficult. A stable-coin
| with Monero's properties would do well I think.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| A stable coin requires proof of who owns the actual
| coins, so that the clubs can be redeemed for real
| dollars. That would defeat the whole point of Monero.
| There is no way to make an anonymous stable coin, as long
| as owning and transferring dollars requires KYC and AML.
| Kranar wrote:
| Doesn't require it no. DAI is a stable coin that has held
| its peg to USD for something like 5 years now and there's
| no proof of ownership involved.
|
| https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/multi-collateral-
| dai/
| [deleted]
| twblalock wrote:
| We already mostly have that.
|
| Most of the US dollars that exist are already digital --
| numbers in a bank account, only some of which is backed by
| actual dollar bills. It is trivially easy to use them to
| pay for things or transfer them to other accounts, and they
| can easily be converted to/from paper money in reasonable
| amounts.
|
| What we have now is fine. I don't see any benefit to making
| our existing currencies more "digital" than they are.
| mypastself wrote:
| The commenter you're responding to was specifically
| talking about digital cash, not digital currency.
| Properties of cash are distinct from other forms of money
| in specific ways. "Ease" of conversion from one to the
| other doesn't make them identical.
| twblalock wrote:
| I haven't yet seen anyone demonstrate a _meaningful_
| distinction between "digital currency" and "digital
| cash" that actually matters for how people use money.
| mypastself wrote:
| Anonymity (or pseudonimity) is a key appeal of cash as
| opposed to other forms of money. Combined with the ease
| of use of digital payments, I can completely understand
| the attraction that the original comment was referring
| to.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| The fact the SEC simultaneously insists it has the right to
| regulate crypto AND refuses to do the basic, vanilla, widely
| supported stuff like require brokers to segregate funds is
| pretty damning.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| How can they do that when these exchanges are based outside
| the US (except for Coinbase)
| joenathanone wrote:
| Correct me if I am wrong, but as I understand it as long as
| they do business in the US then they are accountable to US
| laws/regulations.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Using the example of FTX, only FTX.us _officially_
| operated in the US (and was supposedly run more like a
| real bank), but there was always a "wink, wink, nudge,
| nudge" hint that if you want the _good stuff_ you should
| go around the geoblocking and deal with FTX proper.
|
| The other interesting element is that the most vocal
| crypto backers, often for ideological reasons, _want_ to
| deal with this completely unregulated system that crypto
| has created. If the SEC had intervened before FTX
| collapsed, I 'm sure you would hear cries of
| "authoritarianism" and "fiat banks are scared" from the
| usual suspects. Perhaps we should let these people have
| what they want - consequences and all - and just limit
| the ability to buy Super Bowl commercials in regulated
| markets for unregulated products.
| danaris wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't we _already_ seen a bunch
| of cryptocurrency companies of various types do exactly that?
|
| (It's possible none of them have been exchanges; I admit I only
| pay peripheral attention to that sphere.)
| artursapek wrote:
| It literally just happened with FTX, which was off-shore
| exchange that wouldn't have been under the jurisdiction of
| American regulators.
|
| Ironically, a lot of Americans were using VPNs to trade there
| and lost their savings. Why? Because FTX.US is regulated so
| heavily that it isn't as attractive of a product.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's possible none of them have been exchanges
|
| There have been exchanges, as far back as MtGox, and as
| recently as FTX and FTX.US.
| KrakenEng wrote:
| Exchanges aren't banks and shouldn't act like banks. Banks are
| allowed to take deposits and lend then out, ie they don't need
| 100% reserves. Exchanges should be required to hold at least
| 100% reserves.
|
| FTX collapsed, in part, because they weren't maintaining
| reserves. Instead they gambled with customer money.
| jacquesm wrote:
| FTX collapsed, in part, because they were acting _like banks_
| by lending out the funds they were entrusted with and
| leveraging them.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| I mean... We already knew they were a black box. And anyone
| keeping assets on-exchange this soon after FTX frankly only has
| themselves to blame.
| seydor wrote:
| > The Reuters analysis
|
| The "investigative" part is public data that any of us can view.
| If there was something remarkable there, crypto bros would have
| found it without waiting for reuters to "review" things.
|
| Obviously since binance is not based in the US or EU, its users
| don't expect the same level of transparency that banks have. If
| reuters wanted more transparency maybe it should ask some country
| to allow it to base itself there. But given that they have been
| effectively on the run for most of their existence, it's not
| strange that they are keeping their secrets to themselves. I
| think reuters is trying to be sensational but none of the news it
| reports are.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > If reuters wanted more transparency maybe it should ask some
| country to allow it to base itself there.
|
| They are welcome to base themselves in any jurisdiction however
| they would rather not because they have no interest in
| complying with the kinds of financial regulations that underpin
| a modern and functional economy.
|
| Why on earth would we want to compromise on these regulations
| and onshore these bucket shops? Just look what happens when you
| let them do as they will.
| [deleted]
| seydor wrote:
| > They are welcome
|
| Are they? They are not unless they transform to another
| boring bank which defeats the purpose of the exchange.
| Banking is not why their users joined
| arcticbull wrote:
| > Are they? They are not unless they transform to another
| boring bank which defeats the purpose of the exchange.
| Banking is not why their users joined
|
| Sure, but if their users joined to participate in an
| unlawful offshore casino then my point remains. They can
| comply with regulations, or not. It's not the
| responsibility of the states to bow down to binance and
| allow this silliness, but on binance to conform to a state
| regulatory framework.
| seydor wrote:
| > but on binance to conform to a state regulatory
| framework.
|
| Which is not something they want. That was my comment
| about actually, Reuters article implies that binance must
| comply with some state.
| lottin wrote:
| If binance wants to sell their services in a particular
| market they must comply with the rules that are in place
| in that market. Is that controversial?
| seydor wrote:
| Afaik they do already, binance.us exists
| freejazz wrote:
| Reuters article is implying that Binance's unwillingness
| to show what many regulations would require is because it
| is a fraud.
| corv wrote:
| How is it the responsibility of an offshore company to
| conform to some states regulatory framework - and which
| states anyways?
|
| If people want these products and they are regulated out
| of the market, offshore is where these companies will go
| to provide them.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| If _US_ people want these products and Binance wants to
| sell these products to US people, Binance should conform
| to the US regulatory framework. Otherwise it is on
| Binance to ensure they do not sell their products to US
| customers.
| corv wrote:
| It is US customers who are circumventing the technical
| measures set in place to prevent them from trading on
| these platforms with VPNs and fake PII.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That line of reasoning worked so well for BetonSports.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BetonSports
|
| And hey, what's 33 months in prison?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _since binance is not based in the US or EU, its users don 't
| expect the same level of transparency that banks have_
|
| I am not a Binance user. My tax dollars will be used to clean
| up this mess once it implodes. I am also not too keen on it
| playing piggy bank to Iran and North Korea.
| seydor wrote:
| > My tax dollars will be used to clean up this mess once it
| implodes
|
| Really? have they been used to clean up the mess of some
| other offshore company imploding?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _have they been used to clean up the mess of some other
| offshore company imploding?_
|
| Investigating FTX, extraditing SBF and putting people in
| jail isn't free.
| stickfigure wrote:
| The US government gets a bulk discount.
| seydor wrote:
| That's because sbf was a US citizen. And presumably this
| is all paid by the recovered money, not the taxpayer.
| Otherwise, why even bother
| SideQuark wrote:
| >That's because sbf was a US citizen.
|
| Nope, that's incidental. If he were foreign, and had
| committed the fraud he did against the US, he would
| likely also be extradited to here to stand trial, the
| same as, e.g., these three Nigerian nationals [1] or this
| Jamaican [2] (or, if you search for a moment, hundreds of
| other cases).
|
| >And presumably this is all paid by the recovered money,
| not the taxpayer.
|
| It's paid by the taxpayer, through the budgets of the
| DOJ, the same way things like Enron, Madoff, and other
| massive frauds are not paid out of recovered money, which
| is used to pay off creditors.
|
| You can check the line item in the federal budget that
| pays the DOJ, so that's not a question that taxpayers pay
| for these legal enforcements. If you want to claim
| "presumably" please show the valid source where this
| entire criminal cost will be paid for by the recovered
| money.
|
| [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-nigerian-
| nationals-extr...
|
| [2] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jamaican-national-
| extradited-...
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a pretty naive view. Him being a US citizen makes
| a bunch of stuff easier and some other things harder but
| none of those would ultimately stand in the way of him
| going to trial. And even if you hide in a place where
| there is no extradition you are _still_ going to be tried
| but in absentia. And good luck moving around after that.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Binance is already being investigated by US law
| enforcement; American taxpayers are already incurring
| these costs.
|
| The FBI isn't gonna get the recovered money from FTX
| (what's left of it). That'll go to the bankrupt entity's
| creditors.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's time to go find a nice juicy head of lettuce I think.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| I think it's amusing as hell how the founder of Binance had a
| spat with SBF and was partly responsible for hurrying along the
| collapse of FTX (though that dumpster fire was doomed anyhow),
| and is now reaping the whirlwind of his own backstabbing of
| another major crypto bro.
|
| Note: I personally believe in the utility of crypto and think
| much of the hate for it on HN is downright idiotic and ignorant,
| but giant shenanigans like these are are a separate matter of
| natural human greed, fraud, lies and self destructive
| foolishness.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/11/binance-f...
| deebosong wrote:
| I'm sure you've fielded this Q many times.
|
| I don't wanna be a full-on hater of crypto. And I do wanna hear
| of use-cases that are relevant and intuitively understandable
| or at baseline, usable, to laymen.
|
| What utility do you see - through all the noise and chaos and
| human flaws that taint all things - from crypto, that to you
| just makes sense and will prevail in light of all the deserved
| and undeserved criticism?
| danielvf wrote:
| Two good articles from the last few weeks on what has made
| the cut over the last few years and proven to be useful :
|
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/12/05/excited.html
|
| https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-im-less-than-
| infin...
|
| I won't summarize, beyond agreeing with the second that a lot
| of the view that "all of crypto is a scam" is driven by the
| fact that essentially all public facing crypto advertisements
| are for scams. However behind the scenes there are open
| decentralized system that do move billions of dollars
| smoothly and safely for millions of people.
| corv wrote:
| Very much agree, the post by Scott Alexander is nuanced and
| well worth the read
| jeffreyrogers wrote:
| In most of the cases Scott cites the underlying thing
| being facilitated can be done via a normal financial
| system, some countries just don't have one that functions
| very well. So I don't see the benefits of crypto as much
| as I see the benefits of having a well functioning
| financial system. Crypto just outsources that from local
| regulators, banks, etc., to crypto developers. Might be a
| good tradeoff for those countries.
|
| The personal example Scott gives of sending money to
| Russians is probably illegal and circumvents currency
| controls that the Russian government has deliberately put
| in place, so not really a demonstration for crypto as
| much as it is an example that people find these types of
| transactions useful for various reasons.
| wmf wrote:
| It would be interesting if the US set up some kind of
| Freedom Bank specifically for people in China, Russia,
| Venezuela, Argentina, Nigeria, etc. to access US dollars
| and dollar-based investments. Those countries wouldn't
| appreciate it though so I'd expect a lot of diplomatic
| blowback. Until then, there's crypto for better or worse.
|
| [Insert conspiracy theory here about Tether being a CIA
| op to dollarize the developing world.]
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| Having a normal, working financial system isn't really a
| global or historical norm. Very arguably we're on an
| isolated island of relative economic calm in both time
| and space, and that we should not assume these conditions
| will just continue forever.
| JoshTko wrote:
| If you disagree with your govt. either financial policies
| (taxation, currency controls etc.) or political. You can use
| Bitcoin to maintain control your assets. For example, if the
| government suddenly decides to restrict capital leaving the
| country, BTC would be free from that restriction. If your
| govt. decides your political activity is now criminal and
| wants to freeze all your assets domestically as well with
| international partners, BTC would not be frozen. This is not
| a problem that most people in the US will face. But if you
| are a Russian or Chinese citizen then BTC's utility would be
| much more real.
| cduzz wrote:
| That's an interesting theory.
|
| In practice, maintaining anonymous ownership of your assets
| on BTC is excruciatingly hard, because it's a public
| record.
|
| The organizations that monopolize violence ("governments",
| typically) have ways of compelling people that simply
| ignore some magic number in a distributed database. Please
| do a thing or we'll do a thing to someone you care about. I
| suspect even Satochi would happily give up the private keys
| to avoid a visit to Lubyanka...
|
| That's not to say that there's no value to these things,
| but real life violence trumps imaginary freedom.
| valcron1000 wrote:
| Well, I use crypto to bypass currency controls so there's
| your "imaginary freedom"
| cduzz wrote:
| I'm not sure what is imaginary here.
|
| You believe you've done a thing in contravention of your
| government's laws. Perhaps you've done it and will not be
| caught. Perhaps you've done it and they haven't gotten
| around to asking you politely not to do this. Some crypto
| currency obviously leaves a paper trail for all to see;
| some states it doesn't and perhaps doesn't, but perhaps
| does.
|
| Autonomy to break a law and not get immediately punished
| for it isn't really freedom from that law.
|
| To clarify -- breaking a law is not imaginary. Maybe
| you've broken the law and haven't immediately faced any
| repercussion, but that doesn't mean that bypassing money
| laundering controls renders those money laundering
| controls or punishments for breaking the controls
| imaginary.
|
| (edited to add the clarification)
| Bilal_io wrote:
| the idea boils down to: If the government can see what's
| your bank account in details, and can seize it, and the
| government can see what's in your Bitcoin wallet but not
| with full transparency and cannot seize it, which is
| better?
| enraged_camel wrote:
| I don't know about Russia, but I think if China decided to
| restrict capital from leaving their country, they would
| definitely crack down on crypto since escaping capital
| controls is crypto's primary use case and China knows that.
|
| You might ask "what does such a crackdown look like?" And
| the answer is, they would simply round up and throw in jail
| prominent crypto people, make it a crime to do anything
| with crypto (buy, sell, use as currency etc.) and put the
| fear of god in everyone else so that nobody dares touch
| crypto.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Besides if you control the whole network, how hard would
| it be to filter the Bitcoin network calls and then arrest
| the people making them?
| melenaboija wrote:
| That sounds like an empty argument to me. Besides that the
| only use I see so far for crypto is speculation (with fiat
| currencies) if you disagree with the government never ever
| trade these assets with fiat currencies that are backed by
| governments.
|
| Do the deals between your crypto things that are not
| controlled by governments and taxations and leave the rest
| of us and our economies alone.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| (not op) I stayed with a friend in Zimbabwe at the height of
| their hyperinflation.
|
| His house was filled with petrol (gas) because he'd been paid
| and he had to buy something the same day that would keep for
| a month and hold it's value or his money would evaporate. So
| we sat in his house praying there wasn't a fire.
|
| That's the use case for Bitcoin: currency of final resort.
| It's the same as gold only better (can't be faked, hard to
| steal etc).
|
| I think in countries with stable currencies and after 2
| decades of low interest and inflation, that's underrated as a
| use case...
|
| I also believe (forgive the digression into my weird
| conspiracy theories) that one reason the US has made so much
| progress on legalised weed is because crypto and the dark web
| basically mean you can get whatever you want delivered right
| to your door. But that's just my own weird world view.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Considering how few world currencies are less stable than
| BTC this doesn't make a lot of sense.
|
| Plus if you have the ability to turn arbitrary currency X
| into BTC, you can certainly change it into USD, which is
| far more stable than BTC. So, nope. This is not a good use
| for BTC.
| stickfigure wrote:
| How does a Zimbabwean convert ZWR to USD? How does a
| Venezuelan convert bolivars to USD?
| maria2 wrote:
| They usually go to a black market currency dealer and
| keep the money under their mattress, or at least that's
| how they did it in the USSR.
| rdtwo wrote:
| Bitcoin does not solve that problem. The reason he has a
| ton in gas is that it was government subsdised and sold a a
| fixed rate to worthless currency. So to get paid you needed
| to trade worthless paper for gas and then for something of
| value. Obviously gas is hard to store so there is a
| negative premium for selling a large amount at the same
| time
| tkmunzwa wrote:
| > His house was filled with petrol (gas) because he'd been
| paid and he had to buy something the same day that would
| keep for a month and hold its value or his money would
| evaporate. So we sat in his house praying there wasn't a
| fire.
|
| I'm guessing the friend sold the petrol for USD, right?
|
| Zimbabwean who lived through this checking in - let me add
| context and help deconstruct this for HN: People (and
| banks) were converting Zimbabwean dollars to _anything_
| that could hold value and could be easily resold (in US
| Dollars) ASAP - this could be petrol or petrol vouchers,
| groceries, cookies - anything at all that could be bought
| with Zimbabwean dollars and flogged for USD. One of the
| retail banks got in trouble with the central bank after
| adding masonry bricks to their commodity portfolio[1].
| Petrol was definitely a risky. Bitcoin would not have
| solved this because the using Zimbabwean dollars to
| purchase of commodities was only the first step to
| procuring US dollars while arbitrating the delta between
| the official exchange rate that formal businesses had to
| use, and the much higher real exchange rate as determined
| by the market. The hypothetical bitcoin:Zimbabwean dollar
| exchange rate in 2008 would have always tracked the market
| rate with no opportunity for arbitration.
|
| 1. Not brick futures or other fiscalised instrument: the
| bank bought and took possession of piles of bricks for
| resale later to hedge against inflation
| strangattractor wrote:
| So our Zimbabewe friend buys bitcoin at $60K and 6 months
| later has bitcoin worth a third of that. Or he puts it in
| FTX and has it all disappear. Not seeing how it solves his
| problem.
| maria2 wrote:
| The friend could have purchased a stablecoin. For
| instance, as of writing right now, he could have bought
| USDT and had the same amount of money after 6 months.
| Obviously, the stability of USDT is rightfully
| questioned. But the stability of storing many liters of
| petrol in your house should also be questioned.
| arch1e wrote:
| My country is cracking down on civil liberties (I'm not
| talking the ability to not take certain vaccines), I'm
| talking about religious freedom among other things and crypto
| like XMR gives me a way to make sure I am able to buy stuff
| like Mullvad VPN (again for privacy) without going through a
| centralized payment processor. This is just one instance
| though, I even get domains from njall.la now with XMR/crypto
| and enjoy a lot of privacy benefits (coming from godaddy)
| m00dy wrote:
| you are not alone...
| chollida1 wrote:
| > civil liberties (I'm not talking the ability to not take
| certain vaccines), I'm talking about religious freedom
|
| Interesting framing.
|
| I would have thought the ability to control what goes into
| a person's body, ie bodily autonomy would have far outweigh
| religious freedom.
|
| If I had to give one up, and I don't think anyone should
| have to give up either, I would give up religious freedom
| long before having to give up control over my own body.
|
| I guess that goes hand in hand with the abortion debate,
| you're either in the religious freedoms camp or the bodily
| autonomy camp.
|
| it's good to see there are other's who think the opposite.
|
| I appreciate the differing opinion.
| klyrs wrote:
| Freedom _from_ religion is a prerequisite for bodily
| autonomy, for at least half of us.
| dbfx wrote:
| He is probably trying to stop the inevitable derailment
| once someone mentions(or believes is referring to)
| vaccines in any way that is not unequivocal and blind
| support.
| chollida1 wrote:
| Ah, that makes sense. Appreciate your help!!
| hudon wrote:
| > you're either in the religious freedoms camp or the
| bodily autonomy camp
|
| An abortion kills a baby by directly attacking his or her
| body (dismemberment, lethal injection, etc.). You can
| firmly be in the bodily autonomy camp and in the
| religious freedoms camp at the same time.
| cpgxiii wrote:
| You can't claim to be in the "bodily autonomy" camp and
| believe in compelling actual living people to use their
| bodies to carry a fetus to term.
| anikom15 wrote:
| Considering the most popular religions fundamentally
| reject bodily autonomy, it shouldn't be a surprise.
| okasaki wrote:
| Ah ok, the use case is breaking the law.
| dnissley wrote:
| Yes
| keyme wrote:
| Yes. Or, in other words, maintaining morality despite
| laws.
| andrepd wrote:
| Yes, it may surprise you that the women in Iran, for
| instance, are breaking the law. And so did the people who
| founded the USA, in another example.
|
| Law [?] moralityb
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Yes, it may surprise you that the women in Iran, for
| instance, are breaking the law. And so did the people who
| founded the USA, in another example.
|
| Sure, but plenty of bad actors have broken the law as
| well - the examples of these are far more numerous. While
| there are hypothetical moral use cases for crypto, some
| of the most common _actual_ uses are greed (yield
| farming, speculation), scams (rug pulls, pump and dumps,
| wash trading, ransomware), tax evasion, and as currency
| for contraband like drugs. What ratio of moral to immoral
| use cases is acceptable to the crypto community? 1:10?
| 1:100? Or is anything ok as long as _someone_ out there
| is using it to escape repression?
| mbg721 wrote:
| The more frequently breaking the law coincides with good
| morality, the weaker the law becomes, and the less
| legitimacy the state holds. That's why setting everything
| up for selective enforcement is so destructive.
| Karunamon wrote:
| I question whether the daily flouting of laws like the
| speed limit on the highways has a measurable impact on
| the "legitimacy of the state".
| okasaki wrote:
| It's beautiful when people you like doing things you
| approve of are breaking the law. Let's say someone uses
| crypto to buy weapons or explosives and your loved one
| dies in the attack. Are you still going to support it?
| dbfx wrote:
| yes
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| Yes. The way it's paid for isn't the problem.
| smcn wrote:
| That's quite the response. Are you suggesting that
| weapons or explosives can only be bought with crypto?
| brookst wrote:
| I read it as maintaining privacy while doing legal things
| that a corrupt government might punish despite their
| legality.
|
| What led you to think laws are being broken in those
| scenarios?
| andrepd wrote:
| It's pretty telling that Monero, a project with actual
| utility, underperforms in terms of value/attention compared
| to pump and dump scams or useless NFTs / tokens.
| dogman144 wrote:
| Technical:
|
| - transfer of provably discrete (and sometimes fully private)
| values between machines, without a central intermediary. It
| takes what HTTP/S, FTP, all the information protocols that
| opened up the internet to what it became, and adds the
| ability to know that packet_a is the _only_ packet_a out
| there.
|
| - it's on the back 30-40 years of research of the same
| computer scientists that brought you consumer cryptography,
| Tor, and many other consequential innovations. As in, it
| didn't just pop out of SBF's head.
|
| - Think of what non-discrete digital information transmission
| did to _everything_. Now we have discrete digital information
| transmission. This is where the "money of the internet"
| terminology comes from IMO.
|
| - "but we have Google/ApplePay, Venmo, etc!:" look at the
| protocols that govern the internet and similar examples like
| linux. how many of them are "owned" by a central party like
| digital payments currently are? yes, some have heavy
| influence, and ICANN, DNS, etc are somewhat centralized when
| you really get down to it. But there is no vendor-specific
| HTTPs.
|
| Not technical:
|
| - simply put: people, governments, financial institutions,
| and on and on are using it. The opinion pieces and select
| loud voices in government and HN would make you believe that
| only criminals or techies putting the dotcom bubble to shame
| are using it. However, hand on the bible, it has penetration
| across quite a lot of use cases as a digital, international
| currency, beyond NFTs and moonCoins. Bank of International
| Settlements just let member banks deposit 2% of their
| holdings in BTC. This is not a small event, and its one of
| many out there. While Senators, ECB, and coworkers in HN are
| shaming it, it's getting adopted by their peers. And normal
| folk who don't know better see it as an open question still
| or fraud somehow.
|
| - payment censorship: The largest capital outflows from CN
| where when crypto was legal there, and then subsequently
| banned. Ok though, "it could never happen here" is often
| thought if you live in the West. People saw Julian Assange's
| cut off from payment rails and rightfully so perhaps
| dismissed it. But then what about OnlyFans last year almost
| having to change its entire product because someone didn't
| like porn and pressured enough investors/payment providers in
| the West to cut them off? Mindgeek (Pornhub) lost payment
| providers access as well last year. Ok though, "well that's
| porn." When you combine the march of digital payment
| censorship based on the values of the day, combined with the
| digitization of cash and limitations around paper currency,
| that's a trend to note. What about abortion? What about pro-
| life funding? What about...? What about Equifax selling your
| compensation history to competitors, and your lack of opt-out
| from that system because you get paid in USD via digital
| banks? In short, digital currency is not currently trustless
| and censorship-less in the same way paper currency more or
| less is and has been for centuries, crypto is the only
| (perhaps imperfect!) alternative out there right now.
|
| - inflation: 8% inflation in the US is one thing, but I know
| for a fact restaurants where I live (normal town, US) have
| faced 100% raw ingredient prices YoY. money printing ==
| inflation is irresponsibly simplifying it, but where is your
| right to have a currency backup that at least has some
| boundaries around the monetary policy of the day, enables to
| you exist and spend online, and aligns with your incentives
| to spend or not spend? Dgital currencies built in CN have
| test trial "expiration dates" on them to spend for instance.
| The US is in the middle of similar tech. "It could never
| happen here" but if you dig in and read some Keynes which our
| monetary policy is based on... it certainly could.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| > inflation
|
| There are better bets out there against inflation. Dollar
| is "down" 8% because of inflation but BTC is down 65%..
| Just buy gold if you want a hedge that is not correlated
| with the general stock market. Crypto is just a proxy for
| tech stocks
| digitaltrees wrote:
| The ledger. I think people are so caught up with it being a
| currency or investment asset that they miss the real
| revolutionary ideas. Triple entry bookkeeping. When double
| entry accounting emerged in the renaissance it revolutionized
| commercial activity. I think there are use cases where being
| able to publicly verify transactions and history would be
| immensely beneficial.
|
| I worked as a lawyer in NYC unwinding many of the 2008
| financial crises bankruptcies and can tell you that billions
| of dollars of mortgages, home deeds, commercial loans, etc
| are traded with bankers sending each other excel files. Which
| means that the property ownership is literally a spreadsheet
| (often with a date in the file name). It was shocking but how
| it was done.
|
| There are massive third party organizations that are tasked
| with tracking those transactions MERS. The commodities
| exchanges etc but they weren't much better organized. Lots of
| excel files.
|
| So if there could be a common accounting ledger that could be
| verified it would be a big improvement. The question is
| though would that be 10x better? Or rather enough to get the
| various stakeholders to adopt the ledger. So far. No.
| uberdru wrote:
| Ironically, perhaps not so much so, that's precisely why
| the blockchain was invented in 1992. A simple notary
| service.
| rwmj wrote:
| Couldn't that be more efficiently solved using a public
| database maintained by a trusted third party? We don't need
| a blockchain to know who owns shares for example.
| floober wrote:
| Efficiently? Maybe. Providing the same type trust and
| guarantees? Probably not. A public, append-only Merkle
| tree just has a lot of interesting properties and I think
| there are spaces where they are useful.
| grp000 wrote:
| I'm just an engineer with no background in finance, but
| didn't a fair part of the 2008 collapse come about by
| trusted third party risk auditing that went bad? Rather
| than maintaining a centrality of trust at some level, it
| seems intuitive that if there is a public database with
| trust decentralized among all the participants, there is
| less of a chance for that trust to be abused.
| blowski wrote:
| Financial transparency and integrity is a wonderful goal.
| However, I am yet to understand why any kind of
| blockchain is necessary or sufficient, or even a good
| solution. If you want to cook the books you can do it
| with or without blockchain. Same if you want to be
| honest. Blockchain seems like a very complex and
| expensive way of persisting transactions in a database.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| It's just a fundamental naivete about how the world
| works. If I'm dodging taxes or hiding profits then I'll
| just enter false numbers on the blockchain. Now what good
| is the blockchain? Unless the whole world runs on the
| super inefficient blockchain system then there is always
| a potential for gigantic drift between the actual state
| of the world and the blockchain.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| Not in a way that would have been impacted by a
| blockchain ledger. Third party risk auditors were giving
| financial products risk ratings that were far out of
| touch with their actual risk levels. But this was due to
| flawed logic, financial incentives, and corruption, and
| not because of a lack of transparency. The data of the
| mortgages comprising these financial products was
| available to those interested in those looking to fact
| check, but no one was.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| The "risk auditing" was the bad part, and that's a human
| problem; writing those decisions to a different kind of
| database wouldn't have helped in the slightest.
| strangattractor wrote:
| I would agree. The whole currency thing is a sham. It has
| enabled some horrendous criminal financial activity. But
| when I think of state and local gov't making there ledgers
| public and preserving some anonymity of the payees. I see
| some really exciting prospects for transparency.
| formercoder wrote:
| Why can't we just have a better, trusted, third party? Any
| use case for Blockchain that does not use the phrase "zero
| trust" is not a real use case.
| acover wrote:
| The merkel tree can be separated from the block creation.
| See aws qldb.
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/
| nepthar wrote:
| Any potential trusted third party is corruptible whereas
| the type of "block chaining" that is used can be quickly
| verified as correct by anyone.
| digitaltrees wrote:
| Because separation of the record from the record keeper
| means the system will be endowed with new attributes such
| as accuracy, verification. distribution, longevity etc
| that result in a more robust and valuable system.
|
| Imagine you run a fast food franchise with 10
| restaurants, each keeping their inventories in a local
| database, how do you coordinate global restocking? Manual
| reconciliation across each database. Ok move to the
| cloud. Now you have a global picture where state is
| adjusting in closer to real time and reconciliation is an
| inherent property of they system rather than a process
| implementation operationally. Well as I have described
| elsewhere in this thread. A lot of financial transactions
| are managed in an equivalent process of local databases
| with manual reconciliation.
|
| I am oversimplifying because there are a number of road
| blocks that prevent a solution like "implementing a cloud
| database" and also conflating what happens within a
| company (using the franchise analogy) rather than a
| market (where every single franchise had a common
| inventory and ordering system not tied to a third party
| supplier). By my point is that a block chain ledger would
| solve many of these problems without users even being
| fully aware of the problem in the first place.
| peter422 wrote:
| There is no reason you can't mix the cryptological
| security of the Bitcoin Blockchain without the proof of
| work part.
|
| If I (a trusted third party) maintained a giant public
| database that anybody could append to, it would be
| trivial to release checksums or hash values at specific
| intervals to prove that nothing in the past was altered.
| comte7092 wrote:
| >Which means that the property ownership is literally a
| spreadsheet (often with a date in the file name)
|
| Are you implying that the spreadsheet is/was itself a legal
| document signifying ownership? Because that is radically
| different for my understanding of home ownership. I have
| never owned property, but to my knowledge ownership is
| conferred by way of a deed that is registered with the
| government.
|
| Which leads to the main issue with the crypto hype that I
| see. The majority of the space is taken up by two
| overlapping camps: get rich quick shills and techno
| libertarians who believe we'd have utopia if not for the
| pesky government.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| If there's a mortgage the deed is held by the mortgagee.
| Or at the very least there will be a formal legal claim
| on the deed (in the UK it's called a lien or a charge -
| not quite identical but similar) which isn't satisfied
| until the mortgage is paid off.
|
| Worse, there were instances in 2008 of banks stealing
| homes out from under people - who sometimes didn't even
| have a mortgage - by getting fake paperwork waved
| through, because it was impractical for all the competing
| claims on a loan to be properly validated.
|
| https://www.salon.com/2013/08/12/your_mortgage_documents_
| are...
|
| Would blockchain fix this? No. The problem wasn't
| tracking the transactions, it was the fact that banks and
| the financial industry fraudulently hid the true risk of
| various loan bundles.
|
| Blockchain would only have solved this problem if the
| loan _context_ - creditworthiness, payment history, and
| so on - was included with every loan transaction, and
| could easily be accessed and summarised for all the
| transactions in all of the loan bundles.
|
| Which blockchain doesn't do.
|
| Coincidentally, this is exactly the same problem that
| blockchain hasn't solved for FTX, Binance, Mt Gox, etc.
| Blockchain does not provide an objective assessment of
| risk, value, or corporate credibility. It's just a
| ledger.
|
| Even if you can't manipulate the ledger, you can still
| manipulate the _perceived meaning_ of the numbers in the
| ledger. Especially if you 're a trusted party in the
| cryptoverse.
|
| In fact it doesn't just fail to fix these problems, it
| creates new opportunities for spectacular frauds.
| markwkw wrote:
| Home deeds, loans, mortgages are not accounting concepts,
| but more in the ... contract(?) land.
|
| When a loan is made, a loan document exists; and accounting
| entries exist somewhat separately. A contract can be
| entered without writing, a contract can result in complex
| accounting treatment which may be investigated, rules
| clarified, decided, corrected when methodology errors were
| made.
|
| Do you mean that the blockchain is supposed to help with
| the accounting side, or with the contract side, or both?
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| I think the dream is something like making a single
| commit that updates your code and the documentation that
| is kept alongside it in the same repo. A blockchain
| transaction would represent the entire transaction
| including the mortgage agreement, the deed, the asset on
| the lender's books, and the liability on the borrower's
| books. I say dream because there's no real path to this
| ever happening, and it's definitely not happened yet.
| belter wrote:
| https://aws.amazon.com/qldb/?nc1=h_ls
| elliekelly wrote:
| What about triple entry accounting requires the blockchain?
| Or how does triple entry accounting benefit from being on
| the blockchain? Or a distributed ledger in general? The
| shitty book keeping you encountered will _always_ be
| cheaper, faster, and easier than the "better" alternative.
| The people like SBF with a black hole of excel nonsense as
| their "accounting system" aren't going to be persuaded to
| take up triple entry accounting-- on the Blockchain or
| otherwise.
| RC_ITR wrote:
| Everyone loves cryptography and the chain of blocks
| structure because they are _good things_
|
| Neither of those things are the defining feature of
| cryptocurrencies, decentralization is.
|
| Decentralization is one of the most pointless endeavors
| in technology, because it's so hard to scale anything
| decentralized (case in point, how expensive on-chain
| BTC/ETH transactions are).
| strangattractor wrote:
| I don't think is does - but exposing too much data is a
| problem. The block chain can be public and still maintain
| a certain anonymity. If people see a lot of money going
| into a particular wallet they can ask the city to clarify
| where/why the money if being spent. It might be nice to
| see exactly how money is being spent for schools
| (payroll, facilities etc) for example. Block chain seem
| made for such a thing is all.
| digitaltrees wrote:
| I am not aware of any other triple entry accounting
| system or proposal other than the block chain ecosystem.
| But I have been a crypto curmudgeon and skeptic so I
| don't follow it closely. Honestly it was the only idea
| that didn't make me throw up a little when I would talk
| to crypto fans. It was my little tactic to find common
| ground.
|
| Excel may be cheaper and faster for companies but
| governments care about legitimacy and could probably end
| up forcing implementation. So imagine that instead of
| county deed offices that have physical books dating back
| hundreds of years with title info, they had a blockchain
| ledger then the third party systems the evolved on top to
| make title transfer lowers friction will technically not
| being a true legal transfer could have a middle ground
| where the transaction has the certainty and legitimacy of
| a public record and the low friction of a digital
| transaction rather than physically having to go to each
| county to record the transaction.
|
| Similarly all large banks now have to submit stress tests
| to the federal reserve and one of the hardest things to
| do is trace asset transfers and liabilities to get at
| contagion risk. If regulators were smart they would
| mandate a blockchain or time series database so that
| unwinding transactions didn't have to happen through
| junior attorney and bankers manual review of transfers in
| bankruptcy court.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I still don't understand why this is better on a
| blockchain than a database.
|
| Transactions are harder to do, they take longer, they're
| massively more inefficient, etc. And what do we gain from
| this? Blockchains are not immutable (as we've seen),
| they're usually controlled by a single entity or group of
| entities (as we've seen), they're public but in a bad way
| - as soon as the connection between a person and a key is
| revealed, that person's entire transaction history is
| revealed. And so on.
|
| I know that "all these problems are being solved" but you
| could solve them all in an instant by just using a
| database and having sufficient oversight over who gets to
| manage it. I don't understand the enthusiasm to use a
| blockchain here (or anywhere)
| legutierr wrote:
| If two rival businesses are transacting with each other,
| and they don't really trust each other fully, which one
| hosts the database?
|
| Whoever hosts the database is in a position to manipulate
| data to the disadvantage of the other. Which entity gives
| in and gives up that power to the other? Why should
| either party agree to take on that sort of counterparty
| risk when they don't have to?
|
| Also, what instances of non-immutable blockchains are you
| referring to? Blockchains by definition are immutable
| post-finality.
| laserlight wrote:
| > which one hosts the database?
|
| Both?
|
| > manipulate data to the disadvantage of the other
|
| How is this even possible? Don't they other sign their
| transactions?
| pr0zac wrote:
| While running transactions on a distributed blockchain
| would provide some additional resilience here, I'm unsure
| if I can picture any situation where the added protection
| provided over current contract and civil law would
| outweigh the issue of having your financial transactions
| publicly available for review by all other actors to most
| businesses.
|
| It also doesn't really do much for most real world
| transactions because of the oracle problem. Unless both
| businesses only care about entities that exist on that
| blockchain as well having the transactions there doesn't
| provide any additional benefit since the blockchain
| cannot verify nor enforce anything outside of it.
| Regardless of whether the transaction of you sending me
| money is immutable I can still just not send you what you
| paid me for.
| nradov wrote:
| The clearing house hosts the database. There's no need
| for a blockchain.
|
| https://www.cfainstitute.org/en/advocacy/issues/central-
| clea...
| legutierr wrote:
| What if there is no clearinghouse operating in that
| particular market?
| RC_ITR wrote:
| You build one because it's _way_ easier _and_ cheaper to
| build a clearinghouse than it is to build a massively
| decentralized network of trust-less computers?
| cduzz wrote:
| The two rivals write a contract? The contract involves a
| 3rd party that's mutually agreed upon by the rivals?
|
| If the two rivals can't abide by a contract, a blockchain
| wouldn't resolve the scenario either. Imagine "bug vs
| boot" or "shooting war" kinds of contract violations
| where overwhelming force is in play; why would a
| blockchain make a difference?
|
| Human history has lots of "people don't trust each other"
| scenarios, and they've been resolved in the past, with
| reasonable efficiency, without blockchain.
| eldenwrong wrote:
| >"Blockchains by definition are immutable post-finality."
|
| This is the greatest misunderstanding. Immutability is
| NOT a property of blockchains. Its a property of Bitcoin
| and possibly Ethereum through PoW/PoS
| chaostheory wrote:
| A database is great for one entity. A blockchain is
| useful for situations with multiple actors with an
| inherent lack of trust, but with a need for a shared
| truth
| PKop wrote:
| 3rd party trust and central point of failure. I don't
| agree that we've seen Bitcoin be controlled by a single
| entity or that anyone has power to modify it against the
| will of market. I would argue the things you don't see a
| need for are necessary, if not sufficient, to have a
| sufficiently decentralized ledger. Network effect might
| be the other ingredient.
| streb-lo wrote:
| Blockchain also only works the way people intend in
| entirely digital domains.
|
| As soon as you tie it to real-world assets it's no
| different than an Excel sheet because you must validate
| everything manually anyways.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Would it make sense to put those transactions into
| something like git or does a conventional database sound
| more appropriate?
|
| Why do internet companies not use blockchains like git
| for all their transactions and instead use some form of
| database?
|
| And git doesn't prevent software developers from pushing
| bad/hostile code/data into their repos. A blockchain
| wouldn't prevent financial institutions from publishing
| incorrect/fraudulent transactions into the blockchain.
|
| What you theoretically gain out of a public blockchain is
| just that it is permanent and public. You could try to
| pass laws to require permanent and public access to a
| companies books instead and be technology agnostic. This
| law would be highly unlikely to ever pass. But you don't
| need a blockchain to do it.
|
| And if it isn't public and immutable then the company can
| change the ledger whenever they like and throw away the
| old chain and commit fraud, there's nothing magical about
| the word "blockchain" which prevents that. It is the
| public nature of it which makes it immutable. If you want
| to make it private and immutable a normal database with a
| public, published cryptographic hash of the entire
| contents published at intervals would make that possible.
| What you need then is an append-only database where
| incorrect prior data is fixed not by throwing away the
| bad data, but by publishing new records which update the
| old data, and then a way of publicly validating that the
| old data hasn't been tampered with. That can actually be
| solved without blockchain. It definitely can be solved
| without public blockchain, you just the company to
| periodically "publish" its bookkeeping hashes to an
| agency (or the public) that tracks them.
|
| That doesn't fix fraud, though, those records could all
| be bullshit the first time they're entered. Just makes it
| harder to go back and commit fraud. And if the company
| never opens it books and is never audited then none of it
| really matters, blockchain or not it just becomes a
| private diary of lies.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| Could these ledger be a log data structure in a single
| database that is run by a trusted entity like a government?
| Why does it need to be decentralized?
| hyperman1 wrote:
| I see 2 core parts to cryptocoins: The Merkle tree for
| honesty and the Proof of work for value.
|
| I'd agree the Merkle tree is good as the ledger. AFAIK it
| is also used in certificate transparancy logs: Every block
| of log entries contains a cryptographic hash to a previous
| block, so you can't rewrite log entries, only append them.
| This is what guarantees honesty in the certificate world,
| and is I assume the only aspect you need for your proposal.
|
| But the Proof of work is basically a race to do as much
| computation as possible. This is the part that wastes so
| much energy and resources, the part that slows things down,
| but also the part that provides value to cryptocoins by
| proving that someone wanted to waste/spend the resources.
|
| Do you see value in a system that has both aspects?
| er4hn wrote:
| I'll chime in here that Merkle trees are best used to
| tell you if something changed in the historical records.
| Certificate Transparency (CT) provides you with an easy
| to verify way to generate a single identifier that tells
| you the current state of a set of information. You can
| then incrementally add onto it while checking that none
| of the past information was changed during that addition.
| This is a pretty similar concept (and motivation) to Git.
|
| Where this becomes interesting is that someone can just
| change the past data, then go through and update all the
| subsequent additions to come up with a the new final
| value. CT handles this by having multiple other entities
| check that the CT root values are not changing over time.
| Git handles this by allowing for similar mechanisms - if
| you believe Linus he memorizes the root hash of his local
| repo before bed each night. A post-it note would work
| just about as well for the Linus/Git case, but I am
| getting off topic.
|
| I don't see value in proof of work because it assumes
| that any system would have more entities (where each
| entity has some amount of computing power..) watching
| than there is computing power attempting to rewrite it.
| That doesn't really scale up across most industries use
| cases. A set of say, mortgage companies, could just
| exchange data in a merkle tree format and raise an alarm
| if it looks like the values changed from the prior root.
| This is very fast and cheap to compute and doesn't
| require proof of work calculations.
| Quarrelsome wrote:
| Crypto is really good for buying drugs given that most
| traditional payment systems do not tend to cater for the
| black market.
| darawk wrote:
| I'll give this a shot. I've written variants of this comment
| a billion times on HN, but I sort of enjoy trying to create
| the perfect articulation of what it is that I like about
| crypto, so I'll try again:
|
| Crypto is an alternative financial system. Financial systems,
| on their own, are castles in the air. They provide no value
| to anyone. Financial systems derive their fundamental
| economic value by being wired to the real world in some way.
| That is, efficiently allocating capital to productive
| enterprises, cheaply translating capital between different
| forms (e.g. currencies, but also product <-> currency), and
| transferring risk from those who don't want it to those who
| do. This is why finance exists, and what it is for.
|
| The cryptocurrency financial system as it exists now is only
| very weakly connected to the real economy, and only in a few
| places of marginal or possibly negative social value (e.g.
| drugs, gambling, prostitution, ransomware). However, there
| are a few places that actually use crypto fairly heavily for
| legitimate, socially useful transactions, such as Vietnam,
| Ukraine and Venezuela. Most people here tend not to find
| those examples particularly convincing, and neither do I -
| but they are important to mention.
|
| But what crypto represents is an _alternative_ model for how
| a financial system could operate. It is a financial system
| that offers many of the same features that our existing
| system does, but is different in some ways. Asking "What
| good is crypto?" is a bit like asking "What good is Linux
| when we already have Windows?". They both do very similar
| things, but they do them differently, and most critically,
| they imply _different distributions of power_.
|
| If you build your business around Microsoft products, that's
| fine, but in several important senses that makes you beholden
| to Microsoft. If you want to build a financial business in
| the traditional financial economy, you will probably have to
| go to one of the major money center banks, hat in hand, and
| ask them to let you do whatever it is that you want to do (or
| an intermediary that has done this). Depending on what it is
| you want to do, you may have to go to _all of them_ and ask
| this.
|
| Crypto is different. If you want to build a financial
| business in crypto, you simply write the code and deploy it.
| You don't ask anyone for permission, and there is nobody on
| earth that can tell you "no". Even the US Treasury hasn't
| shut down Tornado cash, they've merely sanctioned it. The
| drawbacks of this approach should be obvious, but so too
| should the benefits. Whether you like the approach crypto
| offers is simply a question of values. But it is, in my
| opinion, undeniable that it is _meaningfully different_ while
| being capable (in principle) of offering most of what
| traditional finance does.
|
| The fact that crypto has not yet been wired to the real
| economy is the reason that it has not yet provided much in
| the way of concrete utility in most developed markets. The
| reason it hasn't been wired to the real economy is that
| regulators and lawmakers mostly have not allowed it. And I
| agree with them! I would like to see a little more
| experimentation in that direction, but crypto is fairly
| obviously not ready for prime time in this sense - not yet,
| and maybe never. Many things would need to happen first.
| However, don't mistake the absence of this connection for the
| theoretical inability to create it. It hasn't been created
| because people are cautious about things this important, as
| they should be.
|
| There is nothing in principle right now preventing anyone
| from tokenizing a house, or a corporate debt instrument. And
| even if you think "nobody has done those things because
| they're stupid and crypto is just worse than traditional
| finance", you may be right! But it should be obvious that
| there are enough crypto believers out there that this would
| have been done if it were legal to do so, _even if_ it were a
| bad idea. Hence, given their total non-existence, it should
| be clear that the reason it hasn 't happened is regulatory,
| not fundamental capability.
|
| You will know crypto has failed if and when there are a few
| real estate titles, car titles, equity shares, bond
| instruments, and other assorted things from the traditional
| financial realm that have been tokenized, but nobody cares
| about them. Assets placed there by a few true believers,
| traded for a bit, and then forgotten. _That_ is how you will
| know crypto has nothing to offer. But for now nobody has done
| those things, because the traditional legal system
| (correctly!) won 't respect them sufficiently.
|
| EDIT: To extend the Linux metaphor a bit, Linux was created
| in the early 90s, but I would argue it didn't become clearly
| economically significant until the late 2000s. Prior to that
| it was a toy for nerds and anyone serious used "real
| products" built by "real companies" and purchased for
| money[1]. Crypto is FOSS for finance, and maybe the
| traditional world is right this time, and when it comes to
| money walled gardens and closed ecosystems are best. But it's
| not the world that I personally want to live in.
|
| [1] The exact timelines here are obviously fuzzy and
| certainly you can argue with whether it was late or mid or
| early 2000s, but what is inarguable is that Linux went
| through a long "just a toy" phase in the minds of most people
| criddell wrote:
| > I personally believe in the utility of crypto
|
| That seeing utility in crypto requires faith is telling.
| cokeandpepsi wrote:
| the real utility in being able to play HFT-arbitrage trader
| at home without all the rules and regulations tied to other
| markets
|
| i'm not a fan personally having worked for a time with people
| invovled in crypto, it just feels like the condensiation of
| everything wrong with technology
|
| eitherway imo the rise of legal gambling apps will probably
| kill the industry since that scratches the itch most people
| went to cryptocurrency to remedy
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| "Believe" means faith which is inherently non rational. Nothing
| ignorant about not sharing someone's religion.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| And it was over Twitter of all things. This is the history of
| 19th century banking repeating itself as a giant farce
| corv wrote:
| Of course letting everyone print their own money is a farce
| and doesn't actually generate any value for society.
|
| In that sense Binance is guilty here with their BNB token,
| having also set the example for FTX' FTT token.
| YawningAngel wrote:
| To be fair to Binance, they have thus far honoured their
| wildcat dollars.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Wildcat banks always honor their receipts.
|
| Until they suddenly don't
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| A lot of the journalism is being done by coindesk on this
| topic. Coindesk is owned by the same company who owns Gemini, a
| rival exchange. So it is indeed poetic
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| I think you have made a mistake.
|
| DCG owns CoinDesk but not Gemini.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/crypto-exchange-gemini-
| tr...
| onecommentman wrote:
| Who makes these changes? I shoot an arrow right. It lands left.
| I ride after a deer and find myself chased by a hog. I plot to
| get what I want and end up in prison. I dig pits to trap others
| and fall in.
|
| I should be suspicious of what I want.
|
| - Rumi (13th C Persian poet, tr. Barks)
| oneoff786 wrote:
| There's a lot of human systems that would be great if not for
| the humans!
| throwaway23597 wrote:
| Binance and Tether will not become insolvent, and that is
| precisely the issue. They have an essentially endless supply of
| laundered funds, criminal money, and international backing. It's
| essentially a financial weapon aimed at the West, and adversaries
| of the West will not let it fail. Major regulation is the only
| way that these beasts will be slain, but they have donned the
| cloak of "an exciting new fintech industry" and are lobbying like
| hell, so I'm not terribly optimistic.
| corv wrote:
| No, Tether and their banking partner Deltec have very little
| international backing, nor are they the same entity as Binance.
|
| Strange to call Tether and Binance, "weapons aimed at the
| West", when their implosion would surely do more to damage
| cryptocurrencies than global US Dollar hegemony.
|
| Of course one would be smart to use other platforms rather than
| creating single points of failure....
| __derek__ wrote:
| > Tether and their banking partner Deltec have very little
| international backing
|
| Isn't Tether based in Hong Kong?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _their implosion would surely do more to damage
| cryptocurrencies than global US Dollar hegemony_
|
| Crypto never threatened the dollar. What is creating issues
| is crypto's risks causing losses to Americans and, possibly,
| the American financial system.
| corv wrote:
| This crypto and asset bubble was of their own making!
|
| Quantitative easing directly lead to inflated asset prices
| and inflation.
|
| Then VCs jumped on the bandwagon and pushed FTX to
| unsustainable heights.
|
| Now people all over the world are suddenly supposed to sit
| in cash while everything is crashing with high inflation to
| boot?
| rvnx wrote:
| This is why God created I-Bonds.
| fredgrott wrote:
| also strange wording given US banks are for the most part
| prevented from offering banking services of crypto exchanges.
| concinds wrote:
| Why "the West"? Crypto is anti-state power generally, not anti-
| West (most repressive countries crack down on its use).
|
| And I doubt the North Korean or Russian governments are using
| Binance.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Crypto only benefits those states shut out of the orderly
| financial system, like Syria, North Korea, Russia and Iran.
|
| North Korea has amassed a veritable crypto fortune, hundreds
| of millions worth, that they're using to finance their
| illicit nuclear weapons programs. They don't need to use
| binance, but binance continued existence props up the value
| of the crypto space and their holdings allowing their games
| to continue.
|
| [edit] To be clear I'm not saying that NK or any other state
| actor is propping up binance or Tether (I just don't know)
| however it's pretty clear IMO that they benefit from its
| continued existence.
| ahtihn wrote:
| > North Korea has amassed a veritable crypto fortune,
| hundreds of millions worth
|
| Hundreds of millions isn't a fortune for a state. Certainly
| financing a credible nuclear program costs way more than
| that every year. Let alone everything else a state needs to
| finance.
| corv wrote:
| So the Russian and Iranian people who are not at fault for
| their governments misgivings are supposed to be shut out of
| the global financial system too?
|
| Thank Satoshi for true net neutrality.
| vkou wrote:
| > So the Russian and Iranian people who are not at fault
| for their governments misgivings are supposed to be shut
| out of the global financial system too?
|
| ... Yes. Just like how the former are currently being
| conscripted to fight their relatives in a stupid war,
| started by their government.
|
| Life isn't fair, and people generally suffer when they
| allow bad governance to ruin their country. Ultimately,
| any government, even a repressive one can only function
| when the people it governs believe it to be legitimate. I
| hear that this sort of thing is being protested in
| Iran[1] these days.
|
| [1] The thing they are protesting has little to do with
| the cause of the sanctions, though, but that's another
| story.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| > So the Russian and Iranian people who are not at fault
| for their governments misgivings are supposed to be shut
| out of the global financial system too?
|
| Speaking objectively here: obviously yes.
|
| There is no government on earth that does not function
| without at least tacit consent of those governed. That
| consent may be obtained in all sorts of manners (many
| coercive or brutal) but fundamentally that matters very
| little from the perspective of an external nation.
|
| The entire point of cutting a nation out of the financial
| system is to generate internal pain among the population
| that removes consent for their government that is
| currently committing atrocities.
|
| If they want back in... the options are clear and simple:
| Choose a new government (through any of several means -
| up to and including rebellion or civil war). Stop the
| actions of your current government.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Are europeans responsible for the deaths and slavery in
| libya? And americans are responsible for the deaths in
| the middle east? When do we cut those populations out?
| carlob wrote:
| > Are europeans responsible for the deaths and slavery in
| libya?
|
| Very much so, but as far as I can tell nobody cares
| enough. Just to give an example: in my city Ukrainian
| asylum seekers get free public transportation, whereas
| those who escaped war in Africa ans went through the
| Libyan lagers we help finance don't. And don't get me
| wrong I would really like to see everybody get treated
| like a human, I'm not advocating for any mistreatment of
| Ukrainians...
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > Are europeans responsible for the deaths and slavery in
| libya? And americans are responsible for the deaths in
| the middle east? When do we cut those populations out?
|
| Speaking as an American, I'd say "yes". At least for the
| citizens who were adults at the time and were aware.
|
| I'm suspicious of any moral framework that's hand-tuned
| to paint some persons as upright.
|
| I think we just shy away from the fact that we _are_ in
| fact culpable, so we look for rationalizations.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| When there's a global structure that has decided that
| those countries are not worth doing business with over
| the actions of their government.
|
| That's the whole point...
|
| You seem to be implying a value judgement I'm not making.
| I'm not making some random condemnation of
| Russia/Iran/Whoever, or extolling the virtues of western
| countries - I'm telling you the point of sanctioning
| those countries is that it's a path towards adjusting
| behavior by removing consent of those governed.
|
| If the Russian/Iranian/Whoever people are happy, content,
| well-fed, and have easy access to luxury items... what
| the hell is their incentive to change how their
| government is acting on the international stage?
|
| The sanctions serve to show those people providing
| consent that the rest of the group of nations they are
| interacting with are not happy.
|
| It's a feedback mechanism that is not: "hey - we're going
| to kill you now". Which Western nations are using 1)
| because it's less expensive in terms of both capital and
| bodies. 2) because it's arguably more humane. 3) Because
| nuclear weapons have made countries averse to full war.
|
| There's no value judgement about whether the sanctions
| are good or bad, or some prescriptive judgement that the
| west is better. It's just the clear intent of the
| sanctions is to make life harder for the citizenry
| without having to kill them.
|
| Whether the countries making the sanctions are moral or
| not (in my opinion, your opinion, or that of anyone else)
| has fuck all to do with the functional manner in which
| they are being used.
|
| Sanctions are a tool, whether that tool is being used
| justly has zero relation to how the tool itself
| functions.
| potatototoo99 wrote:
| There's also the matter of whether or not sanctions work,
| and judging by their track record, they do not.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| Sure - the tool itself may not be particularly effective.
| No argument here.
|
| It's essentially a signaling mechanism - how strong that
| signal is received can vary a lot.
|
| In the case of Russia at least - it's dampened quite a
| bit because both India and China are not participating.
| While they're not outright supporting Russia - they don't
| find the current government so unpalatable that they're
| willing to break off economic activities (and again -
| this is not a value judgement either way... simply a
| statement of efficacy).
|
| In my opinion - I don't really think sanctions are going
| to be terribly effective (I also think the price cap on
| oil purchases will not be effective), but people don't
| seem to grasp that a very real possible alternative is
| outright war. Which, at least personally, I'd like to
| avoid. So I'm willing to let sanctions ride for a bit and
| see. But I'm also in favor of providing more arms and
| weapons systems to Ukraine in the meantime.
|
| that said... I also have a bunch of duct-tape, plastic
| sheeting, water, and some iodine pills in my basement -
| because while I tend to hope that all the nuclear powers
| involved here will act with some restraint, those items
| will be very difficult to acquire in the 15 minutes when
| I might really need them, and they're relatively cheap to
| buy right now. So picking between that and sanctions...
| again - I vote for sanctions right now.
| europeanguy wrote:
| > There is no government on earth that does not function
| without at least tacit consent of those governed.
|
| One thing I've noticed visiting Russia (multiple times)
| is how politically indifferent the average Russian is.
| (Or more precisely the average big city Russian). There's
| this idea everywhere that, you know politics is really
| complicated and you don't really understand it, so let
| the people in charge make decisions.
|
| So yes, Russian people have exactly the government they
| want.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > So the Russian and Iranian people who are not at fault
| for their governments misgivings are supposed to be shut
| out of the global financial system too?
|
| If it helps exert pressure then financial sanctions are
| strictly better than kinetic war. The ability to end
| around those sanctions can lead to significantly more
| death and suffering - both there and potentially
| elsewhere. It's not about fairness it's about minimizing
| harm. If you disagree, vote.
|
| > Thank Satoshi for true net neutrality.
|
| No thanks man. Seems like an interesting cult y'all have
| there.
|
| [edit] Nobody has the right to trade. If you want to not
| conform to social norms and pose a risk, fine - but you
| don't have a fundamental right to exchange with foreign
| powers whom you detest. If you want to go down that path
| you better be prepared to be self-sufficient.
| corv wrote:
| Cryptocurrency proponents have taken on an almost
| religious stance, I'll give you that.
|
| Then again fanatical users speaks to good product design
| somewhere
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > Then again fanatical users speaks to good product
| design somewhere
|
| Or to a conflict of interest. Unlike consumer products,
| crypto usually ends up being worth more if more people
| are using it. Most crypto proponents hold some crypto and
| have a financial incentive to get more people into it.
| corv wrote:
| The same is true of the telephone, smartphones, the
| internet, etc.
|
| Metcalfe's law applies here as the utility of the network
| rises with the number of participants.
| Jensson wrote:
| No the same isn't true, I can't sell my telephone for
| more just because there are more other people with
| phones.
| notahacker wrote:
| It was founded in China, and the West being relatively
| reticent to crack down on it is kind of the point.
|
| (Not buying the theory though; if Binance does have access to
| unlimited funds they're not doing a great job of propping
| their coin up)
| canadiantim wrote:
| Why does Binance need to be slain? Seems aggressive...
| ineedasername wrote:
| They're not big enough to be a weapon. Keep in mind the Cold
| War was as much an economic war as the other aspects. That was
| countless $billions. The space race alone through 1973 cost a
| quarter $trillion and that was a minor bit of spending compared
| to military and intelligence agencies.
|
| The US recently during the Covid shutdowns rapidly spent and
| extra $trillion, then did it again 3 more times roughly a year.
| This is essentially done via minting fiat money.
|
| The US also has too many strategic interests in Europe to allow
| an economic attack there either, although all of crypto is
| still too small to bother the EU to any high degree in terms of
| an economic attack.
|
| Finally, Binance may be filled with criminal gains but
| criminals frown on people taking their money so if anything
| Binance, to the extent it's resources have criminal origins, is
| constrained in deploying them beyond a certain point to defend
| their business.
|
| No, Binance is far from immune to collapse, it's just that if
| they start down that pathway then the criminals will be pretty
| insistent on being first in line to get their money out.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Will you make everybody that believes you and that may end up
| holding the bag in case you are wrong whole? If not then this
| is content free.
|
| Agreed on the regulation front though, that may well - and
| should - happen.
| femto113 wrote:
| In fiat terms, unless you really believe there is over $60BN
| sitting in a bank account that they just choose not to show for
| "reasons", Tether is already insolvent. Since most of Binance's
| non-self-issued reserves are in the form of Tether they, by
| extension, are insolvent as well. The open question is how long
| can they can keep the game going, thus the current rescue
| fund/proof of reserves/transparency audit circuses.
| oc852 wrote:
| Why even give these guys any legitimacy by regulating them? As
| some experts opined, just let them burn. Regulating them will
| end up bringing risk to actual financial markets.
| helloworld11 wrote:
| Binance and Tether are nowhere near big enough to be major
| financial weapons against the west. They also have nowhere near
| the sort of supposed major government or criminal support from
| anyone interested or powerful enough to stop their possible
| collapse. That you're claiming they do is odd compared to many,
| many other more mainstream financial systems that have been
| used as tools by governments and criminals for a lot longer
| than crypto has even existed. People could have claimed
| something similar to what you say about FTX just months ago,
| and would have, as we now know, been very wrong.
|
| Edit: Just the daily trading volume of, say, the forex market,
| completely dwarfs both the total market cap of tether or the
| daily volume of Binance. The total value of global equity
| trading worldwide is also insanely bigger than these two
| combined.
| einszwei wrote:
| > It's essentially a financial weapon aimed at the West, and
| adversaries of the West will not let it fail.
|
| An interesting way to phrase it but do you have any sources to
| back your claim?
|
| I know that Binance is being investigated for money laundering
| and sanctions violations. But this could just be a consequence
| of corporate greed and operating in unregulated markets (not
| some conspiracy against west).
| spamizbad wrote:
| I mean, that's basically the pitch I've personally received
| from various web3 founders trying to recruit me. It's overtly
| political and is some flavor of "Boy howdy the US dollar
| hegemony sure is a big problem. It sure would be nice if we
| had true economic freedom. Want to be part of the solution?"
| rvnx wrote:
| In Europe, wire transfers work exceptionally well since the
| introduction of SEPA Instant Credit Transfer.
|
| You have the choice between a free, transparent, technically
| stable, instant payment system (< 10 seconds until 100'000
| EUR), using a stable currency.
|
| or
|
| an unregulated system where unknown people create and control
| the currency, that is generally slow, often with high payment
| or exchange fees and where you need to trust a lot of unknown
| parties (software, tools, network, coins, etc), where you can
| lose your key, that is falsely transparent (you see
| transactions, but you don't know who control the network).
|
| Mhhh...
| superjan wrote:
| True, but how is it relevant to the comment you replied to?
| rvnx wrote:
| It's to say that "West" has a quite established and
| efficient transaction platform.
|
| Because of that, as part of the "West", I hardly see any
| benefit of crypto, unless you are in some other camp
| (aka: "anti-West").
|
| This is what I meant.
| m00dy wrote:
| Oh cool,
|
| We all know what happened to Jews in the 2nd WW in
| europe. I think it is now the time for "anti-West" people
| that you decide.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what happened to Jews in the 2nd WW in europe_
|
| Bitcoin is now a solution to a second Holocaust?
| m00dy wrote:
| Jews had to swallow precious metals like gold,
| diamonds... This time all I had to remember 24 words in
| order... So, no Bitcoin is not a solution or could be.
| I'm not sure but self-custody is...
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Making it marginally harder to steal wealth from Jewish
| people would have only slightly abated the negative
| effects of the holocaust, but it would not at all solve
| any of their problems.
| superjan wrote:
| I think I read the parent comment differently: when
| crypto is claimed to be a weapon against the west, it is
| not because it is in any way an alternative, it is a
| weapon as a system supporting illicit activities against
| the west (money laundering, sanction evasion, state
| sanctioned ransomware). The fact that it slow, unscalable
| and expensive does not matter for those type of
| activities. So I thought it does not really matter that
| our banks are efficient.
| corv wrote:
| SEPA only works within the EU whereas what you are
| comparing is a global payments system. In Europe it is also
| necessary to report any transactions over 10,000 EUR which
| causes more friction than you imply.
|
| It is not transparent as to how much currency debasement is
| taking place, nor does anybody outside a small group at the
| ECB have any control over it.
|
| It is quite clear who owns decentralized networks - the
| participants. Are they perfectly equal? No but they are
| more egalitarian than what they seek to replace.
|
| Decentralized networks are more resilient to outages than
| the electrical supply of some countries. It may not make
| sense for you to use but millions around the world have
| found a use for it.
| lottin wrote:
| What a whole lot of nonsense. Blockchains operate on the
| basis of one dollar one vote. There's nothing egalitarian
| (not to mention democratic) about this. A central bank,
| on the other hand, is a public institution with a public
| mandate.
|
| By the way, currency debasement is not an economic term.
| The only people who use it are conspiracy theorists and
| crackpots, as far as I know.
| corv wrote:
| You're so close to an ad hominem that I can hardly be
| persuaded to reply but your confusion has taken the
| better of me.
|
| Proof of stake blockchains operate on the basis of more
| dollars = more votes, for this to be true for proof of
| work blockchains one would first need to spend that
| capital for mining equipment.
|
| It is very egalitarian since everyone can participate on
| an equal footing, everyone can run a node and get a
| complete copy of all transactions and verify correctness.
| It is challenging and expensive to get the same kind of
| insight into the stock market.
|
| The European Central Bank has arguably failed its mandate
| of keeping price stability within the eurozone when some
| countries have more than 20% inflation.
|
| Currency debasement is more commonly known related to
| coins but I'll leave the term as is
| yokem55 wrote:
| > Proof of stake blockchains operate on the basis of more
| dollars = more votes, for this to be true for proof of
| work blockchains one would first need to spend that
| capital for mining equipment.
|
| Just to clarify - this really depends on which chains you
| are talking about. Some proof of stake chains implement
| direct on chain governance, in which stake does directly
| translate into explicit voting power to implement policy
| changes. Polkadot in particular does this. But Ethereum,
| does not have anything resembling on-chain governance.
| Ethereum validators have no more say in what makes for
| valid ethereum blocks then what proof of work miners had
| to say. The folks that really matter is everyone running
| non-validating nodes and the people who choose to
| interact with those nodes for their transactions or
| inspecting the chain history.
| lossolo wrote:
| > The European Central Bank has arguably failed its
| mandate of keeping price stability within the eurozone
| when some countries have more than 20% inflation.
|
| It's not that simple. They could rise interest rates more
| but Italy and Greece would probably default on its debt,
| which would make euro a lot more unstable than keeping
| 20% inflation rate in three very small eastern european
| countries which corresponds to 3.6% of the whole EU
| population. Current inflation in euro zone is ~10%.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| > It is very egalitarian since everyone can participate
| on an equal footing, everyone can run a node and get a
| complete copy of all transactions and verify correctness
|
| I have friends that can pay rent but don't have much left
| over. There are people in my city that live hand to
| mouth. I know plenty of people who are well off enough,
| but aren't ever going to (or have the technical
| inclination, or sore cash to) run a node.
|
| > get a complete copy of all transactions and verify
| correctness
|
| I'm sure this is a real benefit for all the single
| parents struggling to feed and cloth their kid.
|
| The reality is, most people don't have the resources
| (time, technical or monetary) to participate in
| "egalitarian" crypto currencies. Moreover, even if they
| all did, it still wouldn't be egalitarian, because they'd
| still be out-purchased by those with capital. So we're
| back to where we started, except with more e-waste,
| energy bills and more exaggerated hyper-capitalism.
| corv wrote:
| Well exactly, had these single parents bought Bitcoin or
| Ethereum years ago they wouldn't be struggling now.
|
| One doesn't need to run a node to use the system but it
| is accessible to everyone, just as the code is there to
| be scrutinized publicly.
|
| The entire point was to reform currency where economic
| policy is more predictable and the currency less
| susceptible to kleptocracy.
|
| Interestingly enough the inflation rate of both Bitcoin
| and Ethereum is now lower than that of major world
| currencies. So while volatility still needs to trend
| lower for day to day usage, the case for a store of value
| has already been established in the past decade and
| anyone can see the price history and number of wallets
| increasing exponentially.
| lottin wrote:
| > It is very egalitarian since everyone can participate
| on an equal footing
|
| Errr, no. One dollar one vote is not equal footing. If
| you have more dollars you can buy more votes. That's the
| opposite of egalitarian.
| m00dy wrote:
| > public institution with a public mandate
|
| Fed's Powell begging people to quit their jobs atm. So,
| it this the public mandate you are talking about?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Powell begging people to quit their jobs_
|
| Out of curiosity, where did you read this?
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| Probably meant to say begging for people to get laid off
| (the economy to cool down).
| sbolt wrote:
| From a legal perspective do Crypto transfers over 10k
| have to be reported too?
| corv wrote:
| According to newly announced regulations crypto transfers
| over 1000 Euros are to be scrutinized. How exactly this
| will be enforced is not clear to me.
|
| Also noteworthy, cash payments are limited to 10,000
| Euros (1000 Euro in Spain)
| patrickaljord wrote:
| > You have the choice between a free, transparent
|
| Transparent you say? Could you point me to the SEPA
| explorer where I can inspect every single transaction and
| account balance please? Here is the one for ethereum
| https://etherscan.io/ and for bitcoin
| https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions
| JanSt wrote:
| SEPA is transparent for authorities though.
|
| Ethereum and Bitcoin are transparent on transactions but
| intransparent on beneficial owner. Who is Satoshi?
| patrickaljord wrote:
| So SEPA allows the government to spy on us while being a
| black box to the rest of us while Ethereum and Bitcoin
| are fully transparent while protecting our privacy. Not
| sure how this is a good point in favor of SEPA but ok.
| mopsi wrote:
| You forgot to mention UX. SEPA payments have horrible user
| experience. The "modern" way of receiving money in
| automated manner in Europe and using SEPA is through
| payment providers. On checkout, customers get redirected to
| payment providers with strange startup names they've never
| heard about to initiate a transaction, and then redirected
| to their bank to log in and approve the initiated
| transaction. This is basically training people to accept
| phishing and MITM attacks.
|
| Checkout via Paypal or debit/credit cards is much more
| straightforward and user-friendly, which is why they are
| still widely used (along with local services like Swish). A
| crypto wallet app that just requires scanning a QR code is
| even better, and miles ahead of anything SEPA/PSD2 offers
| in terms of user experience.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Absolutely true and I use it daily however some people want
| to dodge taxes or pay for child prostitutes. In which case
| the official banking channels are unusable.
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| There are no sources to be found because no one even knows
| what country Binance operates out of. They're deliberately as
| opaque as possible
| rchaud wrote:
| > managing director, Pierre van Helden, said Cape Town-based
| FiveWest receives a "minimal yearly license fee" from Binance to
| facilitate crypto derivatives trading for Binance's South African
| users. "How Binance operates globally is unclear to us," van
| Helden said. He added that Zhao's company was "cooperative" on
| compliance and said FiveWest has regular meetings to ensure
| requirements are met.
|
| I was wondering how an audit for a company moving billions of
| dollars ended up in the hands of a South African branch office of
| an accounting firm (Mazars).
| aaroninsf wrote:
| "Box" is a funny word for something that has the silhouette of a
| tetrahedron?
| yalogin wrote:
| We got really lucky that the crypto industry is not regulated. If
| it were, the politicians would have gotten the opportunity to
| bail SBF out. Of course they wouldn't want all the job losses!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _exchange said it dealt with net outflows of around $6 billion
| over 72 hours last week_
|
| Has anyone tried to verify this?
| chollida1 wrote:
| https://cryptoquant.com/asset/btc/chart/exchange-flows/excha...
|
| its measurable on chain if you know what wallet addresses to
| watch, which can be crowd sourced by people taking money off
| exchanges.
| rsanaie wrote:
| I cashed out of binance and the funds were wired into my
| account within 48hrs, thank god!
| kepler1 wrote:
| Ahem. According to this story, we're supposed to use the term
| "flight recorder" now, not "black box":
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34039816
| quesera wrote:
| There is more than one kind of black box. The article refers to
| one of the kinds that is not a flight recorder.
|
| Aside from that, your comment is not likely to generate
| constructive conversation.
| greenyoda wrote:
| In particular:
|
| > _In science, computing, and engineering, a black box is a
| system which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs
| (or transfer characteristics), without any knowledge of its
| internal workings. Its implementation is "opaque" (black).
| The term can be used to refer to many inner workings, such as
| those of a transistor, an engine, an algorithm, the human
| brain, or an institution or government._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box
| ericpauley wrote:
| Sibling comments aside, flight data recorders are (by design)
| not black, so the name really doesn't make any sense.
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