CFTC sues Binance and CEO Changpeng Zhao [pdf]
docdroid.net
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https://twitter.com/web3isgreat/status/1640373566322491393
My favorite is probably the VIP feature "prompt notification of any law enforcement inquiry concerning their account". And of course there are all the text messages indicating they knew all the things they did were illegal.
The phrasing! LMFAO
They put this in writing!
> Rule 1: If you're going to do crimes, don't put them in writing.
> Rule 2: If you're going to put them in writing, don't write them in "I CAN HAZ CHEEZEBURGER" style writing, it's embarrassing.
> according to Lim, Binance purposely engaged a compliance auditor that would "just do a half assed individual sub audit on geo[fencing]" to "buy us more time." As part of this audit, the Binance employee who held the title of Money Laundering Reporting Officer ("MLRO") lamented that she "need[ed] to write a fake annual MLRO report to Binance board of directors wtf." [1]
By the time you write "fake annual MLRO report" in text, you're about to be a one-person retirement plan for some attorneys.
[1] https://twitter.com/web3isgreat/status/1640378422483472386
They would rarely put stuff in writing. I was always told to do stuff. Never in email, never in memo's or any other written form. It was always, "We're going need you to scrub some files from xyz database." or "I need to rewrite this contract and add these additional sections which weren't on the original document." If I needed details, they would put them on a sticky note. I remember they had someone come around and take these notes off of people's desk when the task was completed.
I remember at Christmas one of my uncle's was a stock broker and a big knocker at some financial company. He was asking what I did and where I worked. He started asking more questions and told me I needed to be very careful - what the startup was doing was either really illegal or they were operating in a very gray area. Neither of them will end well for anybody and if the SEC thinks I'm involved in any way of covering up what they were doing? Then I'm in deep shit.
I quit about three weeks later. A year or so after that, the economy collapsed. I found out they were automating robo-signatures for real estate and mortgage companies. They were changing clients contracts from fixed APR's to 3 year ARM's and a bunch of other highly illegal shit. The company went under and despite several local news reports about it, nothing happened. Pretty sure they just got lost in the myriad of other companies going under, people losing everything and the economy collapsing.
It was a good experience for me to understand and see red flags when something doesn't feel right.
I guess this is what happens in remote working. You can't tell people how to break the law over lunch any more.
They seem not to have learned the lessons from The Wire about "taking notes a criminal conspiracy."
[edit] Oh man I wonder if we're going to find out where ex-Binance US CEO Catherine Coley has been hiding all these years.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2020/10/29/l...
(He was taking notes because they’re following Robert’s Rules of Order, lol)
It really comes down to who is willing to take the most risk on behalf of investors
Watch: This CEO will come back in a few years with another scheme that is backed by millions in venture money, just like Kalanick
If some of these allegations [1] are credible, he and everyone in his orbit are going to jail.
There is a reason why someone way funnier than me came up with "Dunning-Krugerrand"
The impunity seems like a general theme with everyone involved with crypto - just flagrant wrongdoing in broad daylight.
But considering that flagrant wrongdoing in VC-land continues to result in no severe consequences (see: Kalanick, Neumann) I guess maybe we're the suckers.
Something is off with these folks' sense of risk. Let's put aside the illegality. By laundering for Hamas and Russian criminals, Binance's leadership has put itself on the wrong side of the United States, Israel, the Gulf monarchies and the entirety of fucking NATO. At the same time, there are powerful people in Moscow, Tehran and Beirut who would rather see them dead than captured.
> flagrant wrongdoing in VC-land continues to result in no severe consequences (see: Kalanick, Neumann)
Kalanick and Neumann didn't steal money or finance terrorists. The wrongdoing in crypto/web3 is on another level.
Binance, FTX, etc. are the former, and I'd say Coinbase is the latter... there's a big difference between wilful non-compliance, and disagreements between regulators and counsel at firms like Coinbase about interpretation of law.
The fact that all of these regulatory actions are happening at once suggests that regulators either may not appreciate the difference or may not care, which is unfortunate.
Yes, that all seems pretty horrible to me.
[0] https://twitter.com/web3isgreat/status/1640379218461589506
All these companies are doing a great service aiding the historically "underbanked": criminals.
LOL.
If you believe people must be responsible and professional just because they handle a lot of money, it's your problem, not theirs.
That’s because of AML laws.
Their account got flagged by OFAC—deservedly or not—and the company is bound from discussing anything about it under any circumstances.
The level it goes to is frankly kind of ridiculous, but that’s the legal regime financial services companies operate under. And that’s not to defend PayPal as a company either. Just that when you see people saying some company is horrible because they close accounts and give no information, it's (not always, but) very frequently one situation that’s entirely out of the company’s hands.
Which is why, to the extent that it it might be legal otherwise, you probably don't want to make written directives documenting your specific knowledge and intent wrt crime.
In the case of anti-money laundering laws, my belief[0] is that it is very illegal to tell a customer they are being flagged.
On the other hand, if it's a copyright thing, or some kind of contract dispute? You're normally totally free to tell the customer.
[0] No professional experience involved, just a lot of reading patio11/Matt Levine.
There's a time and place to go after criminals but I don't think that financial institutions are the ones who should be making the final decisions on these things - that should be left for law enforcement.
Maybe it's illegal, but then I prefer that over a legal exchange.
Yes, a good way to delineate pragmatic from extreme views on privacy are when they find no exceptions for designated terrorist organizations and Russian criminals.
I presumed as much until I read the CFTC's allegations. Unfortunately, Binance looks like a criminal enterprise [1]. FTX, in comparison, looks like childish incompetence.
no, it isn't. It's a scheme designed - from day one - to take retail dollars and gamble them on crypto markets because line (was) go up. And then when line went down, everyone's money was lost. It was built on a lie - from day one!! - making it a deliberate fraud and a scam. That's not childish, it's criminal, and the incompetence was thinking crypto line go up forever and FTX/Alameda can play heads I win, tails you lose.
Key phrase: "looks like"
And yet..
You haven't even bothered glancing at any of the linked material, have you?
> The CFTC’s complaint here gestures at traditional regulatory concerns like retail customer protection and cracking down on money laundering. But it is mostly about cutting off a big international crypto exchange from big sophisticated proprietary market-making firms in the US. I think the market expectation here was that if you are a big trading firm trading with your own money and your own algorithms, and you have enough lawyers and offshore shell entities, you can trade on any crypto exchange in the world from the comfort of your Chicago office: There might be a technical argument that it’s not allowed, but your lawyers are aggressive and sophisticated enough to get around that technicality, and anyway why would the CFTC care? But the CFTC does care, perhaps not because it wants to protect big US high-frequency trading firms from the risks of trading on Binance, but because Binance is the biggest crypto exchange and this is a lever to crack down it. And the CFTC also has lawyers who are sophisticated and not deterred by technicalities — here, for instance, the technicality that Trading Firm B’s account actually belonged to a Jersey company.
This is the actual substance of the complaint. The "terrorist financing" and retail stuff is a smokescreen to seem worthy of the CFTC's attention. Nobody is being protected here. No significant terrorist financing is being stopped.
Cracking down on a shadow derivatives exchange doing swaps with American institutions is bona fide CFTC enforcement.
Most securities law is written from an investor-protection perspective. Not swaps clearing. When everyone is writing bilateral swaps and nobody knows how much counterparty risk is accumulating with whom, you get a ticking time bomb. (This is what turned AIG into a systemic risk.) I imagine the next shoe to drop will be these firms' compliance departments.
Certainly I agree with you that, in principle, this is legitimate enforcement. They do have the authority to regulate this as you are saying they do. But you and I both know that there are no serious concerns within the CFTC about counterparty risk here, and that has nothing to do with their motivations.
They are very clearly not trying to protect anyone - at least not from derivatives counterparty risk. And they are most definitely not trying to protect Citadel, Jump, et al, nor anyone else from them.
I suppose you could argue about whether the CFTC's relevant regulations protect anyone, but they certainly think they do, and if so it's easy to argue that Binance was skirting those protections.
There are two weird things here. The first is that the CFTC does have purvue to protect the American people. However, if Binance were to simply say “we now accept US citizens” — the trading cited here would be allowed. Market makers are accredited investors.
It’s rather because they offer services to investors who are not US based which, if they were offered to US investors, would only be allowed to be offered to Accredited Investors — Binance has chosen to not offer services in the US, and allowed Accredited Investors (the same group who would be permitted if they did operate in the US).
The case is interesting. Even though these traders were operating significant portions of their business from the US, the claim will be made that they were acting as their international subsidiary.
How do you know? When Binance’s own Chief Compliance Officer was primarily in the business of helping customers avoid compliance, it doesn’t seem like they would know very much about what ultimately went down on the platform. The complaint quotes an internal email that read: “We close our eyes.”
Binance was a major counterparty of Bitzlato, a crypto exchange that existed primarily for Russian money laundering: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/binance-moved-346-m...
That’s probably the tip of the iceberg.
The CFTC’s complaint naturally focuses on the stuff that’s easiest for them to prove. Getting evidence from hedge funds based in Chicago is obviously a lot easier for a civil agency that doesn’t have enormous resources.
I don't, but obviously the CFTC doesn't either, otherwise they'd have spelled it out. So, considering the party investigating is ignorant of any significant terrorist financing activity, I see no reason to think otherwise.
> Binance was a major counterparty of Bitzlato, a crypto exchange that existed primarily for Russian money laundering: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/binance-moved-346-m...
There is nothing in the complaint stating that Binance knowingly facilitated any criminal activity of Bitzlato, afaik. The fact that criminal actors had an account at a financial institution is not prima facie evidence of any crime on the part of the financial institution, especially not for one that isn't registered in the US. Even for US registered entities, plenty of criminals have bank accounts. It's the bank's job to perform a certain level of diligence to stop them, not an infinite level of diligence.
If the CFTC believed Binancing knowing facilitated criminal activity on the part of Bitzlato, that'd be in the complaint. It's not, therefore, they don't. Or at the very least, they have insufficient evidence for it.
So any suggestion that significant terrorist financing is being stopped here is pure speculation, unsupported by anything in the document itself.
Or, they do know and more detail wasn’t relevant at the complaint stage of the civil case, whereas it might be to the actual trial and to the parallel criminal referral that it has been reported that DoJ is investigating.
A civil complaint is not required to be, and generally is not, a catalogy of every piece of relevant information the filing party has. And it especially isn't a catalog of everything they know where a civil lawsuit isn't the venue for addressing it.
> If the CFTC believed Binancing knowing facilitated criminal activity on the part of Bitzlato, that’d be in the complaint.
No, if the CFTC believed that, it would be in the criminal referral to DoJ, and, if DoJ could support it to the required level to move forward, it would be in the criminal indictment DoJ would seek from an appropriate grand jury. Those typically lag considerably behind civil action from the same regulatory-body investigation (sometimes with indictments issued after the civil complaint is settled or otherwise resolved.)
So enlighten me, what is the actual $$$ threshold where "terrorist financing" can be deemed a legitimate complaint?
Crypto space is chock-full of scammers, hustlers, bad actors, and organized crime. Which of the crimes are worth paying attention to and which aren't? Has the bar slipped that low that some crimes are "small" and aren't worth going after?
Seems like a stones throw away from whataboutism.
I don't know, more than the percentage of your average multinational bank? No large financial institution is going to have literally zero unsavory characters using its services.
> Crypto space is chock-full of scammers, hustlers, bad actors, and organized crime. Which of the crimes are worth paying attention to and which aren't? Has the bar slipped that low that some crimes are "small" and aren't worth going after?
The point of my comment and Matt Levine's article is that they are not going after these things. They are superficial artifice on top of the real thing they are going after them for: allowing US HFT firms to trade there.
It seems reasonable to at least set the lower bound above Deutsche Bank who are frequently in the spotlight for AML and terrorist financing for amounts far greater than $600 and operating today.
Here is the actual lead in to him quoting that part:
> Anyway I said that there are only a few accusations of financing crimes or secretly trading against customers in the CFTC complaint, but there are not none, and I should quote them. Here’s this:
Judge for yourself if I am misrepresenting his view.
The CFTC want to prosecute Binance for violating restrictions on allowing US persons to buy and sell derivatives, but they are aware that this is somewhat weak sauce, because the people buying and selling are all sophisticated institutional players, and Binance themselves are only very dubiously subject to US jurisdiction.
So they make it into a case about 'funding terrorism' based on a casual remark from a chat log.
Chief Compliance Officer promoting "creative means" of circumventing compliance controls. You just can't make this up.
The point of this is that "sounds dodgy" or "done only to avoid a legal obligation" and "is illegal" are two very different things. Which it is, is a question I think few are capable of giving an even remotely informed opinion on. It's a global company being sued by the one country in the world they don't [nominally] offer service to.
Take care in your own jurisdiction to get good tax advice, since perhaps “avoidance” is a grey area!!!
As a contractor, I had several schemes attempt to woo me to use them, with ludicrous promises like "Keep 92% of your gross earnings!". I always said no thanks. Now I read on contractor forums as people panic that HMRC has evaluated their magic tax avoidance strategy and they want back taxes plus interest and I have no sympathy - they were high earners and they were trying to avoid contributing their share.
The worst are the loan schemes - You give all your earnings to an offshore entity, and it gives 95% back as an interest free 'loan' that is never expected to be repaid. No tax! W00t! But now not only are the tax authorities interested in you, but when some of these schemes wind down an external liquidator takes a look at the books and decides "Hey, there's all these loans outstanding, we need to recover these funds for shareholders!". Ruh-roh.
nothing scream like "We failed at legislation so we're going to resort to arbitrary decisions"
Unless they define what contrived or artificial manner means exactly, which I doubt.
Without looking up or pausing he responded "How much do you want it to be?"
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ilnd.43...
I think it can be summarized that they knowingly traded securities with US entities, and intentionally circumvented legal and technical restrictions to make those trades happen.
That's got to make companies around the world feel more comfortable using it!
Oh, and AWS too!
Despite many people never setting foot in the US a lot of them use the US banking system or some of the piping that is predominantly US-based to move money around…
Meaning that the US can get involved.
From what I can tell it's extremely difficult to do business without having anything you do touch something based in the US. IE if you do business nearly anywhere, Uncle Sam can (almost certainly) prosecute
If you're doing business in any way that touches people from the US (which certainly FIFA does, one way or another), then it's hard.
But for the rest of us, it's not really that hard. Everything the US has, there is a alternative for that hasn't anything to do with the US, from banking to hosting to productivity tools.
Binance caught commingling funds between US and international exchanges: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34079629
Binance's books are a black box, filings show, as it tries to rally confidence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34055058
[1]: https://www.mcgill.ca/engineering/files/engineering/cv.pdf#p...
They are ranked 31st in the world in QS (rankings are not that useful, but they can be a metric to whether people "consider" it a good school). Extremely well-known research-wise, at least in Canada and north-east.
Better presentation technology will not be found here, as much as I detest Powerpoint, I'm willing to admit that it is the pinnacle of slide presentation.
To reach a better presentation and flowing of information across the society, the answer is to ditch slides altogether. Which I am not envisioning how as I'm not a product manager or a salesman but for myself I'm doing perfectly fine with markdown and other text based means of communicating information.
This also allows students to take notes and actually absorb the material - otherwise, there is a tendency to pack too much into slides and you end up loosing half your audience. Although sometimes helpful for giving visual intuitions, more often than not, slides just get in the way.
When there really is no alternative to slides (e.g., for workshops and conference presentations), I find LaTeX/Beamer much easier to handle. It has good defaults and does not require fiddling with transitions and formatting and superficial but ultimately pointless settings.
Can't be too bad...
"For example, in September 2022 he was quoted as saying that "Binance is a Canadian company." The Chief Strategy Officer's statement was quickly corrected by a Binance spokesperson, who clarified that Binance is an "international company."
Oh boy...!
[Edit: Used to link to the PDF from the CFTC in this comment, removed since hn story now goes to it. Thanks, dang!]
Edit: changed from https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=cftc-sues-binance-and-ceo-c... to the pdf linked there.
Surprise! They were.
P.S.: I'm an investor/liqudity provider for most of protocols doing this.
The SEC has an order of magnitude more employees than the CFTC [1][2]. Crypto favored the latter not because it was a good cop, but because it is a weaker one.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/strategic-plan/about
[2] https://www.eeoc.gov/federal-sector/commodity-futures-tradin...
My crypto-friendly friend found this to be the only way to supply his parents with remittances out of Australia.
As I told him, besides gambling, theft and paying for drugs, this is all it is good for.
Bigger picture: transfer of value without a middle-man or central authority.
Now that's something.
So, starving folks who may or may not agree with their governments politics is a good thing in your book?
You clearly have the moral high ground here.
There is a chance that every one runs for the exit in the coming days and that Binance is not 100% backed.
Also the gamification aspects they mention would have hurt a lot of people with gambling problems.
> Certain digital assets, including BTC, ETH, LTC, and at least two fiat-backed stablecoins, tether (“USDT”) and the Binance USD (“BUSD”), as well as other virtual currencies as alleged herein, are “commodities,” as defined under Section 1a(9) of the Act, 7 U.S.C. § 1a(9).
This is interesting, it appears ETH was named a commodity in some US federal legal document. Interesting to see how this will play out in court. Should this override SEC statements about ETH being a security ?
CFTC regulates commodities, so of course they will say things they want to regulate are commodities. OTOH SEC regulates securities, so they will say things are securities.
See also the way any kind of fraud can become "securities fraud" if you have investors. Basically, if your business involves defrauding customers, that is likely going to negatively impact stock price when it comes out, and if you lied and told shareholders you were not defrauding customers, you are also defrauding shareholders thus securities fraud thus SEC jurisdiction.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67092867/1/commodity-fu...
No. Informants, possibly even confederates.
1) poorly tested. Btc, the best of them would never be shipped at a top tech company with such bad docs/testing 2) barely available. The rpc end points for most of these chains are barely up at three 9s. 3) hardly distributed or censorship resistant . The idea that govt can’t stop these networks is laughable
Should be interesting times.
> "Like come on. They are here for crime." - "we see the bad, but we close 2 eyes."
This is just criminals being criminals, like all the crypto junk always has been beneath all the lofty rhetoric. No grand conspiracy theory needed, the chickens are just finally coming home to roost.
Additionally, the US Govt has managed to weaponize the US dollar through the global financial system; allowing it to enforce it's will without bloodshed (even on nuclear capable states like Russia). It's a capability that is invaluable. So when you hear things like Russians selling oil in Yuan, you need to respond.
How is TikTok related to dollar hegemony?
Although everybody deserves their day in court, and these should be considered allegations until proven, the new game nowadays could be: Find a Crypto company with no allegations of illegal activities...
"Web3 is Going Just Great" - https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=cftc-sues-binance-and-ceo-c...
Coinbase? Going after Coinbase but letting the gangsters that do both run Bitfinex and Tether roam free?
SBF/FTX was a fraud and was iFinex's biggest customer. Billions of stolen customers money and investors funds ended directly in iFinex's stash. It's very likely the one that made lots of money when Alameda was losing it all is the iFinex gang.
Why are they walking totally free, not getting sued?
At this point I call monkey business.
Each one of these takedowns will help build an eventual case against Tether. If they had gone for Tether first there would have been a big blowup and controversy. This way they can mop them up after the system around Tether has collapsed.
https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-inve...
It's pretty clear Cumberland Global (largest USDT customer after FTX/Alameda) is "trading shop" A or B (headquarter in Chicago, offices in NYC, London, Singapore)
They don't have the resources to hit everyone at the same time. Just like a cop on the freeway can't stop 10 speeding cars at once but can pick them off one at a time.
The more shenanigans the longer it takes to prepare the case. Just keep your popcorn warm.
Actual LOL on that one.
At this point, we oughta just set up a couple of food trucks for everyone.
1) each one they take down, they get evidence that helps with the next one, so that's what determines the order they go in
2) they know people who need more time to get out of USDT, and they like those people (not a legit reason but could be the reason)
3) when they take down Tether, the impact on world financial system will be bigger than those others, for example if most of what they have is Chinese real estate bonds at face value, otherwise it's an empty shell, then they may be too nervous about the shockwaves from that. Instead of TooBigToFail it would be TooBigToMakeFail.
Just a few speculations; I predict we'll find out this year though!
This seems like a conspiracy theory: every time an exchange gets too big, the US cracks down on it. But it might be the US is concerned that something gets too big to get out of its control? We already know that P2P and small exchanges are out of control due to sheer size.
> SBF/FTX was a fraud and was iFinex's biggest customer.
It's very likely that the FTX creditors will be very happy to receive their USDt that they held on FTX when they receive whatever amount of it from bankruptcy. They'll be able to redeem 1 USDt for $1 from Tether.
[1] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8450-21
[2] https://www.cftc.gov/sites/default/files/idc/groups/public/@...
What did they expect would happen when the other guys are in power?
It's not about ideology for them, it's quid-pro-quo.
From what I understand, the reason CFTC is involved is that bitcoin was ruled to be a commodity, and CFTC has authority over commodity derivatives. It's literally in the name.
Tether on the other hand is what? Just a number. They don't have authority over betting on numbers.
While I don't support the first point, second is way more scary IMO. We need to stop US ruling the world as if it's its own, seriously.
This is against freedom. Ironic for a country where owning and carrying a gun is a right.
While there are always workarounds, if people want to use something, they should be allowed to use it (as long as it doesn't harm others of course, which doesn't in this case).
In no way US should be able to do anything to CZ as long as he doesn't enter US soil, physically in person.
Now, maybe it could be illegal for me to gamble. Sometimes, this means it is then illegal for me to "jursdiction shop" by going on vacation somewhere specially with the purpose of doing something that would be illegal for me to do here.
I think, as an example, it is illegal for me to be in any way involve in betting on some kind of animal fight. This is something that I understand is legal in some other countries. I can appreciate jurisdiction shopping to be illegal.
But like, that's on me, right? If it is illegal for me to do something then I am the one at blame for doing whatever it is that was wrong. It isn't up to the random people in the other country to prevent me from doing the thing.
I thereby am having a very hard time thinking the US should have international jurisdiction over the entire world of people to require a non-US company from allowing US users to even use its site, requiring ID checks.
I admit: I like crypto. But I also hate both gambling and gamification. It is important to understand that the REASON I like crypto is because of stuff like this: I do not believe one country should have such global power.
Either it should be illegal for the firms in New York to set up all the shell companies and the individual retail traders to use VPNs to do a thing that could be illegal for them to do even if they jurisdiction shop...
...which would mean that any and all enforcement should be directed at them, not Binance, who wasn't trying hard to prevent anyone from doing this but frankly is doing more than I think the US has any right to demand!...
...or it should be narrowly illegal for someone in the US fo provide a venue for doing it. Saying it is illegal for anyone anywhere in the world to allow people from the US to do something "for their own good" is inane.
But so, I imagine a lot of people on this website are in at least some western country if not the US, and so it feels good to spread Western values everywhere; and hell: this website is also anti-crypto in general.
But to give you another example: are you selling software online? If you do, you have to KYC all of the people you sell to and collect VAT so you can remit it to the correct European authorities in each country.
There is sometimes a de minimus threshold, but the threshold isn't that high, it has been going down over time, and AFAIK some of the EU countries do not have any threshold. It isn't something you are supposed to ignore.
There is also a "convenient" one-stop shop so you can have a single registration and remit all of your taxes in a single currency, as the alternative before they started moving in this direction was complete madness.
But like, it isn't legal for you to be selling digital services and downloadable software with nothing but e-mail and PayPal: you need to be using IP addresses and billing addresses and then collecting/reporting.
Maybe that example--where right now many of the people on this website are doing something illegal today and maybe should be contacting some accountants and some international lawyers to figure it out--is elucidating.
I spoke with several people who work at various AGs and folks in DC.
It seems they will come down hard on him for a variety of reasons and through a variety of methods.
If you're writing in English, to an English speaking audience, anything other than Western Order is nonsense, because referring to someone you've never met by just their last name is really sketchy.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Western_name_ord...
That's an interesting observation. Since you are talking about the order of names, do you mean "last name" as in surname or given name? Because the document does use surnames (which is what "last name" means in western order) to refer to people, apart from the first time when their full names are used.
An either way, in what sense is that sketchy? I know that referring to people by their given name only is a sign of intimacy, but I don't associate either with sketchiness. Do you think it imply sketchiness in the speaker's relation to the spoken, or sketchiness with regard to the subject themself?
Exactly.
For people you don't know well, 'getting formal' is never really going to steer you wrong. Many of the Romance languages (Spanish being one I know best, also because my brother's wife is originally from Panama) have the concept of a formal and informal pronoun "you".
To an older person, I might say, "¿Como esta usted?" instead of "¿Como estas?" as a sign of respect or deference.
For the record, I know precisely zilch about the rules in pinyin, and by coincidence didn't really grasp that "Standard Chinese"[1] is really an offshoot of Mandarin until a couple of years ago.
Seeing "Crouching Tiger" in Mandarin somehow got me in the mindset that this was "old" Chinese to fit with the time period of the film.
Not so much.
All the smartest people are working on AI. At least until they are laid off. Desperation sets in. What next. Hype, hype, hype. Never give up.
hm. 16% of users make $63M in a month? In any case CZ can dispense this unprofitable 16% and move somewhere in russia or intl waters now. Assuming that canada and EU break all ties with him
Attacking the onramps to crypto in the middle of a bank crisis is not giving out the best of vibes
(Thanks for the flagging but i m not debating this either way; i know HN is anticrypto)
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/27/binance-and-ceo-changpeng-...
> In May 2021, Binance’s monthly revenue earned $1.14 billion from derivatives transactions, up from $63 million in August 2020, the CFTC noted. Of that amount, about 16% of Binance’s accounts were held by U.S. customers.
In any case this is contrary to the main accusation that "Much of Binance’s reported trading volume, and its profitability, has come from its extensive solicitation of and access to customers located in the United States"
AFAIK throughout the years they were publicly sending users to binance.us and did not encourage breaking the rule. Didn't seem like "Extensive solicitation"
Where is their HQ?
Sounds to me more like the SVB and FTX failures lit some fire under the regulators asses and they're now starting to crack down on the bad dealings they've been ignoring.
It doesn't matter what people do. What matters is, that banks can't give deposited money back to its customers. It's just a bad system if a bank run can crash the entire system. Without switching from QT to QE again and bailing out customers two weeks ago, America may look much worse today.
Did he? FTX went to CZ for help. CZ looked at their notoriously-shit balance sheet and ran scared.
> SBF jokes CZ couldn't visit the US
> CZ announces he will sell his full stake in FTT (a huge percent of the float)
> Alameda was extremely leveraged _based on their FTT holdings_, once FTT started crashing they went under water on their leverage and started fire selling assets at a loss
> some of those assets belonged to FTX custumers
Crypto is obviously about politics and always was. But is there even a technology angle left anymore? Bitcoin is frozen in amber and will never do anything more than it does now. Ethereum after the PoS transition is essentially a very slow distributed database owned by a special interest group. Other blockchains are variations of the same theme.
Is it worth talking about crypto on HN at all? A total ban on crypto topics might be worth contemplating. Other purely political topics are similarly banned.
A hypothesis. Big tech loved crypto for the same reason they overpaid armies of engineers to do nothing: it prevented them from creating competing AI companies.
Is it possibly correlated that FTX and SBF donated boatloads to Democrats with full media coverage, and donated to Republicans supposedly covertly, which turned out embarrassing in the pissed off public opinion, so now the politicians who were on the take need to look like they're not complicit?
No. It’s hard, politically, to go after something when it’s making people rich. These investigations have been ongoing, some for years. FTX and Silvergate changed the calculus of watching, waiting and collecting versus pressing charges.
The US government cannot censor or control TikTok the same way they censor and control US based social media companies. The US alphabet boiz have all access and muscle to get the data these social media companies have one way or another.
Time and again I said this but anyone who thinks we will have decentralized currency are fools, who don't understand why the financial industry works the way it works. And why do govts don't like not having control over their currency.
And the only place to speak out is Twitter? A boy was banned from the platform because he published publicly available data of a private jet owned by the owner of Twitter. Overnight it was decided what constitutes parody or joke.
The CFTC is going after Binance for purposeful evasion of U.S. regularities.
The SEC is taking action on Coinbase, this one is more confusing because Coinbase has been asking for guidance from the SEC and they have refused.
TikTok is a national security risk, unrelated to these other two issues, if you've seen the conspiracy theories being peddled by Elon, he does present a lot of right-wing/alt-right positions.
Coinbase has announced that they've asked for guidance. I find it equally plausible that the SEC hasn't decided the rules as that Coinbase asked for overly specific (or overly broad) guidance that they knew couldn't be given.
Bitcoin started the year at $16.6k USD and is currently $26.9k USD (a return of 62% year to date).
Why?
Who/what is dumping money into Bitcoin that would cause this much demand? Can the rise in price be attributed to demand? I don't see how it couldn't be.
How many millions of USD have been converted into "buy and hold" long term BTC investments? Is that the main driving force for this increase in price? It has to be a very sizable amount for BTC to be outperforming every other asset class... right?
There's no way the price is artificially up 60%+? How could it stay propped up? I've seen it mentioned many times before that crypto can possibly be manipulated by whales or "smoke and mirrors" if you will. Coinmarketcap.com says Bitcoin volume in 24 hours is roughly 615,000 BTC ($16b, 3% of the total circulating supply)
Is there more money going into BTC (inflow) than SPY/VOO/VTI/IVV/QQQ/mutual funds? I wouldn't imagine so. Why is the money that is making it into BTC (is the average middle American dollar cost averaging a portion of their paycheck bi-weekly into BTC through Coinbase?) able to increase BTC 60% YTD but a more sizable portion of money (because we can assume the stock market is much much larger of an investment vehicle) going into SPY/VOO/VTI/IVV/QQQ/mutual funds leads to a lesser return (SPY is up 3.95% YTD with like 1/4th of a 1.6%/year dividend in the process of being paid out so far, so call it 3.95% + (1.6%/4 quarters=0.40% quarterly dividend, Q1 just being paid out) = 4.35% return
>Bitcoin started the year at $16.6k USD and is currently $26.9k USD (a return of 62% year to date).
You're citing the growth in the last almost four months as evidence that Bitcoin isn't bothered by news that broke about an hour ago?
As usual, there's no way to tell if the demand is synthetic, or anything other than invented stablecoins and fake volume, because the entire market is deliberately opaque.
Isn't this like a pedantic detail? How is Tether bought? USD/EUR/GBP/JPY, right?
Fiat -> stablecoin -> BTC
Fiat -> BTC
basically the same journey
my point is, according to this https://markets.chainalysis.com/ there's $3b/day in BTC inflows...