Article is by Molly White, who you might recognize from Mastodon and web3isgoinggreat.com:
https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/117526961419935070
I wrote up what we know about the Binance hack so far. By my best estimate, Binance is out around $3 billion after stablecoin issuers froze what they could. Changpeng Zhao is promising Binance will cover it, but he’s legally barred from running the company.
now updated to $6.8B.
So much for blockchain security and free money.
$6.8B is the figure they stole, but since some of the assets got frozen they are only left with $3B they can use
only
Isn’t blockchain just a way to control the transactions? Why can’t they just reverse the transactions and essentially deny the theft?
A blockchain doesn’t actually provide control over a transaction, it just verifies that it happened. It’s supposed to be a long, immutable record of every transaction that has ever ocurred, which is precisely why transactions can’t be reversed. The work of verifying those transactions is performing by miners, or some other “proof of” design where you have an authority in the chain that confirms it.
Basically, it’s nothing more than a fancy receipt.
Something like this happened with Ethereium iirc and the coin split into two. One were the transaction was reverse and the OG one. But they were able to reverse the transaction because all the biggest holders decided to. Not sure if those coins stole from binance are as centralized as Ethereum was at that moment to be able to do it.
Well if you did that, then crypto would cease to be useful as a criminal currency, wouldn’t it?
They had access to 6.8, Binance froze over 3 billion, and off chain partners froze other coins. They said 3 billion or less.
So much for blockchain security and free money. You missed the point, this wasn’t supposed to be possible, bro.
they didn’t break into a blockchain, they broke into a website. blockchains are built on hashes, nobody’s reversing hashes no matter how much you dislike blockchains.
hacking into websites is actually totally possible, bro. get your facts straight, bro. you don’t know what you’re talking about at all, bro.
Did they break the security of the blockchain or just hacked an application that stored it in a database?
they hacked the website. People who use Binance are storing their money there, instead of on a self-custody wallet
Crypto coins are a scam, and one of the main feature, decentralization, is vastly nullified by people storing their coins in a centralized wallet of someone else.
crypto works great as a currency that is difficult to tie to individuals, not as an investment.
How many people use it with its intended purpose vs people using it as an “investment”?
Wishful thinking won’t make it less of a scam
Exactly. Stocks weren’t meant to be traded as a way to make money. They were meant to represent ownership in a company that payed out dividends.
But then finance bros being finance bros, figured out they could gamble against a stock’s value and potentially make even more money.
Then it became normalized.
At least there are rules now and some oversite. It used to be a literal secret group of men, in a room, deciding value and who gets what.
One could say the same about trucks being used as a status symbol but that doesn’t discount their utility.
“works great” as in… how? it’s all way too slow and volitile and cumbersome to handle the global financial system, so nobody actually uses it as currency. in what sense does it “work great?” in theory it works great, but in practice, not so much. nobody wants to pay their rent with bitcoin if the price has shifted down 20% by the time it gets processed.
in practice it’s also really easy to link your crypto transfers to you. it only takes one opsec failure and you’re not anonymous anymore. so i really don’t think it works “great.”
look at any of the websites selling hrt without doctors’ involvement
They were able to recover a lot, so 3B is what they cannot recover.