> The exchange, Zhou noted, has reserves to cover these withdrawals, but the crisis deepened as, in response to the incident, Safe moved to temporarily shut down its smart wallet functionalities to “ensure absolute confidence in our platform’s security.”
Sure. I am confident that this statement won't age as good as milk, and we will fondly remember it next month thinking "yes, that statement is just unadulterated truth".
Having traded several times on this exchange, people here are underestimating their profit margins. My money is betting on them being able to finance this 1.5bn hole and carry on operations.
Of course it’s a hack.. I doubt the exchange owners wanted to send their entire balance to the North Korean military. That the multisig signers were compromised is no different than if a bank CEO had his machine hacked and a wire initiated on his behalf.
> is no different than if a bank CEO had his machine hacked and a wire initiated on his behalf
Those are not equivalent because the traditional banking sector is less vulnerable to North Korea. In theory a bank could be drained of $1b via a misdirected wire, but in practice that kind of plan is hampered by real-world controls and limitations applicable to international banking.[1] North Korean hackers instead focus on what works, which is crypto.
This is good for eth because it takes them out of circulation, like a token burn. In this case, 400k eth. ETH has recovered its losses and then some despite BTC falling today. North Korea presumably has access to little liquidity. They cannot sell , as they are being backlisted. The major BTC hacks from 2014-2016 in part contributed to BTC's record 20x surge in 2017 because those coins could not be sold on the market and hinder the rally. So there is an unexpected positive to this.
For physical materials, like gold, this applies because gold is useful other than as a medium of exchange.
But ETH is a mathematical construct. It should be true in the limit up until the very last measurable quantum of ETH is erased, and the very last bit holds the entire value of the cryptocurrency.
To put it another way when does “deleting eth is good for eth” cease to be a valid argument?
When I really think about ETH and well others. I question is there really some market cap. Or is the value actually more so the coins in active circulation, with some lowering factor for big reserves. That is that market cap is in sense a lie, and amount of circulating tokens is what really indicate the value. As thus removing tokens from circulation actually would remove value. Just that calculating market cap is really hard. Unlike say redeemable stocks for say ETF.
the founder of Bitcoin literally said lost btc is a gift for everyone else. there is likely some optimal about of burning that increases value of other tokens vs. destroys the network.
As long as it’s not your eth though. In that way, I guess yes it is good if you’re holding onto a ton of Furbies and there’s a massive Furby culling elsewhere.
Isn't it a little premature to celebrate a few intraday candles when ETHBTC has been falling consistently since 2017? It will need to rise 304% to get back to where it was, but alright, congrats on your 2.8% recovery.
How is North Korea possible dump $1 billion on the market when everyone trying to blacklist them? Hackers typically have access to much less liquidity as the coins are considered tainted, so they either are never sold or sold gradually on dark markets or OTC where there is no market impact.
ETH is supposed to be an electronic contracts market.. Is everyone who writes a contract from now on going to include code to block using these coins as collateral? If there's no consensus to interfere with the transaction, I assume people will watch the coins in motion and extend a larger map of tainted accounts and coins, yet be unable to interfere in many algorithm decided actions.
There do exist anonymous tokens, such as XMR and the like, but no one knowledgable would ever think coins with (public!) transparent ledgers were somehow 'anonymous', only merely decentralized.
Seems like the tokens are tied to a specific IRL identity in the case
It only takes one connecting piece of data for the pseudo anonymity to become a complete history of every transaction you have done. This is one of the reasons crypto coins will never become currencies
This whole crypto wave since early Bitcoin is so insane.
The entire idea was to have a truly decentralized monetary system outside the control of institutions. But it so happens that almost everyone deposit them in institutions, and when a problem/hack occurs, no one can help because well… it is outside the control of institutions.
If you look at the market cap of coins, it is obvious that nobody gives a flying fuck about the underlying technology.
Bitcoin copies/forks like Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, jokes like Dogecoin and Shiba Ina, memecoins like $TRUMP are in the top 50, while innovative protocols like Chia are at rank 250 or so.
Sure. The thing is, sometimes social sentiment changes.
Fiat tends to remain stable and valuable, because it is carefully managed to that end, and is the legally sanctioned method to extinguish debt and pay taxes.
Crypto is nothing but magic beans and a bad database. If its value falls, there's nothing to stop the fall but sentiment.
The Dollar is expected to lose almost all value over the lifetime of a person. Warren Buffett once noted that the Dollar already lost over 90% of it's value during his lifetime. With Bitcoin, there is no such expectation.
> The Dollar is expected to lose almost all value over the lifetime of a person. Warren Buffett once noted that the Dollar already lost over 90% of it's value during his lifetime. With Bitcoin, there is no such expectation.
You’ve taken the wrong lesson from this, and the fact that Warren Buffett isn’t a pauper should be your biggest clue.
This is why it’s important to invest real dollars in productive assets.
The actual issue that needs solving is that real wages haven’t been rising to match inflation for the last nearly fifty years.
This is nonsense. Money supply is related to inflation, but not the same, and the graph you showed is the clearest proof of that - money supply shot up in the wake of the GFC, while inflation reared its ugly head only in the wake of supply side shocks due to war and pandemic.
Any savings beyond a few months worth of cushion should not be held in cash anyway, but in equity and debt, which support productive investments. These have yielded positive results over these timeframes. (And BTW, both US equity and US corporate debt have outperformed gold over the last century or so.)
Even if you go for risk-free treasuries: long term real rates have mostly been positive [0], while short real rates have been hovering around, but in the last decade and a half below, zero [1], granted. But these rates are determined by economy wide equilibrium processes that can't be overcome by some magic beans and a bad database.
(Note that there are some 10,000 coins with strictly limited supply. They will not ipso facto outperform the dollar.)
Yes agreed, but the 'idea' is diluted when it's only about decentralized money. The truly powerful promise of Web3/crypto decentralization is in creating alternative economic ecosystems that empower users and communities.
We're obviously still in the teething stages of the technology and need some serious improvements to underlying security; and to move beyond scams and ponzi structures.
> The truly powerful promise of Web3/crypto decentralization is in creating alternative economic ecosystems that empower users and communities.
What does this mean? It’s indistinguishable from marketing chaff.
It occurs to me that the biggest recent successes in “alternative” ecosystems have absolutely nothing to do with cryptocurrencies. Mastodon comes to mind.
So deFi can help users and communities because decentralized financial systems, allow users to lend, borrow, and trade without intermediaries, enhancing financial inclusivity and reducing costs.
Web3 technologies can facilitate community-driven initiatives, e.g. regenerative finance (ReFi), which supports climate action and equitable resource allocation. Also some interesting things happening around DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) e.g. Venture DAOs supporting new business creation.
In general the principles behind having reduced intermediaries, and having user control and ownership of user data, together with enlightened uses of smart contract and other Web3 technologies is empowering, especially if it's put to use to solve real world problems.
I do think that it's difficult to see past the sometimes murky shenanigans and greed often on display in Web3. But I think decentralization is a paradigm shift, it's going to take some visionary entrepreneurs and technologists to continue to build out the promise but I believe that it will happen.
You can't do uncollateralised borrowing/lending without credit checks, that is interaction with the real world. This requires trusted centralized counterparties, identity, etc., and is not suited for permissionless blockchains.
Trading equity/FX on centralized platforms is extraordinarily cheap. You don't save much, if anything, by going decentralized there (not to mention the fact that to enter the crypto system, you need to exchange fiat (hard to get crypto by mining these days), and Coinbase charges consumers 1.55% on average for that, so 3% for a round-trip back to fiat.)
Having control of user data is orthogonal to the technology. It's a legal matter. We could retain ownership of a tweet with a different contract. The nature of the underlying distributed database hardly matters.
The vision of crypto has failed. Instead of reducing intermediaries, it gave rise to a whole new host of intermediaries, and enormous externalities (environments, scams, hacks, crime).
Thanks for your reply, food for thought. I take your point about uncolateralized loans, although I believe there is some interesting work going on with zero knowledge proofs that can help to assess creditworthiness without revealing sensitive information.
It's an interesting time: we're seeing mainstream adoption of blockchain and crypto technologies at the same time that shitcoin madness is trending.
The basic concepts behind smart contracts are sound and enable efficient transactions and alternative economic systems, this is why I believe we'll increasingly see major institutions adopting it.
As far as community and user empowerment and creating alternative economic ecosystems, it will inevitably take some time to realize effective systems and usage models. I think there is huge potential, still early days.
Thanks for the healthy scepticism though, I probably need more of it!
I'm sort of worried they're hinting at these "network states", which seem well placed to not only trick people into parting with their money, but also potentially their homes. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyl171lyewo
We are beyond the teething stages and have seen alternative economic ecosystems that do stuff to users and communities but they mostly seem to be slave labour scam centers in Myanmar.
It seems if you give humans anonymous non reversible financial transaction technology the results are not all good. I think the problems are with the humans as much as the tech.
Bitcoin's initial release was in 2009. Web3 was coined in 2014 and the first NFT was minted soon after. These technologies are not infants, and they're not teething. They're just toothless.
Toothless indeed. The whole "It's early days" narrative is so misguided. The smartphone is maybe a year older than crypto, but a roaring success. Nobody needs to explain [1] how great smartphones are, because they're obviously useful.
Similarly, within a decade of the invention of the WWW, there were heaps of successful and useful sites (amazon, Bloomberg, Wired, Friendster, ...).
[1] Note that Steve Jobs, when he introduced the iPhone, did have to explain it. He carefully explained that it was an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator, demonstrated how to unlock it, how to scroll, how to open apps, etc. But then people got it. With crypto, after 15 years "you just don't get it".
Plus there's the reality that the US can derail any plans for de-dollarizing by simply buying up crypto, in which case crypto is now fully backed by the dollar and becomes the same exact reserve currency as the dollar.
This is the most strategic defensive play the US can do, so unfortunately the case for BTC to get to a million is a valid one. It's outrageous, but missing this move will leave a lot of people even poorer, and it will happen all of a sudden. They are accumulating right now, and one day they will just set the new high price.
I hear stories about them and whether the con-artist got access to their digital wallet, whether they made it to a safe room in the home invasion and, of course, whether they got rights to mine the dump.
As I understand it, the software surrounding and managing the wallets is always what’s compromised, right? So it’s really the exchanges are the only place that the money is being lost, because the protocol itself is sound.
Countless amounts of money has been lost off-exchange. The entire reason people use exchanges is because holding your own crypto is laughably hard.
Forgot your password? All your money is gone. Hard drive crashed and no backups? All your money is gone. Accidentally installed malware? All your money is gone. Spouse or parent with all the coins died? All the money is gone. Fat-finger a value in a transaction? Lots of your money is gone.
Yes there are “solutions” to all of these problems. All of them are Rube Goldberg contraptions themselves and have their own failure modes.
Sorry, I wrote this, but it is just a guess. I say that because of the size of exchanges, and I know most people are in this because they think they can sell for a profit later (both amateurs and professionals).
The truth is hard to know. I wonder how many people lost their coins to the ether by losing their keys or sending to the wrong wallets.
Is there an example of a crypto system that is actually used for legitimate monetary transactions? Excluding money laundering and moving money offshore?
USDC is becoming pretty popular. It's on every major chain, and has a native bridge by Circle. On Solana you can send millions of dollars in USDC, in a few seconds, for less than a penny.
I think HN is about 7-8 years behind tech when it comes to crypto. You still hear people talking about ‘gas fees’, slow transaction times, and people like the parent have no idea the variety of asset classes that are tradable onchain.
Sorry, again, what exact use cases do these crypto assets have? Could you provide evidence of them being used in monetary transactions on a regular basis?
Crypto is un-censorable money. Everybody buying it knows that. If you want un-censorable money, you have to accept the fact that transfers are only verified by cryptography, and irreversible. You can't have one without the other.
The people running Bitcoin came together to fix things they didn't like, rolling back some 20+ blocks in the process, at least twice. The people running Ethereum have no problem with scams and child porn and drugs and money laundering, but hacking the DAO, that's unacceptable and was reversed.
Given they just got hacked they are probably being a bit cautious transfering funds around.
We trade security for convenience by using exchanges. It's better if crypto owners alone know their private keys.
Are there not open source p2p alternatives to the exchanges we have now?
Having traded several times on this exchange, people here are underestimating their profit margins. My money is betting on them being able to finance this 1.5bn hole and carry on operations.
https://i.redd.it/acyagmhvmpke1.jpeg
Is this a "hack"? I read some articles saying they had valid multisig authority to transfer the ETH. Blockchain security working as intended.
Of course it’s a hack.. I doubt the exchange owners wanted to send their entire balance to the North Korean military. That the multisig signers were compromised is no different than if a bank CEO had his machine hacked and a wire initiated on his behalf.
> is no different than if a bank CEO had his machine hacked and a wire initiated on his behalf
Those are not equivalent because the traditional banking sector is less vulnerable to North Korea. In theory a bank could be drained of $1b via a misdirected wire, but in practice that kind of plan is hampered by real-world controls and limitations applicable to international banking.[1] North Korean hackers instead focus on what works, which is crypto.
[1] https://pacforum.org/publications/yl-blog-89-crypto-north-ko...
Whose to say they don't get a cut on the back end? Sounds like a nice exit strategy to me if you want plausible deniability.
Sure, but that’s just two crimes instead of one crime. They don’t negate.
Did the mtgox people ever get their money back?
sort of https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-24/mt-gox-cr...
I got my FTX money a couple of days ago.
This is good for eth because it takes them out of circulation, like a token burn. In this case, 400k eth. ETH has recovered its losses and then some despite BTC falling today. North Korea presumably has access to little liquidity. They cannot sell , as they are being backlisted. The major BTC hacks from 2014-2016 in part contributed to BTC's record 20x surge in 2017 because those coins could not be sold on the market and hinder the rally. So there is an unexpected positive to this.
Just to clarify, it’s good for cryptocurrency when a portion of that finite currency is irreversibly removed from circulation forever?
In that case I assume it’s best if all ETH were to cease to exist completely. I can’t really argue against that.
There a wide spectrum between "some removed from circulation" vs "the entire thing ceasing to exist". think of this as a 400k token burn.
For physical materials, like gold, this applies because gold is useful other than as a medium of exchange.
But ETH is a mathematical construct. It should be true in the limit up until the very last measurable quantum of ETH is erased, and the very last bit holds the entire value of the cryptocurrency.
To put it another way when does “deleting eth is good for eth” cease to be a valid argument?
When I really think about ETH and well others. I question is there really some market cap. Or is the value actually more so the coins in active circulation, with some lowering factor for big reserves. That is that market cap is in sense a lie, and amount of circulating tokens is what really indicate the value. As thus removing tokens from circulation actually would remove value. Just that calculating market cap is really hard. Unlike say redeemable stocks for say ETF.
the founder of Bitcoin literally said lost btc is a gift for everyone else. there is likely some optimal about of burning that increases value of other tokens vs. destroys the network.
As long as it’s not your eth though. In that way, I guess yes it is good if you’re holding onto a ton of Furbies and there’s a massive Furby culling elsewhere.
Isn't it a little premature to celebrate a few intraday candles when ETHBTC has been falling consistently since 2017? It will need to rise 304% to get back to where it was, but alright, congrats on your 2.8% recovery.
the price action shows surprising optimism despite such a large hack . This is a possible reason , among others.
A solar flare could take out every computer on the planet and someone on HN would say “this is good for bitcoin”
It's like a token burn. These are always bullish.
Why can’t the stolen coins be sold? If they can’t then what’s the point in stealing them?
How is North Korea possible dump $1 billion on the market when everyone trying to blacklist them? Hackers typically have access to much less liquidity as the coins are considered tainted, so they either are never sold or sold gradually on dark markets or OTC where there is no market impact.
ETH is supposed to be an electronic contracts market.. Is everyone who writes a contract from now on going to include code to block using these coins as collateral? If there's no consensus to interfere with the transaction, I assume people will watch the coins in motion and extend a larger map of tainted accounts and coins, yet be unable to interfere in many algorithm decided actions.
So the anonymity touted is not so anonymous?
Where did anyone say ETH was anonymous?
There do exist anonymous tokens, such as XMR and the like, but no one knowledgable would ever think coins with (public!) transparent ledgers were somehow 'anonymous', only merely decentralized.
Most crypto isn't anonymous - it's pseudonymous. You can trace what a wallet is doing, but it's not tied to a real life identity.
Seems like the tokens are tied to a specific IRL identity in the case
It only takes one connecting piece of data for the pseudo anonymity to become a complete history of every transaction you have done. This is one of the reasons crypto coins will never become currencies
This whole crypto wave since early Bitcoin is so insane.
The entire idea was to have a truly decentralized monetary system outside the control of institutions. But it so happens that almost everyone deposit them in institutions, and when a problem/hack occurs, no one can help because well… it is outside the control of institutions.
All the disadvantages without the advantages.
> All the disadvantages without the advantages
The advantage to the vast majority of crypto investors / holders is a high speculative return.
If BTC was still worth a fraction of a cent, (almost) no one would be investing in it for th decentralized nature.
If you look at the market cap of coins, it is obvious that nobody gives a flying fuck about the underlying technology.
Bitcoin copies/forks like Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, jokes like Dogecoin and Shiba Ina, memecoins like $TRUMP are in the top 50, while innovative protocols like Chia are at rank 250 or so.
> nobody gives a flying fuck about the underlying technology
That's the thing about money and value.
Value is a social construct.
Value is not created by the underlying technology.
Value comes from collective agreement among human beings.
That's why copying a coin doesn't automatically make the copy valuable.
Sure. The thing is, sometimes social sentiment changes.
Fiat tends to remain stable and valuable, because it is carefully managed to that end, and is the legally sanctioned method to extinguish debt and pay taxes.
Crypto is nothing but magic beans and a bad database. If its value falls, there's nothing to stop the fall but sentiment.
A few people care about the technology but a minority.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BOGMBASE
Bitcoin is capped at 21 million.
The Dollar is expected to lose almost all value over the lifetime of a person. Warren Buffett once noted that the Dollar already lost over 90% of it's value during his lifetime. With Bitcoin, there is no such expectation.
> The Dollar is expected to lose almost all value over the lifetime of a person. Warren Buffett once noted that the Dollar already lost over 90% of it's value during his lifetime. With Bitcoin, there is no such expectation.
You’ve taken the wrong lesson from this, and the fact that Warren Buffett isn’t a pauper should be your biggest clue.
This is why it’s important to invest real dollars in productive assets.
The actual issue that needs solving is that real wages haven’t been rising to match inflation for the last nearly fifty years.
Well the number of BTC went from zero to ~twenty million in that time, not really zero inflation.
If the treasury could credibly say “we will only ever print 2^64 dollars”, that wouldn’t make it inflation free, just a maximum possible denominator.
Being able to create currency is a feature, not a bug.
The idea that an economy has a fixed amount of currency makes no sense. You want it to be available to facilitate transactions.
Finite amount of gold as well. Finite amount of bitcoin cash as well. Finite amount of real estate as well.
The amount of Gold in circulation rises by about 2% per year.
For new real estate, there is also basically an infinite amount that can be added to the market. Planet earth is still mostly unused.
Bitcoin Cash has no USP that could lead to it becoming the digital Gold instead of Bitcoin.
What's the irrevocable USP that Bitcoin has? Is it because it was first, like Yahoo, MySpace, and Friendster?
The amount of BTC in circulation is increasing per year as well. There’s a finite amount of gold on Earth.
Real estate is definitely not “infinite”. Especially if you consider arable land and weather patterns.
This is nonsense. Money supply is related to inflation, but not the same, and the graph you showed is the clearest proof of that - money supply shot up in the wake of the GFC, while inflation reared its ugly head only in the wake of supply side shocks due to war and pandemic.
Any savings beyond a few months worth of cushion should not be held in cash anyway, but in equity and debt, which support productive investments. These have yielded positive results over these timeframes. (And BTW, both US equity and US corporate debt have outperformed gold over the last century or so.)
Even if you go for risk-free treasuries: long term real rates have mostly been positive [0], while short real rates have been hovering around, but in the last decade and a half below, zero [1], granted. But these rates are determined by economy wide equilibrium processes that can't be overcome by some magic beans and a bad database.
(Note that there are some 10,000 coins with strictly limited supply. They will not ipso facto outperform the dollar.)
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/REAINTRATREARAT10Y
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/REAINTRATREARAT1MO
Yes agreed, but the 'idea' is diluted when it's only about decentralized money. The truly powerful promise of Web3/crypto decentralization is in creating alternative economic ecosystems that empower users and communities.
We're obviously still in the teething stages of the technology and need some serious improvements to underlying security; and to move beyond scams and ponzi structures.
> The truly powerful promise of Web3/crypto decentralization is in creating alternative economic ecosystems that empower users and communities.
What does this mean? It’s indistinguishable from marketing chaff.
It occurs to me that the biggest recent successes in “alternative” ecosystems have absolutely nothing to do with cryptocurrencies. Mastodon comes to mind.
Yes it does sound like marketing speak, my bad.
So deFi can help users and communities because decentralized financial systems, allow users to lend, borrow, and trade without intermediaries, enhancing financial inclusivity and reducing costs.
Web3 technologies can facilitate community-driven initiatives, e.g. regenerative finance (ReFi), which supports climate action and equitable resource allocation. Also some interesting things happening around DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) e.g. Venture DAOs supporting new business creation.
In general the principles behind having reduced intermediaries, and having user control and ownership of user data, together with enlightened uses of smart contract and other Web3 technologies is empowering, especially if it's put to use to solve real world problems.
I do think that it's difficult to see past the sometimes murky shenanigans and greed often on display in Web3. But I think decentralization is a paradigm shift, it's going to take some visionary entrepreneurs and technologists to continue to build out the promise but I believe that it will happen.
You can't do uncollateralised borrowing/lending without credit checks, that is interaction with the real world. This requires trusted centralized counterparties, identity, etc., and is not suited for permissionless blockchains.
Trading equity/FX on centralized platforms is extraordinarily cheap. You don't save much, if anything, by going decentralized there (not to mention the fact that to enter the crypto system, you need to exchange fiat (hard to get crypto by mining these days), and Coinbase charges consumers 1.55% on average for that, so 3% for a round-trip back to fiat.)
Having control of user data is orthogonal to the technology. It's a legal matter. We could retain ownership of a tweet with a different contract. The nature of the underlying distributed database hardly matters.
The vision of crypto has failed. Instead of reducing intermediaries, it gave rise to a whole new host of intermediaries, and enormous externalities (environments, scams, hacks, crime).
Thanks for your reply, food for thought. I take your point about uncolateralized loans, although I believe there is some interesting work going on with zero knowledge proofs that can help to assess creditworthiness without revealing sensitive information.
It's an interesting time: we're seeing mainstream adoption of blockchain and crypto technologies at the same time that shitcoin madness is trending.
The basic concepts behind smart contracts are sound and enable efficient transactions and alternative economic systems, this is why I believe we'll increasingly see major institutions adopting it.
As far as community and user empowerment and creating alternative economic ecosystems, it will inevitably take some time to realize effective systems and usage models. I think there is huge potential, still early days.
Thanks for the healthy scepticism though, I probably need more of it!
I'm sort of worried they're hinting at these "network states", which seem well placed to not only trick people into parting with their money, but also potentially their homes. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyl171lyewo
We are beyond the teething stages and have seen alternative economic ecosystems that do stuff to users and communities but they mostly seem to be slave labour scam centers in Myanmar.
It seems if you give humans anonymous non reversible financial transaction technology the results are not all good. I think the problems are with the humans as much as the tech.
Bitcoin's initial release was in 2009. Web3 was coined in 2014 and the first NFT was minted soon after. These technologies are not infants, and they're not teething. They're just toothless.
Toothless indeed. The whole "It's early days" narrative is so misguided. The smartphone is maybe a year older than crypto, but a roaring success. Nobody needs to explain [1] how great smartphones are, because they're obviously useful.
Similarly, within a decade of the invention of the WWW, there were heaps of successful and useful sites (amazon, Bloomberg, Wired, Friendster, ...).
[1] Note that Steve Jobs, when he introduced the iPhone, did have to explain it. He carefully explained that it was an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator, demonstrated how to unlock it, how to scroll, how to open apps, etc. But then people got it. With crypto, after 15 years "you just don't get it".
Stop. The idea is dead. This is getting embarrassing.
Plus there's the reality that the US can derail any plans for de-dollarizing by simply buying up crypto, in which case crypto is now fully backed by the dollar and becomes the same exact reserve currency as the dollar.
This is the most strategic defensive play the US can do, so unfortunately the case for BTC to get to a million is a valid one. It's outrageous, but missing this move will leave a lot of people even poorer, and it will happen all of a sudden. They are accumulating right now, and one day they will just set the new high price.
The people will make the market regardless of a coders intention it seems.
> almost everyone deposit them in institutions
Why do you think so? Of course, we all hear about people who lose it all in crypto exchanges. But how would we hear about the ones who don't?
> But how would we hear about the ones who don't?
I hear stories about them and whether the con-artist got access to their digital wallet, whether they made it to a safe room in the home invasion and, of course, whether they got rights to mine the dump.
As I understand it, the software surrounding and managing the wallets is always what’s compromised, right? So it’s really the exchanges are the only place that the money is being lost, because the protocol itself is sound.
Countless amounts of money has been lost off-exchange. The entire reason people use exchanges is because holding your own crypto is laughably hard.
Forgot your password? All your money is gone. Hard drive crashed and no backups? All your money is gone. Accidentally installed malware? All your money is gone. Spouse or parent with all the coins died? All the money is gone. Fat-finger a value in a transaction? Lots of your money is gone.
Yes there are “solutions” to all of these problems. All of them are Rube Goldberg contraptions themselves and have their own failure modes.
Yes, it's always the user's fault if they lose their crypto, because crypto outsources the hard parts, such as key management, to the user.
Sorry, I wrote this, but it is just a guess. I say that because of the size of exchanges, and I know most people are in this because they think they can sell for a profit later (both amateurs and professionals).
The truth is hard to know. I wonder how many people lost their coins to the ether by losing their keys or sending to the wrong wallets.
You mean like the stories of people who lost their crypto because they lost the HDD they were stored on?
> decentralized monetary system
Is there an example of a crypto system that is actually used for legitimate monetary transactions? Excluding money laundering and moving money offshore?
Bitcoin obviously. But many other major currencies are used for ecommerce as well.
USDC is becoming pretty popular. It's on every major chain, and has a native bridge by Circle. On Solana you can send millions of dollars in USDC, in a few seconds, for less than a penny.
I think HN is about 7-8 years behind tech when it comes to crypto. You still hear people talking about ‘gas fees’, slow transaction times, and people like the parent have no idea the variety of asset classes that are tradable onchain.
Sorry, again, what exact use cases do these crypto assets have? Could you provide evidence of them being used in monetary transactions on a regular basis?
An exchange is no more of an institution than an online casino.
Elegantly put.
The biggest lie that is told about crypto is that writing off a few thousand years of experience with money will make problems go away.
Crypto is un-censorable money. Everybody buying it knows that. If you want un-censorable money, you have to accept the fact that transfers are only verified by cryptography, and irreversible. You can't have one without the other.
The people running Bitcoin came together to fix things they didn't like, rolling back some 20+ blocks in the process, at least twice. The people running Ethereum have no problem with scams and child porn and drugs and money laundering, but hacking the DAO, that's unacceptable and was reversed.
I'm trying to square your comment here and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43151500 .
It seems like this money is pretty censorable, it's just a different group doing the censoring.
> it suffered a near $1.5 billion hack that saw hackers, believed to be from North Korea’s Lazarus Group
To recap, the crypto community has graduated to "real money" which they have been ... contributing ... to the preeminent international pariah state.
Crypto folks-- what here is worth salvaging?