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FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

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Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#251

Post by ShredKazoo »

YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #116

Regardless of whether you are pro- or anti- crypto, the collapse of FTX, SBF's bubble bursting in a rather extreme fashion, and now this hack are more nails in the coffin for mainstream support. I am no fan of crypto myself, but it's interesting to think what would have to happen for crypto to burnish its image. Would key people have to voluntarily form some sort of coordinating council and self-regulate? Would they…

A less-discussed effect here is that crypto sketchiness crowds out legitimate applications. If someone has a problem that crypto is actually a good fit for -- an application that would legitimately deliver value for customers, insuring medical tourism perhaps -- a lot of people will dismiss it just because they assume crypto=scam.

As crypto gets scammier by the year, this crowding-out effect means that the dream of early adopters 10+ years ago, of a world economy running on cryptocurrency, becomes more and more distant.

Combine with rising interest rates, I wouldn't be shocked to see BTC drop below $10K and never recover. Past crypto bubbles have reinflated by exposing crypto to larger and larger segments of the investing public, but I think we may be running out of greater fools. For example, last I checked the number of Americans who own crypto is pretty similar to the number who have an old-fashioned brokerage account.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#252

Post by duckmysick »

ajb wrote: post #168
AustinDev wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he is in fact on the run... Does this dude really think the CIA and FBI won't find him? He's likely not safe anywhere but Russia, China, North Korea or Israel.... maybe Pakistan.

No, not safe in Russia. From https://mobile.twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/15791389474472... "In contrast, Russian cryptobros that I know tend to act very, very lowkey. The fewer people know about your activities, the better. Posting about dealing with crypto in social media is absolutely unthinkable. Why? Because that makes you too easy and lucrative prey" That thread describes how a basement was found, in the house…

How do we know the crypto owners were held there?

> 5. That may explain why Russian army and the military equipment are so archaic btw. In order to create something new, e.g. drones you normally need non-violent entrepreneurs who would actually create stuff. In Russia they're being wiped out by the violent ones. Hence, no drones

Iran has drones. Does that mean Iran is an example of "an artificial, abnormal environment which selected out the violent entrepreneurs, allowing the non-violent ones to flourish"?

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#253

Post by bmitc »

zone411 wrote: post #243
bmitc wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see any crypto projects. How do you know that? It says explicitly: "52 contributions in private repositories" between November 1 and November 11.

Obviously nobody knows what the private repos are. I was talking about public projects. "Gary Wang" is not an uncommon name. For example, here is another one with a Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Wang

That's a good point. For whatever reason, I missed the first part of your comment. I did indeed operate under the assumption, incorrectly, that it was his profile.

What's interesting is that a lot of the FTX people on the about page (https://about.ftx.com/), including Gary Wang and Dan Friedberg have deleted their LinkedIn accounts, whereas they were available earlier. If they're deleting something so harmless, then who knows what else they are deleting and covering up.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#254

Post by everfree »

ISL wrote: post #208
YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the algorithms powering crypto are sophisticated pieces of technology. Just look at the zero-knowledge proofs. The thing is that "not being regulated like a bank" is exactly what many people like / liked about it. (Yield farming, using DeFi for mortgages, etc.) What I'm saying is that Crypto seems to be headed to being taught alongside, if not the Therac-25, then the Mars Climate Orbiter (which was lost…

If there were a clear and well-regulated equivalent of Tether, with obvious and transparent dollar-backing, I suspect it would find a lot of usage. Might cost $1.15 to mint a new USD-coin redeemable for $1.00, but I suspect there would be an appetite. Massive volatility and the occasional collapse of a crypto-bank are probably hindering the appetite of many people for anything in the crypto market. That population pr…

> If there were a clear and well-regulated equivalent of Tether, with obvious and transparent dollar-backing

There are several. I compiled a list of them a few months ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31381864

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#255

Post by n0tth3dro1ds »

iblaine wrote: post #33
zeven7 wrote: post #4

> Investigating abnormalities with wallet movements related to consolidation of ftx balances across exchanges - unclear facts as other movements not clear. Will share more info as soon as we have it. From FTX's general counsel[1], retweeted by FTX_Official. So that indicates it's not being sold off legitimately under some sort of liquidation proceedings. It could be insiders or it could be hackers. [1] https://twitte…

It’s unfortunate that what started out with altruistic motives, a method for decentralized anonymous asset exchange, is being derailed by opportunists. There was a time where a 51% attack was the biggest concern. All that said, I’m not surprised at where we are today.

> It’s unfortunate that what started out with altruistic motives

Are you actually buying into SBF’s pathetic ideologies? Or are you more referring to Satoshi’s white paper when you refer to “altruistic motives”.

I can’t understand how anyone would take SBF seriously. He’s a smug charlatan who converted funny money to real money so that he could dump it into politics for his own aims, all while calling his actions “altruism”. Biggest false virtue signaler of all time.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#256

Post by hestefisk »

douglaswlance wrote: post #133
YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #116

Regardless of whether you are pro- or anti- crypto, the collapse of FTX, SBF's bubble bursting in a rather extreme fashion, and now this hack are more nails in the coffin for mainstream support. I am no fan of crypto myself, but it's interesting to think what would have to happen for crypto to burnish its image. Would key people have to voluntarily form some sort of coordinating council and self-regulate? Would they…

This isn't a crypto failure. Crypto works. This is a human failure. FTX didn't collapse because of the technology. It collapsed because of human error. The fix is rather simple. If an organization looks like a bank and quacks like a bank; it should be regulated like a bank.

Indeed. Beyond the failure of human greed in the crypto Ponzi schemes, FTX is also a massive regulatory failure. These firms have been allowed to play with people’s money for too long.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#257

Post by petesergeant »

colechristensen wrote: post #143
YossarianFrPrez wrote: post #116

Regardless of whether you are pro- or anti- crypto, the collapse of FTX, SBF's bubble bursting in a rather extreme fashion, and now this hack are more nails in the coffin for mainstream support. I am no fan of crypto myself, but it's interesting to think what would have to happen for crypto to burnish its image. Would key people have to voluntarily form some sort of coordinating council and self-regulate? Would they…

Crypto that doesn’t suffer from these kinds of failures is boring. It looks like traditional banking with a different API. Exciting maybe for banking nerds, but not so much for anyone else. Ultimately though blockchain ledgers will probably only be long term useful for record keeping between small closed groups of independent entities like banks settling overnight balances between themselves. It’s never going to be e…

> blockchain ledgers will probably only be long term useful for record keeping between small closed groups of independent entities like banks settling overnight balances between themselves

It’s never going to be useful for that, though. It doesn’t solve any of the problems that small, closed groups who know each other and have legal recourse have.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#258

Post by cuteboy19 »

trophycase wrote: post #110

Where are the regulators and enforcers when we actually need them? How is any high up in this institution not arrested yet? What the hell are they doing? Like is this a psyop to destroy crypto? Is this preferential treatment of SBF due to his donations/regulatory capture? Imagine if there was a mass shooter in a crowd of people and they just let him continue firing until he ran out of ammo, that's analogous to what's…

I would remind you that classifying crypto to be securities would very easily make all of this illegal. Yet the crypto sphere fought tooth and nail against this.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#259

Post by Thorrez »

imgabe wrote: post #211
foogazi wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a human failure Is there any crypto out there without humans ? Is there an undo button to reverse the transaction? All financial systems involve humans

There is the same undo button that exists for every other financial institution that commits fraud: lawsuits.

And if you can't find the person to sue because the person is an anoymous hacker? With fiat the court will tell the banks to reverse the transactions.

Re: FTX faces potential hack, sees mysterious outflows totaling more than $600M

#260

Post by threeseed »

MacsHeadroom wrote: post #231
threeseed wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No technically. There are seemingly endless ways to move funds anonymously.

There's endless ways to move cash. If/when the movement of cash/crypto is peer-to-peer or interacting with a machine only (a machine that gives quarters for dollar bills or a DEX, for example) KYC is entirely unnecessary.

Dealing with large volumes of cash is very difficult.

It's physically large so you can't move it between countries with drawing attention from customs and security. You can't exchange it between currencies easily since brokers are required to implement KYC/AML. Banks have automatic triggers on their internal systems to notify regulators if you deposit/withdraw large sums.

And if it's being tracked then washing it requires you having to go through exotic means like poker machines since all simpler options have been locked down over the decades.

It's one of the reasons crypto is so popular with states like North Korea, Iran etc because it's scalable enough to allow them to move billions.

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