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Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

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Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#691

Post by Hallucinaut »

lui8906 wrote: post #681
jandrese wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that you are missing is that crypto transactions are slow and expensive. When I say slow I mean hours to complete a single transaction. That's why people keep their money on the exchange, it's far more efficient and usable. Of course it's also risky because exchanges do rug pulls all the time. Knowing when to pull your crypto and bail is a trick. If you're seeing news articles about "minor irregularities" a…

Name one Crypto chain that takes hours to confirm a transaction. Bitcoin has a blocktime of 10 minutes and Ethereum is 10 to 20 seconds. More modern networks process transactions in orders of magnitude less time, eg. Solana has a slot time of 0.5 seconds and time to finality being 1 or 2 seconds.

All things are liquid if the transaction fees are big enough

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#692

Post by arcticbull »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #656
charcircuit wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The only reason it exists is because smart contracts didn't exist when they first started. Calm down. That is not true. Smart contract based exchanges do not let people exchange real money into crypto. There will always need to be offchain exchanges for trading USD for crypto. Additionally, trading off chain is much cheaper than on chain. Centralized exchanges will always exist because people want on / off ramps, pe…

The flaw of BTC: everyone wants to cash out in dollars, euros or Swiss francs. Real money BTC is barely used as an actual currency to buy things with. I could be wrong but I thought the idea was that you'd be using BTC in daily life so that you wouldn't need to go "off the ramp".

Well yes but at 2-3tx/sec, that supports a large flea market or a mid-sized costco, not a global economy. Even onboarding everyone onto Lightning would take 75 years, the entire rest of the block reward, about a trillion dollars worth of electricity and many gigatons of e-waste.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#693

Post by chromatin »

Animats wrote: post #472
kkielhofner wrote: post #106

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…

There's a market here for a safe way to store crypto. Something like a thing you carry with you, a thing you can keep at home, a thing you have a friend hold, a thing you have in a safety deposit box, and info a service holds for you. Some combination of majority votes, time delays in days or weeks, and warning messages lets you recover from loss and damage. With backup from an insurance company. But nobody has addre…

I can speak only about Bitcoin, not "cryptocurrencies" generally (and in fact, all of the real innovation in secure storage that I am aware of is happening on Bitcoin, with crypto lagging by many years).

> But nobody has addressed that market.

Au contraire! You've correctly identified an important market! There is both existing work and ongoing development that tries to satisfy exactly what you've asked about (and doesn't involve burying etched steel plates).

Encumbering your bitcoin with the requirement for multiple, M of N threshold signatures ("multisig") is an important way to protect large amounts. Companies like Unchained Capital [0] provide a service wherein the user holds two keys and the company holds 1 key in a 2-of-3 multisig setup; if the company key is needed, video authentication and other procedures are required.

Other, non-company-assisted multisig setups use schemes such as you propose; one example is the Nunchuk wallet [1] which allows you to sign multisig transactions on your own, or request signature(s) from a key held by a family member or friend, passing the PSBT (partially signed Bitcoin transaction) over a secure communication channel.

Finally, two great examples of physical devices to protect your Bitcoin are (1) the Tapsigner [2], which is an NFC-enabled smartcard holding your secp256k1 private key that does on-card signatures; and (2) Jack Dorsey's Block (formerly Square) is developing a hardware wallet that integrates with your smartphone [3] -- one neat innovation here is that policies can be set such that the user may spend small amounts of funds with the phone only; but larger transactions require a thumbprint or pin on a physical device.

You also mentioned time delays -- this is also supported by Bitcoin script; advancements such as miniscript [4] allow you to express complex spending conditions in a tree-like way.

[0] https://www.unchained.com/ [1] https://nunchuk.io/ [2] https://tapsigner.com/ [3] https://wallet.build/ [4] https://miniscript.fun/

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#694

Post by kranke155 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #668
kranke155 wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DAOs are fantastically interesting and if you look into the ones that work, Vitalik’s ideas for Quadratic Voting, there’s a lot toucan imagine could happen there. DAOs and NFTs are already incredible in my view, they are just in pre-alpha stage and everything is kind of a mess. But people see the pre-alpha and goes “this will never work”. I really disagree. I see for instance how DAOs and blockchain could help develo…

> I see for instance how DAOs and blockchain could help developers receive compensation for commits to open source software, creating a possibility for the commercialisation of open source that competes with even large companies. I know people who looked into this. And I hope it happens. I was appropriately reprimanded by dang yesterday for starting a comment with an attack, so I'll slow down and just point out the f…

I’ve gotten some flak from dang as well ;) happens sometimes

I think we are describing fundamentally different economies. GitHub Sponsors is optional. I’m talking about a way to have mandatory payments in open-source, with fully transparent automatic payment mechanisms to all contributors.

And before you say well how, MakerDAO is kind of already working like this (I’d have to look into it more but that’s my impression).

Imagine you buy a piece of software - and it costs you 20$. It’s open source but when you buy it you get an NFT that lets you run the software. The commit tree and their importance are valued by the community. And when you buy the software everyone who’s contributed gets a piece. If you add or extend to it, you’ll also get a share, or you can sell your modules on the side and make your own money on top. But using the blockchain as a method of developer verification, open source becomes profitable in a way that’s verifiable, decentralised and permission less. Anyone can fork but whatever much of the software youve re used still goes to the original developers.

I’m talking about full open source software that would always be paid, where the devs would be IDed on chain, where anyone could write new modules for and get paid on chain for their contributions. All of this is not crypto Utopianism - again some DAOs are already there or close.

Im not talking about “hey sponsor this dev”. I’m talking about a way to earn money while keeping software open source and rewarding people for expanding it in a completely novel way. This is already partially true, even if my whole vision at the moment is a bit fuzzy, it would solve a major challenge that I think we have now.

I am a bit sleepy so I wonder if my comment will make sense but I hope it does.

But fundamentally I believe MakerDAO already does this, it’s just a web app and you pay to use it. Part of that revenue goes to Ethereum miners/stakers, some goes to the protocol, and the protocol decides who to reward.

I don’t see why that model wouldn’t work for a lot of other things. Essentially with crypto VMs you can enforce a model that A. Is open source B. Rewards contributors financially.

Asking why this is better than GitHub Sponsors is a bit like asking why people didn’t pay for digital art before NFTs. It’s just fundamentally different imo.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#695

Post by arcticbull »

tinco wrote: post #278
stefan_ wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto isn't money. You are not a bank customer depositing cash. I'm not sure why their customers should be creditors at all, it's a bit like asking GMail for your emails back when Google goes bankrupt.

> a bit like asking GMail for your emails back when Google goes bankrupt. And I sure as heck would want by e-mails back if Google goes bankrupt. Google shouldn't own them, they're just an exchange for e-mails. The idea that another entity would buy those e-mails and do with them what they like is ridiculous, regardless of any juristic reality.

I'm not so sure actually. I think your hypothetical is actually exactly what would happen.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#696

Post by partiallypro »

constantcrying wrote: post #85
lbriner wrote: post #7

Forgive my ignorance but it seems that one major problem with crypto-exchanges is that they don't necessarily have any assets other than the crypto that has been deposited there, which means all overheads (which I am assuming for some of these guys is $Ms/year) can only come from trading crypto unless they are charging reasonable money for the privilege of using their exchanges. In the FIAT world, banks make tonnes o…

An exchange shouldn't count deposited crypto as their asset. It is an asset of their customer. I do not think the actual problem here is crypto exchanges being unprofitable. Even if a crypto exchange goes under, it could (and frankly should ) still be able to go under gracefully, e.g. letting all customers withdraw their assets for a month (and E-Mailing private keys as a last resort). The issue here is crypto exchan…

One thing that FTX was doing was minting a new totally BS coin, putting out a small float but retaining the vast majority of it. Then propping up their financials using that completely illiquid asset as collateral. On top of that, allowing Alameda to front run announcements about different coins. There's no way FTX is the only one doing this. How such a thing is allowed is absolutely baffling. It's very Enron-mtm-esque.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#697

Post by herval »

yieldcrv wrote: post #586
herval wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Volatility aside, stuff like Bitcoin _is_ already used for payments, albeit in a much lower volume than the crypto proponents wish it would be. I pay contractors now and then with BTC, particularly in South America and Africa, and works MUCH better than SWIFT (even if I have to convert from USD to BTC and they have to convert from BTC to whatever on their side). Projects like Ripple also have their use - it's mostly…

Avoiding all regulatory scrutiny and delays of an international wire transfer by converting them to domestic transfers in both countries is a major use of crypto that has almost no way of being quantified. International wires are fraught with painful user experiences and costs and time issues and its all unknown beforehand. This works even better when you already have inventory of ANY crypto, or keep stablecoins on h…

That requires you to trust stablecoins, though. Not a very wise idea IMO, for any meaningful amount of money

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#698

Post by freejazz »

krzyk wrote: post #663
johannes1234321 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that's largely because of the lack of regulation that so many cryptocurrency fans tout. In next sentence they will tell you, that you shouldn't have kept the private keys at the exchange. Use your own wallet and keep your copy of the Blockchain.

Basic common sense, not your keys not your coins.

Yet, not a legal position. If it wasn't your coins, SBF taking them to do whatever he wanted with them would not be illegal.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#699

Post by amalcon »

sweetbitter wrote: post #661
cortesoft wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While there's nothing intrinsic about cryptocurrency that would make it more prone to fraud than anything else There are absolutely intrinsic things that make cryptocurrency more prone to fraud. The inability to reverse transactions, quasi-anonymity, and lack of any central authority to resolve disputes. To limit fraud to the levels you see in traditional finance, you would need the regulations and oversight by cen…

> The entire purpose of cryptocurrencies are to avoid those things, so while you technically could have them with a cryptocurrency, you would end up with no good reason to have a cryptocurrency at all. I will substitute a word from your post that will help you understand this easier: "The entire purpose of cash is to avoid those things, so while you technically could have them with cash, you would end up with no good…

This sort of rhetoric is suboptimal. It only seems persuasive because you consider cryptocurrency to be analogous in purpose to cash, but the person you're trying to convince likely does not believe this. If they did, then they likely would already see purposes of cryptocurrency other than avoiding regulation, via the analogy.

If you're going to argue through analogy, you ideally need to ensure agreement with the analogy. Since asynchronous discussions make this difficult, we often need to settle for motivating the analogy instead. Simply assuming it is usually not persuasive.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#700

Post by skinnymuch »

zmgsabst wrote: post #399
skinnymuch wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those other billionaires donating a ton may be mostly legally doing their huge business. That doesn’t make it moral or ethical or completely legal. If the entire system is corrupt, pointing all fingers at the corrupt Dem party when the Repub part is just as corrupt if not more so is weird, uniformed, and biased. Are you spreading election misinformation?

Excusing criminality by saying “well, legitimate business isn’t totally ethical!” is nonsense gaslighting.

Who is excusing it? I'm not! You have to lock SBF up assuming everything we have heard so far is close to the truth.

I want the lot of billionaire donors to have their and their company's finances and political involvement investigated and made transparent for the public. Keep them all accountable. But ofc SBF is worse than all the rest because of how bad his actions have been. The worst. But overall we shouldn't allow any one to have such outsized power. Don't make it legal to politically donate this much money to any one.

On the other hand, you appear to be excusing the Republican donor's. Your comments are saying "go after this visibly criminal (according to our justice system) Democrat. Focus on that! Ignore all the republican [and other Democratic] ones". Being as partisan as can be.

nobody9999 summarized my side perfectly as well.

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