> About $2.4 billion out of this is already frozen by Circle and Tether. Some of the big ones:
How does freezing crypto work in this context?
How does freezing crypto work in this context?
https://medium.com/chainargos/losing-the-blacklisting-race-e...
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/stablecoin... (I didn't verify per-stablecoin volume, or actual volume at those hours, or typical volume for those exact hours, which a better analysis would have done.)
If they can mint with no impact doesn’t that mean they can just print money?
And yes they can print money, you have to trust their reserves that are off chain.
They have been caught cheating before, their numbers are astronomical, and no crypto numbers are actually verified and regulated.
It's remarkable to me how long this scam has lasted and how much confidence people have in it, in spite of the very shady characters involved and the likelihood of fraud.
These stablecoins are just a database owned by untrustworthy people and backed by nothing but their promises, they're just one step up from NFTs.
However, the stablecoins are not “real” cryptocurrencies like e.g. BTC or ETH, but are built as smartcontracts on top of ETH, basically using it as a big replicated database. So they might(?) just manually “give back” the money to Binance, as in freezing money in the stolen account forever and “printing” an equal amount to Binance's credit.
Or, to put it in another way, no need to reverse an erroneous SQL transaction if you can just create a new one that fixes the data you altered.
Keys? Hahaha, still not your crypto.
If you ban a coin, instead of persuing the actual criminal, then you're both doing a disservice to honest users of the coin and leaving the bad actor to do harm to society in some other way.
There are only 8B people in the world - they all fit into a "box" of 2k by 2k by 2k of humans.
It really isn't that hard to know who's doing bad things to others, especially with current technology.
Criminals used to meet in person to discuss crime (because mail/phones can be intercepted) and meet in person to move cash. It was a hard limiting factor on what they can get away with. With e2e messengers and anonymous crypto both of those "issues" are fixed.
Do you know anyone who uses it for legit purposes? I don't. I bet you ban a coin like that and you kill orders of magnitude more crime revenue compared to .001% of honest users using it to send money home and save a few dollars on the transaction.
It is an evolutionary process, with incentives are high enough for both sides to keep finding solutions.
But there is still a distinction between monero being banned and the government saying “we don’t believe you can fulfill kyc obligations”. There is a legitimate argument that yes they could that could be made in court, depending on the implementation.