YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Do you understand the monetary system? If so, what specific steps do you suggest I take to acquire a similar understanding?

Edit: the downvotes are suggesting I'm missing something. I think my communication style could be improved.

...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.

don't bet against the house. eventually you have to cash the chips out for real money, and the house might throw out the old chips.

Unless the house is monero or something and you want a lifetime supply of drugs.

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."

>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.

No takebacks make perfect sense UNTIL you hand over your keys to a third party;p

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?

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.

The unforked variant of the network was kept alive for years. Why didn't it prevail over the forked variant?

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.

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.

It's a poor dunk anyway. The crypto space is vast and has many kinds of coins and communities/people. Some people seem to think it's still 2012.

It's still useful for the portion of the audience that doesn't realize the depth of the fraud.

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.

Code is law!

not your keys not your coins...

So what happened with all of those with hardware wallets that have been pwned?

There apparently is no such thing as “your crypto” with how many security problems there are.

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.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/70f69253-6017-4259-95c9-48bf0e088...

Isn't it already too late at that point? The tokens would have moved already.

And it's impossible to mix them because Ethereum is even anonymous than Bitcoin.

Not your keys, not your crypto.

Keys? Hahaha, still not your crypto.

In other words, they are essentially casino chips, not cryptocurrencies.

They let you play blackjack on online crypto casinos? The one casino game that you can famously beat the house on?

It seems like bitcoin, currently 78719, was only 58526 on 30 June. That's 34.5% up in four months, meeting the definition of bull market.

Binance has a market cap just shy of $100B, so a $5.8B sure hurts, but it’s not a showstopper I’d say.

Yes, typo.

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.

Sure. Since the invention of say Bitcoin, which of those assets would you have preferred to own and why?

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...

>You don’t want your actual currency to gain value just by waiting

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.

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.

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.

It kinda is too bad because every inflation miss compounds, permanently. The 6 and 7% annual rates the US experienced a few years back are permanently embedded in price levels - it's not like the Fed adjusted its target down for a few years to counteract past years of high inflation, nor is it even evident that current policies are working, given that inflation hasnt actually been at 2% since 2018 (excluding 2020) and inflation is rising again in 2026. Obviously the late 70's were worse, statistically, but the Fed took enormous steps while the current Fed seems far more hesitant to ignore the government and Wall St.

Tbh both ways of phrasing are fine to me. $1.56 today will get you as much as $1 in 2008, looking at it simplistically.

Is that what happens here? Tether just pocket the difference?

Because Tether is an obvious fraud linked to these other obviously fraudulent companies and predicated on trust in cryptocurrencies.

By definition maybe they’re more risk tolerant. But I’m not sure they consciously identify as that.

Most people in crypto are noobs, not hardened veterans of previous hacks.