Live data from Hacker News

Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

trends.aax.com

411–420 of 843 posts

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#411
post #228
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No regulation would have prevented this crime from happening. I want to be clear here, what happened here is already illegal as is, and no regulation would have prevented it from happening in the first place. Hell, the firm was already being audited, and those auditors didn't catch the accounting discrepancies, so it's doubtful that any additional regulation would have found this earlier either...

You aren't wrong, maybe it's my wishful thinking. What do you think the solution is here? Do you think the house of cards stayed propped up because a lot of people were in on the fraud? Were the auditors just incompetent or were they in on it? Auditors are reasonably well known firms.

The solution is simple, relegate centralized exchanges to niches that so far can't be fulfilled in any other way (namely fiat-crypto transactions), and use them only briefly and immediately withdraw any assets from it once the transaction you need is complete.

You may also take on insurance against such malfeasance on the part of the exchange, increasing your likelihood of recovering your funds. On the plus side insurance agencies now have a financial incentive to ensure the exchanges they insure are honest.

In other words, see centralized entities as the unreliable partner that they are and work accordingly.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is designed to combat inflation? Please show me how it does this. I am very skeptical of this claim.

Because there will be maximum only 21 millions of bitcoin while US dollar in circulation is doubling every decade or so.

This seems to use the uncommon, Austrian and wrong definition of inflation as being purely an effect of monetary supply.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#413

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.

Put it on encrypted distributed backup that you control. I don't know why more people don't do this.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can we acknowledge that both of those options are utter trash compared to conventional banking, though? The system that the crypto advocates hate on, but provides 250k per person + per bank + per account type as insurance by default to all registered financial institutions?

Have you seen how much wealth was destroyed in 2008?

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first instinct was right, they come with little steel squares with individual letters pre-etched, and when you receive them you arrange them yourself into your seed phrase

The venn of arts and crafts, paranoid delusions, and blockchain.

Heh I would not call them paranoid after all these crypto collapses.

Say I'd have $100000 in a crypto wallet, I'd etch it too and keep it in a safe instead of giving it to a website with no state backed guarantees.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can we acknowledge that both of those options are utter trash compared to conventional banking, though? The system that the crypto advocates hate on, but provides 250k per person + per bank + per account type as insurance by default to all registered financial institutions?

I've never seen it as a replacement, but a supplement with it's own pros and cons

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#417
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…

That is still the promise and unlock of cryptographic currencies. But that does not seem to be the use case for much of the people I've seen in the space the last years. I think the fact it is crypto currencies is incidental, it is all about earning money through appreciation of some popular asset.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#418
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…

I do this (for the most part). Whenever I buy currency on an exchange, I Immediately transfer it to a personal wallet. This is actually what drove me away from anything based on Ethereum, because the transfer speed and fee system for Ethereum is so horrendous, I found myself leaving that currency in the exchange managed wallets.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#419
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Storing a 12/13 word string in your head for a cold wallet puts it into territory a lot closer to a bank account, and in the US normally words in your head can't be seized via court order (there are some exceptional circumstances, but they're far more limited than freezing bank accounts).

I think it's closer to hiding a pile of money personally. The security is based on you remembering a 12 word string or geolocation, and the string/geolocation can't be siezed via court order (other than exceptional circumstances, or by finding the location/keys). The 'storage' in both instances is decentralised. If you forget your 12 word string or geolocation, you lose your money. Banks on the other hand: * Provide…

Clearly the advantages and disadvantages have both overlapping and mutually exclusive elements. For this reason It makes sense to me that some may choose to diversify their holdings by taking advantage of both. To me relying fully on the bank doesn't seem safe at all, as the IRS and other agencies have been known to arbitrarily seize accounts based on absurd claims of 'structuring' even for sub 10k deposits [0]. Crypto is volatile, and you can forget your seed string, but nearly impossible to seize if appropriate precautions taken. Local value like land/durable goods retain value largely as long as you can defend them by force, but are poor choices when fleeing.

As time moves on it's clear to me all these assets are becoming important members of the financial landscape. If crypto were merely a degraded version of the dollar, then I don't think so many people would use.

[0] https://ij.org/report/seize-first-question-later/

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#420

The warning bells should be going off in the entire crypto sector right now. If you have money in crypto, I'd strongly recommend going off-exchange

While I agree with you generally, it's a bit absurd to compare these bizarre degen exchanges with something like coinbase.
Post reply on HN