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Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

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Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#151
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can say that, but when MtGox went bankrupt, and also lost 4 fifths of its stored crypto, the court just heaped together all assets into one big pile and all creditors into one big pile and let them fight it out. So now there's a bunch of assholes including but not limited to Peter Vessenes, that are suing the bankrupt entity for billions (completely frivolous of course) and all the depositors have waited for 8 ye…

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.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#152
post #61
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing wrong with this, and indeed it's a good thing.

In a regulated market sure, but here they seem to be trading with customer assets - which is so much worse.

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...

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The issue here is crypto exchanges severely mismanaging the assets of their customers. "Severely mismanaging" is a euphemism for fraud and theft, right?

Absolutely.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SBF spent about 33% Republican / 66% Democrat EDIT: Not accurate ^ Yet 18 of the 25 top donors were Republican leaning. Billionaires comprise 20% of Republican funding vs. 14% for Dems. Most republican megadonors were entirely republican. The big ones are from hedge funds. So yeah, SBF donated to the dems. We need more regulation to get money out of politics. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking the republican p…

SBF spent 99.9% Dems and 0.1% Repub, according to your first link. You’re telling untrue facts according to your own sources — to minimize that the second largest Dem donor was a criminal stealing customer funds. Your comparison to Repubs is unfounded as none of their donors engaged in organized crime like SBF. Why are you spreading election misinformation?

Ok buddy, look, one. You're right, it was a mistake. I misremembered something. I cited a source containing the right information and you pointed it out. Thanks.

> Why are you spreading election misinformation?

Two, Fuck off. This is needlessly passive aggressive. There is no need to throw in a worst-faith assessment of my motivations for posting all of this.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#155
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…

The use of intermediaries is due to the deficient user experience of cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrency community:

1) They downplay the expertise and knowledge required to manage your own tokens.

2) They advocate for the use of cryptocurrencies by normal (i.e. non-expert) users as this increases the value of their holdings.

3) They prefer to blame users who make mistakes, are hacked/scammed, or otherwise lose (real) money for their lack of technical expertise.

Given this, it's not surprising that the enormous gap between naive engineering assumptions and human reality is filled by intermediaries despite how consistently they fail. As long as cryptocurrencies continue to exist beyond a tiny niche I don't see this changing.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#156
post #9

In the current climate, I'm left wondering who still has their crypto on exchanges. Which maybe thats the problem - people withdrawing funds causing even more bank runs.

Correct, there seems to be an exodus from exchanges or at least moving to decentralized exchanges

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#157
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…

You get things, I think, but bitcoin’s transaction bottleneck meant it was never going to be able to handle anything approaching wide scale adoption for day to day transactions. Attempts to address that with other coins or centralized exchanges is at least one of the major factors that lead to this point.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#158

Pardon for living under a rock, but why are crypto exchanges affected by the mood in the crypto market? I thought that a crypto exchange functions like a currency market: I put an offer to sell 10,000 EUR for 1 BTC and someone else puts an offer to buy 10,000 EUR for 1 BTC. When orders cross, a transaction happens and the exchange gets a fee, whether in currency or crypto units. What are crypto exchanges fundamentall…

Firstly, people keep their Crypto with the exchange for trading purposes and because it is easier than self custody. This means if the exchange goes bankrupt they potentially lose their money. Secondly, as it is an unregulated space, we have instances such as FTX where they were using clients funds which should be segregated. This arguably crosses into fraud, and we do not really know which exchanges have been doing…

Re point #2 - this is one of the crazy things for me. When you work in finance, in the UK at least, you get it drilled into your head what "client money" is, what that implies, what you can do with it, and notably you get reminded during any training session the size of the fines that get imposed on people who fuck with client money.

So to me it suggests that they simply don't employ anyone with any experience in banking or compliance, if they did those people would be raising hell or at least leaking or whistleblowing

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#159
post #119

"At this point I'm convinced Satoshi Nakamoto was actually a public administration professor trying to teach kids why financial institutions have the rules in place that they do. Given enough time, the entire crypto space will have reinvented every regulation they tried to get rid of and understood why they existed in the first place."

I like to call it "eventual civilisation" ...
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