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Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

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Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#161
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the correct take, and why American regulators need to address crypto sooner rather than later.

But the WHOLE point of crypto was to avoid governmental control. If the government is regulating it that means they can control it. And it becomes completely worthless. If you want digital gold as an inflation hedge you can literally buy a GLD ETF. It gives you digital shares in actual GOLD.

There's nothing to stop people using crypto to buy/sell goods directly, or to trade directly between themselves, completely outside of government control. And crypto itself can't be inflated away, or obsoleted, or otherwise really controlled by government, except by attacking it; making it illegal to own or trade, to operate nodes, to write code, or use CIA shenanigans, etc.

But if an exchange claims that they hold your crypto 'frozen' and completely separate from their trading activities, and especially if the exchange also deal in government currency, then I think it's quite right for government to regulate, and ensure the exchanges are compliant.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#162

> Due to the failure of our third-party partner, some users' balance data were found abnormally recorded in our system. Hence, limiting our services to prevent further risks, the technical team has had to manually proofread and restore the system to ensure maximum accuracy of all users’ holdings. "Abnormally recorded" ... "prevent further risks" ... "manually proofread" ... "maximum accuracy". Wow.

It actually makes sense if they were “dropshipping” lol, which an exchange might do to increase liquidity. In other words, when you deposited to their exchange they actually held your money and executed your trades at FTX for certain pairs. Then FTX suddenly zeroed everyone’s balances (! or at least many people’s) so their crappy scraping system overwrote your old balance with zero and they have to manually check backups to see how much money you had with them. Definitely possible as an exchange is a chicken and egg problem and they seem to be a nobody.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#163
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…

They should make money in the same way that the New York Stock Exchange does - by taking a small fee from every trade.

Ah but think of all the money that leaves on the table!

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#164

The warning bells should be going off in the entire crypto sector right now. If you have money in crypto, I'd strongly recommend going off-exchange

Quoted post unavailable.

> Bitcoin's intrinsic value is exchange fraud.

That's a really funny and clever take.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#165
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 people who were pushing the fact that you'd have sole control over your wallet were those who wanted to be immune from the government seizing their money: scammers, criminals, tax dodgers, and exchange runners (a combination of the first three).

Those people put a bunch of money into bitcoin to inflate the price, but they need a bunch of rubes trading the currency to keep the value of the coin (relatively) stable so they can withdraw their holdings, but they don't care much if those rubes have full control, and that's where exchanges come in.

Exchanges are there as a way for the first movers and the ultra-wealthy to extract wealth from uninformed, naive new investors into crypto.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#166
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…

The exchanges work very hard to not distinguish between those legally, because if they admit it, they're admitting bank-like aspects and regulations kick in, which they're often trying to avoid.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#167
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And that's largely because of the lack of regulation that so many cryptocurrency fans tout. If it's not legally regulated as a currency, or a security, or anything of the sort, then why would it be considered to belong to you, and not Mt Gox, once you've given it to them? All you have is a digital account that's basically the legal equivalent of an IOU on a napkin. Welcome to your libertarian utopia.

If you let somebody borrow your car and they steal it, that's still a crime. You don't need to be a regulated and registered automotive lender to make it anymore or less of a crime. The law has surprisingly strong enforcement of even informal agreements (such as e.g. an email), and these agreements were anything but informal.

Incidentally, protection of property rights is one of the primary roles of the government in a libertarian ideology. It's not anarchy.

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#168
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not expected to exchange back, it is expected to give back cryptocurrency deposited there.

But from what I understood from the article is that they halting withdrawals of cash, the crypto themselves seems fine...

That’s always the slow walk with these. Expect more bad news in subsequent updates

Re: Crypto exchange AAX suspends withdrawals

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When you steal $1000 from someone, it's theft. When you steal $1000 from a million people it's "mismanaging assets".

Related:

"One man with a briefcase can steal more money than a hundred men with guns."

—Don Corleone, "The Godfather"

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