Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Doing so without having their own house in order would be suicidal. Or just desperate. It happens.
Desperate for what? It all to be over maybe?
Desperate to focus attention on someone else’s troubles. A distraction.
Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery
171–180 of 280 posts
Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine thinking an industry worth $800B, with 200M users, transferring billions of dollars a day, is "hated by the whole population". You really live in a bubble
For those 200M I'd like to see an independent source before I believe it. Or are you trying to claim 1 wallet = 1 user or something? When it comes to money moved: the top 1% in the US possess more wealth than the whole middle 60% of income distribution combined . So if you believe that moving a lot of money inherently implies broad adoption in the population you live in a very small bubble far away from reality.
https://www.coinbase.com/about claims 108M verified users so 200M overall is not that absurd. That doesn't mean that all these users own significant amounts in crypto though.
Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery
#173[deleted]
Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery
#174It's only a matter of time https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2020/10/29/l...
Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just can't see how crypto can recover tbh. What other technology spent ten years, produced basically nothing of value, is almost universally hated by the whole population and then came back to be something useful? It's not like quantum computing where we just don't know how to make it work. There are close to no technical problems, the core idea just doesn't work.
Imagine thinking an industry worth $800B, with 200M users, transferring billions of dollars a day, is "hated by the whole population". You really live in a bubble
> an industry worth $800B
According to https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/ the market cap you're referring to was $2.4T at some point in the last year, now down to the number you're quoting. With such variability, it's hard to trust this number as being anything intrinsic to the actual value of the industry.
From this link, FTX alone seems to be correlated with a fall of almost $200B in market cap, down from $1T to a bit more than $800B. If Tether eventually collapses as many even within the cryptocurrency world expect it will, how low will this number go? What about other shady companies in this space?
It's really hard to put a floor on this market cap, as opposed to regular companies that can always be sold for parts, so as a coarse approximation, they should at least be worth their assets minus their liabilities. Given that we don't even know the liabilities of actors such as Binance and Tether, we can do no such computation here.
Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery
#176One thing to be aware of with Binance. As far as I understand, most of the transactions occur on their own ethereum-compatible-but-not-quite-ethereum chain called the "Binance Smart Chain". While having these sidechains can improve scalability and reduce costs (they are just another form of sharding), this presumably introduces an additional point of potential failure compared with regular centralised exchanges: not…
How is this kind of sidechain any better than just having your transactions recorded in a boring old private SQL database?
The Axie Infinity hack suggests that these private chains are the worst of all worlds: they're effectively controlled by a single entity, but also far more susceptible to hacks than a well-understood traditional database. The blockchain part seems to be a pure marketing decoy that's worse than useless because it's actively harmful to customers.
Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only way for them not to trigger the FTX crash’s at the point they did, would have been to absorb 8 billion $ worth of missing funds and handing over control of a much larger set of funds to the people responsible for those losses. They weren’t partly responsible for FTXs crash for looking at that balance sheet and going wtf, we’re out. Even if they themselves are running the same scam. They might just be much le…
I am not sure I follow your logic. CZ and Coindesk triggered (not caused, but triggered) the collapse by announcing they thought there was an issue. CZ could have avoided that without giving FTX any money by just not doing it: quietly selling Binances FTT. I do't blame CZ for the problems at FTX. I am just saying, if you trigger a (justified) bank run in a competitor, you have to expect people to withdrawn from your…
> quietly selling Binances FTT
I don't think this was possible. This would have crashed FTT anyway, so people would have looked at it and found out that Binance was behind this. If Binance hadn't communicated about this beforehand, it would have made them look even shadier.
Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery
#178Binance is even more shady than FTX. They are most likely not solvent. Personally, I'd move all my funds off binance to off-exchange wallets for the time being.
Just makes one wonder why the binance guy even stirred the pot initially with FTX, like 3 possibilities exist: 1. He assumed the blowout would be minimal outside of FTX and/or assumed FTX was shady but not as bad as it turned out 2. He acknowledged the possibility that binance will also get scrutiny but realized FTX was just so bad that letting it fester further will only get him arrested faster too. 3. He’s just ano…
4. He has relatives in mainland, and ccp wants crypto gone completely.
Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I squint, I can understand the value of a non-audit-audit in some circumstances. But I don't understand the value of it in this circumstance, except for the value in obscuring one's finances behind a "serious" auditor's letterhead. Put another way: the context is anxious investors. Is this intended to assuage them, or is it intended to dupe them?
Not necessarily. It might simply be because they wanted to publish something now and not in a couple of months.
That’s Tether’s old line. News articles about “just a few more months” date back at least five years.
https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2022/tether-audit-prom...
Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
As for 3), we really need to avoid the narrative that these people are idiots or stupid. They are sharks - intentionally malevolent people who have defrauded millions of people. SBF's current defense is that he was too naive and unaware of what was happening at FTX. Obviously its a lie - but we shouldn't help these people spread it.
I think his defense is sort of: 1. We had a busted accounting system 2. Early on in FTX people had to route dollars via Alameda because banking is hard 3. We accidentally credited those dollars both to Ftx and Alameda 4. Each side thought they had billions to spend / lose (their VC and related spend was WILD), and suddenly, oops!!!!!! I suspect there's a grain of truth to this, in that steps 1-4 did actually happen t…
I don't believe that at all. I can believe an initial loss of some amount of money, but there's no way everyone completely ignored it for years.
Like, how hard do you have to try to lose 8 Billion dollars and not know how?
I'd bet on them hoping they could make the money back after losing it, and just digging successively deeper holes. They knew what they were doing, and excuses are all about avoiding decades of well-deserved prison for the amount of people they've fucked over.