561–570 of 890 posts
For apps to be compromised, that means a dev was involved, either knowingly or unknowingly. And as a dev, that unknowing part would be very hard, way more difficult when dealing with an app that handles so-called financial transactions. If something got in unaudited, that's also on the devs.
The hacker has spent the last 11 hours slowky and incrementally converting all the various tokens they got to ETH. They've been using a variety of different defi exchange and have eaten large slippage fees, at least once over 5M lost in slippage. We're not seeing any else, e.g. laundering through another exchange, splitting into different accounts, automating the liquidation of tokens to ETH, off loading ETH into a c…
This last week has been a rollercoaster. I've been in crypto since a long time ago and have seen quite a bit, but this FTX implosion takes the crown. And to be honest, I don't think its over.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is wrong and green washing. We could also use this energy for better things than Bitcoin. And while BTC doesn't make any value besides moving money from one person to another, it also produces hardware garbage like ASIC chips and power supply. It also steals demand from others too. There is only downside for most of us than benefit of allowing Bitcoin mining independent of it's source.
No, this is not wrong. You can't magically just "use it for something else". That's not how this works. You need to generate electricity where it is needed (or transport it, which costs money). If there are landfills out there that are just spewing methane gas (20x worse than CO2, btw) into the atmosphere, why not make sure that is burned and used more efficiently? Please show me a realistic plan to do this. Bitcoin…
Where are landfills too remote to transport electricity away from?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if you already are in a bad place?
If you use non-privacy chains, which are the common ones, you can get found out as soon as you try to do anything meaningful with it. Eg you move to some country, you want to buy a place, you find a seller willing to take crypto, ding-ding-ding, authorities will ask them where they got the coins from and there you are in your pool.
Or maybe, if they are hackers they can use/launder those in some way or another, but if this is SBF behind a mask then he can't?
I am far from an expert about money laundering techniques, but I find it hard to believe that it is impossible to launder, given the context.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If someone has a problem that crypto is actually a good fit for -- an application that would legitimately deliver value for customers, insuring medical tourism perhaps -- a lot of people will dismiss it just because they assume crypto=scam. If there's a great application that solves an important problem using crypto then I imagine most people would focus on the problem and not the fact that crypto is used to solve…
Fair point, however I think the argument ultimately still holds. If customers or regulators learn that the application is crypto-powered under the hood, they'll be turned off. And it might be that the crypto part can't be stuffed under the hood. It's a frustrating situation for someone like me who enjoys geeking out about designs for alternative institutions. I see many ways our institutions could be better-designed…
Well, not like you since you’re genuinely trying to solve real-world problems.
I had that feeling a lot during the dotcom era because you had a similar, although less pronounced, dynamic where some companies were focused on selling their technology as some kind of magic cure for every problem (this was also the era where you’d see startup founders proudly showing off millions of dollars worth of Sun servers running Oracle to process 100 orders a day). We’d get calls from our clients who’d get these shiny presentations but couldn’t understand how something made sense for their business, and we’d walk through it with them and confirm that it didn’t.
Most of those “it’s new and shiny! Buy now!” companies either folded or were acquired at more accurate valuations when bubble money dried up. I remember a couple of sales guys asking about jobs and it was like “you didn’t care what your prospects needed when money was easy, who can afford you now?”
My advice would always be to focus on what real thing you’re making better. If you can’t find one, either leave or have a fallback plan for things suddenly grinding to a halt. Lower-level staff are usually the ones left holding the bag unless your job is very clearly linked to revenue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you believe there is more to come and this isn’t over, are you still holding crypto?
I've been in cryptocurrencies/blockchain since 2012. I "missed" the BTC boat and got into ETH early. I'm of the thought that CeFi services like Ftx, Nexo, Coinbase and similar are stupid. The only thing that should exist is simple Exchanges between Fiat and cryptocurrency. But everything else is just a scam IMHO. Why would you do a CeFi in crypto , when theres more TAM in doing it normal FIAT? Because you want to Avo…
However I’ve grown less confident in ETHs longevity following the move to PoS. I’m concerned about the centralization of control and influence (eg transactions being dropped, tornado cash), lack of ability to withdrawal staked ETH, and general lack of trust created by the extreme number of scams. How do you view ETH long term, particularly wrt the proximity it has to these seemingly endless scams?
FTX is just an exchange right? Any sensible person only puts funds into an exchange that they want to trade. Not your keys, not your crypto.
“Any sensible person”. I think this is an unfair characterization of people that keep large sums on exchanges. It’s not unreasonable to trust a company worth billions to hold your funds. Some might even argue an exchange is safer than a hardware wallet in the sense that if you physically lose the wallet, or completely forget the password, you’re SOL. No one expects a multi-billion dollar exchange to vaporize over nig…
Except for everyone who has?
We don't expect banks to vaporize because they're FDIC-insured with extreme regulations on their lending/investing, highly regulated.
But crypto exchanges are the wild west. Totally vulnerable to both hacking and ponzi scheme fraud. Essentially zero regulation or customer insurance. And "vaporizing over night" is how it always goes -- to quote the famous phrase, you go bankrupt slowly and then all at once.
So it's actually incredibly unreasonable to trust a company with essentially zero oversight to hold your funds.
And sure, there can be a movement towards more openness about funds/audits. But now customers have to decide... which auditors can be trusted to review the numbers, when it's the exchange selecting and paying the auditors? How can you even know? And do the auditors provide any defense against hacking?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Retail investors are creditors right? Though I guess you mean only the larger creditors. I think the bigger difference is that bankruptcy proceedings take a long time and to a retail investor ‘you might get some money back in N years’ isn’t so different from ‘you get nothing’.
I just had that realization that I'm sure so many have already had.. In a bankruptcy, we really are creditors.. but we're not Creditors, and won't get our money back until big C's have had all they want.
I think there are two ways to think about this:
1. If you’re a company and you have N classes of debt then probably ‘ordinary people’ will all be in the same class (this can vary, eg if you’re a big retail store then wages owed will likely be a different more senior class of debt than anything you owe customers). So the more senior claims are more likely to be big companies as are the more junior claims, and it is unlikely that the ‘ordinary people’ class of debt will be the most senior. For FTX I expect the hedge funds and retail customers to have the same seniority.
2. Hedge funds, etc, will be able to retain lawyers and seek representation in the bankruptcy process in a way that is unaffordable to ordinary people. So they might end up with favourable timelines/restructurings or better accounting of what they’re owed but those arrangements can’t be that the big members of the class get a higher proportion of their money back than the smaller members.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the difference between this, terraluna earlier this year or MTGox?
Luna was quite bad, but it was pretty straight-forward path to death that everyone saw from a mile away. Not many people predicted that FTX and SBF will fall from grace within a timespan of 48hrs. The whole thing is also so full of scandals, theft and corruption we will be reading about this in the news for weeks to come. mtGox was so early in crypto, there wasn't any institutional capital or major players, mostly re…