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.
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.
Seems like the issue here is that he became former CEO. Funds are not safu without him...
For another narrative, 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.
Then I forgot my pass phrase and have never been able to recover any of it. I don’t even know how many btc were mined/lost.
Before anyone asks, no, there aren’t any usable exploits / vulns found for the encryption methods used. And from what I can tell the coins in question have still sat frozen for going in a decade and a half now. I suspect many other hackers did the same thing…
Edit: I thought he was talking about 2012 but yeah in 2010 CPU mining was still a thing
Possibly Trezor (35 points, 16 days ago, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50078423
> Coldcard’s software is built on MicroPython, and Coinkite supplies its own hardware-RNG wrapper for the device’s STM32 chip. To avoid conflicts, Coinkite deliberately disabled MicroPython’s built-in RNG path by setting a configuration flag, MICROPY_HW_ENABLE_RNG, to zero. The problem: the underlying library checked only whether that flag was defined, not whether it was enabled (set to a non-zero value). Because a flag set to zero is still “defined,” the build silently compiled against the wrong code, and seed generation fell back to a deterministic software pseudo-random number generator called Yasmarang
Tbh the biggest problem is platforms deciding you’re buying drugs because you purchase and transfer out (thanks Venmo)
A paper wallet works as well
A hardware wallet is just a tradeoff between convenience and an extra security risk
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”?
In fact, updates are only a risk. You physically remove anything that can allow updates to happen + anything that allows wireless networking.
That sounds like your housekeeper's key...
If your paper wallet, generated offline, used a bad RNG, it is just as vulnerable.
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.
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?
As far as I understand blockchain, that is the system working as intended. Some nodes choose to run Ethereum Classic and some choose to run Ethereum. Isn't that the whole point? Decentralisation?
Ethereum never did it again, rolling back hacks didn’t (and couldn’t) become normal policy. IMO, they shouldn’t have made an exception, as it set a bad example.
I’ve seen a few other small projects attempt to do rollbacks since, but it usually turns into some kind of 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.
That's 80% of the thing right there.
ETA: it's a joke because the original saying is "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"
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.
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."
In this case, iFinex has the explicit ability to freeze funds in Tether.
So USDT is not truly decentralized and your money can be frozen for any reason or no reason at all.
Am I missing something here? Seems like a waste of time
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?
What am I missing ?
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.
Suppose you have some control over currency. You run a country. I'm that case, so you still want the currency to gain value compared to the alternatives?
Your choice is basically: holding currency is more profitable than building a house or running a business (or lending to those who do), or else less profitable. If you run a country, do you want houses and jobs and all that kind of thing, or do you want people to do better if they choose to hoard currency?
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.
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.
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.
You can't "move money into an offline crypto wallet that is not online at all."
If "money" i.e. crypto "currency" is in a crypto "wallet" then it is online. Anyone with the key and an Internet connection can transfer it at any time.
The wording is confusing because to someone who doesn't know how cryptocurrencies work it sounds like you can simply "take the crypto offline and put it into a physical device" as if it was a file. But that's not how it works. The physical key merely contains the actual key for the always-online wallet.
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.
https://tether.io/news/tether-completes-the-largest-inaugura...
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.
I meant the faux concern over NK is evergreen unlike some other causes such as the ones I mentioned.
As soon as (if ever) NK joins the fold of Western-aligned liberal states, the media machine will spin up and it will cease to be maligned, and you will move on to the next bogeyman.
Everything you know about NK is from the media.
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.
I no longer dunk on crypto.
Not because crypto got better, but because the joke got old. I got tired of dunking on it.
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
> “A lot of the people who come into this money are flashy, and they’re signaling that they have wealth,” he previously told The Post.
As long as you don't brag about it, I don't really see this being a real world issue. I think credit card fraud is a lot more likely.
Binance wallet 16 came online in 2021.
Why to wait 5 years to attack.
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?
I bet they are celebrating.
Congratulations. Nice haul.
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.
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.
Imagine someone offered you to buy $1,000,000 of that dirty money for $100,000? $10,000? $1,000?
At some point there will be people who would buy it and deal with money laundering.
Their kid is definitely getting at least 30 dolls and 250 pencils.
Current largest was ~1B
fundsu were not in fact safu
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.
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).
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=_...