Hacker News

points by miohtama 4 hours ago | 0 comments

Stablecoins are frozen so the hole will likely be around two billion dollars.

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.

This might sound good.. but freezing currencies is bad. It evaporates trust of liquidity from whoever is doing governance. It's part of the reason why the bond market is doing what its doing lately and why countries are on-shoring gold reserves.

[–] fragsworth 1 hour ago

That sounds kind of ideal, but I feel like their actions might have been justifiable.

If a massive heist like this triggered a run on one of the largest exchanges (Binance), potentially leading to a liquidity crisis, the consequences for the ecosystem could be far worse than temporarily freezing specific addresses holding stolen stablecoins.

Not saying that's what would have happened, but it seemed like a real possibility. And I'm not saying freezing assets is good in general, but in this particular case, maybe it was the lesser evil.

[–] idiotsecant 20 minutes ago

No. Permissioned cryptocurrency is all the horrible parts of cash and all the horrible parts of crypto put together with none of the advantages of either.

I want crypto because I don't trust nation states with the leverage and dials of fiat currency. All we've done is replace government with trusting whoever made a particular stablecoin.

Permissionless crypto is the only real crypto.

[–] dboreham 3 minutes ago

All cryptocurrency is permissioned. This is because governments can make it illegal for someone to turn your cryptocurrency into real currency. You need their permission to turn it into pizzas and yachts.

[–] paulpauper 4 hours ago

governments freeze currency all the time.

[–] nradov 3 hours ago

Only the shithole countries freeze currency trading. That doesn't happen with actual reserve fiat currencies.

[–] mirashii 3 hours ago

The primary reserve currency does it all the time. https://ofacblockedfundslawyers.com/us-sanctions-freeze-doll...

[–] nradov 2 hours ago

That's different. They freeze individual accounts subject to legal orders. They don't freeze the whole currency.

[–] platinumrad 2 hours ago

Is that not what is happening here?

[–] mirashii 28 minutes ago

It is, thus the links being to individual wallets.