The $6.3B Binance hack was pulled off in just 20 minutes
wired.com
wired.com
Isn't Binance the one that needs to be prosecuted for negligent security? How does "a compromised laptop" lead to a $6bn wipe in a matter of minutes?
This is why banks are regulated, though I have no idea if/whether these platforms are regulated in any similar way.
Note that “crime” has a specific definition in law. You don’t have to be a criminal (commit a crime) to be rightfully sued, civil suits are a thing.
Anyway, your parent comment already answered the question, they would be sued by negligence.
Only the government (e.g., federal, state, local) may bring a criminal suit.[1] But in both civil / criminal cases they are still a suit under the law seeking some form of ordered relief from the Court.
Essentially, you can think of "criminal" as a category of law and relief (e.g., prison) that is only accessible to the government.
Both the government and citizens may bring "civil" suits. Very generally, the remedies in civil suits are a court order to 1) stop doing a thing; 2) to do a thing required by law / agreement; 3) to transfer property, usually but not always money, from one party to another; or 4) to define a set of rules governing the parties going forward.
[1] There may be some obscure exception to this, but it is true for everything I've ever seen / heard of.
> If they do not have the liquidity to let people withdraw money that is another issue, but it does not seem to be the case.
Again they cannot be charged for losing billions of their own money, and there is no way to somehow consider the lost funds as "customers' money". I am all for companies getting sued due to negligence when eg they fail to protect customer data, but this is just between binance and the hackers.
So this stolen crypto is off Binance own reserves. So it could be absorbed across current accounts as long as they aren’t drawn down to below $6B? And if crypto drops they can apply cash reserves to plug the hole more easily?
Next time this happens to Binance though they won't have an emergency fund and possibly they'll be in debt, and that's when the users will be very screwed.
Their terrible security certainly indicates to me that future of Binance is not going to be a pretty one unless they make some enormous changes.
It seems very unlikely they have $3-6B lying around ready to repay customer deposits. At the very least this would be catastrophic for them if they do lose all that money.
Have they re-enabled withdrawals yet? If I were a customer I'd be taking everything out as soon as possible.
For Binance? I’d actually say very likely. They’d need to move a couple of papers around, but should be easy.
withdrawals have been paused since Thursday night. binance says it will reopen them in stages from Sunday and publish proof of reserves by Monday, which is the thing that would actually answer your question.
Funds have been already allocated for recovery by the CEO Richard Teng.
$3.5B stolen was "stable coins", which you could equate to a piece of paper with a dollar amount written on it.
Those are largely freezable by the issuer of the paper.
Then we have $2.4B in Bitcoin and ETH stolen. Those are not directly freezable.
However, if that does create a liquidity challenge for these exchanges, what if the price just so happens to drop by 60% after trading is restricted? That liability might shrink in actual value.
Comparing crypto to actual currency typically connected to large, real economies is not relevant here.
A country like Iceland is far smaller, and their currency famously fluctuated in 2008. Would you consider Icelandic króna as money? Most people do.
Anyway, that and your question are hardly relevant to the fact that Binance and their cabal own the crypto exchanges and consequently could manipulate the price to reduce the size of their obligation denominated in crypto rather than currency or stable coins.
I understand Binance alone accounts for a third of the market, and their ability to coordinate with other exchanges is hardly restricted to the participants we know were in that specific group chat.
I think the point stands that a liability in eg. USD is much different from one denominated in crypto.
Yeah Binance itself is big but it'll take a lot more than one exchange, an exchange everyone is now handling with extra suspicion, to cause a crash.
> I think the point stands that a liability in eg. USD is much different from one denominated in crypto.
If course it's different but that's so much weaker of a point. And the foreign currency comparisons weren't to particularly stable currencies.
Binance obviously has influence on crypto prices, potentially affecting a liability denominated in crypto.
And I'm sure they have nonzero influence but anything significant needs more evidence than a signal call that has Kraken in it.
> "Those are largely freezable by the issuer of the paper."
Interested to understand how this would work in a decentralised accounting mechanism.
Crypto at it's current price has a market cap around $2.6T. Obviously the liquidity is questionable, and since crypto isn't connected to any mention worthy real economic activity, a change in sentiment can quickly crash the price and liquidate leveraged positions.
While that's of course true for other assets also, crypto not being connected to production of real value, combined with the comparative lack of regulation, makes it much easier to manipulate.
In my view their interest, which aligns with that of all other major owners of crypto, is to acquire as much real currency as possible.
Acquiring more crypto by decreasing its valuation is not furthering that.
Maintaining a high valuation and positive sentiment in order to convert buyer's real currency into profit to cash out is what I believe their strategy is.
Presumably the hypothetical price change is reversible or there would be no point. So lower price, buy, raise price, sell, repeat. A dump-n-pump.
So there are good reasons to be skeptical of his statements.
Binance and its former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, were previously sued for willfully evading anti-money laundering (AML) controls. In that instance, the government ruled their compliance failures were not an accident, but a deliberate criminal enterprise. Binance paid $4.3 billion in fines and forfeitures to settle with the DOJ, CFTC, and FinCEN in November 2023.
No, it's not. At least not historically.
Sorry, what do you mean?
Basically, the historical origins of different bank regulations are quite complicated and also differ from place to place, and they were often put in place by (political) coalitions of people who already had not one single motivation but a whole spectrum of them.
And then in addition to historical reasons, you also need to ask why things are still in place. Inertia is one answer, but it's not the only one.
Sorry, what do you mean?
-- think that's referring to bank deposit insurance schemes...
US banks tend to meet AT1 requirements by issuing preferred shares.
Binance's approach seems to be based on vibes and a vague promise
To understand the regulatory framework for banks, the best place to start is the BIS and Basel III. https://www.bis.org/committees/bcbs/standards Generally speaking, international banks follow Basel III in addition to their domestic regulators’ capital requirements (which are probably also derived from Basel III, but have differences just to make things tedious).
However, BIS and Basel III (and the previous Basels) are just what's currently in force for most of the world. I suspect most people would be better served by more of an historical overview. But it also depends on what one is interested in.
Do tell me, please: why do banks care about getting deposits? And why did Silicon Valley Bank get into trouble, when depositors left?
But let's assume you understood the BoE right. My questions still stand:
> Do tell me, please: why do banks care about getting deposits? And why did Silicon Valley Bank get into trouble, when depositors left?
(And before you answer something about regulation: the regulators had willingly blessed SVB's damaged balance sheet for quite a while, and they only collapsed when depositors decided to leave.)
You might want to read the section of the pdf you linked that includes:
> So if a given bank financed all of its new loans in this way, it would soon run out of reserves.
I know about central bank reserves. It's not fractional reserve banking, though. It's basically just regulation, but regulation done in the language of money, which banks (and any 5 year old) can understand.
Banks have many reasons for attracting deposits. Not least of which to get customers "on board" such that they might buy other financial services. But yeah, they also need to stay on the right side of regulation, or not run out of central bank reserves, if you prefer to think of it that way.
Ultimately it's all fake. Whether you think of it as "reserves" (that don't really exist, of course), or regulation is up to you. It's ultimately just a bunch of IOUs but raised up about ten levels of abstraction.
Anyway, the whole thing is incredibly complex and nobody understands the whole thing. I did think the commenter was referring to fractional reserve banking, but they might have meant central bank reserves, I don't know.
Yes. Move fast and break things and forget governance... Cryptocurrency has always been dumb. You either con people out of their money or you lose yours.
I had someone approach me in 2017 or so because he wanted to do a rugpull coin operation. I said I was busy and didn't help, but I'd probably be much richer (and a piece of shit human) if I got involved.
Regulations probably help but they basically serve to keep evolutionary memory in place in a corporate ecosystem where companies can spawn from nothing.
Bad banks no longer exist but regulations, after an extinction event, perhaps try to make that evolutionary event permanent.
At least that is my mental model.
Regulations are very lagging. And they should be understood to create moats and friction. There is no free lunch. Regulations purposefully shrink or destroy markets. That is how markets work.
Something I wish tech folks would absorb more.
If it's not frustrating and stupid, (to you at the time) it's probably not really a regulation.
This is a funny take on things, and untrue. But traditional finance is way safer and better controlled than the crypto frontier. Someone like coffeezilla has to rely on patreon and ad revenue to do the sort of journalism that exposes how debased cryptocurrency finance is. There should be much more money in exposing the fraud, but our premier capitalists are complicit in the fraud. They are fraudsters at heart, which is why they have the money and influence they do.
> Regulations purposefully shrink or destroy markets.
Sometimes maybe, but that's a matter of corruption. Regulatory capture has been used to create regulation that protects monopolies, duopolies, and the broader oligarchy for a very long time. When politicians were representatives of their voters, things worked better. Post-citizens united, the incentives are broken and we have a congress full of duplicitous, self-interested idiots.
What happens when the US govt tells others not to do business with you?
When everything goes wrong the only defense is to be slow enough to fix it.
This idea that there are shortcuts that you can be decentralised and fast at any size is wrong.
I would assume binance is more like a bad bank but without the internal friction to make stuff like this hard.
But you’re absolutely right, it’s hard to compromise something that moves at such an absolutely glacial pace.
I can't imagine thinking that banks won't lose your money. You live in a complete fantasy world.
If you live in Argentina, I sympathize and I take your point.
People who essentially want government guarantees for their money should just buy government bonds.
Not with simple account deposits, no
Basel rules are still a thing
Customers stop monitoring their bank, when deposits are insured.
>The general assumption is that it would require the US government to collapse for your checking account to vanish, in which case you'd probably have larger problems to worry about.
See USSR-Russia transition in 1990-1992 for example.
Accounts didn't vanish, but all people's money where used to cover the deficit
Crypto 'banks' need orders of magnitude more security and it's not a trivial problem.
Bank don't loose USD because it can printed at will the the holding country like they bailed banks in 2008.
My grandfather lost his tuition money he had saved to become a dentist, in the great depression.
Instead he worked his whole life in a factory for GE.
Last I heard he’s is now living in luxury in the United Arab Emirates. There was a profile on him in a paper.
I’m not sure Sam has enough cash to get a pardon.
“Mr. (Changpeng) Zhao has a long history of legal and regulatory problems. Binance pleaded guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023 and paid a $4.3 billion fine to the U.S. government. After serving a four-month prison sentence, Mr. Zhao was pardoned by Mr. Trump last year. Binance also forged a business relationship with World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto company.” [1]
[1]
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/30/technology/binance-hack-a...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/23/technology/trump-pardons-...
I'd be surprised if it were. Crypto exchanges have been targeted by hackers since forever, and Binance is one of the top. If it was so easy to exfiltrate crypto from them, I'd have expected a heist before now. (Unless controls have just gotten worse recently.)
Just going from what Binance PR must believe about a laptop it seems unlikely to me that they've been tested in much depth by anyone with mafia tactics.
> Binance has said the incident was a “complex attack” that stemmed from multiple factors.
> Its initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorised withdrawal transactions.
I know it says "multiple factors" here, but there are no other factors I've found.
> Our initial investigation suggested that the security incident may have involved a compromised laptop, however our subsequent investigation has uncovered additional points of breach.
That seems to be their most recent update on the matter afaik (30 Oct, 8:47am UTC)
Of course they want it to sound like the world’s most sophisticated hacker
The FBI and other federal agencies engaged in law enforcement routinely use appeals to authority and expertise they do not have and create set-piece situations that almost in every case involving more than one defendant sets up a circular firing squad situation where the most guilty is at an advantage of simply pleading guilty and cooperating first, or otherwise they'd dump it off via the AUSA down to the state level if they can, or blame China, Russia, NK, Iran, or Israel, countries that do not extradite their own citizens on request and rarely if ever do so unless it's done so on their terms. Blockchain tracing ultimately still needs the connection between the chain and off-chain ID and there's no surefire way to even ascertain with something that isn't a mere heuristic with an error rate unacceptable in criminal court and would fall apart if there's competent defense counsel, which the FBI have, in the one case where on-chain evidence was going to be used, actually went full Chewbacca and created a two year delay mid-trial and then pulled Chainanlysis' "expert" off before cross examination. The company has the balls to brag as if the courts have validated their method in whole, when in reality the court have long understood what clustering is and so that part is of course admissible evidence, but it also doesn't get you to the purported end - attribution. If one can use a strawman as a sales tactic, this would be exactly that. The attribution aspect have never been allowed to be properly examined in the criminal context. The "reactor" is merely a database, and in the small bit of direct examination the chainalysis employee claimed that every time he queried the database the correct rate was some absurd, Robert-Mugabe's-election-number figure that is higher than the DOJ's conviction rate when they were still credible and actually higher than the CCP's official conviction rate in a fake criminal justice system where due proceess doesn't exist and they give leeway because claiming to be 99% correct is absurd. Of course, they've never been tested in the same situation and still haven't, and if the industry mouthpiece is basically hiring sales and not legal, which is basically what every company in the Blockchain Association has been doing, rent-seeking to be Wall Street 2.0 on top of free merged pull requests and open source software. Tracing on chain is all well and good for shits and giggles but Department of Treasury went and sanctioned a smart contract thinking that it was an EOA address that belongs to a person as if etherscan was never checked beforehand tells you all you need to know.
They had a bad case against Tornado Cash since the ultimate demand would require the devs to somehow predict the actual identities of those that interact with their contracts - which in many cases isn't even a human. It's telling that when the 5th Circuit and the one judge in that circuit who knows anything about process and technology through sheer luck got on the panel and wrote a clear rebuke of how federal investigators failed at doing any due diligence, and for once, the feds did not attempt to do an end-run or even ask for en banc hearing of the issue, but simply made up a completely different issue to pursue (building the front end) which is not a crime. The feds can't match the IP/in house firms in renumeration and can't even match public interest or federal defenders in hiring out of tech competent law grads when it comes to having a moral high ground. They have so much resources so that they can hire contractors, but can't vet the contractors. Being able to fall back on coercion covers up a lot of incompetence. The Atomic Wallet 'hack' was almost certainly not a NK job as they have claimed, for example, and they relied on some dude on twitter's hunch (notably the first thing one learns that is never evidence if presented in court) and a post-hoc heuristic that is indistinguishable from a copycat or a third party's infrastructure to make the attribution. People with poorly thought out opinions are all over the place on Twitter, but this permission slip to "make mistakes". Also, they're part of the system of funding provided to your local police so they are better funded now than before 2020. Check their work under all circumstances, and plea bargains should not be considered as evidence of actual guilt since coercion and BS is as common as actual cases backed by properly collected evidence that builds a procedurally sound case.
FWIW in 2022 one of their systems was breached and $570 million worth of "BNB" was taken.
Yep... that's why banks have never been robbed, never been hacked, and neer lost money! ;)
Wasn't it even a central bank that was hacked into a couple of months ago?
Thank god for regulation!
I am not sure why this get thrown randomly as the solution to every problem. Bitfinex major hack was due to regulation. Banks and Crypto companies don't have the same attack surface and the one for crypto is way more complex due to permissionlessness.
I wonder what could happen if somebody compromised Jamie Dimon's laptop?
Best a hacker could probably achieve is sending some sketchy emails or messages, but even there people are just going to confirm by verbally communicating with him.
Banks are actually the worst analogy for this sort of thing because there is a ridiculous amount of system federation and ultra-conservative system controls. It can take a month to get a simple route or firewall port opened on controlled networks (god I hate change committees).
Makes me think traditional banks have solved this from the start. You can't steal the backing of an unbacked currency.
Traditional banks and crypto exchanges alike rely on the carefully cultivated illusion that you can withdraw your money at any time.
$6B is probably several billion too large for a hot wallet but it's not completely obscene for an operation of Binance's size.
To unlock my laptop - I need a boot password - then I need a finger print scan - after that a password, after that a 2fa app. Then I need to connect to a VPN .. 2fa again. My laptop locks within 1 minute of inactivity. 30% of my CPU and RAM get hogged by our security suit constantly. My USB ports are disabled for data. I understand it's windows and windows can get compromised - it's just very unlikely that it gets compromised to a level where you could actually cause damage.
They can even block all but allow-list certain vendors and models, but because USB is an unauthenticated standard - an attacker can easily spoof any vendor or model. So best not to rely on that and instead block all of certain types of USB device.
No ones going to disable mice/keyboards.
If the point was to eliminate all possible ways of compromising the device, they'd just put the device in the shredder.
You have to balance having a usable and functional thing with the risks involved.
FYI each of the top 10 banks in the US have been hacked before, and they’re still doing ok.
Small price to pay for ensuring people and the gov don't lose billions.
Ah yes, the bane of enterprise workplaces.
The paradox is resolved by considering the expertise, which took a long time and much effort to acquire.
With the heist, the analogous paradox is somewhat weakened. There is hidden effort, but it’s highly specific to the actual target task.
With the locksmith, the hidden work is done on entirely separate tasks and so on, which happen to provide the necessary skills for the current target task.
But maybe it wouldn't be that exciting to see some guys sitting at a desk.
Let me introduce you to the TV show Industry which takes you into the world of London high finance where tense phone calls, compliance violations and financial crimes are the order of the day [1]
It's HBO. They are known for this. But they definitely went too far with Industry in my opinion.
The sex and drug scenes are much more toned down in the latter two seasons. Part of the reason why is the cast had more leverage and strong armed the writers / directors.
Great show but definitely would be better with 90% of the sex / drug scenes removed.
This is like medical series about ER, in real life it doesn't happen. In real life nobody cares, things slip trough, people die, finally someone receives a huge bill.
So yeah, really not exciting ... just sad.
They're not in NK, though their family is.
Not sure if I want it written and developed by North Korea or its enemies…
That was the solution that the movie Swordfish came up with to solve this tricky problem.
He is still in China living with his girlfriend.
Miami, Florida – A 17-count indictment was unsealed in federal court in Miami, Florida charging Paul E. Vernon, 48, the founder, operator, and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Project Investors Inc., doing business as Cryptsy
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdfl/pr/ceo-major-online-crypto...
The US and China do not have an extradition treaty. ie even if they wanted to do something, they can’t. The same goes for Russia
China absolutely could do something if they wanted to. No treaty just means they aren't obligated to "do something", not that they can't. For example, if the US wanted to reinstate the $800 no tariff policy in exchange for Vernon, I guarantee you they'd arrest him and turn him over.
I can't find any reference to Vernon's citizenship, ie if he is a Chinese citizen or not. Which would change the math.
Just recently, the US and China had repatriated fugitives to each other, despite having no extradition treaty. No extradition treaty does not mean transferring suspects is impossible.
That is a safe bet 92% of the time, but they rushed getting the stolen coins into a tumbler service. The kind of people that do business in bitcoin, are not the class of folks you want finding these thieves first.
Yet, picking politically attractive proxy-scapegoats is a classic pro move. =3
Also I thought tumblers didn’t work anymore? Didn’t they figure out how to trace btc anyway?
Cursor's security announcement was posted on Oct 29 and says that the malicious extension was live "between about 2:27am PT and 1:35pm PT today"
This article says the attack took place "on Thursday" (which means Oct 29) and began at 4pm ET (which is 1pm PT)
and Binance has been tweeting that the cause of the hack may be a compromised employee laptop. yikes
Binance hot wallet signed 50 EIP-7702 delegations 3 minutes before the drain - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50306715 - October 2026
Binance hot wallet signed 50 authorizations 3 minutes before the drain - https://808bits.com/articles/binance-hot-wallet-eip-7702-del... - October 30th, 2026
i don't have a solution.
That tooling should be shut off from the internet [1], and if it uses a LLM that should be at least a few years old.
[1] technically impossible if it also has the ability to veto responses, but the surface can be very small.
Things like--
* Minimizing attack surfaces by not running lots of software on the same server and not bloating feature sets beyond the minimum
* Limiting access so that most things can't be done by most users, there are *no* super-users, and escalating access is temporary ans requires multiple accounts to authorize
* Encrypting data at rest
If your plan is to quickly apply upstream patches, your plan is bad.
I try so hard for this, but don't even get approval to change an internal site to use https instead of http.
I get we gotta keep the new features and workflows coming, but a single resource dedicated to low hanging fruit of security could fix a lot in a very short time.
That usually doesn't happen unless the company has suffered a large financial or reputational loss as a result of poor security practices. Sometimes not even then, if the company doesn't get scared they'll start losing money or get in some sort of legal trouble.
Is encrypting data at rest useful when the app must have access to decrypt the data? What sort of scenarios do you use it for and where do the keys live?
This used to be common before devops and cloud took over. Looks like it might make a comeback. Maybe with a new fancier job title
Easy to drop a sentence in a discussion. Harder to implement.
It's easy, if you already have teams in the US, UK, India, and Australia - it's always normal office hours in one of those location.
I've seen this a few times, and it's pretty annoying as a user, but ultimately it's not that bad usually. If you are ordering something at 3am, the physical shipment still occurs during daylight hours. Many banking operations are not actually instantaneous, they settle in a batch job overnight.
And this doesn't have to be binary. Providing a read-only interface provides lots of value while having a reduced attack surface.
It has been days now.
they also say there’s no evidence any private key leaked yet their own signing system signed the transfers.
Computer security is a farce.
Let's address the elephant. I find the accused to be very unlikely.
20 minutes?! $6.3B?!
Their APT groups have been classified as advanced but not elite, this suggests a huge jump for their groups.
"There will be signs".
There should be an influx of purchases right? Or at least a large number of imports perhaps through shell companies to further obscure the sources as this nation.
Based on what I am told and read about this nation they are poor, can't afford to feed their people, etc., etc. Additionally, the quality of education is reported to be low due to the isolation.
Where are the shipments into the country and where does that money lead? Until these signs occur I am skeptical.
That kind of money is what the FBI, Interpol and other investigators specialize in right?
I don't participate in any digital currency, but if I did I would think a worldwide investigation with collaboration amongst these agencies would be in order.
Let's ask: Which nations are the best in cybersecurity?
France, China, USA, Israel is what comes to my mind. I'm not sure if there's any other country with highly advanced cyber units. Usually Israel is the one with the most advanced defense technologies.
CISA: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa... USHHS: https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/dprk-cyber-espionage... USDOT: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm774
These seem dated, >5 years, but don't seem to indicate a level of sophistication needed for the heist.
The reports do touch on laundering the coins, but that still wouldn't excuse the "there will be signs" related to a large influx of monetary resources right?
Even with advanced agent frameworks, this level of attack is beyond their capabilities. Stuxnet level sophistication was shown to be only possible for Israel and the USA in co-operation.
But why would a nation like the USA attack a company whose CEO they have just pardoned and that endorses crypto and crypto-stocks that much as of now?
Israel on the contrary needs new artillery and money to support their wars to be continued. The offensives they want to continue against all their neighbors cost a lot of money. But I want to be careful here, since there's proof required. The question now is howto follow the money? I think we need our hacker friends to watch the money-flow: Jim Browning, Pierogi/Scammer Payback, Ryan Montgomery/Zero Day. Curious who else would be best to doxx and find out the truth.
Israel has lasting peace with half its neighbours.
You obviously have an agenda here (possibly with Qatari sponsorship - but I would be careful of making claims without proof).
Absoluter Humbug mein Freund.
> Israel has lasting peace with half its neighbours.
Ok, funny I just met an Isreali in person yesterday and he said they are in war. He's from Tel Aviv, guess a first hand source is more trustable than an anon defending israel and claiming they're in peace..
The conclusions made prior by OP are thoughtful and it strictly makes North Korea quite implausible as the "Binance Hacker". Leaves us with Isreal. Saudi and Quatar are so damn weak in Cybersec, I haven't even heard of any of those countries doing any meaningful operation ever in the media, but to be honest I don't follow what they do either.
OTOH I heard that the culprits didn't steal the private keys of the affected customers. If this is true the stolen cryptocoins are worthless.
The only hope is that most of it gets frozen in some way or another, but if even only 1% gets through they'll still have made about $65M
How can you "freeze" Bitcoin transactions? If you have the private keys you can always make transfers etc.
If they get away with $6.5 Billion Binance is done for. There's no way they'll be able to repay their customers.
So that pool of wallets that stores all their customers funds needs to be managed by the exchange somehow, meaning there's going to be some sysadmins/devs/etc that have access to parts of the system that deal with those wallets, and possibly also the keys to those wallets (which it looks like was the case here).
I don't work at Binance, but having been in that exact situation (SRE @ Crypto company with lots of assets, attacked by North Koreans), I'm guessing DevOps guy gave access to some CI/CD, `kubectl exec` what have you which allowed attackers to play with APIs, some settlement mechanic, some smart contract update pipeline. You don't really have to attack wallets if something less secure controls them. This really could stem from nothing, excessive permissions in a GitHub token can go very leveraged properly.
2) You can't freeze Bitcoin transactions (well, the crypto bros running it could if their majority wanted to, but they don't want to), but some of the stolen coins were stablecoins like USDT and USDC.
And fiat-backed stablecoins are ipso facto centralised (someone needs to 1) take receipt of fiat and issue coins against that, 2) custody that fiat and hold on to it reliably, and 3) return the fiat when given back the coins). You can then with the private key send the coins back to the issuer, but the issuer can refuse to give you the fiat.
However, many stable coin smart contracts are even more powerful: they give the issuer an authorized control account that can add a wallet address to a blacklist. The contract checks that list whenever someone tries to move the token; if the address is blocked, it rejects the transfer. Then the balance can’t be moved.
There’s a small difference: USDC blocks transfers both to and from a blacklisted address. USDT generally blocks the address from sending USDT, though it may still receive USDT. Tether’s contract also has a separate function that can destroy tokens held at a blacklisted address; that is distinct from simply freezing them. Note that when they destroy tokens, Tether keeps the cash - so it's a transfer from the criminals (or whoever held the tokens) to Tether. (Tether can then re-issue the coins and hand them back to law enforcement or the victim, but that's a separate step.)
Exchanges do put most of the assets in a cold storage. Binance has $155B in assets and handles $14B of trade volume in 24 hours so not all of it are in a cold storage.
You’re misunderstanding where these coins were taken from/are now. Of course they did not get access to customer private keys, because in an exchange there isn’t really such a thing. You’re trusting the exchange to hold the coins for you, and they get put into a shared wallet that they manage with the exchange’s key.
Even if they did not have access to the exchange’s private keys and only got access to some API that let them execute the transfers, it doesn’t matter anyway, as the attackers transferred the coins into new addresses with keys controlled by them, so they’re free to move them now.
…well, mostly, the stolen USDC and USDT coins got frozen by the issuers, but those are not really decentralized as much as they are built on top of decentralized infrastructure.
This level of targeting is really only something that nation state actors can pull off, who are also protected from actual law enforcement prosecution. Unless attackers are really in North Korea, they would 100% be caught within just few days.
Lost out on $900m off a single spelling mistake - probably the most expensive spelling mistake in history.
I think people here underestimate how profitable these exchanges are.
Just on-server cryptocurrency…
'Elite North Korean hackers' blamed for $6.3B Binance hack - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50300853 - Oct 2026 (228 comments)
Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50296470 - Oct 2026 (1237 comments)
Sure, it let's some people keep their savings safe from dictatorial countries. But it also fuels other dictators that are doing pretty nasty stuff to their own people. And crypto is facilitating that.
Analogy is holding and trading gold underground that hasn't been mined yet using securities or other representation subject to capital market regulations and the legal framework. Is it an asset? Yes, if proven, documented, etc. Is it safe? Yes. Will you get your value back if the capital market representation of the underlying is stolen? Most likely (finra, sipc, etc).
But having live value on rails that enable instant movement globally with no recourse for unauthorized transfer? You're gonna have a bad time.
I equate it to anonymity on the internet. Yes, if everyone had to associate their real identity with everything they posted on the internet some unjustly persecuted individuals would not be able to get their stories out. And there would be a heck of a lot less other bullshit.
That seems valuable, but I’m not sure how much truth there is to a story I read on the internet.
Wait you mean Venezuela didn't experience four years of hyper-inflation in a row? You mean you don't believe that story is true?
For example, you can donate to Sci-Hub with cryptocurrency. Sci-Hub has an ideological mission which is widely supported, but it runs afoul of copyright law and is illegal in nearly every country and sanctioned in many. You cannot donate to Sci-Hub with fiat currency.
Unfortunately, I agree that in practice >99% of cryptocurrency's use is for scams.
Of course, the bottleneck then becomes converting stablecoin dollars to real dollars.
In the end, maybe that friction is actually a net positive for safety.
Whener I tried to send Crypto, there were fees over fees, from wallets, transfer fees, etc., probably I was doing something wrong, but that was the most frictionless path
On the other hand, sending USDC actually moves the money for real, albeit, not totally free.
And I feel for them but 2 wrongs don't make a right. Crypto is not the answer for that problem.
Did I imply that? Creating a bank account in my country is an adventure on its own. If I got 50 USD in my wallet, I can exchange it somewhere and pay for food and whatever. My crypto account requires a computer, an internet connection, and someone willing to take it (no one around here).
And approximately none of these people's problems have been actually solved with cryptocurrency.
But more likely scenario is they have friends who let them use their bank accounts (but don’t have friends who let them use their good overseas bank accounts, so not that useful).
When I was younger I thought they really are against hierarchy and that society should be equal in all aspects.
But as it turns out, they are against current hierarchy as they don’t have much to say in this setup. But once they would get to be “in” and calling shots that’s where their world views change.
The point is to NOT have a single place with access to all the money, votes, etc. Every participant should be acting as themselves, and there should be no way to do things on behalf of others without their consent.
The point of smart contracts is to have code you can actually trust. Your bank or openAI can change their website, APIs and even their models tomorrow. That’s not great for trust. Trust is what enables things to scale.
The same way you trust other internet protocols to just “route around problems” and not have one single point of failure, that is the substrate for Web3.
Imagine a Web2 website such as a student-teacher marketplace NOT handling millions of dollars, accepting money from students and paying them out to teachers. Imagine it being simply an interface while the actual transactions are approved by the students themselves, and instead of the central site signing payouts with some keys, the teachers get paid through smart contracts and code on the blockchain. The site can still take 10% commission from everything, it would be above board, and it can never change it without the consent of the people. The business logic is in the smart contract.
(Since this comment has the keywords “crypto” and “web3”, I know what will happen in advance already.)
Being able to leverage crypto on this scale requires everyone to either A) be technical enough to understand and use smart contracts directly or B) delegate a party that handles this for you. This is where the utopian case usually falls apart, because most people are B and this requires trusting a third party, which kinda defeats the entire point of the vision.
Because most people don't want to do the work of learning and managing crypto directly, a huge industry flourished to service these people, full of its own interests, corruption and various levels of criminality. And well-intentioned crypto people have no way to reign this industry in because the entire point is to operate in a deregulated way.
Ironically, the piece that makes crypto fundamentally unworkable 20 years in is capitalism.
Very hard sell? This is effectively how the vast vast majority of people in the US have their money handled.
The means to afford LLMs? These are services that cost pennies.
Specifically, you had to claim your rewards in a certain time window or they'd disappear.
I miss the old days of decentralized networks, and smart contracts that were audited. Forget the shitcoin memecoins and zero sum games mania, the NFTs and the prediction markets. There is so much positive sum that can be done:
The stolen USDT will likely be returned because Tether can do manual freezes like a traditional financial institution.
Where code is law the funds are just gone.
Like even in your example of the marketplace I don't see the benefits over having a central authority. Who determines who is a student or teacher? Who kicks out bad actors? Who resolves disputed transactions?
A decentralized network of wallets and balances doesn’t present an attractive target for hackers specifically because the payoff per wallet is so small!
It is exactly the centralization you are defending, which is at the root of the problem. In the decentralized case, no one has to determine who is a student or a teacher. If a teacher needs to pass KYC with a marketplace, they do it once, and from then on can permissionlessly receive their small payouts.
Centralization (on Binance) made the attack appealing, but decentralization (of crypto broadly) is the only reason it's possible, and centralization (of USDT et al) is the only path to recovery.
Re: the marketplace: we'd want to be able to revoke teacher access too, and sometimes we may need to roll back transactions (Goods not delivered? Wrong goods delivered? Wrong goods purchased?), and then I have to ask... why involve a blockchain at all?
The only compelling real world use case I've seen is helping people navigate hostile governments or dysfunctional economies.
That’s very naive thing to expect from code.
Indeed, very shortly since modems were invented, there was need for error correction. They were slow and clunky. The only reasonable conclusion is that the Internet is a fad and not worth discussing. Same as this newfangled decentralized cryptography stuff.
Indeed, very shortly after the Web came out, regular script kiddies could write php websites with blink tags. Credit card numbers were sent in the clear with http. This “e-commerce” thing was a dangerous joke, only idiots would send their credit cards over the Internet. It would never catch on!
Second, the crypto bros running Bitcoin have reverted 20+ blocks on at least two occasions when it suited them to do so, and Ethereum has famously undone the DAO hack. Oh, and then of course you have all the bugs in smart contracts that can't be fixed. So the notion that "code is law" is laughable, and the notion that it's desirable is misguided, too.
Third, there's the oracle problem. Keeping track of bits in a ledger is a solved problem and has been a solved problem for a long time. The issue is correlating it with the real world. In your example, what if the student pays, then the teacher doesn't teach? How is the money flow reverted? If the student can just revert it, what happens if the student pays, the teacher teaches, and the student then reverts the payment? You need the legal system, and external adjudication, one way or the other.
Crypto adds nothing but idle speculation and the circumvention of (largely sensible) rules and regulations.
If you wanted to run the arbitrage, you'd buy Bitcoin cheap abroad, send them to China or Korea, sell them expensive, and now you're stuck with fiat in China or Korea which you can't take out, either. BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes was closing the loop in the early days by frequently crossing the border from China to Hong Kong with a backpack full of cash. SBF and Alameda claimed to have made their early money similarly by finding a way to close the loop on the kimchi premium.
The yuan is not tied to the dollar, but can be traded for dollars. Same for Euros, gold, and bricks of heroin.
OK, that last one has to be converted to bitcoin first....
Nothing to do with dollars.
I think you're just using words that you don't really understand. Do you know what a tied currency actually is? They do exist. Do you know what they are?
But the end result is that crypto currencies never really delivered on their promise, because they barely work in practice, and the only reason to engage with them is for gambling or crime. Anything else is just too slow, too expensive, too cumbersome, too error-prone, and just generally far too inconvenient. What's the point of a digital currency that is best stored on an air-gapped device that must never connect to any network?
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
I would've thought the implication was kind of obvious? And I'm not sure why you mention Dodd-Frank -- there were many bailouts throughout 2007-2010 and the point of Dodd-Frank was to put an end to that scheme.
There are defenses of traditional currencies that don't hold up to scrutiny, for instance the intrinsic value of gold is way lower than it's traded value. The ability to pay taxes in a currency is only valid while the arbitor allows it to be.
The Blockchain is an impressive design to allow multiple arbitors where you can't know in advance who it is going to be so no single actor can act in advance of that knowledge nor act as if they had sustained control.
The public record combined with an international Comms network means noone is disallowed.
So the good parts are, 1. a mechanism where everyone can use it. 2. No one actor can control monetary policy.
The bad parts are, 1. Uses a lot of power (but less than often reported) 2. lack of understanding and unrealistic expectations allow fraudsters to exploit people.
It is not a stick-it-to-the-man scheme, nor is it a way to perpetually make wealth (it can create and lose wealth over varying time frames but only by guessing how people in the future will value it compared to today)
The dangers of theft of a scale like this are an artifact of there being no single arbitor saying "no you can't do that" there is actually a solution to this, but it is not really being done. It is designed to have no do single arbitor, but if you have a majority of people reaching a consensus on any issue the entire system can change rules to any paradigm they wished. You could theoretically have a majority agree to reverse all of the digits in everyone's balance and then update the system to make it so.
To prevent cases like these huge heists you could have a majority consensus to support an independent regulator that makes decisions that can involve arbitrary changes to balances. While there is a majority consensus to agree with the rulings of that regulator they could adjudicate cases like this. If the regulator started acting in the interests of any particular party that consensus would be lost and miners who disagree would not incorporate their rulings into the chain.
I think there is potential for there to be a better system there. It would likely involve governments becoming miners (or at the very least having some influence on the miners in their duristiction)
I don't think there is enough public opinion in support of doing that though.
Tldr; I can see a way in which it works, but we are not there. We might get there over a long duration (if crypto does not go away for another few decades). To get there quickly would require significant changes in public perception.
I’m also uneasy about the investment case. When you own crypto, you have a reason to want others to buy it too. That can create a cycle where demand pushes the price up, and the rising price attracts more buyers. That happens in other markets too, but productive businesses can also generate revenue and cash flow that help support their value. Many crypto assets don’t have that same kind of foundation, although some are tied to specific services or network activity.
Regular currencies have a more obvious role in everyday life (pay taxes, settle debts, and buy things). Their value is influenced by factors like monetary policy, confidence in the issuer, and the strength of the underlying economy. That doesn’t make them stable or valuable in the same way as productive assets, but it does give them a practical purpose that many crypto assets don’t have.
I realize the morality of such a thing is subjective, so I'll just say that I've known a number of individuals, especially minors, who have relied on gray market sources.
But, what I liked about the idea of crypto is for the many poor and weaker countries that realistically can't afford to float their own currency in a stable way.
Many countries have never-ending sliding currencies or highly volatile currencies. And the locals don't have a lot of choice but to hold the local currency and watch their hard-earned savings evaporate.
Or worse they can't even do business with other countries because their banking system is highly restricted (because of maybe illegal activity taking place in the country by a minority or their local government being out of favor with the rest of the world) and that prevents legitimate businesses from easily transacting.
There are so many countries in which the national currency is a daily nightmare. And individuals in those countries that are unbanked.
Crypto in the rich industrialized countries never really made sense to me. And even less so as an asset for speculation.
In rich countries, I think it's more for those who are of the criminal or conspiracy theorist variety.
Further, in the rich, industrialized countries, the ability to have a stable national currency and a national currency that is easy to transact with around the world is taken for granted.
And, for those poor weaker countries, dollar access is weaponized as we've seen in many cases. Even if a country is wealthy enough to hold significant dollar deposits, those can be frozen at any time.
In fact even within a country that wants to use the international banking system, that country's access can be frozen at any time, at the stroke of a pen, by a government far away.
And it's naive to believe that this power is consistently used in a just manner.
North Korea is a case in point regarding the value of crypto for a poor or sidelined country.
I won't get into a debate regarding whether that's a good thing or bad thing in the case of North Korea, but it does illustrate why crypto has value for countries that are extremely poor and lack access to global finance. It's not always because the country is run by an evil dictator.
Sometimes it's because the country is just run by an incompetent government.
And in an increasingly hostile world with increasing great power rivalry, crypto has usefulness for countries that want to stay out of the crossfire and transact business without having to kowtow (become subservient) to one of the great powers just to transact payments.
But yeah crypto in the industrialized world is mostly for speculators, conspiracy theorists, and criminals. That I agree with. But I do think crypto has a powerful use case in a lot of the world where the payment system isn't as developed and isn't as well integrated into global finance.
The unbanked, like myself. People that for any reason is being locked out of the "american" way of doing things
Stripe doesn't cover 200 countries, nor does Apple Pay, Google Pay, Paypal, Visa, etc (all american btw). So a parallel banking system is needed, no questions about that, and Binance provides the best of all, and that's why it's being targeted by we know who (just follow the money)
Now, whether if it is crypto or not, I don't care, all I want is the possibility to pay and receive money (USD, EUR or CNY as the top currencies right now) without the draconian restrictions imposed by the hegemons trying to asphyxiate does who don't kneel
That's exactly why we need a parallel banking system, crypto or not
I agree. AI is useful to layoff thousands of employees as we have already seen, hacking companies and governments with agent swarms and also helping with accelerating cyber crime.
Now anyone including script kiddies can tell an AI agent to build an exploit to attack a website of their choosing the moment they find a vulnerability.
You cannot say it is useful (which it is) and it does not also accelerate and amplify all the negative consequences at the same time.
> Crypto has none except scams and get rich quick.
Stablecoins are quite useful for companies such as Stripe, Shopify, Square and others for payment of goods and one can send stablecoins around the world on the same day, 24/7 with extremely low fees.
Crypto is not the one that will cause the next financial crisis. That will be AI.
Thanks to the $3TN (and counting) debt that is now becoming a massive risk to the point where big tech companies are hiding it from their balance sheets [0] with Oracle and even CoreWeave being the most likely to default first. [1]
[1] https://siliconangle.com/2026/10/14/shares-of-oracle-neoclou...
They're not even remotely close to being comparable.
The original promise of crypto and blockchain was to cut out the middleman and NOT concentrate a lot of money under a few custodial keys.
If you took your crypto off exchanges when not in use, you’d be fine. Not your keys, not your crypto.
That's not true at all. There have been so many smart contract hacks in the past.
> safe from dictatorial countries.
Yeah, that's definitely an argument. But it's kind of funny when the backdrop is that $6B was taken by North Korea.
It feels like a sibling to the popular attitudes towards not trusting big banks, or voting for <candidate> who demonstrably achieves the opposite of what you're seeking, or feeling that democracy ain't working out great, or that vaccines are scary and dangerous. There's just a fundamental lack of higher-order thinking. It's all vibe-based reasoning. What feels scary is what guides these behaviours. Which, I think, is why it's so unsurprising that people in these camps make such unbelievably strong candidates for exploitation.
I mean, that's what the big mean government does, they monitor financial transactions and they collect taxes. But when we talk about financial privacy from the prying eyes of the government as a goal, and let's suppose people actually use crypto like was dreamed, this necessarily implies crypto being a tool to launder money. (in practice, this is better realized by privacy coins like Monero and ZCash, since Bitcoin sucks for privacy: your address is an anonymous handle but the network leak metadata. But, the desire for financial privacy was there in the Bitcoin community since the beginning).
And what else people do when they can hide their money from the government? In a lot of cases, they don't pay taxes (which is also a disposition present in the Bitcoin community since the beginning, with a rhetoric like, collecting taxes are not legitimate)
What I think was a later development was the main use case for crypto in real world, which is to collect payment for ransomware and things like this. This, I don't think it's something the early Bitcoin community envisioned.
> The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks
Bitcoin DNA trait #1: minting rules are in the protocol and they are deflationary.
But I think private/permissioned chains will gain some adoption in the background of tradfi, especially for clearing and settlement, collateral management via tokenisation etc. Your bank might eventually use technology developed in crypto, but it'll be called 'distributed ledger technology' or 'tokenisation' rather than crypto because of the negative image.
One of the ways this manifested was my ability to anticipate problems at work and poke holes in things. This made me incredibly unpopular. You never get thanked for this. Instead you get punished for being right too early. You are negative. You are a naysayer. You aren't a team player. And you were 100% correct and it didn't matter.
Back in 2012 I remember thinking "I don't see how crypto has any applications other than illegal stuff". And I stood by that. Note that morality and legality are two different things. Sending money to relatives in a country that disallows foreign currency transactions may be moral but it's still illegal.
What's frustrating is dealing with the same consequences of being right too early. It's muddied by true disruption. An example that was often brought up was Google. In the late 1990s, it was believed that search was a "solved" problem and there was no money in it. That's 100% true. But you can't ignore any criticism with "people once thought the world was round". It's a useless fallacy to deploy.
The absolutely dumbest people and outright scammers were attracted to crypto. A bunch of people who missed out on Bitcon's meteoric rise didn't want to miss the next meteor or they simply wanted to rug pull before they themselves got rug pulled.
The financial system is an endless series of Chesterton's Fences. So many things work the way they do because of a problem that occurred. They say that safety regulations are written in blood. People died to make those regulations. Well, financial regulations are the same way.
Being able to freeze assets and reverse transactions, for example, is a feature, not a bug.
The real story with crypto is how greed clouds people's judgment. So many people on HN thought they were going to make their bag on crypto and people like myself got shouted down as naysayers.
I really don't know what to do with this information other than those same warnings are beign ignored about AI and in 5 years I will be punished for being right too early. There's simply no market to recoup the trillions invested in rapidly depreciating assets around software with no moat.
These may be perfectly legal (example xxx sites), gray at worst (like anime websites). Some anime site that had (for example) paypal for over 15+ years. Plop ... gone.
Crypto has become become the alternative payment method for those sites. So its not "dictators that are doing pretty nasty stuff" but a ton of sites and services that can be affected.
Ironically, there has been a lot of focus also in Europe regarding this issue, as much of the internet payment processors are in or linked to the US. With the focus to get a alternative to Visa/Mastercard going.
The reality is that a lot of power regarding payment processing is in the hands off one country, that has a lot of large companies with interests/powers to dictate over the entire world, what is and is not allowed. And crypto has becomes a necessary evil. In a ideal world we do not need crypto as payment processors are neutral or at minimum have very stronger requirements to kick off clients. But the reality is different...
This is why I don't particularly support most cryptocurrencies, as they don't solve these issues and feel more like a horrific version of the stock market. Monero on the other hand does pretty decisively solve these issues, I can give you an address to send money to without giving out any other information, I can send money to you without my purchase history being public (unlike bitcoin), the transaction fees are very low (unlike bitcoin), the block time is quite low. It does feel like the perfect system for daily purchases if it would be embraced, which I am aware it won't be. The issue of no recourse for keys being compromised could be slightly mitigated by putting only limited amounts of money in the wallet at a time, although I do know this isn't ideal (but it's probably a cost for having actual privacy). I really don't get most cryptocurrencies though, bitcoin was a good POC but it's been surpassed in every way by now.
I just feel like I'm being forced to give up my privacy, and Monero (or similar) is a potential solution to this that doesn't give up the convenience of digital currency. I guess though I'm seeing it from the perspective of a daily payment system, rather than a savings system (I'd pretty much always prefer my savings in an actual bank with the protections therein).
Keeping an absolutely small amount of buffer in stablecoins and swapping it for monero for actual transactions is what I do or just keeping it in monero directly (and that is also because the act of moving the money out is harder and I just buy vps's/domains with it semi-anonymously)
You can just pay fiat to buy monero when you actually have use of it.
Aside from very few use-cases (like dictatorship cases for example) I just think that it doesn't make sense for people to invest life-saving investments for money within crypto perhaps.
I think that one can use crypto for its good sides (anonymous payments) without facing its downsides by buying crypto or just having an insanely small/small buffer and using it when needed rather than life-changing savings.
So crypto is more like user-unknown rather than anonymous. I expect that normally these are about equivalent, but if you run into edge cases the difference could be catastrophic.
You can still choose to generate a proof of transaction to give to someone, which proves that you did make one specific transaction.
Monero is genuinely a really interesting, and frankly ideal as far as I can tell for my purposes, cryptocurrency. It's a shame it's associated with crime because it solves all of my issues with spending digital currency from a privacy and practicality perspective.
Did it take 17 years for you to get there, or was it a while ago and you just say now that you were into crypto 17 years ago?
And I don't mean to be offending here: people routinely take years or decades on similar things. I have been observing that with climate change for 20 years now. And I see many many people who are still in that process. Actually I would argue that most people out there haven't reached the point where we can have the discussion, they seem to be in the "denial" phase still.
Wow... actively detrimental?
It does have speculative value, as well, but I suspect that if you subtract speculative investments, the remaining total market cap of crypto is the value of criminal profit.
Bitcoin’s price volatility also seems no worse than the possibility of losses of cash due to theft.
It would be better if it was dictators stealing from dictators or normal people stealing from normal people, but it's not that at all.
Without cryptocurrency, dictators and criminals would still be able to move money around, it would just be a bit harder for them. For ordinary people it’d be disproportionately harder and more expensive.
X enables good things but X also enables bad things. Freedom of speech enables democracies, but it also enables mass manipulation. By definition any freedom enables any possible action resulting from that freedom. Note that this is not really the case with everything either. The same argument can’t be made (reasonably) about biological weapons for example.
IMO it’s very hard to make a proper argument pro or against crypto in lay terms. It will be a never ending argument. The fundamental is that of centralization vs decentralization and that’s a relevant reasoning despite of what the current incarnation of currencies and behaviors we’ve been seeing.
I don't know about that. What I know is that dictators and criminals have existed since forever and the official estimates put the part of the worldwide GDP tied to criminal activities to between 3% and 5%, which is gigantic.
I don't think Bitcoin is to be blamed for that. If we're worried about dictators and criminals, a good question to ask would be: why do those exists at all? (and that's irrelevant to Bitcoin)
a) blockchain has no technological merit (given that permissioned systems already allowed for robust distributed consensus even in the presence of byzantine nodes back in the late 1990's).
b) the one innovation it brings (permissionlessness) is overwhelmingly negative (who really needs the "no gatekeeper" property?).
c) blockchain is good for nothing except crypto and crypto kittens (due to the oracle problem).
d) crypto is good for nothing except speculation and the circumvention of rules and regulations (which, like it or not, are mostly sensible).
Concretely for example on your point (it "let's some people keep their savings safe from dictatorial countries") - this would be trivial to offer for any bank using 1980's technology (offer an USD account just with username or password, no KYC), but it would also obviously be illegal and be shut down.
Making it harder to shut down - that's the one innovation crypto brings. But shutting it down is what we should be working towards.
And that's just on the cybersecurity front. In terms of economic empowerment, reducing financial friction, enabling greater participation in commerce via stablecoins, it's been a massive boon. There would be totally law-abiding people right now who would have practically no international banking options if it were not for blockchains.
Binance has cold wallets and hot wallets. The hot wallets used to be small and therefore low value, but have grown to be huge, without anyone really paying attention. The hot wallets have much less ceremony attached to moving money, as they are required to move money multiple times a second to track customer inflows/outflows from the system. There are no controls or transaction limits on the hot wallet because it's just a bitcoin wallet (or set of wallets). The hackers got access to the system via the dev machine, found the hot wallet keys in the system (which it requires to function), and simply started draining it of funds, it turned out the hot wallets contained a LOT of funds.
That doesn't require in-depth knowledge of Binance operations, all they need is access to hot wallets via the keys which we know the app would need to have in order to use it.
The lack of controls on the Binance side here is astounding, but it does appear like they had no safeguards, limits or monitoring on the hot wallet in spite of the money involved, or if they did they kicked in too late.
Partly this is a problem with the crypto itself which underlies their system: it's designed to be permissionless and without controls slowing down or reversing transfers.
First 10 minutes: Making a team, 2 guys or gals living a life, talk about it
11-30 minutes: Demoing how bad our security systems are, we need to patch them, day and night, can't keep up
31-40: But we need money, no one is paying our bounties
41-50: How about? They do not tell what it is
51-60: We are going to hack StarLink (they never say that, it is just the logo in the background when they are talking how easy it is to get in and out)
61-70: Dry Run, text scrolling on the screens
71-85: The Hack, split screens, zoom in and outs
86-88: Oh it was Solozzo (Binance) all along, not Starlink.
89:90: Dude fills up his car with the stolen USDT and realizes that as he is sitting in the car
I like the final twist. It would be even better if it turns out the protagonist was manipulated by the real players and he ends up with little reward (because crime doesn't pay, kids!) but with renewed faith in his abilities.
who is Barzini and who is Tattaglia, just so i can call the latter a pimp
1-90: Time needed for bathtub scene to explain this shit
Floodgates were already open somewhere in August 2025 around that time we got Sha1-Hulud and phishing of NPM contributors. Those supply chain attacks were happening all the time since then in smaller and bigger amounts.
Other thing was Mythos, project Glasswing and start of really AI assisted vulnerability research. This on the other hand gave us plenty of new CVE to patch. If some project had in June 2025 0-3 new vulnerabilities, June 2026 it had 13-18.
It is just a rollercoaster in cybersecurity last 2 years already. But Hugging face incident is IMO not that noteworthy if you tried doing any task with AI agent on your own.
Crazy that most of this gets put into North Korean weapons programs.