> waste of time

It seems like it took some number of minutes and scored billions, and at that point it was a matter of whether/how much they could trade out before it was locked. I don’t know how many minutes or hours it took to lock? If they managed to trade 1% before blocking, that would be an extra tens of millions. If 10% that would be hundreds of millions, etc.

Apparently [1], he managed to put them as collateral on a lending platform. That allowed him to borrow ETH. The way it works is that if you don't pay back the loaned ETH, the lenders can take the collateral. Except that here the collateral is itself frozen. So apparently, the ETH as now safe in the hacker's wallet and the lenders just lost a bunch of money.

I wonder why not swap them? And had he, would it have bricked the swap pool?

[1] https://x.com/czesmaill/status/2115988477905080716

In this case it looks like the attacker managed to swap some stablecoins into ETH before they were frozen.

It reveals what they are to the public. It's fake crypto with all the downsides of crypto but none of the upsides.

I'm not clear whether the stablecoin providers will then be "creating" new coin to make binance whole - without which you've still fucked binance

So USDT is a great amazing decentralized censorship-free drop in replacement to USD except:

- much more awkward to use

- more liable to hacks

- deposits are not insured

- fewer legal protections

- doesn’t pay interest (or not easily anyway)

- and as I find out, bannable by a central institution with lower legal oversight than the Fed

I’ll keep a mental note of this.

Turns out that there are quite good reasons to have a centralised currency after all. Who would’ve known.

Arguably any fiat-collateralised stablecoin is ipso facto centralised and trusted (someone needs to 1) issue the coins only against fiat collateral and then 2) hold onto that collateral reliably and 3) return it upon presentation of the coin), and at step 3 they can always say "no, we won't give it to you".

Decentralized is a great concept but it’s 99.9% rug pulls and you can’t get any safety unless you centralize. As an investor there is no way to protect yourself because the rug pulls are several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than most people’s understanding.

The U.S. government is the largest beneficiary of this service. More than $2.1 billion in USDT connected to or requested by U.S. authorities out of over $4.4 billion in total illicit USDT freezes globally.

The financial system has evolved over 5000+ years and is like an endless series of Chesterton's Fences at this point. Here we find another: the ability for a regulator or a bank to freeze assets is once again proven to be a feature not a bug.

Managing a wallet where there is no recourse if your wallet is compromised is simply too difficult when even crypto exchanges get hacked and otherwise sophisticated people get compromised when taking cautious measures (eg [1]).

Crypto really is and always was a race to the rug pull.

[1]: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/about-3-5-million-los...

If they baked in a function to freeze USDT, why not also add a function revert a transaction flagged as part of a hack?

Did they ever show proof that they actually hold $1 for every tether? This was big a few years ago but never heard anything about it since. (I could Google it but others here probably want to know)

Anyone can refuse any bitcoin, too. But that's not implemented in the contract, just by how much real money people want to give you for bitcoin.

A shame that they can and do so here but happily facilitate transfers or scam victims, human trafficking and sexual abuse including of minors.

So when tether is blacklisted, is it reissued?

I lost ~20,000 USDT by accident once and the CTO just sent me some freshly printed ones. That was many years ago though.

Indeed! And Elon Musk just gave the entire world a lesson in not trusting someone else's technology, by shutting down Ukraine's Starlink/Starshield used to defend against Russian jet-powered drones, cutting down the speed to near-stationary, and for no evident reason, blaming the President, and then it turns out it was likely a ploy to "upgrade their subscription". [0]

No matter what the reason or the situation, shutting off your access to the technology is their option and it will likely happen at the moment it is a greatest problem to you.

This goes so far beyond "Not your keys, not your coin", it is "Not your stack, not your sovereignty".

Obviously in this case, there is are truly solid rational and moral reasons to shut down those USDT transfers: to cut off the theft which is funding NK's aggressive nuclear weapons program. But that changes nothing about the structure of everyone's vulnerability in using technologies controlled by others such as USDT.

[0] https://newrepublic.com/post/217349/elon-musk-cut-off-ukrain...

The smart contract for those tokens supports freezing. Tether just calls the freeze function on that address.

Most crypto assets are operated by a smart contract that controls every transfer. So the contract can decide to not perform certain transfers.

It doesn't, the hacker already loaned against it to get eth so they froze saves assets.

Poor fellas, barely enough for rent

Stablecoins only use the accoutrement of blockchain as smoke and mirrors to distract and confuse regulators, not because they actually benefit from it at a technical level. They aren't really decentralized at all and could just as easily be a database, except for the regulatory thing

Stable coins are not decentralized

nothing about crypto is decentralized. it's verified by enormous mining farms, who contribute hashes to centralized pools, all stored on one central ledger, and interfaces with the fiat/legit financial system only by using that very financial system.

oh, and three acounts hold like 25% of all btc in circulation.

crypto can do some things, but decentralization isn't one of them. just ask Coinbase

USD tether is barely crypto at all, it's a wrapper around treasury bonds which the US govt. regulates

Centralized stablecoins like USDT and USDC aren't layer-one cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum. They're more like applications running on top of other blockchains, usually as smart contracts, and their issuers hold admin keys which can freeze, mint, burn, and otherwise redistribute funds at will. As far as timing goes, stablecoin issuers can't actually cancel or reverse a transaction that's already in a block that's been mined, but they can freeze the receiving address afterward and burn the funds there, then reissue them elsewhere, which has much the same effect.

USDT and USDC are both centralised crypto currencies with a single source of truth.

If people dont know, they should look up DAO hack and Ethereum hard fork.

That's not the whole point at all. And there are truly wild west cryptos, but most people want some trustworthy regulatory body, whether it's a government or not, backstopping their funds when they get large enough.

For instance to unwind a 5 billion dollar robbery

Stablecoins are fiat on-chain and they are legal so they need to have the freezing mechanism in the smart contract otherwise they could go to jail.

So crypto + legal company means not really following bitcoin ideology anymore

At least a motivated person could audit the smart contracts on this. It isn't like it's a surprise when it turns out it's possible to freeze these coins.

this isn't crypto, it's US dollars with a techno-wizard sheen on the top for no reason

governments, banks freeze currency all the time

> Freezing crypto is so disgusting to me I don’t know…

The feature literally appears to have just saved over two billion USD from being stolen! I mean, fine, "disgusting" is subjective. But the need for the feature is real and quantifiable (and very large) and it did what it advertised.

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Does anyone on this website realize there are different types of crypto coins?

USDT is implemented as a contract written in Solidity, working over other network like ETH, and it has a blacklist managed by admins. Once address is added to a blacklist, you cannot spend anything from it.

yeah bitcoin indeed was

"A loss of X dollars is always the responsibility of an executive whose financial responsibility exceeds X dollars." - Weinberg’s 'First Principle of Financial Management' and 'Second Rule of Failure Prevention’ - 'First-Order Measurement', Quality Software Management, Volume 2, Gerald Weinberg

Well it is engineers fault. But not that engineers. Some engineer designed a system without extreme oversight that should be involved in the process.

If nothing else it shows a complete disregard for insider threat.

Nope, that engineer had far too much access. I'm confident this is the case in pretty much all organizations to some degree, but a lot of engineers are also the only ones that can deny themselves the access so in a roundabout way it's their fault anyway.

But a lot (generalizing here) don't like giving up access "in case they need it". I haven't worked backend in ages, but years ago there was one developer that went to the ops guys and said "can I just ssh to production I need to check some env vars to debug my software" (or something to that degree). Ops team was good and it was a hard no - "just add some logging, you can deploy a new release quickly enough".

It depends on what the engineer did to the laptop and if it’s his fault. If it was a vanilla install, and he didn’t do anything shifty to try and get around the device management access and permissions then it isn’t his fault.

Not only. I'd say the fact that something was stolen might be the engineers fault (depending on how exactly the laptop was compromised). But the amount that could be stolen like that is just ludicrous.

We have no idea if this is accurate or honest or if engineer did something negligent.

Laptop? Was it a company laptop that remained in the office, locked up?

If you download a typosquatted package because you don't check what you type or your AI assistant got fooled I'd consider it my fault in such a case.

These days I’m getting so many 1Password prompts for agents pulling env variables out of it and with very little context of what is being accessed by who (The dialog 1Password shows is pretty bad) that it would be very easy for something to slip in there.

I have been using Yubikeys for years, according to this guide: https://github.com/drduh/yubikey-guide

The nice thing is that using the private key requires physical touch. That means that AI itself (or a remote attacker, for that matter) can't do things unless I confirm.

How would that help when your workstation is compromised? They can just steal your authentication the moment you log in through the password manager

My secret is `4`. Is that ok? Do I still need to move it??

as for ssh keys, you can generate your keypair in secure enclave and reuiqre touchId for every new ssh session. The private key never leaves the secure enclave.

Isn’t the password manager a prime target too?

you know most password managers have open sockets, or other channels to other local processes to interact with and allow stealing entries?

you know most tools like gcloud, bitwarden, etc store auth keys just in dotfiles too?

Local compromise is KO now, and we can't do shit on platforms like MacOs didn't research Linux recently

They claim the attack wasn't just "compromised laptop ==> drain wallets" but had more steps in-between, with the attackers using image registries as an entry point into their systems.

Read a few, added to my rss reader :) that's the same author as https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/ which is feels a bit more snarky but very fun.

They are as long as the company doesn't fold, yes.

Binance/Coinbase use hot wallets, they are not stolen from actual user accounts.

Top tier all inclusive premium service

I think a sensible architecture would involve many pools of wallets with different availability. So the majority of funds can probably be completely offline, with only occasional transfers to/from various offline vaults. The there could be different groups of different levels of online funds that are ideally physically separated (individual teams and employees can only access a subset of the wallets).

> I wonder though how a sensible architecture would look like.

Any withdrawal should only ever be authorized from wallets protected by multisig and every withdrawal should go through several machines, running different implementations of the exchanges' verification part of the codebase, replaying the user's entire deposit/trading/withdrawal history and verifying if the withdrawal the user's asking matches his balance/history.

Devs working on "verification before withdrawal" on one of the stack should be forbidden from ever touching the other stack, and vice-versa.

This would prevent SNAFUs like this one for now at least two devs would need to be independently owned before such a heist could be pulled off.

I'm not saying hacks would be impossible. But the "I still $6 bn in 20 minutes" would be much harder to pull.

Another sensible thing to do would be to not have $6 bn on a warm wallet: I really don't think Binance really that much at all times available on warm wallets?

Nothing is 100% secure: but the "one dev gets its laptop owned, hence $6 bn disappear" is just madness and, as a whole (not speaking about crypto here), we can really do better here.

For a start we can do better than thinking: "Nothing can ever be 100% secure, so there's no way to do better than seeing $6 bn vaporize in thin air when a single dev's laptop gets pwned" (I'm know it's not what you're saying: you're asking what can be done better).

So many are going to think: "But if you do that, it still can be hacked because this and that". Which ain't the point: the point is to make hacks harder to pull off, not to make them impossible to pull off.

This is irrelevant for large accounts operated by market makers, wallets for rebalancing portfolios for derivatives etc.

Binance literally tweeted this themselves [1]. So either Binance is lying, in which case they cannot be trusted. Or their security practices allow developers unprecedented access to wallets, in which case they also cannot be trusted.

[1] https://x.com/binance/status/2115993361517891592

Lol, binance wins because of volume. Crypto traders see cex security risks as the price of doing business, they're not going anywhere.

If they lose 6B but manage to keep their customers whole, I don't think it's that bad of a message. Too big to fail territory.

funds are safu

Don’t think they’re suggesting it’s not a big deal.

Any company losing 10 months of revenue overnight is a BIG fucking deal. Doubly so in a speculative asset that you’re holding for others “securely”. The financial hit has only just begun for them.

That said yes the trading volume has huge.

Money is meaningless nowadays. One billion dollars used to be absolutely huge, now it's a seed round into a team with two MIT dropoffs and one mac mini

Facebook recently got a fine bigger than that.

Binance is the largest custodian/exchange out there.

It is a big deal, but not big enough for them to go out of business

From what I've read, DebugBear is related to the Polymarket hack, not Binance.

That's not much help if you don't vet all third-party dependencies closely, ideally at the source level pre obfuscation/minification.

They indeed would not have had it, it would've been all stolen by now.

But I guess what you are trying to say, is that with current valuations, Mt Gox would've upped their game and would've moved to much more secure architecture and infra.

If so: I doubt it. At the time of the heist, they were still running largely from a PHP monstrosity, that was originally built to trade cards amongst hobbyists. The only thing one could say for the Mt Gox people (Mark Karpelès etc) is that at that time, things moved extremely fast. Tech and infra may be good to trade tens of thousands of $/year one day. But if weeks later you are now trading millions $/year, there's no catching up. In hindsight they should've realized their organization and tech wasn't up to it and should've closed down. Because keeping up was clearly impossible.

*disclaimer: I lost significant amounts at the heist, eventhough I never held more than strictly needed on an exchange.

Measuring the size of the heist in USD is convenient but arbitrary, as what was stolen was predominantly Stablecoins, BTC and ETH. So it makes more sense to measure the heist in Stablecoins, BTC and ETH. But that doesn't create as exciting a headline, as the BTC component was almost 50x smaller than the Mt. Gox heist!

The difference is that Bittance loses only a few percent of their reserves and the dance continues. Gdox did ~70% of the daily volume for crypto and wrecked the entire ecosystem when they got 100% pwned. Maybe they've learned something!

People got out of crypto after the Mt Gox thing. The ones who stayed accepted the risk.

There is selection bias in play now. The remaining people are naturally more risk tolerant. So I agree this second time around, no lessons will be learned.

Well I've learnt my lesson after having lost 3 bitcoins as a student on Mt gox I finished writing my thesis on blockchain technology and then never touched crypto again.

To put things in perspective, I used to dunk on crypto because of how dysfunctional and how people kept losing money in scams, hacks, or even by accident.

I no longer dunk on crypto.

Not because crypto got better, but because the joke got old. I got tired of dunking on it.

How do you prevent it though? My understanding is that it’s genuinely hard in crypto. Any automated access control must be baked into smart contracts, which are very limited in terms of the logic they can implement (in practice - in theory Solidity is Turing complete Id imagine).

A bank API can be 10-100s+ kloc if they need that to implement access controls.

What's the supposed lesson? To close the shop?

The lession learned is: Tether now exists as a casino chip central bank. They can just freeze and print more and provide a backstop to the major CEXs.

Of course, Tether runs completely counter to any of the idealistic claims about crypto.

Mt Gox was widely reckoned to be a clown show long before they got hacked (it was originally a Magic the Gathering trading site for chrissake).

Binance's reputation is hardly impeccable, but by crypto standards they're kinda sorta the adults in the room. Then again, so was FTX.

My worry is rarely about an employee being dishonest. It is about what a dishonest person will do to that employee to obtain their access.

Any organization putting billions of value in the control of any single individual or computer should be treated as though they were caught trying to donate to North Korea with plausible deniability.

The point of cold wallet is to minimize movements, if there is high frequency of funds moved from a wallet then it is likely can not be called cold any more. Plus CEX in any case still needs to have large buffer of funds on some wallet to support day trading.

For a large CEX like Binance, $5B might just qualify as a hot wallet.

Crypto is a hard lesson for early adopters who believed that humanity will get actual benefit when in reality it was completely hijacked by bad actors while people got relative nothing or worse. What an incredible disappointment of a project.

TRM Labs[0] claims it is indeed NK

[0]: https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/north-korea-steals-us...

NK is literally the primary victor of Crypto as an ecosystem. They've never had an easier time funding their economy.

The previous strategy North Korea used before Crypto was to make the best quality counterfeit US dollars ever made. That got somewhat countered. So North Korea was actually going to be in a bad place funding wise. Thank goodness everyone gave them trivial access to free money through crypto!

Thanks to Crypto and the Ukraine war, North Korea is doing really well for itself. Which, to be clear, means nuclear tipped ICBMs

What would be the list? NK, then Russia, anybody else ?

why would it pop tether? if anything, it makes tether more profitable, as they can collect the yield on the treasuries and not have to return the principal dollars which are frozen.

think of it this way - if someone steals your iphone, and you lock it, does apple pop? No, apple sells you another one. locked devices are good for apple because it causes more demand.

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>The problem with Bitcoin being on your computer is that its useless there.

If you want to use the BC on your computer, you can transfer it to wherever you want.

Its the difference between gold and fiat.

Pirates wanted gold because they did not belong to any State to issue them IOU.

But owning the gold in a locker and trading with the IOU of the bank means you need to trust the bank instead.

> who knows maybe the Binance guy actually made a deal to send $5B of crypto for a really cool NFT when drunk

... or when sober.

> It seems better when it's on an exchange like Binance, because they cover you when it gets stolen.

Assuming they actually can cover the losses financially.

And if they don't good luck suing them.

we will see if they do.

How on earth would anyone think they can cover you?

some coins are easier than others, but states definielty have an interest to limit access and make it seem like a really intimidating thing to own.

Yes but given the dominance (and vulnerability) of CEXes, assets are often effectively frozen after a big theft.

Stablecoins are more like a bridge for fiat. So that it's only partially decentralized not all that terrible.

You see, he's no longer running Binance or participating in its operation in any capacity, per their deal with the Trump admin / Justice department. He's tweeting about this hack as a civilian, offering personal guarantees to Binance customers out of the goodness of his heart!

Don’t necessarily disagree but wasnt he already out of prison when he got the pardon??

The problem is, just like with Bitcoin, when you need to use it someone could steal it

The whole idea behind Bitcoin is that you can be your own bank. Binance is just an exchange. You cannot be JP Morgan Chase.

100% agreed. To your question, I think unfortunate reality is people usually learn from pain. We burn our ourselves and learn to stop playing with fire.

It took two world wars and the fear of atomic weapons to establish the global cooperation we have now.

It took 9/11 for intelligence services to get over themselves and start sharing information.

It took a financial crisis to realize packaging subprime mortgages into tranches doesn’t suddenly make them AAA credits.

Maybe it will take some hackers doing something that seems improbable to have a framework for regulating the development and distribution of AI.

I’m sure there are cases where people saw calamity coming and circumvented it. When there is the perception of big money and winner takes all dynamics on the line, I wouldn’t bet on people motivated by power and money to do the “right” thing.

So I’d say fasten your seatbelt and be ready for whatever.

The car analogy is the standard regurgitated response to anybody who questions the pace of technological development.

First, horses weren’t slow and safe.

Second, cars aren’t autonomous and they have relatively narrow use cases compared to AI.

Third, cars were eventually heavily regulated to prevent accidents and reduce serious injury from inevitable accidents. That’s why you have to wear seatbelts and cars top speeds are regulated.

Fourth , rather than using basing what do about AI on how we handled the introduction of cars, maybe we should focus on the facts, data, evidence specific to AI.

It’s fine to reflect on the past to think about how to build the future. Maybe we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion because we did something in the past we should do it again in a completely different context with a completely different technology.

Edit: fixed the count of points from “Fourth” to “Third” and “Fifth” to “Fourth”

> All those accidents you mentioned are "breaking a few eggs". The omelette is speed.

False. There is no omelette. This is all happening because Pandora's box has been opened, and we know that attempts to slow it or regulate it are playing into the hands of the big AI firms who desire regulatory capture.

So it could end up terrible, or not, but either way there's just no way to stop it. The big AI firms getting their way would only slow progress in the countries where they operate. The rest of the world would progress unimpeded. So Big AI would get its paycheck but AI as a broader concept would hardly be slowed at all.

> When the car was invented, there were a lot of accidents

These accidents were on the individual scale, but now we're looking at societal scale accidents. Usually it's smart to insist on a bit more planning and consideration at that level.

Cars are not a black box goop of matrices, this comparison is bad. You also should not compare LLMs to going from assembly to high-level.

I’m not a policy maker, but off the top of my head:

For starters, I’d have Congress preemptively do what they would probably do post some AI disaster. Something like form a committee of academic researchers, security professionals, and other people who are incentivized to be skeptical and have them investigate the risks posed by the AI we have and what’s cooking. The aim would be take the risks seriously and propose policies that seek to mitigate those risks.

I’d also, make more of an effort to cooperate with governments to establish some treaty-like agreements about how we will use AI in critical areas like warfare. We have these kind of agreements about biological and nuclear weapons. We can have them about AI weapons, too. Maybe this would cool down the arms race atmosphere.

I would establish some kind of central-bank like authority whose members are protected from congressional and executive-branch meddling and whose mandate is to influence the development of AI in a way that’s universally agreed to be good society. Not sure how this would look and what their levers would be, but I think something similar to the Feds mandate to balance employment and inflation, but the AI version, would be worth exploring.

Finally, I wouldn’t wait until AI has replaced people and hyper scalers are sitting on trillions to have a plan for how millions of people are supposed to make a living when they can’t find work anymore because agents and robots are doing the jobs they used to do. I think we’re still a ways away from that reality. But having a framework, better yet policies, in place would probably make people feel a lot better about the development of AI. If everyone knows they’re going to get a UBI check for 5K plus access to a solid state sponsored healthcare plan for them and their immediate family when AI makes us all redundant, I don’t think people would be so apprehensive to AI and data centers.

Again, I’m not a policy maker. I’m sure there are a bunch of externalities that people can point out to poke holes in my ideas. Be my guest.

Sitting around doing what amounts to jack shit while the technology that powers the internet seems increasingly vulnerable to the technology we’re building and distributing as fast as possible definitely is not the way to go.

The credit markets seem concerned about the timing of the AI booms future cash flows. So maybe the invisible hand will take care of the situation for awhile. I just hope the unwinding doesn’t take the rest of the economy down with it.

Either way AI is here to stay. So, even if the bubble burst, when the market inevitably comes back the same issues will be there. Better to get ahead then not.

Ha ha ha, I can see how I’m giving luddite vibes in this thread. You’ll just have to take my word for it that I’m more capitalist technocrat than luddite. I’m also a liberal, humanist, with an aversion to taking systemic risk. So, there is some tension.

Functionally, yes anyone wanting to trade will likely use a centralized service.

That's one of my main gripes with bitcoin and all the others today. I don't agree with some of the original bitcoin papers ideas and goals, but at least the idea if being peer to peer makes sense.

The fact that today both securing and using these "currencies" requires a centralized service completely ruins the point of them. At best they're faster than wire transfers, at worst they're just a means to gamble on less regulated assets.

its middle ground in a sense that it has all centralisation (1) and none of legal accountability (0) so averages at 0.5 (middle ground)

A lot of altcoins were forks of popular code bases. ie btc and eth. Some code bases pulled in bug fixes from upstream, others drifted or were not maintained. Others were greenfield projects without as many eyes. A lot of targets imo.

How do/did they get it out though?

You cannot mix billions in TC

Wrench attack

https://nypost.com/2025/11/25/us-news/sam-altmans-ex-boyfrie...

tell me how NK woould steal 6B, or any money, with a virtual hack, from a bank. not by going in there guns blazing.

yea, break things... like your legs

Billions at stake in a service that is highly used to launder money, exchange illegal goods, etc.

Whoever went for this has some balls.

Not necessarily. But I believe they said that the laptop was hacked.

what kind of regulations would serve this particular scenario?

The hack is purely technical in nature.

This could have been the FED's system that got compromised and the response would have been the same.

Oh, no, sorry - it wouldn't because we wouldn't even know it happened as FED is fully opaque while crypto is quite transparent.

In that sense crypto is much more democratic because at least there's some ability for the public to audit it. With FED there's none.

You could prompt it to do the opposite.

that would be a net loss - it's as if you postulated to not rebuild the Internet after the countless breaches and hacks.

Cons: difficult to money launder.

This is what I do. I'll only use crypto in a few rare cases where I don't want the vendor to get my credit card number. Always in amounts that, if ever stolen, would not break the bank.

these use cases exist with all forms of cash too

not to be whatabout... but... anything of value is used for all that too, in much larger amounts.

it is wild to me that people expect that crypto is supposed to solve a problem that is as old as currency.

Bitcoin was meant to be cash and an antidote to crony finance. Instead, it became yet another mechanism for the financial world to abuse. I'd say thats a pretty heavy failure by any measure.

For me bitcoin opened up the idea that we could maybe do money better. That idea still lives, but not in practice. Yet.

NFT era was the peak of stupidity. I lost a lot of respect for many “smart” people during that time.

Yeah apparently it's news in 2026 that banks can actually keep their assets secure in comparison to the web3 clown fiesta. Of course banks do get compromised but not anywhere close to this degree.

how are you gonna use your paper keys when you want to spend some of your bitcoin? the private key has to touch a computer at some point.

Security through decentralization, if there is such a term.

I'm not concerned because I have zero crypto because I would hate to be worried about being hacked to have it stolen.

Honey can be exchanged for goods and services

Perhaps OP means to say it is a honeypot criminals create for us ...

Except that plenty of exchanges can also blacklist a wallet, and then block transactions that include funds that (indirectly) come from those blacklisted wallets.

I don't know much about bitcoin but surely you don't store this all in one wallet? You split it into thousands and then use hardware security modules with a risk management system so it doesn't let you transfer $5bn instantly. Unless it was an inside job maybe?

I'd be really curious to know what their security architecture was.

I know, but if something is split up and stored in a vault somewhere the likely hood of a vulnerability napping the wallet falls. Defence in depth and risk analysis.

I suppose they could play the super long game and deposit many many small amounts into "shady" online crypto casinos, play a few hands of blackjack and then withdraw. Clean coins.

that one was over (years?) time, wouldn't call that a heist really

fraud, not a heist

Guess they said by(e) to their bit(coin)

"have anything to do with the company anymore", lmao what crucial decisions would even be in play here that Richard Teng wouldn't obviously make?

And lots of museum-quality art. And a few oligarch condos.

You must be joking. With $5.6 billion you could lose 80% and still have over $1 billion.

Only down 3% today, which is pretty much nothing for something that regularly sees 20% swings

Pretty sure you can get a metaverse for dirt cheap these days. Still, no one has figured out why you'd want one.

https://xxcancel.com/cz_binance/status/2115915423174853077

"Pardoned" with implications of bribery, as opposed to being found innocent by a court.

Dead internet

Came back here to see if i was seeing double

> And decreasing, since BTC is dropping as we speak. Always a good idea to hedge a currency with the currency itsself

Depends on what you’re insuring, no? For theft, it actually makes senses, right? That way, you’re insuring a constant number of coins, no matter what the market is doing. If you’re insurance currency would tank during a bitcoin heist, you would lose the insurance effect.

> Funds are safe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelF6zEHXpE

Another guy pardoned by Trump.[1]

[1] https://people.com/trump-pardons-changpeng-zhao-binance-cryp...

This might sound good.. but freezing currencies is bad. It evaporates trust of liquidity from whoever is doing governance. It's part of the reason why the bond market is doing what its doing lately and why countries are on-shoring gold reserves.

they borrowed ETH against the stablecoins on AAVE before they were frozen

Doesn't matter how much they custody!

Uh don’t you not want to cover losses with customer funds?

It's a (weak) bear market capitulation signal - max fear when people think everything is broken.

already over. a tiny bounce after falling 55%

Fractional reserve banking but for Bitcoin.

much more was at risk as a percentage of market size, market was in worse shape,

You mean FTX?

Though in that case the crash was directly due to "effectively altruist" SBF fraudulently dumping customer assets in a half-brained and presumably stimulant-addled attempt to manipulate the market and reduce his liabilities.

Not making any market predictions here-- just saying that it's probably not that useful to generalize from that event.

Not to be too pedantic, but with some napkin math, I don't think this is true. Looking for clarification!!

I downloaded Binance's self published market data (https://data.binance.vision/), calculated spot and futures volume for the past year, and then applied their *highest fee tier* on both sides of the volume (for every $1 traded, they generate a fee on the taker and the maker. the fee rate is asymmetrical).

Spot revenue worked out to $7.6B USD, perps revenue worked out to $13.8B

This is an upper bound on the fees charged on volume. Binance also scams their users with a b-book, has DMM deals, etc.

I don't want to get into all that today.

But the final result is that they print somewhere in the range of $20B per year on fees. I guess CZ also has huge stockpiles of BTC and stuff. A 1% rise in BTC price probably means more for them than their actual fees, LOL.

All this to say, I think $5.6B significantly hurts.

See Google's stock price today. Their ads business slowed down a bit, and their stock tanked 10%. If binance was publicly traded, I imagine a similar affect would be demonstrated on their price.

How much money do you think they are making? Because I really doubt this is peanuts to them.