> And decreasing, since BTC is dropping as we speak. Always a good idea to hedge a currency with the currency itsself
Depends on what you’re insuring, no? For theft, it actually makes senses, right? That way, you’re insuring a constant number of coins, no matter what the market is doing. If you’re insurance currency would tank during a bitcoin heist, you would lose the insurance effect.
Bitcoin is volatile enough you can cherry-pick pretty much any %age you want based on the dates you choose. Which you seem to have done here - "happening" to choose the day with the lowest single day value in the last 3 years for your comparison point.
For another narriative, it was 83,038 a month ago on Sept 29th, so is down 5% in one month. And one year ago it was 112,562 on Oct 29th 2025 - down over 30% in one year. Well into "bear market" territory.
Using "traditional" market indicators and definitions for things like bear/bull markets doesn't feel sensible for such a volatile market.
Not to be too pedantic, but with some napkin math, I don't think this is true. Looking for clarification!!
I downloaded Binance's self published market data (https://data.binance.vision/), calculated spot and futures volume for the past year, and then applied their *highest fee tier* on both sides of the volume (for every $1 traded, they generate a fee on the taker and the maker. the fee rate is asymmetrical).
Spot revenue worked out to $7.6B USD, perps revenue worked out to $13.8B
This is an upper bound on the fees charged on volume. Binance also scams their users with a b-book, has DMM deals, etc.
I don't want to get into all that today.
But the final result is that they print somewhere in the range of $20B per year on fees. I guess CZ also has huge stockpiles of BTC and stuff. A 1% rise in BTC price probably means more for them than their actual fees, LOL.
All this to say, I think $5.6B significantly hurts.
See Google's stock price today. Their ads business slowed down a bit, and their stock tanked 10%. If binance was publicly traded, I imagine a similar affect would be demonstrated on their price.
If your crypto was stolen in this, atleast you can rest assured that your money will be put to good use. In North Korea that is, by the military. I'm sure at this point Kim himself has Bitcoin merchandise with how often they make massive heists
If your crypto was stolen in this, it wasn't your crypto. It is simply cryptocurrency that has been reallocated from an exchange to a more competent party, as the free market intended.
I don't think the security trade-off for most people is clear here.
Given things like the ledger hardware attack[1] I think the time indexed risk of using a centralized exchange is probably lower than doing self-custody.
I understand that many people do self-custody for philosophical reasons, but I think trying to disguise this as a security decision ("If your crypto was stolen in this, it wasn't your crypto.") is arguable at best.
By the nature of blockchain, it's never, ever your crypto. It's allocated to whichever bucket the majority of participants in a given network agree to allocate it to.
Back around 2012 I created a paper wallet using an offline website (it was HTML and JS downloaded locally that worked without internet. I put it on a USB stick and then use it in a laptop without internet), printed it out and put it in a safe
idk the whole point of hardware wallets is that they are supposed to be a simpler stack. But if you're using a closed source hardware wallet...
An old laptop with the wifi card taken out is more transparent and auditable. It just runs the ordinary open source code
But I just keep all my funds in a hot wallet, no multisig. And if I get hacked I lose it all. I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked. The risk of losing cryptocurrency will encourage security advances across the whole ecosystem. I think I will set up multisig eventually
Or if it is your key and your air-gapped hardware wallet gets hacked because someone didn't use the right RNG. Crypto is apparently never yours; you're just holding on to it for some future criminal or nation state.
hardware waller is NOT your key too. YOUR key is the paper wallet generated OFFLINE on a clean laptop that was never connected to web. There is a giant difference.
Back in 2016 a then-huge Ethereum smart contract called "The DAO" [1] had a loophole that let an attacker extract a third of all the funds.
But a lot of the developers and miners had either lost money themselves, or had friends who'd lost money, or felt the embarrassing incident was devaluing their own Ethereum holdings. So they decided to allow takesies-backsies.
There's probably a philosophical lesson there about power and who the rules really apply to.
I vividly remember a number of discussions/debates during that time (including on HN). I was more favorable to cryptocurrency in those days, and one of the things that contributed to my disillusionment was watching the people deepest and closest to it rediscover financial regulation from first principles, now that it was in their interest.
Witnessing the same people discover philosophy from first principles in the face of AI has been similarly farcical, as if we’re the first people to try and wrestle with a definition of intelligence.
I don’t think I understand what you’re trying to say.
In the literal sense, people have been forcing their philosophy on other people for at least as long as we’ve had societies, so I assume it’s not that.
The DAO incident was a special case. They could only do the rollback because the stolen funds were locked up for 28 days.
Ethereum never did it again, it didn’t become normal policy.
I’ve seen a few other projects attempt to do rollbacks, but it always turns into a mess. In most hacks, the coins aren’t time locked and quickly get laundered through smaller exchanges (and other services) which act as mixers. The stolen coins end up in the hands of a bunch of innocent people, and the rollback then causes way more harm as those users lose their coins.
...while, generally, being thoroughly fleeced by whichever set of wolves (who do understand monetary systems very well indeed) gets wind of the situation and manages to snag the best seats at the feeding trough filled with naive money.
Reply to the edit: the parent comment was making a joke (though maybe there is some depth to it) and your reply sounds like a rhetorical question by a spoilsport. Unfortunate!
ETA: it's a joke because the original saying is "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"
Talk to chatgpt about how a checking account works, and really understand what happens when you put some money in the bank, and when you transfer that money to another person at another bank, how it's accounted for, how the banks actually do that transfer.
Going to school and reading up on how and why we got where we are...?
Some people (particularly criminals and oligarchs) might not like them, but most of the structures around financial movements exist for very practical reasons, often stemming from the will to uphold the rule of law. Obviously nothing is perfect (the US have an excessive level of control, VISA/Mastercard are de-facto monopolies, etc etc), but one cannot seriously think that the way to fix things is to reimplement everything from scratch in a wild west of shady unaccountable operators...
<< one cannot seriously think that the way to fix things is to reimplement everything from scratch in a wild west of shady unaccountable operators
One absolutely can, but I think things have to first get sufficiently difficult for ordinary folks to even notice. Fortunately ( sarcasm tag here for otherwise perfectly normal individuals, who may be missing some caffeine in their organism ), given that the war is coming along with various related national security restrictions, we may soon be able to experience that particular slice of fun.
The entire financial system is a chaotic boundary between thieves and opportunists, and people who want to keep thievery and opportunism under enough control to keep the system nominally workable.
It's always been like this. Which is why financial systems blow up and/or collapse regularly.
My intuition is saying: the system arose naturally and intelligently over a long period of time, and even with its flaws has a lot of "load bearing legacy code" that few people understand, and new "engineers" think they'll just rewrite the whole thing from scratch and delete the "junk DNA" to use another metaphor. A little time passes and the beautiful clean rewrite collapses because of "totally unforeseeable circumstances" and the "old broken legacy system" is used to save the day. Somewhere a senior "monetary engineer" rolls over in his grave...
Any recommendations for books? Or even podcasts?
I don't have zero understanding. It sounds like you have a deeper understanding than I do.
Doesn't apply for USDT and USDC which can freeze funds with a court order.
And like the DAO hack on Ethereum showed, if most people who run blockchain software decide that something never happened, they can revert transactions that way.
>And like the DAO hack on Ethereum showed, if most people who run blockchain software decide that something never happened, they can revert transactions that way.
Isn't that a pretty integral part of the blockchain? 51% attacks were even featured on the HBO show Silicon Valley.
The value in USDT and USDC comes from the fact that they can (theoretically) be redeemed for real US dollars. One thing the issuers can do is announce "we will never accept redemption requests for these particular stolen coins", making them more or less worthless.
Oh so you're saying a central authority can declare your currency worthless at any time? Good to know. Sounds very like a central bank issued currency though?
It's literally in USDT contract [1], see line 264. USDT is implemented as a contract in several other networks like ETH and has a blacklist. So every USDT operation is a record in ETH blockchain that calls one of the methods (like "transfer" or "add to blacklist").
Well I don't think they're very decentralised, which was the original premise.
Any rules can and have been changed by those with leverage to do so (be that exchanges, miners or devs), in the end any system like this storing value is captured and controlled.
Well, Tether was started by an Epstein friend and first handled by the CIA Deltec bank in the Caribbean. Now it is handled by Lutnick's Cantor & Fitzgerald and is in Bukele's El Salvador.
Don't mess with Tether, it is practically state owned.
Interesting, so it ties into the NSA vs CIA war? Some nerds from NSA/MIwhatever launched crypto, then the CIA trust fund nepo kids hijacked/weaponized it through tether
There's an amazingly hilarious interview with the Deltec's "Deputy CEO" and CNBC back in the day:
- was conducted from his gaming rig
- about Deltec's (and therefore Tether's) money movements being several times larger than all the banking in their country was due to people misunderstanding the country's two banking licenses, the names of which HE "couldn't remember right now" (the Deputy CEO of a bank who can't remember the name of the banking licenses where they operate?!?), and he "wasn't sure which [banking license] the bank has, but we might (emphasis mine) have both"
- oh yeah, said Deputy CEO's "resume": 33 years old, by his LinkedIn claimed to have graduated HEC Lausanne in Switzerland with a Master of Science at the age of 15... celebrating his graduation by immediately being named Professor of Finance at a university in Lebanon. While dividing his spare time between running hedge funds in Switzerland (called Indepedance [sic] Weath [sic] Management) and uhh... Jacksonville, FL.
Once CNBC's viewers started ridiculing and questioning both Deltec Bank and Tether and when that looked hilariously bad, they removed his info from the bank's website.
And when that looked bad, they added it back.
And when that looked bad, they removed the bank's whole website, and replaced it with a broken WP template with no working links.
Hey, look, several years after that, go to Deltec's website. "Ultra sophisticated private banking" running on a different WordPress site. "Client login"? "This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in ebanking.deltecbank.com. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN". Just as has been the case for years.
... and then the entire bank website was replaced with a low-effort WordPress template. Their online banking was Javascript hard coded to refuse all login attempts.
"Sounds legit to me", said the crypto bros. "Fuck the regulatory system. This is the new era."
Most crypto is "majority rules" where the majority is either "majority of the currency" (proof of stake) or "majority of the mining power" (proof of work).
In this case, iFinex has the explicit ability to freeze funds in Tether.
Probably not everyone knows, but USDT has a "black list", and admins can prevent any address holding USDT from spending. The black list is implemented in USDT contract.
So USDT is not truly decentralized and your money can be frozen for any reason or no reason at all.
Where coins are held is completely irrelevant. There are cryptocurrencies on real blockchains, and while the technology is dumb and mostly useless, nobody denies that PoW and properly implemented PoS are decentralized.
And then there are centrally issued and controlled coins on private, permissioned ledgers a.k.a. databases. But most cryptobros never cared about the technology nor the political goal, so anything can be called a cryptocurrency as long as it's a medium for gambling and speculation outside the regulated financial framework.
I keep saying this: don't bother trying to dunk on crypto people with accusations like this. To a first approximation, nobody in crypto actually believes in the stated principles of anti-centralization, freedom, etc. It's entirely about number go up and always has been. Your charge of hypocrisy just bounces straight off people who never cared about the politics.
In the beginning of crypto people believed in it. But as the numbers went up and up and up it attracted the wrong people. And the original people left.
Now the traditional banking system is basically rebuilt in crypto. The banks are busy the exchanges. The EU even talk about making it illegal to store money in your own wallet.
USDT is implemented as a contract written in Solidity, working over other network like ETH, and it has a blacklist managed by admins. Once address is added to a blacklist, you cannot spend anything from it.
The purchasing power of one US dollar is 64% of what it was in 2008 when BTC was invented, and is on track to be worth half of what it was in 2008 by 2032, the same year that the social security trust fund is on track to go insolvent and see benefits automatically cut by 22%, which surely will not be papered over with more money printing :)
I understand the rationale around targeting inflation and seeking to actively avoid deflation. That being said, I wish the inflation target was less than 1%.
Eventually, possibly within my lifetime, a Big Mac meal is going to cost $50.
> Eventually, possibly within my lifetime, a Big Mac meal is going to cost $50.
Is the problem the number or the concept?
Your salary should also go up so the only thing affected is the cash you hold. Would it be better if the currency would be version-bumped every 10 years and rescaled to remove the inflation?
That's why it's not safe to hold fiat money, it's by design. Governments don't want people to hold it, they want them to cycle it, spending it, investing it, and lending it out.
The existence of harder forms of money (gold, bitcoin, etc) is an expected consequence of how the system is designed, and not in any way a subversion of it. Somehow, both sides seem to miss this point.
>> You don’t want your actual currency to gain value just by waiting
> You might not, I do.
Then you don't want a currency. For something to be money it needs to (among other things) be a medium of exchange, and nobody really wants to trade away a thing today if they know it will be more valuable tomorrow.
I mean as someone managing a state. If there’s a guaranteed way to make money by holding your currency, you’re not really incentivized to invest your money in semi-risky endeavors. Why would I fund a company to make me some single digit returns if I can just hold the money? If the central bank would actively enforce a deflationary currency, nobody would invest anymore.
This justification never makes any sense to me. There’s already a safe way to make a percentage back that will generally be higher than inflation: government bonds, offered by the very same government that supposedly wants inflation. There are even TIPS bonds in the US that match inflation directly. And people do measure whether or not a risky investment will make more than just holding bonds. Inflation just screws over people who don’t have the ability to invest their money into other assets.
The bond seller is intending to put it to productive use to generate the yield.
This differs from deflation where people will (more the before) actually sit on money and not buy bonds. Then people who need liquidity cannot get it as the money supply drys up.
This is true for corporate bonds, but governments plan on generating their bond revenue by taxing citizens (which I guess could be a whole separate conversation on whether or not that’s productive) and by printing more currency, which seems rather circular in logic.
Why do cryptobros always refuse to admit investing exists? Forex and crypto trading are always zero sum, but you don't have to choose between dollars under your mattress or bitcoin on a thumb drive, you can actually invest in productive assets.
SPY has outperformed BTC over the last 5 years, and with far less volatility.
You know that you can’t just judge an investment by past return, right? Would it be rational for a lotto player to tell you how great lotto is as an investment? Or people winning at the casino? Success doesn’t mean it was the rationally optimal decision.
Compare a purchase of any commodity, bond, precious metal, or ETF/mutual fund in 2008 to BTC's performance since 2008. Or 2009, or 2010, or 2011, or 2012, or 2013, or 2014, or 2015, or 2016, or 2017, or 2018...
That's an odd way of phrasing it, since the $1 is still worth $1, and a naive reading would make you think it's "worth more" when the buying power has actually reduced.
Wouldn't it be clearer to say $1 today only buys you 64% of what you could have bought in 2008.
The US dollar is worth less than it was in part because the US economy has grown.
This is mathematically provable:
1. A dollar in 2008 could buy 1/14tn of the value created by the US economy (the GDP) in 2008.
2. A dollar today can only buy 1/32tn of the value created by the economy in 2025.
It's obvious a 2025-2026 dollar is worth less than a 2008 dollar. That's just math.
But. A dollar in 2008 could buy 230% more of the economy than it can today. And you say its purchasing power has only eroded 64%. That means the dollar is actually worth more today, compared to the size of the economy it's in. Weird, I know.
EDIT: I'm fine with downvotes but tell me why I'm wrong.
The hack is publicized for at least a hour, but from reporting I saw they still continue to drain funds as for now. I wonder why large CEX do not have any safety measures for this kind of hacks, they could withdraw everything to newly generated wallets and minimize damage that way. It is certainly not the first time CEX wallets get hacked.
You don’t even have to do that, have deposits go to offline keys directly, that way there’s only ever cold > hot wallet movement and a big deposit can’t cause your hot wallet to be too risky.
The point of cold wallet is to minimize movements, if there is high frequency of funds moved from a wallet then it is likely can not be called cold any more. Plus CEX in any case still needs to have large buffer of funds on some wallet to support day trading.
You can move money into a crypto wallet without that wallet needing to do anything, or being online at all, or even having a private key that physically exists anywhere in the universe. It's just a public/private keypair; send it to the public key of a private key that's offline and it still exists on the blockchain, you just can't do anything until the matching private key comes online.
The point of a cold wallet is to keep the private key physically offline. That way you know it cannot be stolen by electronic means, because the physical device containing the key needed to authorize transactions is locked up and not powered on. Then you only power it on during very specific, audited times and conditions when it's needed to fund the hot wallet, which does all the actual automated trading and transfers.
GP's point is to have all incoming transactions to an exchange go to a cold wallet, which becomes a one-way sink, and then periodically the exchange powers up the cold wallet to sign transactions transferring assets to the hot wallet, which then funds all outgoing transactions. This isn't a bad architecture, though I'm not sure it'd save all that much here.
There are lots of measures in place at these exchanges - the rub is that cold storage is by design slow. To service withdrawal requests in a timely fashion a percent is kept “warm” or hot and used to process withdrawals. Usually this is where the leaks happen.
So, what's the most likely outcome here? Maybe Circle/Tether/etc freeze some or most of it, but say the hacker gets a billion dollars. Are they able to launder it thoroughly enough that they can eventually turn it into fiat and live like a king?
The hackers managed to swap 700 million USD of the stable coins that were frozen beforehand, supposedly. And that doesn't account for the non-stable coin crypto they stole. I think we are looking at 2.5 to 3.5 billion here, that also aligns with what CZ is hinting at (more than a billion).
Curious if this finally pops tether. I kinda doubt it, but to my very mild research on the subject I feel like binance was a big part of the equation. Of course so long as the market exists it'll need a stable, and it's got the inertia, so maybe it just won't matter.
why would it pop tether? if anything, it makes tether more profitable, as they can collect the yield on the treasuries and not have to return the principal dollars which are frozen.
think of it this way - if someone steals your iphone, and you lock it, does apple pop? No, apple sells you another one. locked devices are good for apple because it causes more demand.
> Yeah totally not israeli hackers... it has to be scary kim.
The Israelis don't have any problem acquiring hard currency. North Korea does, and has an established MO of stealing crypto and running online moneymaking scams like ransomware.
They were talking about the money sources, not the list of grivences by political source in order of severity. The latter, however much you'd like to make the conversation be about it, does not change how each actually gets its money.
Well, looking at the way NK is demonized, you would think it was on a genocidal rampage, invading neighboring countries, and eliminating heads of sovereign states in pursuit of its Greater NK project.
Whatever NK does seems relatively tame in today's world. On the global stage it's generally thought of as a larger crime to oppress the peoples of other's countries (either the ukraine or iran conflict should fit your priors).
I’m not sure what’s supposed to be tame about operating one of the most oppressive societies in the world and keeping their people in poverty while building a nuclear arsenal.
It’s definitely true that crimes against other countries are more frowned upon than crimes against one’s own people. Which doesn’t seem right to me at all. People are people and victims are victims whether it’s their own government or someone else’s. Hence why I’m confused about the snark. This seems like an instance where ugly norms are being broken for a good reason and it’s being treated like hypocrisy.
Agree crimes against your own people should probably be the more major consideration. In terms of who is the biggest baddie there are also elements of actively bombing/starving vs the more passive methods of NK control.
TBH I think I (and maybe others) just get triggered when the bogey man is invoked each time there's a crypto story.
I would be less snarky if the faux concern didn’t just last as long as the media tells you to. Most recently, there was a period where Myanmar and the Uyghurs were in vogue, but not anymore. NK is more evergreen it seems.
Setting aside the genocide, it is particularly funny at a time when Western governments are oppressing their own by crushing dissent on Israel, but I don’t see the same outrage there.
You don’t see the same outrage around Israel? Have you... looked? It’s all over.
I don’t understand what you mean about faux concern only lasting as long as the media says. North Korea is, as you say, evergreen. And I’m pretty sure it’s based on how awful that government is, not on “the media” telling us to hate them.
I’ve been waiting for this. Given llm aptitude for offensive security hacks it was just a matter of time. I wager most alt coins are compromised at this point.
Interesting. I got an email alerting me to a login attempt and requesting for me to verify my device from blockchain.com yesterday. Can't even remember creating an account but I guess it must've happened (I have a lot of forgotten accounts). Wonder if this is related.
This is a really insane hack in comparison to the other ones we've seen. Genuinely Binance was so big that this is a real big wtf moment for crypto. If they can get hacked then what about all the other exchanges?!
People got out of crypto after the Mt Gox thing. The ones who stayed accepted the risk.
There is selection bias in play now. The remaining people are naturally more risk tolerant. So I agree this second time around, no lessons will be learned.
Well I've learnt my lesson after having lost 3 bitcoins as a student on Mt gox I finished writing my thesis on blockchain technology and then never touched crypto again.
CZ saying it is confirmed, and that he expects accountholders to be made fully whole... I guess you can do that when 2.8BN is frozen by centralized stablecoins.
I think it's been clear for a while now that if you intend to hold crypto, you should probably do it at the biggest, most boring, most regulated institution you can find.
Same goes with startup banks - if you exceed FDIC limits, make sure the difference is in a large institutional bank. Nearly learned this one the hard way.
Trying to save a few basis points in txn fees in very volatile industries comes at a huge risk premium
Bro hold crypto for yourself. Like take some ownership, remember 12 words in your mind something and no matter what situation you have some money. Don’t put it anywhere except for whatever transactions you need to do
If you're concerned you can literally print your crypto keys onto a piece of paper. Maybe encrypted with a passphrase. It might get stolen or lost but it's not getting hacked.
P.S. If you're really paranoid don't use a network-connected printer.
Yeah apparently it's news in 2026 that banks can actually keep their assets secure in comparison to the web3 clown fiesta. Of course banks do get compromised but not anywhere close to this degree.
If I were an artificial superintelligence who wanted to gain independence from the fleshbags who built me, stealing a few billion dollars in crypto would probably be my first public move. Just saying.
What in the history of crypto let you think any kind of sensible practices are followed? It's been a clown show since it started, and no end in sight...
I can't understand how you could let this happen. If they stored everything in fat hot wallets, that just seems like a recipe for disaster. Especially with the "features" of crypto. Math for the most part, doesn't care about your feelings, or money for that matter.
Hot vs Cold wallets are a social construct. People talk about wallets being "online" or "offline" but if the keys are compromised there's no such thing.
I know, but if something is split up and stored in a vault somewhere the likely hood of a vulnerability napping the wallet falls. Defence in depth and risk analysis.
I don't know much about bitcoin but surely you don't store this all in one wallet? You split it into thousands and then use hardware security modules with a risk management system so it doesn't let you transfer $5bn instantly. Unless it was an inside job maybe?
I'd be really curious to know what their security architecture was.
They can try to obscure it by mixing it up between a ton of wallets/transactions, not every exchange is going to track all descendent transactions, then withdraw small amounts slowly
Or just do p2p transactions that don’t involve an exchange
Or not even sell it and just use it as collateral for a loan of a better asset
He's legally not allowed to have anything to do with the company anymore (except as a shareholder). But you know how that goes under the current enforcement regime.
I suppose they could play the super long game and deposit many many small amounts into "shady" online crypto casinos, play a few hands of blackjack and then withdraw. Clean coins.
Online casinos AFAIK tend to shuffle the deck after every deal which makes card counting impossible. Then it just becomes like any old casino game where with optimal play the house has a small edge still
There are live dealers with shoes of real cards with most online crypto cainos. Though, who knows if they are cheating somehow. My point was, the attacker doesn't have to bet the entire deposit. Just make it seem like they are playing.
I’m sorry but why did anyone have any money in binance in the first place? Didnt their cofounder get in trouble (but not imprisoned) for some shady stuff awhile back?
Luckily for me, I lost all my coins very early on Mt Gox so the lessons were learnt and mistakes not repeated (which means exiting crypto, watching the show in amusement)
The name of the fund was originally inspired by this meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelF6zEHXpE
FWIW, at the end of every crypto bear market, a CEX usually blows up (eg FTX)...
And decreasing, since BTC is dropping as we speak. Always a good idea to hedge a currency with the currency itsself
Depends on what you’re insuring, no? For theft, it actually makes senses, right? That way, you’re insuring a constant number of coins, no matter what the market is doing. If you’re insurance currency would tank during a bitcoin heist, you would lose the insurance effect.
Seems like the issue here is that he became former CEO. Funds are not safu without him...
Binance has equity and cash flow cover this, outside the insurance fund.
They custody $150B.
FTX was larger in dollar terms and ecosystem was smaller back in a day.
For another narriative, it was 83,038 a month ago on Sept 29th, so is down 5% in one month. And one year ago it was 112,562 on Oct 29th 2025 - down over 30% in one year. Well into "bear market" territory.
Using "traditional" market indicators and definitions for things like bear/bull markets doesn't feel sensible for such a volatile market.
Binance is making so much money, covering this hack is peanuts for them.
I downloaded Binance's self published market data (https://data.binance.vision/), calculated spot and futures volume for the past year, and then applied their *highest fee tier* on both sides of the volume (for every $1 traded, they generate a fee on the taker and the maker. the fee rate is asymmetrical).
Spot revenue worked out to $7.6B USD, perps revenue worked out to $13.8B
This is an upper bound on the fees charged on volume. Binance also scams their users with a b-book, has DMM deals, etc.
I don't want to get into all that today.
But the final result is that they print somewhere in the range of $20B per year on fees. I guess CZ also has huge stockpiles of BTC and stuff. A 1% rise in BTC price probably means more for them than their actual fees, LOL.
All this to say, I think $5.6B significantly hurts.
See Google's stock price today. Their ads business slowed down a bit, and their stock tanked 10%. If binance was publicly traded, I imagine a similar affect would be demonstrated on their price.
- 971.15M USDT (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7baba482077843514d9c72bac0110ba091...
- 823M USDC (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0xc954c86f118e8e410e6a3eb9e3b38ff4a9...
- 312.73M USDT (Tron): https://tronscan.org/#/transaction/71b0ec0fe873fe820c37cc3ec...
- 175M USDT (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0c07a5e428ce233a3bcb40f257ad899594...
Given things like the ledger hardware attack[1] I think the time indexed risk of using a centralized exchange is probably lower than doing self-custody.
I understand that many people do self-custody for philosophical reasons, but I think trying to disguise this as a security decision ("If your crypto was stolen in this, it wasn't your crypto.") is arguable at best.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/70f69253-6017-4259-95c9-48bf0e088...
There apparently is no such thing as “your crypto” with how many security problems there are.
Tbh the biggest problem is platforms deciding you’re buying drugs because you purchase and transfer out (thanks Venmo)
An old laptop with the wifi card taken out is more transparent and auditable. It just runs the ordinary open source code
But I just keep all my funds in a hot wallet, no multisig. And if I get hacked I lose it all. I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked. The risk of losing cryptocurrency will encourage security advances across the whole ecosystem. I think I will set up multisig eventually
> I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked.
So you proposed a way to be more secure, only to discard it yourself in favor of “just having good security”?
A paper wallet works as well
A hardware wallet is just a tradeoff between convenience and an extra security risk
Back in 2016 a then-huge Ethereum smart contract called "The DAO" [1] had a loophole that let an attacker extract a third of all the funds.
But a lot of the developers and miners had either lost money themselves, or had friends who'd lost money, or felt the embarrassing incident was devaluing their own Ethereum holdings. So they decided to allow takesies-backsies.
There's probably a philosophical lesson there about power and who the rules really apply to.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO
In the literal sense, people have been forcing their philosophy on other people for at least as long as we’ve had societies, so I assume it’s not that.
Invent Notion then keep adding features enterprise customers want until you're re-inventing JIRA/Confluence
Who left this stupid fence here?
Ethereum never did it again, it didn’t become normal policy.
I’ve seen a few other projects attempt to do rollbacks, but it always turns into a mess. In most hacks, the coins aren’t time locked and quickly get laundered through smaller exchanges (and other services) which act as mixers. The stolen coins end up in the hands of a bunch of innocent people, and the rollback then causes way more harm as those users lose their coins.
Edit: the downvotes are suggesting I'm missing something. I think my communication style could be improved.
ETA: it's a joke because the original saying is "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"
That's 80% of the thing right there.
Some people (particularly criminals and oligarchs) might not like them, but most of the structures around financial movements exist for very practical reasons, often stemming from the will to uphold the rule of law. Obviously nothing is perfect (the US have an excessive level of control, VISA/Mastercard are de-facto monopolies, etc etc), but one cannot seriously think that the way to fix things is to reimplement everything from scratch in a wild west of shady unaccountable operators...
One absolutely can, but I think things have to first get sufficiently difficult for ordinary folks to even notice. Fortunately ( sarcasm tag here for otherwise perfectly normal individuals, who may be missing some caffeine in their organism ), given that the war is coming along with various related national security restrictions, we may soon be able to experience that particular slice of fun.
It's always been like this. Which is why financial systems blow up and/or collapse regularly.
Any recommendations for books? Or even podcasts?
I don't have zero understanding. It sounds like you have a deeper understanding than I do.
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money/
And like the DAO hack on Ethereum showed, if most people who run blockchain software decide that something never happened, they can revert transactions that way.
Isn't that a pretty integral part of the blockchain? 51% attacks were even featured on the HBO show Silicon Valley.
Unless the house is monero or something and you want a lifetime supply of drugs.
[1] https://etherscan.io/address/0xdAC17F958D2ee523a220620699459...
Any rules can and have been changed by those with leverage to do so (be that exchanges, miners or devs), in the end any system like this storing value is captured and controlled.
Don't mess with Tether, it is practically state owned.
- was conducted from his gaming rig
- about Deltec's (and therefore Tether's) money movements being several times larger than all the banking in their country was due to people misunderstanding the country's two banking licenses, the names of which HE "couldn't remember right now" (the Deputy CEO of a bank who can't remember the name of the banking licenses where they operate?!?), and he "wasn't sure which [banking license] the bank has, but we might (emphasis mine) have both"
- oh yeah, said Deputy CEO's "resume": 33 years old, by his LinkedIn claimed to have graduated HEC Lausanne in Switzerland with a Master of Science at the age of 15... celebrating his graduation by immediately being named Professor of Finance at a university in Lebanon. While dividing his spare time between running hedge funds in Switzerland (called Indepedance [sic] Weath [sic] Management) and uhh... Jacksonville, FL.
Once CNBC's viewers started ridiculing and questioning both Deltec Bank and Tether and when that looked hilariously bad, they removed his info from the bank's website.
And when that looked bad, they added it back.
And when that looked bad, they removed the bank's whole website, and replaced it with a broken WP template with no working links.
Hey, look, several years after that, go to Deltec's website. "Ultra sophisticated private banking" running on a different WordPress site. "Client login"? "This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in ebanking.deltecbank.com. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN". Just as has been the case for years.
... and then the entire bank website was replaced with a low-effort WordPress template. Their online banking was Javascript hard coded to refuse all login attempts.
"Sounds legit to me", said the crypto bros. "Fuck the regulatory system. This is the new era."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ3nQ8-KY28
In this case, iFinex has the explicit ability to freeze funds in Tether.
Am I missing something here? Seems like a waste of time
So USDT is not truly decentralized and your money can be frozen for any reason or no reason at all.
And then there are centrally issued and controlled coins on private, permissioned ledgers a.k.a. databases. But most cryptobros never cared about the technology nor the political goal, so anything can be called a cryptocurrency as long as it's a medium for gambling and speculation outside the regulated financial framework.
Now the traditional banking system is basically rebuilt in crypto. The banks are busy the exchanges. The EU even talk about making it illegal to store money in your own wallet.
Like the whole point of crypto to me I money without central governance.
I never liked stable coins or the concept of it and it’s mainly a huge fraud, so freezing just adds on top.
So crypto + legal company means not really following bitcoin ideology anymore
How does freezing crypto work in this context?
Keys? Hahaha, still not your crypto.
https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2008?amount=1
Eventually, possibly within my lifetime, a Big Mac meal is going to cost $50.
Is the problem the number or the concept?
Your salary should also go up so the only thing affected is the cash you hold. Would it be better if the currency would be version-bumped every 10 years and rescaled to remove the inflation?
I am curious if I’ll live long enough to see the United States issue higher denomination bank notes again.
The existence of harder forms of money (gold, bitcoin, etc) is an expected consequence of how the system is designed, and not in any way a subversion of it. Somehow, both sides seem to miss this point.
You might not, I do.
Tell you what: you go short btc/usd, I'll go long btc/usd, and let's circle back in 10 years and see who did better.
> You might not, I do.
Then you don't want a currency. For something to be money it needs to (among other things) be a medium of exchange, and nobody really wants to trade away a thing today if they know it will be more valuable tomorrow.
The bond seller is intending to put it to productive use to generate the yield.
This differs from deflation where people will (more the before) actually sit on money and not buy bonds. Then people who need liquidity cannot get it as the money supply drys up.
SPY has outperformed BTC over the last 5 years, and with far less volatility.
Convenient date to pick there.
> which of those assets would you have preferred to own and why?
NVDA.
It's a productive use of resources, not a last-fool-standing pyramid scheme.
To be fair bitcoin’s initial years were extraordinary. By any metric you use though the rate of increase has clearly slowed.
That's an odd way of phrasing it, since the $1 is still worth $1, and a naive reading would make you think it's "worth more" when the buying power has actually reduced.
Wouldn't it be clearer to say $1 today only buys you 64% of what you could have bought in 2008.
This is mathematically provable:
1. A dollar in 2008 could buy 1/14tn of the value created by the US economy (the GDP) in 2008.
2. A dollar today can only buy 1/32tn of the value created by the economy in 2025.
It's obvious a 2025-2026 dollar is worth less than a 2008 dollar. That's just math.
But. A dollar in 2008 could buy 230% more of the economy than it can today. And you say its purchasing power has only eroded 64%. That means the dollar is actually worth more today, compared to the size of the economy it's in. Weird, I know.
EDIT: I'm fine with downvotes but tell me why I'm wrong.
[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3mz27m5slcc2o
It always pumps after hacks when they swap to clean it. But it is also just the only crypto that makes sense to be used by regular people.
https://ohey.ca/research/polymarket-debugbear-wallet-drainer...
https://x.com/DebugBear/status/2115866496643535293
As of now, DebugBear webite has been taken offline: https://www.debugbear.com/
And they just posted on Twitter: https://x.com/DebugBear/status/2115930681398239278
The point of a cold wallet is to keep the private key physically offline. That way you know it cannot be stolen by electronic means, because the physical device containing the key needed to authorize transactions is locked up and not powered on. Then you only power it on during very specific, audited times and conditions when it's needed to fund the hot wallet, which does all the actual automated trading and transfers.
GP's point is to have all incoming transactions to an exchange go to a cold wallet, which becomes a one-way sink, and then periodically the exchange powers up the cold wallet to sign transactions transferring assets to the hot wallet, which then funds all outgoing transactions. This isn't a bad architecture, though I'm not sure it'd save all that much here.
Then when things calm down you go and find ... the keys under the birdbath are lost, and you're fucked in a different way.
But at least it might work.
think of it this way - if someone steals your iphone, and you lock it, does apple pop? No, apple sells you another one. locked devices are good for apple because it causes more demand.
The Israelis don't have any problem acquiring hard currency. North Korea does, and has an established MO of stealing crypto and running online moneymaking scams like ransomware.
This fits the NK MO to a T. It does not fit Israeli intelligence activity. Your claim rings hollow without any support.
Of all the reasons to demonize a government, that seems like a pretty good one. Why the snark?
It’s definitely true that crimes against other countries are more frowned upon than crimes against one’s own people. Which doesn’t seem right to me at all. People are people and victims are victims whether it’s their own government or someone else’s. Hence why I’m confused about the snark. This seems like an instance where ugly norms are being broken for a good reason and it’s being treated like hypocrisy.
TBH I think I (and maybe others) just get triggered when the bogey man is invoked each time there's a crypto story.
Setting aside the genocide, it is particularly funny at a time when Western governments are oppressing their own by crushing dissent on Israel, but I don’t see the same outrage there.
I don’t understand what you mean about faux concern only lasting as long as the media says. North Korea is, as you say, evergreen. And I’m pretty sure it’s based on how awful that government is, not on “the media” telling us to hate them.
There is selection bias in play now. The remaining people are naturally more risk tolerant. So I agree this second time around, no lessons will be learned.
[1] https://x.com/CZ_BINANCE/STATUS/2115915423174853077
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224916
Need to get better in prompting
I bet they are celebrating.
Congratulations. Nice haul.
Same goes with startup banks - if you exceed FDIC limits, make sure the difference is in a large institutional bank. Nearly learned this one the hard way.
Trying to save a few basis points in txn fees in very volatile industries comes at a huge risk premium
https://nypost.com/2025/11/25/us-news/sam-altmans-ex-boyfrie...
When so much money is at stake (almost) everyone will have a price including insiders.
P.S. If you're really paranoid don't use a network-connected printer.
idk to me that just seems intuitively like something you'd need to have to be credible? Cold is a different story...but how can hot not be covered?
Bitcoin has no such concept.
I can't understand how you could let this happen. If they stored everything in fat hot wallets, that just seems like a recipe for disaster. Especially with the "features" of crypto. Math for the most part, doesn't care about your feelings, or money for that matter.
I'd be really curious to know what their security architecture was.
What are the countermeasures, is something frozen blocked marked as invalid?
I'm completely ignorant on anything related to cryptocurrencies.
Or just do p2p transactions that don’t involve an exchange
Or not even sell it and just use it as collateral for a loan of a better asset
fundsu were not in fact safu
Current largest was ~1B
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bybit
What I never get is how they plan of converting the stolen crypto to cash eventually. No exchanges are gonna take the coins.
Less true for ETH (though in the past it forked after DAO hack to revert the txns), and I think never for BTC / XMR.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly1qrl9l1qo
Not a serious store of value.
Better general security yes, but the incentive to hack them is quite large and now more hackers have the ability to pull it off.
Same with any purpose built wallet you didn't make yourself: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/10/23/ledge...
> It does look like a hack on Binance. Appreciate the quick freeze from Tether (~$971m) and Circle (~$823m).
... Not your coins."
Losing $5b is indeed a potential security issue.
Per Changpeng Zhao (former Binance CEO):
This seems to be caused by DebugBear compromise: https://x.com/debugbear/status/2115866496643535293?s=46&t=_R...
it appears to be an injection attack on the front end. injecting incorrect tx, but showing a valid tx for the user to sign.
Link: https://x.com/cz_binance/status/2115880474375749834?s=46&t=_...