Binance hasn’t REcovered $6B+, it’s COVERING it (reimbursing customers from company funds). Some was frozen, but Binance is not likely to recover even half.

Bad headlines like this are a big part of why I started covering crypto. Generalist reporters on deadline far too often end up repeating company spin.

#crypto #cryptocurrency #journalism

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io yeah that Reuters falls for this is unforgivable. I mean it’s a technically challenging subject but to explain how a deficit is “recovered” is really much more an accounting 101 issue

@ssiekmann In my experience, a lot of journalists are still pretty unwilling to believe that companies will just lie. And that’s a particularly bad perspective to hold when you’re covering the crypto sector.

@molly0xfff "Covering" aka, passing the cost on to future customers? k...

@molly0xfff Bad headlines like this is why I have avoided crypto like the plague...

@molly0xfff the sentence after the one you highlighted says that $5B of the lost assets are the exact token assets that were lost. Why is that not considered recovered? What am I missing? Not supporting them or saying you're wrong, just confused.

@forced_gump they’re saying that the company funds are held in the same asset that they’re replacing. For example, they already held ETH that they’ll use to replace the stolen ETH, without having to convert it from some other asset.

@molly0xfff @ssiekmann Even worse when it's governments/cops.

@molly0xfff @ssiekmann That's an especially depressing blind spot because it seems like it should be the most familiar part. 'Crypto' likes to exaggerate how much the math really matters; but there are details there that you would expect a finance reporter to need to read up on if they want to get into the weeds. "Shady things happen on quasi-securities markets and people do perjury and fraud sometimes" seem like much more universal concepts.

@fuzzyfuzzyfungus @molly0xfff @ssiekmann Agree. I'd like journalists to get into more detail. Does Binance possess investor's private keys?

@HenryT @fuzzyfuzzyfungus @molly0xfff @ssiekmann Most "investors" don't even understand how cryptocurrency works and don't have possession of their own coins. They just have a pinky-promise from whatever exchange they use that "X amount of coins in the exchange's possession belong to you and are available for you to withdraw" tracked in an ordinary database. It's utter clowncar shit.

@molly0xfff Repeating company spin is policy for most media enterprises. Everything else is too expensive. Thank you for your reporting.

@molly0xfff If frozen has a meaning for cryptocurrency, then it really isn't "decentralised". Does each cryptocurrency come with a sanctions list these days to stop miners processing specific blocks?

@merospit I explained it a bit in a footnote to https://www.citationneeded.news/its-always-north-korea/

@molly0xfff Serious question (I really have no idea about how these companies are set up): where do they get that above of money from? ‘Assets’ of their non-victim customers?

@anotherdaniel They say it’s coming from company funds

@molly0xfff I'd like to know how they can just pull $6+ billion out of their hat like it was nothing. Their reserve was only $1 billion, and what's left is a goodly chunk of change for any company to come up with in cash on short notice.

@tknarr Sure is! And they paid $4.3 billion just a few years ago as a criminal penalty.

@molly0xfff @ssiekmann i remember Izabella Kaminska ranting about this in 2017 JUST KICK THE FUCKIN TYRES GUYS

@molly0xfff
So, I was mistaken in thinking that bitcoin, blockchain based assets, intrinsically included something that would prove ownership.

@guardeddon @molly0xfff you're not mistaken, if people keep crypto in their own wallets that's exactly the case. But most people here aren't using crypto as it was originally envisioned - the entire industry has become "financial markets without those pesky rules" so everyone is just yoloing their money to wallets where the company records the entries on a traditional database in order to get interest etc

@m1ke @guardeddon @molly0xfff yeah. it's important to remember that the brochure version of crypto doesn't fucking work in any practical sense so everyone centralises because then they can get anything one

@molly0xfff I'm having a hard time understanding how they are able to afford such huge loses with no FDIC insurance equivalent.

@Spirit @molly0xfff i suspect a lot of it is "trust me bro, why would i deceive you"

@molly0xfff Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it. Got Goxxed. Not your keys. Not your coins.

@bebadefabo @molly0xfff and with ledger, your keys still not your coins