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Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty

wsj.com

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Re: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty

#371

Post by sneak »

colesantiago wrote: post #143
glerk wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uncensorable money across borders

This is a perfect use case for criminals and ransomware gangs which is certainly why crypto is popular for these groups. Especially for funding the North Korean regime. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-18/how-north-korea-makes...

The fact that it is useful to criminals does not mean it is not useful to non-criminals. You asked for examples of utility; it was provided.

Firearms and cryptography are two additional examples of things that provide a lot of utility to their users, both innocent and criminal.

Re: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty

#372

Post by winternett »

blobbers wrote: post #237

SBF decided to testify against CZ to try to save his own ass, giving justice dept and sec something to fine CZ with. Govt collects a big crypto fine, fine makes the big losers in FTX whole, problem solved. CZ should have just bought FTX and closed the deal and made people whole, woulda saved himself some drama.

Or nobody should have ever bought unsecured crypto on sketchy new exchanges... That would have saved the entire loss perhaps?

Pretty much every major marketing push and normalized on social media (Including NFTs and influencer Culture) ends up being a massive scam.

It worries me that no one sees the trend and holds social companies & people involved properly accountable for this form of crowdsourced theft.

Re: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty

#373

Post by FabHK »

shrimpx wrote: post #244
nprateem wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More specifically now you can get actual real money by putting your savings in a bank account (and most people are struggling to pay the increased cost of living), there's less incentive to throw it away in a casino.

5% annualized on 4% inflation is a joke. I don't consider "high yield" savings to be any kind of strategy.

Real rates in the US are at the highest level since before the GFC, they’ve basically gone from negative to >2%.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/REAINTRATREARAT10Y

Re: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty

#374

Post by dodyg »

underseacables wrote: post #232

I'm absolutely astonished by this. He lives in the Middle East, which does not have any extradition treaties with America. Granted, he might transit a country that has a treaty, but I'm really shocked that he would give him. What did they have over him? Maybe it was China…

He lives in Dubai. What's the point of having money if you cannot escape that giant mall?

Re: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty

#375

Post by MehghanLee »

blobbers wrote: post #237

SBF decided to testify against CZ to try to save his own ass, giving justice dept and sec something to fine CZ with. Govt collects a big crypto fine, fine makes the big losers in FTX whole, problem solved. CZ should have just bought FTX and closed the deal and made people whole, woulda saved himself some drama.

[dead]

Re: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty

#376

Post by MehghanLee »

LandoCalrissian wrote: post #320
blobbers wrote: post #237

SBF decided to testify against CZ to try to save his own ass, giving justice dept and sec something to fine CZ with. Govt collects a big crypto fine, fine makes the big losers in FTX whole, problem solved. CZ should have just bought FTX and closed the deal and made people whole, woulda saved himself some drama.

Pretty great example of Hacker News when the top comment is "They should have done more crime but in a different way."

[dead]

Re: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty

#377

Post by acdha »

bnchrch wrote: post #129
saalweachter wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The second half of money laundering is you need a way to pretend to have income from a plausible source. People will ask questions like "How do you pay for your groceries?" and "Where did you find the money to buy a $37M penthouse?" and your paper trail needs to convince people the answer isn't "With the billions of dollars I embezzled."

I understand your point but I feel like even a 10 year old could come up with 100 plausible excuses. Many of them end with "Consultant", "Collector", or "Trader".

Most of those only work at a certain scale: if you launder $500, you might be able to say some people bought your comic book collection at a garage sale and get away with it. Try that with $1M and you’re going to start getting requests for evidence of your collection, how it got to have so many high value items, etc. If you’re claiming consulting revenue, then you need clients and a justification for what kind of legal work was worth paying that kind of revenue for – make the case that your advice is worth $1k/hour and you still need to be showing a year of full time work to launder a million dollars after taxes, and it’s going to be suspicious if the invoice is just “I’m awesome, pay here” with no details about such valuable work.

Every few years there will be some story about a cartel banker getting busted and one of the things which will usually stand out is that they had a bunch of people working for them, and found some legitimate businesses which had large enough volume to hide millions of dollars in criminal activity. Setting that kind of thing up isn’t usually a one man operation.

Re: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty

#378

Post by chipgap98 »

lordfrito wrote: post #358
chipgap98 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends if buying FTX would have stabilized the price of their FTT coin. That would have filled in some of the hole. And then CZ wouldn't have had to step down

So FTX would still be in the hole, and CZ is likely in the hole. Sounds like kicking the can down the road to me. That won't end well. SBF commits fraud and loses $8b, CZ pleads guilty and pays $4.3B fine and loses access to US market. I don't know why so many people think the crypto space is legit and this is just a temporary setback.

Kicking the can down the road is the name of the game in ponzi schemes

Re: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty

#379

Post by umeshunni »

acdha wrote: post #370
psychlops wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suggest spending some time understanding why the cost of living went up. Clearly you live in a place with a relatively stable currency (for now).

A lot of the inflation seen in the U.S. is corporate profit-taking such as when the automakers used the chip shortages to steer buyers towards the highest-end models they prioritized for production while less profitable models were back ordered. That matters because cryptocurrencies don’t help at all with the inflation consumers are seeing, while adding more personal risk and an exchange rate to arbitrage.

That's not how inflation works.

Re: Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty

#380

Post by smt88 »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #288
smt88 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it help clear the bad image? There are seemingly no large crypto orgs left that are untouched by criminal convictions.

There are seemingly no large tradfi bank or organization left that are untouched by criminal convictions. So then what?

Traditional banks aren't trying to prove that people should trust them. People already trust them, and even if they don't, they're already regulated enough that consumers know the government will step in to bail them out.
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