My intuition is saying: the system arose naturally and intelligently over a long period of time, and even with its flaws has a lot of "load bearing legacy code" that few people understand, and new "engineers" think they'll just rewrite the whole thing from scratch and delete the "junk DNA" to use another metaphor. A little time passes and the beautiful clean rewrite collapses because of "totally unforeseeable circumstances" and the "old broken legacy system" is used to save the day. Somewhere a senior "monetary engineer" rolls over in his grave...

Any recommendations for books? Or even podcasts?

I don't have zero understanding. It sounds like you have a deeper understanding than I do.

<< one cannot seriously think that the way to fix things is to reimplement everything from scratch in a wild west of shady unaccountable operators

One absolutely can, but I think things have to first get sufficiently difficult for ordinary folks to even notice. Fortunately ( sarcasm tag here for otherwise perfectly normal individuals, who may be missing some caffeine in their organism ), given that the war is coming along with various related national security restrictions, we may soon be able to experience that particular slice of fun.

Regulations provide recourse if fiat or securities are stolen. Ownership is not possession, but shared agreement via legal frameworks.

Crypto is Chesterton's Fence at scale collectively.

(cybersecurity and risk management consultant to traditional financial services firms, thoughts and opinions always my own)

If you want to quick primer to read tonight I suggest “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp by Radford”. Will be free download.

That was already proven false after ETH fork on 2016-07-20, that rolled back funds stolen in DAO hack.

Centralized decentralization

Well, Tether was started by an Epstein friend and first handled by the CIA Deltec bank in the Caribbean. Now it is handled by Lutnick's Cantor & Fitzgerald and is in Bukele's El Salvador.

Don't mess with Tether, it is practically state owned.

Doesn't apply for USDT and USDC which can freeze funds with a court order.

And like the DAO hack on Ethereum showed, if most people who run blockchain software decide that something never happened, they can revert transactions that way.

The idiots that wanted no takebacks are the same ones who lacked the critical thinking ability to foresee this exact situation.

The value in USDT and USDC comes from the fact that they can (theoretically) be redeemed for real US dollars. One thing the issuers can do is announce "we will never accept redemption requests for these particular stolen coins", making them more or less worthless.

That hasn't been true for years.

Back in 2016 a then-huge Ethereum smart contract called "The DAO" [1] had a loophole that let an attacker extract a third of all the funds.

But a lot of the developers and miners had either lost money themselves, or had friends who'd lost money, or felt the embarrassing incident was devaluing their own Ethereum holdings. So they decided to allow takesies-backsies.

There's probably a philosophical lesson there about power and who the rules really apply to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO

It’s always been that the voters determine reality.

Turns out that even crypto's rules only apply if you're poor.

Most crypto is "majority rules" where the majority is either "majority of the currency" (proof of stake) or "majority of the mining power" (proof of work).

In this case, iFinex has the explicit ability to freeze funds in Tether.

So much for anti-centralization.

If your crypto was stolen in this, atleast you can rest assured that your money will be put to good use. In North Korea that is, by the military. I'm sure at this point Kim himself has Bitcoin merchandise with how often they make massive heists

> 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?

Frozen? What are they going to do, fork the blockchain?

I thought crypto was built specifically to prevent these 'freezing' actions? wtf

That doesn't sound very decentralised.

There are live dealers with shoes of real cards with most online crypto cainos. Though, who knows if they are cheating somehow. My point was, the attacker doesn't have to bet the entire deposit. Just make it seem like they are playing.

To be fair, USDC & USDT are centralized by Circle and Tether respectively, and they can freeze funds.

Less true for ETH (though in the past it forked after DAO hack to revert the txns), and I think never for BTC / XMR.

> Changpeng Zhao (CZ), former CEO of Binance, tweeted "Funds are safe"

Seems like the issue here is that he became former CEO. Funds are not safu without him...

The insurance fund is not for covering hacks.

Binance is making so much money, covering this hack is peanuts for them.

There are lots of measures in place at these exchanges - the rub is that cold storage is by design slow. To service withdrawal requests in a timely fashion a percent is kept “warm” or hot and used to process withdrawals. Usually this is where the leaks happen.

So 3% yearly Inflation? The target is 2% so not too bad. You don’t want your actual currency to gain value just by waiting.

>$1 in 2008 is worth $1.56 today

That's an odd way of phrasing it, since the $1 is still worth $1, and a naive reading would make you think it's "worth more" when the buying power has actually reduced.

Wouldn't it be clearer to say $1 today only buys you 64% of what you could have bought in 2008.

Oh no? Moneymaking scams? Wait till you hear how many children israel has killed in the last few years

Could be Claude!

Curious if this finally pops tether. I kinda doubt it, but to my very mild research on the subject I feel like binance was a big part of the equation. Of course so long as the market exists it'll need a stable, and it's got the inertia, so maybe it just won't matter.