Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users

thenewscrypto.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 424 posts

Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users

#411

Post by RestlessMind »

AlexandrB wrote: post #352
RestlessMind wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

USDT / Tether came out recently with the proof of reserves. Even US regulators looked into that and found nothing - https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/23/tether-bitfinex-reach-settle... Rising interest rates certainly helped them and USDC/USDT are a money making machine now for their owners.

> USDT / Tether came out recently with the proof of reserves. Do you have a link for this? All I could find is an "attestation" of reserves from a few months ago but could not find any evidence of an audit by a third party that might constitute "proof".

https://tether.to/en/transparency/#reports

Latest report from an independent auditor: https://assets.ctfassets.net/vyse88cgwfbl/63oJePOHqIvrcnXWMP...

Key stats: "Cash & Cash Equivalent & Other Short-Term Deposits" are $73,567,577,334 (out of total assets of $86,499,251,218). Remaining assets are precious metals ($3,270,216,824), bitcoin ($1,676,229,360), corporate bonds ($115,496,758) etc.

It is no rocket science to see why USDT is in black now - with 83B USDT, they have that much cash available to park in T-bills and earn 5+% interest just like that. Even if they were in a hole a few years back, they would have recovered over the last 12-18 months when interest rates started rising.

Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users

#412

Post by llm_nerd »

eaurouge wrote: post #384
llm_nerd wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a bizarre bit of strawmanning. The crypto brigade has arrived so this has all gone very desperately defensive. No, that isn't what I said. I said that clearly crypto in any rational sense has failed . Not just failed, overwhelmingly, catastrophically failed. It has zero relevance to the broader market. It has retreated from even where it was five years ago, that being a massively failed experiment. BTC has held…

Here's effectively what you said, edited for information: > Every bit of evidence is that the crypto boom has crashed to Earth ... > Yet somehow BTC is still trading at close to historic highs. > ... if it were remotely a functioning market or were at all "real", it would be trading at a tiny fraction of that amount. The fact that it still holds is the best demonstration of how illusory the whole sham is. Which, as o…

What reality did I alter? Bitcoin's current value is *completely* irrational and absolutely unjustified. When it had some prospective future, sure some tenuous argument could be made, but now it's basically NFTs -- people collecting worthless things, with so little real (not wash) trading that for a while the illusion holds on. That's the sham. In the same way that GameStop or BedBathandBeyond didn't become retail powerhouses because a bunch of WallStreetBets sorts aped it.

You seem to be under delusions that a given niche market is demonstrative of much at all. Crypto was the future. Now it's, for all intents and purposes, dead outside of crime, but as long as there are HODL sorts it can keep up the pretend value.

Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users

#413

Post by autokad »

orwin wrote: post #215
autokad wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nearly 14 years in, where exactly is this “ton of real world utility”? That's not a helpful comment, and you aren't even correct. the web was around in the 80s, 70s ... no wait the 1960s. The number of years its been around is irrelevant to its current or future usefulness.

No. The web is NOT arpanet. This is an American-centric lie, like saying apple/Steve Jobs invented the mouse. The web was invented in Zurich by an English man in 89. Saying arpanet is the web is like saying Minitel clients are personal computers. Yes, the underlying tech is basically the same, but the design and philosophy is different.

you are being dishonest in your arguments. the point is the technology was around for decades before the said creation date. their argument is the tech for crypto has been around for 14 years so if it didnt take off by now, it never well. you are trying to get around my argument by nit picking over details 'what is the web and what isn't', which is a dishonest approach do discussion.

Technology is usually around for a very long time before adoption.

Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users

#414

Post by midmagico »

api wrote: post #370
ChainOfFools wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to consider that mining has traditionally been gently and benignly disregarded by most of the media interest in crypto. This is not an accident, the miners are very aware that calling attention to themselves would reveal exactly how suspiciously the valuations in crypto are constructed, and they've done a fantastic job of deflecting attention (with enormous help from the unbelievably clownish behavior of cer…

Stolen electricity is just part of it. Miners in Texas (and probably other places) have negotiated shockingly corrupt deals where they get electricity at low rates and then are paid to shut down when the grid needs more power. They're getting paid like a grid scale storage provider when in reality they're just a sink.

This is .. pretty much just a total whole-fabric lie.

Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users

#415

Post by burnte »

garba_dlm wrote: post #104
burnte wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blockchain tech isn't 14 years old, it's 30 years old, or even 40 if you want to go back to the '82 paper. Still no world-changing tech has come from it, aside from monopoly money.

> Blockchain tech isn't 14 years old, it's 30 years old, or even 40 if you want to go back to the '82 paper. Still no world-changing tech has come from it, aside from monopoly money. that's like saying that submarines were invented when Jules Verne wrote about them (i.e. you're wrong) blockchain technology requires the internet, hence it cannot be older than the internet

The internet started in the 60s. Even if blockchain needed the internet (it doesn't) the internet was absolutely around in 1982. Even TCP/IP was being used in 1982, becoming the standard across the entire net Jan 1, 1983.

Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users

#416

Post by burnte »

garba_dlm wrote: post #371
mrguyorama wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet existed in the 80s. How old are you?

the internet is a global network, but I suppose the telegraphs really is that old

Again, the internet goes back to the 60s. But yes, telegraphy was global a century ago.

Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users

#417

Post by midmagico »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #323
rspeele wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As much as I would like to believe BTC's market is completely fake, there has to be some real liquidity there. The hashrate is ~421 EH/s which represents a tremendous amount of ongoing spending on mining equipment and energy. That spending has to be funded somehow and the only way that makes sense is by selling the mined BTC. So there may be a lot of wash trading and games played with stablecoins trying to prop up th…

You have to consider that mining has traditionally been gently and benignly disregarded by most of the media interest in crypto. This is not an accident, the miners are very aware that calling attention to themselves would reveal exactly how suspiciously the valuations in crypto are constructed, and they've done a fantastic job of deflecting attention (with enormous help from the unbelievably clownish behavior of cer…

You are inflating the amounts considerably (and unverifiably with bald assertions) and then generalizing the rest of the industry based on anecdotal individual reports.

The amount of bad participation is negligible compared to the whole; the benefits are well-catalogued in places where it works under a legal regime. Your commentary about the attempt to destabilize the world economy has no legs and no justification aside from bald assertions, and in any event is directly contradictory to literally every academic estimation of the size of Bitcoin's black market going back to literally its first participant, being Silk Road v1, which even at the very beginning of Bitcoin represented only a tiny, tiny fraction of the otherwise legitimate economy.

Your assertion about the nature of miner profitability even internal to the assertion itself is a completely contradictory lie, since it can only be true if both miners are somehow ultra-profitable due to theft, but also not profitable at all and is thus a lie.

The mining conglomerates and larger operators and their profit in your assertions are clownish strawmen that have nothing to do with reality, and you are ignoring high-quality analyses of majority hashrate, their location, their energy use and source of energy, and ignoring the fact that literally hundreds of millions of people worldwide find positive value in Bitcoin's existence, and smacks of an oppressive first-world privileged hypocrisy and failure in value judgement.

Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users

#418

Post by ChainOfFools »

midmagico wrote: post #414
api wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stolen electricity is just part of it. Miners in Texas (and probably other places) have negotiated shockingly corrupt deals where they get electricity at low rates and then are paid to shut down when the grid needs more power. They're getting paid like a grid scale storage provider when in reality they're just a sink.

This is .. pretty much just a total whole-fabric lie.

wrong.

I don't recall the keywords to find the bust I was talking about from a couple years ago (2019 or so) which was explicitly targeting Bitcoin mining, (not eth or some other altcoin) but it turns out I didn't have to because in the past 2 years alone there have been two _more_ busts of electricity stealing crypto gangs, in thailand alone, collectively of a similar scale to the one I was referring to. By the evidence tables they appear to have been using slightly older antminers, what looks like a mix of s9, s17 (distinctive plug/fan layout), maybe s19 vintages, so although they don't say so in the articles this was almost certainly Bitcoin (or just as bad, BCH) being mined.

2022: https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2455120/thousan...

2023: (much smaller scale than above but still stealing over USD $150000 a year in electricity)

https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/2569745/crypto-...

This time around the authorities estimate that they've only found 1%, not 10% as they had before, of the illegal mining done in their country. Perhaps the mining bans in Vietnam and China have triggered an influx of even more illegal activity into neighvoring states. This is the dirtiest secret in Bitcoin, bar none, and the conveniently suspicion-deflecting narrative that miners barely make profit is a straight up lie. This is just one of the many reasons its earning the name klepto-currency.

Sure, some upstart miners, the ones who foolishly attempt to operate completely above board may be in that position but they are not the handful of quiet established operations that have been around for 5, or even 10 years, and who have longstanding ties both to one another and to pool operators who help conceal the illegal portions of the hash rate they control. Thus is substantially the reason that miners can survive downward price pressure, since they themselves are the main source of it. But you're perhaps one of these hopeless cases who actually believes all or even a majority of the volume on exchanges is real as well.

Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users

#419

Post by jrm4 »

llm_nerd wrote: post #412
eaurouge wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's effectively what you said, edited for information: > Every bit of evidence is that the crypto boom has crashed to Earth ... > Yet somehow BTC is still trading at close to historic highs. > ... if it were remotely a functioning market or were at all "real", it would be trading at a tiny fraction of that amount. The fact that it still holds is the best demonstration of how illusory the whole sham is. Which, as o…

What reality did I alter? Bitcoin's current value is *completely* irrational and absolutely unjustified. When it had some prospective future, sure some tenuous argument could be made, but now it's basically NFTs -- people collecting worthless things, with so little real (not wash) trading that for a while the illusion holds on. That's the sham. In the same way that GameStop or BedBathandBeyond didn't become retail po…

A lot of "real" companies are investing in it; which by definition makes it no better or worse than ANY OTHER SPECULATIVE THING.

Basically "that's, just like, your opinion, man."

Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users

#420

Post by bparsons »

vitehozonage wrote: post #213
bparsons wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The blockchain is a perfect tool of government surveillance. They can track the flows of money like never before, while most users think it is completely anonymous. It is the perfect weapon of state control. There has been hundreds of stories about how blockchain technology has been a boon to investigators trying to track drug, terrorism and illegal porn money flows. https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-blockchain-ha…

monero exists

So does cash.
Post reply on HN