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Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

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Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#331

Post by skohan »

SilverBirch wrote: post #92
mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holding crypto on an exchange is like giving money to a guy on the corner who knows a broker to put in the stock market and telling them you don't need the account numbers, you trust them. If you're going to do crypto, get a wallet setup where you have the keys to it.

There's two counter points to this. The first is that in terms of day to day likelihood of losing the bitcoin, you're probably generally safer with an exchange than holding the crypto yourself. Secondly, if the exchanges actually do collapse, then whilst you won't lose your BTC if you're not on the exchange, your BTC are probably going to be worth a lot less anyway, so you're still exposed to the risk of exchanges co…

So it's not safe to keep in an exchange and not safe to keep outside of an exchange. Future of finance alright.

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#332

Post by throw_nbvc1234 »

warkdarrior wrote: post #292
throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People look at decentralization as an ideology rather then a threat model. The security you might implement to protect $100 vs $100k vs $100 million is different. Running your blog on AWS is running your own server in a decentralized sense; but if your threat model includes Amazon shutting you down or something like the US Govt/public compelling Amazon to shut you down then it might not be good enough. Which is why T…

> The security you might implement to protect $100 vs $100k vs $100 million is different. This almost makes sense, except that you have to take into the relative value of that amount, in particular relative to one's total net worth. If I want to protect $100, and that is all the money I have, I'll worry about security a lot. If I have $1,000,000, protecting $100 is not a priority. The general assumption is that peopl…

It could be absolute and/or relative depending on the mechanisms. Relying on FDIC insurance to protect $1 million in a bank account is probably not a good idea.

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#333

Post by olalonde »

jmoak3 wrote: post #322
olalonde wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you have a more black-and-white vision than me. While it's not perfectly decentralized, e.g. some users do delegate their trust to centralized services for convenience or security, it is still more decentralized than fiat where (digital) self-custody is simply not possible. Decentralization and trust are a spectrum, not a binary. Even compiling the software yourself wouldn't get you 100% there [0]. I also fee…

>I'd say you have a more black-and-white vision than me. I definitely do. If a part of bitcoin's chain of usage requires enough trust to ask the government to intervene to protect me, why not just trust the government? >My suspicion was simply that many HNers tend to reflexively upvote any comment that paints crypto in a bad light. I think that many people agree with me, and that it's not some reflex, fud, or decepti…

> I definitely do. If a part of bitcoin's chain of usage requires enough trust to ask the government to intervene to protect me, why not just trust the government?

I am not sure I understand the question, Bitcoin does not require trust or intervention from the government.

Your original comment is objectively incorrect in two different ways. It's not even remotely a surprising event[0] and most importantly, self-custody does not require running a server. Therefore I maintain my suspicion but enjoy your upvotes.

[0] "You can't make this up": used to express great surprise. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/you-coul...

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#334

Post by golergka »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #288
golergka wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crypto needed a tangible market/reason d'etre to be valuable. I have recently paid $40 for a $240 SWIFT transaction that I made on behalf of my father, as his bank (with most Russian banks) have been cut of from the world's financial system. Crypto is fulfilling a real need felt by many people all around the globe; it's just most of those people don't live in first world nations.

I think most people would prefer for the sanctions on Russia to be more rigorously enforced

I would prefer if Europe actually put in place oil/gas embargo and stop giving Putin's regime billions of dollars to wage war instead of blocking the people who have spent years protesting and are now trying to flee the totalitarian regime, but here we are.

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#335

Post by mrkramer »

mempko wrote: post #276
mrkramer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking of Bitcoin; Satoshi was an excellent C++ programmer but s/he wasn't quite good at creating GUI and "Crypto" consumer apps that's why s/he open sourced it and left it to the community to build upon it and expand the Bitcoin ecosystem. Btw at the time Bitcoin was in the experimental phase and Satoshi left the Bitcoin community pretty early that's why "Crypto" was user hostile and maybe still is.

Satosh was NOT an excellent C++ programmer. As someone who heavily dug into bitcoin code, the whole thing was a mess from the beginning. Poorly architected. Insane amount of global variables. It was just a huge mess and still is. IMO it was initially written by someone deep in government (but I have no proof, just my opinion from looking at the code).

>Satoshi was NOT an excellent C++ programmer.

I'm not a programmer but that is what Gavin Andresen said[1]; he said something like this "Satoshi was an excellent C++ programmer but he wasn't a cryptographer" and "Satoshi wasn't familiar with Cryptography 101" in a sense that Satoshi was sometimes mixing up basic cryptographic concepts.

And yea I know Bitcoin had plenty of bugs I heard of notorious Value overflow incident[2].

>IMO it was initially written by someone deep in government (but I have no proof, just my opinion from looking at the code).

My assumption is someone from the academia e.g. university professor. Maybe someone who was teaching freshmen basics of Computer Science and basic C++ programming then your point might be valid that Bitcoin's codebase was poorly written looking from the practical and from the professional point of view.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ3e1Pzu7iI

[2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#336

Post by rmbyrro »

twawaaay wrote: post #266

I am so happy about this. I hope this is going to sour crypto for "investors". I use quotes, because they really are not -- investing should be reserved for fronting cash to create some value (like buying stock to infuse capital into a corporation). As it is all crypto trading is purely speculation. The world would be so much better if money tended to be exchanged in good faith, to improve something rather than just…

Technically, only direct stock offerings "infuse capital into a corporation".

The rest (which is probably 99% of the market volume) is also just "speculation".

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#337

Post by legulere »

danuker wrote: post #291
twawaaay wrote: post #266

I am so happy about this. I hope this is going to sour crypto for "investors". I use quotes, because they really are not -- investing should be reserved for fronting cash to create some value (like buying stock to infuse capital into a corporation). As it is all crypto trading is purely speculation. The world would be so much better if money tended to be exchanged in good faith, to improve something rather than just…

> As it is all crypto trading is purely speculation. The reason I stay invested is the supply-side economics. The supply is well-known in advance, and is advantageous to Bitcoin. US M2 money supply grew 8.04% in the past year [0], while Bitcoin's grew ~1.75% [1]. Yes, demand has its 80% ups and downs, but each crash was to a level higher than the previous. [0] - https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_m2_money_supply_yoy […

What when demand goes to 0, when people realize that bitcoins aren’t useful for anything legal?

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#338

Post by rglullis »

FabHK wrote: post #298
rglullis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go, a whole list of decentralized crypto exchanges: https://www.coingecko.com/en/dex

Can you trade BTC/USDC or BTC/ETH on any of them?

Yes. You can trade one of the many ERC-20 tokens that wrap bitcoin (e.g, WBTC, renBTC) and later you can swap these tokens for "real" BTC, also just by executing the smart contracts from the wrappers.

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#340

Post by nradov »

0daystock wrote: post #180
jmoak3 wrote: post #20

You really cannot make this up. As usual crypto in practice is the opposite of decentralized because people. Will. Not. Run. Their. Servers. Moxie nailed it

All monetary systems are built on trust. You can say the same thing about a run on traditional banks, which only have a fraction of reserves to cover deposits and would result in similar price depression.

False. Fiat monetary systems are built on a state monopoly on violence. Trust is merely a byproduct. You are required to pay taxes in the local fiat currency, and if you fail to pay then the government will eventually seize your assets by force, or perhaps put you in jail. This is a feature, not a bug, and it generally works fairly well in practice as long as the government is at least minimally competent.
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