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Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

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Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was a failure of traditional financial institutions and people who are ok with them, not of crypto. Satoshi wouldn't be encouraging people to put their coins on a trusted third party like that. All fundamental crypto values say this.

Precisely the failure of crypto is thinking that people will follow "fundamental crypto values" and underestimating the power of convenience and ignorance. "Traditional financial institutions" are inevitable in crypto.

Fractional reserving is taken as something that is good and wonderful, but before you had the fed who could print money at will, you had banking crashes caused by it on a regular basis.

In a fixed money supply currency, fractional reserve banking should be illegal and banks should instead make money off fees. Venture capital should put their own money at risk to invest in the economy. How will people afford houses though? The housing market booms and busts because of the wildly fluctuating availability of credit caused by the money multiplier rapidly creating and destroying money which is tied to the fractional reserve banking concept. Homes would be drastically cheaper and people would actually be able to save to buy them if it weren't for the huge supply of rapidly created and later contracting credit available to buy them. Things we buy with credit like housing and education have gone up steadily in price, while things bought with cash have not.

The fractional reserve people are so sick of crypto, that ,in one platform, you can buy bitcoin but you can't send it to a crypto address. You have to get your friend on the platform, you can send it to them, and then they can convert it back into fiat. It's ridiculous, you're basically just buying and selling a security that tracks Bitcoin and not Bitcoin itself.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've noted before on HN the entire concept of people being able to manage their own wallets flies against everything we know about people. People forget stuff, make mistakes, and lose things. The margin of error for a wallet is tiny. It's not rare for crypto forums, twitter, etc to prescribe completely ridiculous processes and systems for securing wallets, backing up seed phrases, etc. There's an entire cottage in…

Print your private key on paper and lose it all when your house burns down. vs Give your private key to an exchange, and enrich the shitheads running the exchange when they run away with your money. First option seems preferable. If you're going to lose your money, better for the money to be truly lost than to enrich a thief.

Print your key works fine if I’m locking my “money” under a mattress. If the point of Bitcoin I was to replace currency then I’d still need an easy way to keep it close with my all times. So, carry your signed transfer title to your house in the wallet and lose your entire house to a mugging seems more appropriate as an analogy.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've noted before on HN the entire concept of people being able to manage their own wallets flies against everything we know about people. People forget stuff, make mistakes, and lose things. The margin of error for a wallet is tiny. It's not rare for crypto forums, twitter, etc to prescribe completely ridiculous processes and systems for securing wallets, backing up seed phrases, etc. There's an entire cottage in…

Print your private key on paper and lose it all when your house burns down. vs Give your private key to an exchange, and enrich the shitheads running the exchange when they run away with your money. First option seems preferable. If you're going to lose your money, better for the money to be truly lost than to enrich a thief.

> If you're going to lose your money, better for the money to be truly lost than to enrich a thief.

I'd quite like an option C

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#325
post #119

"At this point I'm convinced Satoshi Nakamoto was actually a public administration professor trying to teach kids why financial institutions have the rules in place that they do. Given enough time, the entire crypto space will have reinvented every regulation they tried to get rid of and understood why they existed in the first place."

Regulated banks and currencies have similar issues, for example: - the government can print more money and devaluate your savings (it's like a form of tax one cannot avoid). But it is difficult to "print" more cryptocurrency. - the government can put limits on amount of money one can withdraw from a bank account. So you legally have the money but cannot use it. - the bank can refuse to deal with you under AML acts wi…

> Regulated banks and currencies have similar issues, for example:

And, yet, it's not an everyday occurrence that some US regulated financial institution loses all customer deposits...

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good post. > 96% of house seats were won by the party that spent more in their race. I don’t think the causality here is clear. A lot of companies/billionaires/millionaires and even regular people tend to donate money towards the people who are likely to win the race. If you wanna be in the good graces of the person representing a certain district in the House the best way to do that is to make a bet on the likely wi…

I would say... mostly true? The 96% isn't as sobering as it first sounds because most races are not competitive at all. https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/by_race/2022?di... Many have literally $0 by outside spenders (ignoring the parties themselves). On the other hand you don't see a ton of money going to non-competitive races because it doesn't really matter. The politician doesn't benefit all that much s…

>On the other hand you don't see a ton of money going to non-competitive races because it doesn't really matter. The politician doesn't benefit all that much so it's not exactly a great way to earn favors.

Just my own speculation, but this is probably only true to a certain point. A politician in a non-competitive race is not going to have anything productive to do with 15 million as in NV3, but money that goes to the PAC run by your former aide helps to grease his palm (so 100k goes in and 50k is spent on ads, 50k on the PAC CEO's salary for example), or to similarly grease the palm of your various consultants, friends, and family, or to grease the palms of friendly industry groups who you sincerely hope will hire you on a do-nothing job once you retire from politics.

Money coming in to a certain point is always a good thing, and I speculate being in a foregone conclusion race probably helps limit the scrutiny on how you spend it.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#327
post #33

So, having been around since the early bitcoin days, core to the salespitch back then was the fact you would have control. You'd have your coins in your wallet, and no need for banks etc. Apparently nobody does this anymore, and gives their wallets to these exchanges (i.e. banks) and balks when the obvious happens in pyramid schemes. People just don't get distributed currency if they promptly undistribute it. Or is i…

Many people are managing our own coins, you just don't hear from us because we don't get burned every year.

Somehow, humanity has gotten good at taking systems that were designed to be decentralized and distributed (like crypto, E-mail, personal websites, and so on) and instead, surrender them to a few big companies who become single points of failure. We keep failing to learn from this every time.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#328
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of day traders on FTX are learning first hand the value of DeFi and self custody.

Yes, because DeFi never suffers from collapses or hacks. Nobody every drained a DAO with a flash-loan, or used one to cash-out illiquid assets with no intention of paying it back... DeFi is as much of a joke as the rest of the ecosystem.

Different category of risk.

CEX and DEX can both have hacks. An open source DEX can be verified, formally tested, and made immutable and un-upgradable on chain, like Uniswap.

Uniswap V2 contract is 2 years unchanged, $3.8B TVL and $1B daily volume, close to 10 year old Coinbase CEX. Not bad for being a joke.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#329
post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely the failure of crypto is thinking that people will follow "fundamental crypto values" and underestimating the power of convenience and ignorance. "Traditional financial institutions" are inevitable in crypto.

But at least in crypto I have the OPTION of storing it myself. Also, if I do decide to use a custodial provider, I can choose to use a provider that publishes proof of reserves [0], giving me more confidence in the provider. [0] https://www.kraken.com/proof-of-reserves

That’s great, and also moot when the vast variety of coin holders opt for the convenience of a centralized third party service instead.

With fiat, you also have the option of storing gold yourself.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#330
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've noted before on HN the entire concept of people being able to manage their own wallets flies against everything we know about people. People forget stuff, make mistakes, and lose things. The margin of error for a wallet is tiny. It's not rare for crypto forums, twitter, etc to prescribe completely ridiculous processes and systems for securing wallets, backing up seed phrases, etc. There's an entire cottage in…

> As I've noted before on HN One of the joys of HN is that on the whole no one knows who anyone else really is nor keeps track of what they've argued previously.

Some of us put out real info in our profiles.
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