Much better to drive across the border and then book a flight with a non-US airline.
He could've taken out cash from his local bank account, turned off his phone, driven to San Ysidro and walked through the public turnstile into Tijuana. And then tried to get a flight from Mexico City to somewhere in south asia. Would have been much better than going through the US/Canada border which has a full data sharing agreement between CBSA and US CBP/ICE. (note: this is a stupid, humorous theoretical, not rea…
Isn't the whole point of crypto that you don't need to get your cash out of a bank account that the government can monitor and potentially lockdown?
Great example of how most of the fluff around decentralized finance being more fair just because it is public and “open” is naive at best and a wolf in sheep’s clothing at worst. They claim that regulated banks are a moral evil and “wouldn’t you want something neutral and open and transparent,” conveniently forgetting that this will always favor those with money to market, attract, and sell to potential “buyers” (sca…
Coinbase is not decentralized finance, it's a centralized crypto bank. > the fluff around decentralized finance being more fair just because it is public and “open” is naive at best As another commenter pointed out, the investigation was triggered by this tweet [0]. How is that not more open and fair? If there wasn't a public record of the transactions, like in traditional finance, this guy would have likely gotten a…
Because there still exists informational asymmetry where the platform/exchange owners (and all employees privy to that information) still have material advantage over their customers but can now manipulate them easier than they can in traditional systems. With traditional systems, you have to purchase shares with your real name and thus regulators are able to detect patterns easier. In DeFi, these guys just spun up new anonymous wallets each time and if they were slightly better at it, they likely never would’ve been caught. Getting to parity of current insider trading detection in DeFi would require massive data analysis constantly keeping track of which wallets make suspiciously timed trades, leading to the same financial surveillance and de-anonymity DeFi wants to solve. One good tweet is not enough to validate the whole system.
If you read the actual SEC filing, you'll note that they're only filing for 7 of the alleged 25 coins that he traded. [1] Even the SEC agrees that this was not insider trading in all 25 instances. "Throughout the relevant period, Nikhil and Ramani repeatedly traded ahead of Coinbase listing announcements, trading in at least 25 tokens. At least seven of the listing announcements described above involved crypto asset…
Is there a list of all 25 somewhere? This could provide some illumination on what SEC does and does not consider a security.
Or maybe the SEC considers all of them securities but thought that they had the strongest case for these seven and didn't want the distraction of arguing about the other 18. But yeah, would be interesting to see the list.
He could've taken out cash from his local bank account, turned off his phone, driven to San Ysidro and walked through the public turnstile into Tijuana. And then tried to get a flight from Mexico City to somewhere in south asia. Would have been much better than going through the US/Canada border which has a full data sharing agreement between CBSA and US CBP/ICE. (note: this is a stupid, humorous theoretical, not rea…
Isn't the whole point of crypto that you don't need to get your cash out of a bank account that the government can monitor and potentially lockdown?
ideologically, yes, but I don't see any airlines that take payment in crypto for one-way rush last minute tickets to india
It talks volumes about the internal controls at CB that it took a tweet to expose this. Given the speed with which they grew last two years I expect their financial and security processes to be next to nothing. This is just tip of an iceberg. Insiders would have made tens of millions over last two years of bull run, if not more. This dude just got greedy and unlucky to get caught just as the crypto bubble began burst…
I studied accounting. We were told that Internal Control, audits, reviews etc. are the silver bullets to curbing corporate corruption and accounting scandals. When we reached master's level all that was thrown out of the window and the truth was that, those techniques are only there to serve nothing but regulatory and statutory requirements. Corporate ethics is practically non-existential.
The way scandals are exposed are almost always through whistleblowers. That is a fact. If you want transparency and honesty in a system, establish a bounty system and protect the whistleblowers.
Wow, the indictment references [this tweet][1] that caused Coinbase to investigate the matter and ultimately led the defendant in being caught at the airport before trying to leave the country. > On May 11, 2022, Coinbase’s director of security operations emailed ISHAN WAHI to inform him that he should appear for an in-person meeting relating to Coinbase’s asset listing process at Coinbase’s Seattle, Washington offic…
It's amazing how they already had tabs on this guy and just waited for him to leave but without arresting him sooner if you think you broke the law and want to avoid arrest, stay away from the airport. anyone who buys a ticket they get your full info and then the arrest is as easy as picking you up at the gate, nowhere to hide.
It talks volumes about the internal controls at CB that it took a tweet to expose this. Given the speed with which they grew last two years I expect their financial and security processes to be next to nothing. This is just tip of an iceberg. Insiders would have made tens of millions over last two years of bull run, if not more. This dude just got greedy and unlucky to get caught just as the crypto bubble began burst…
I studied accounting. We were told that Internal Control, audits, reviews etc. are the silver bullets to curbing corporate corruption and accounting scandals. When we reached master's level all that was thrown out of the window and the truth was that, those techniques are only there to serve nothing but regulatory and statutory requirements. Corporate ethics is practically non-existential. The way scandals are expose…
I’d be inclined to think controls, audits, and reviews prevent most of the casual fraud, even if some fraud still happens.
Sort of like door locks. They don’t eliminate all theft. But they greatly reduce casual theft.
During which conversation a fairly large number of HN commenters thought that crypto insider trading wasn't illegal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012837
For some nuance, though, partly this has to do with lack of SEC enforcement on crypto as a security. My opinion then would have been that this should be insider trading, crypto should be classified as a security, and also that I wasn’t sure the SEC would classify this as insider trading. Since the definition of insider trading is kind of, “whatever the SEC enforces”, it’s possible to believe that this is a security t…
> the definition of insider trading is kind of, “whatever the SEC enforces”
Insider trading is a crime. The SEC cannot bring criminal complaints. Every insider trader who has gone to jail was prosecuted by the DoJ.
A lot of people suspect there's ""official"" insider trading at the exchanges; there's no reason for the exchange not to front-run orders or fake the order book if they think they can get away with it. Or trade against heavily leveraged positions to liquidate them. Or prop-trade with the customers' money.
It’s legal for the company to do it. Not legal for individuals. Coinbase could have bought assets ahead of time and done the same thing legally. There was a case where a person had access to the credit card transaction data[1] and used that data to figure out sales prior to earning calls. That same data is available to hedgefunds willing to purchase it from Bloomberg. They call legally get a companies sales data prio…