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Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery

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261–270 of 280 posts

Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery

#261
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming rational actors I can't see any reason to evade audits for years, even after litigation, unless the result of the audit would be bad.

(Not an audit expert) I can imagine that a full audit would uncover dangerous skeletons in the closet that don’t necessarily imply insolvency. At the very least, Binance made no secret of using extremely dubious banking relationships to collect money from its clients.

Also not an audit expert, but my understanding is that they've released an audited point-in-time snapshot of their bank accounts. The problem is that there are various ways to make that number go up for an instant, so people want (amoung other things) the value of their bank accounts over a longer period.

Audits aren't all-or-nothing, they've already paid an auditing firm to do a custom audit they designed. They could have made that audit much better without going into what you're mentioning.

Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery

#262
post #88
post #19

I’m waiting for Binance and Tether to collapse, and then we will know with certainty crypto’s best days are behind it, down to zero it goes. If you have assets on Binance I would not be complacent. Get them out.

Definitely get out of Tether. There's no upside to holding Tether, and there's unknown risk.

I’m out.

Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery

#263
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling anything crypto "investing" is really funny.

invest verb gerund or present participle: investing 1. expend money with the expectation of achieving a profit or material result by putting it into financial plans, shares, or property, or by using it to develop a commercial venture. Seems like a correct use of the term to me, even if crypto is highly speculative and kind of a dumpster fire recently.

The expected return in a negative sum game is negative. We can call such schemes investments but then we're going to have to call PowerBall tickets and roulette wheels investments too.

Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery

#264
post #254
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 us…

I think seanhunter has got Binance Smart Chain a little wrong - it's just a fork of Ethereum with basically the same functions. There's a coin BNB which is like Eth and you can issue other tokens, NFTs etc on it.

I said Binance Smart Chain was an Ethereum fork. My point is to move things from the eth mainnet to or from it you need a bridge, which, looking at this[1] looks like there is a bridge which they control. The problems I mentioned are intrinsic to bridges.

[1] https://www.bnbchain.org/en/bridge

Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on how the media wants to spin it. My point was, even if the whole crypto ecosystem went to zero right now, the effects on the economy at large would be negligible. However, it would be the perfect scapegoat to finally crash the economy with no survivors. The media would not have a problem with just blaming it all on crypto: as you can see here, people are already very eager to do so! No other explanation…

Whom exactly would want to crash the whole economy?

You are aware that the whole economy is a house of cards, right? Not just crypto?

It is bound to crash down after the last decades of reckless policies and all-around fuckery going on. So why not do this "cleansing" while blaming it all on an already hated scapegoat? It doesn't matter if it's not real nor realistic, what matters is the narrative, which I'm sure everyone ITT will gladly lap up!

Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery

#266
post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh dear - house of cards.

Arthur Hayes of Bitmex pleaded guilty to "willfully failed to implement an anti-money laundering (AML) program at the exchange." He got six months of home confinement and Bitmex is going strong. Not sure the house of cards thing will happen.

SBF got arrested - he is going to be made an example of by the DOJ - the poster child of all that is wrong with crypto.

Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery

#267
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I can’t decide which is better so I further diversify into both?

That's it. What you lose in safety due to price volatility you gain in worrying less about your house broken into and not knowing how flammable your mattress is.

Haha I love that’s great, I might borrow that explanation

Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery

#268
post #150

Wouldn't be better to ask for a proper audit from one of the big 4 (EY, PWC, KPMG, Deloitte), instead of something that looks fishy? Edit: typo.

Better for whom? A proper audit would probably be very bad for Binance, Zhao, and his chums, which is why they won't allow one.

Yeah I see that angle, it is unfortunate. I was thinking that it would be much better in order to show some credibility.

Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery

#269
post #3

Binance 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…

or (4) he thinks he's legit and simply experiencing a temporary setback. His intent is to put the spotlight somewhere else so he can keep the charade long enough to get the books back into balance. Motivated reasoning makes him sure this will succeed if he can buy enough time, even though that's obviously highly unlikely.

Re: Binance is trying to calm investors, but its finances remain a mystery

#270

https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-justice-dept-is-split-... WASHINGTON, Dec 12 (Reuters) - Splits between U.S. Department of Justice prosecutors are delaying the conclusion of a long-running criminal investigation into the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, four people familiar with the matter have told Reuters. The investigation began in 2018 and is focused on Binance's compliance with U.S. anti-mo…

Oh dear - house of cards.

https://gizmodo.com/binance-crypto-ftx-withdrawals-stablecoi...

Oh dear - so it begins.

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