The name of the fund was originally inspired by this meme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DelF6zEHXpE

FWIW, at the end of every crypto bear market, a CEX usually blows up (eg FTX)...

And decreasing, since BTC is dropping as we speak. Always a good idea to hedge a currency with the currency itsself

Depends on what you’re insuring, no? For theft, it actually makes senses, right? That way, you’re insuring a constant number of coins, no matter what the market is doing. If you’re insurance currency would tank during a bitcoin heist, you would lose the insurance effect.

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

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

I downloaded Binance's self published market data (https://data.binance.vision/), calculated spot and futures volume for the past year, and then applied their *highest fee tier* on both sides of the volume (for every $1 traded, they generate a fee on the taker and the maker. the fee rate is asymmetrical).

Spot revenue worked out to $7.6B USD, perps revenue worked out to $13.8B

This is an upper bound on the fees charged on volume. Binance also scams their users with a b-book, has DMM deals, etc.

I don't want to get into all that today.

But the final result is that they print somewhere in the range of $20B per year on fees. I guess CZ also has huge stockpiles of BTC and stuff. A 1% rise in BTC price probably means more for them than their actual fees, LOL.

All this to say, I think $5.6B significantly hurts.

See Google's stock price today. Their ads business slowed down a bit, and their stock tanked 10%. If binance was publicly traded, I imagine a similar affect would be demonstrated on their price.

- 971.15M USDT (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0x7baba482077843514d9c72bac0110ba091...

- 823M USDC (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0xc954c86f118e8e410e6a3eb9e3b38ff4a9...

- 312.73M USDT (Tron): https://tronscan.org/#/transaction/71b0ec0fe873fe820c37cc3ec...

- 175M USDT (Ethereum): https://etherscan.io/tx/0x0c07a5e428ce233a3bcb40f257ad899594...

Given things like the ledger hardware attack[1] I think the time indexed risk of using a centralized exchange is probably lower than doing self-custody.

I understand that many people do self-custody for philosophical reasons, but I think trying to disguise this as a security decision ("If your crypto was stolen in this, it wasn't your crypto.") is arguable at best.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/70f69253-6017-4259-95c9-48bf0e088...

There apparently is no such thing as “your crypto” with how many security problems there are.

Tbh the biggest problem is platforms deciding you’re buying drugs because you purchase and transfer out (thanks Venmo)

An old laptop with the wifi card taken out is more transparent and auditable. It just runs the ordinary open source code

But I just keep all my funds in a hot wallet, no multisig. And if I get hacked I lose it all. I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked. The risk of losing cryptocurrency will encourage security advances across the whole ecosystem. I think I will set up multisig eventually

> I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked.

So you proposed a way to be more secure, only to discard it yourself in favor of “just having good security”?

A paper wallet works as well

A hardware wallet is just a tradeoff between convenience and an extra security risk

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

In the literal sense, people have been forcing their philosophy on other people for at least as long as we’ve had societies, so I assume it’s not that.

Invent Notion then keep adding features enterprise customers want until you're re-inventing JIRA/Confluence

Who left this stupid fence here?

ETA: it's a joke because the original saying is "those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"

That's 80% of the thing right there.

Some people (particularly criminals and oligarchs) might not like them, but most of the structures around financial movements exist for very practical reasons, often stemming from the will to uphold the rule of law. Obviously nothing is perfect (the US have an excessive level of control, VISA/Mastercard are de-facto monopolies, etc etc), but 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.

It's always been like this. Which is why financial systems blow up and/or collapse regularly.

Any recommendations for books? Or even podcasts?

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

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510289/planet-money/

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.

Isn't that a pretty integral part of the blockchain? 51% attacks were even featured on the HBO show Silicon Valley.

Unless the house is monero or something and you want a lifetime supply of drugs.

Any rules can and have been changed by those with leverage to do so (be that exchanges, miners or devs), in the end any system like this storing value is captured and controlled.

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

- was conducted from his gaming rig

- about Deltec's (and therefore Tether's) money movements being several times larger than all the banking in their country was due to people misunderstanding the country's two banking licenses, the names of which HE "couldn't remember right now" (the Deputy CEO of a bank who can't remember the name of the banking licenses where they operate?!?), and he "wasn't sure which [banking license] the bank has, but we might (emphasis mine) have both"

- oh yeah, said Deputy CEO's "resume": 33 years old, by his LinkedIn claimed to have graduated HEC Lausanne in Switzerland with a Master of Science at the age of 15... celebrating his graduation by immediately being named Professor of Finance at a university in Lebanon. While dividing his spare time between running hedge funds in Switzerland (called Indepedance [sic] Weath [sic] Management) and uhh... Jacksonville, FL.

Once CNBC's viewers started ridiculing and questioning both Deltec Bank and Tether and when that looked hilariously bad, they removed his info from the bank's website.

And when that looked bad, they added it back.

And when that looked bad, they removed the bank's whole website, and replaced it with a broken WP template with no working links.

Hey, look, several years after that, go to Deltec's website. "Ultra sophisticated private banking" running on a different WordPress site. "Client login"? "This site can’t be reached Check if there is a typo in ebanking.deltecbank.com. DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NXDOMAIN". Just as has been the case for years.

... and then the entire bank website was replaced with a low-effort WordPress template. Their online banking was Javascript hard coded to refuse all login attempts.

"Sounds legit to me", said the crypto bros. "Fuck the regulatory system. This is the new era."

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

Am I missing something here? Seems like a waste of time

And then there are centrally issued and controlled coins on private, permissioned ledgers a.k.a. databases. But most cryptobros never cared about the technology nor the political goal, so anything can be called a cryptocurrency as long as it's a medium for gambling and speculation outside the regulated financial framework.

Now the traditional banking system is basically rebuilt in crypto. The banks are busy the exchanges. The EU even talk about making it illegal to store money in your own wallet.

How does freezing crypto work in this context?

Keys? Hahaha, still not your crypto.

Like the whole point of crypto to me I money without central governance.

I never liked stable coins or the concept of it and it’s mainly a huge fraud, so freezing just adds on top.

So crypto + legal company means not really following bitcoin ideology anymore

Eventually, possibly within my lifetime, a Big Mac meal is going to cost $50.

Is the problem the number or the concept?

Your salary should also go up so the only thing affected is the cash you hold. Would it be better if the currency would be version-bumped every 10 years and rescaled to remove the inflation?

I am curious if I’ll live long enough to see the United States issue higher denomination bank notes again.

The existence of harder forms of money (gold, bitcoin, etc) is an expected consequence of how the system is designed, and not in any way a subversion of it. Somehow, both sides seem to miss this point.

> You might not, I do.

Then you don't want a currency. For something to be money it needs to (among other things) be a medium of exchange, and nobody really wants to trade away a thing today if they know it will be more valuable tomorrow.

The bond seller is intending to put it to productive use to generate the yield.

This differs from deflation where people will (more the before) actually sit on money and not buy bonds. Then people who need liquidity cannot get it as the money supply drys up.

SPY has outperformed BTC over the last 5 years, and with far less volatility.

This is mathematically provable:

1. A dollar in 2008 could buy 1/14tn of the value created by the US economy (the GDP) in 2008.

2. A dollar today can only by 1/32tn of the value created by the economy in 2025.

It's obvious a 2025-2026 dollar is worth less than a 2008 dollar. That's just math.

But. A dollar in 2008 could buy 230% more of the economy than it can today. And you say its purchasing power has only eroded 64%. That means the dollar is actually worth more today, compared to the size of the economy it's in. Weird, I know.

Convenient date to pick there.

> which of those assets would you have preferred to own and why?

NVDA.

It's a productive use of resources, not a last-fool-standing pyramid scheme.

To be fair bitcoin’s initial years were extraordinary. By any metric you use though the rate of increase has clearly slowed.

[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki/post/3mz27m5slcc2o

https://ohey.ca/research/polymarket-debugbear-wallet-drainer...

https://x.com/DebugBear/status/2115866496643535293

As of now, DebugBear webite has been taken offline: https://www.debugbear.com/

And they just posted on Twitter: https://x.com/DebugBear/status/2115930681398239278

The Israelis don't have any problem acquiring hard currency. North Korea does, and has an established MO of stealing crypto and running online moneymaking scams like ransomware.

This fits the NK MO to a T. It does not fit Israeli intelligence activity. Your claim rings hollow without any support.

Of all the reasons to demonize a government, that seems like a pretty good one. Why the snark?

It’s definitely true that crimes against other countries are more frowned upon than crimes against one’s own people. Which doesn’t seem right to me at all. People are people and victims are victims whether it’s their own government or someone else’s. Hence why I’m confused about the snark. This seems like an instance where ugly norms are being broken for a good reason and it’s being treated like hypocrisy.

Setting aside the genocide, it is particularly funny at a time when Western governments are oppressing their own by crushing dissent on Israel, but I don’t see the same outrage there.

I don’t understand what you mean about faux concern only lasting as long as the media says. North Korea is, as you say, evergreen. And I’m pretty sure it’s based on how awful that government is, not on “the media” telling us to hate them.

The point of a cold wallet is to keep the private key physically offline. That way you know it cannot be stolen by electronic means, because the physical device containing the key needed to authorize transactions is locked up and not powered on. Then you only power it on during very specific, audited times and conditions when it's needed to fund the hot wallet, which does all the actual automated trading and transfers.

GP's point is to have all incoming transactions to an exchange go to a cold wallet, which becomes a one-way sink, and then periodically the exchange powers up the cold wallet to sign transactions transferring assets to the hot wallet, which then funds all outgoing transactions. This isn't a bad architecture, though I'm not sure it'd save all that much here.

Then when things calm down you go and find ... the keys under the birdbath are lost, and you're fucked in a different way.

But at least it might work.

[1] https://x.com/CZ_BINANCE/STATUS/2115915423174853077

There is selection bias in play now. The remaining people are naturally more risk tolerant. So I agree this second time around, no lessons will be learned.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50224916

Need to get better in prompting

I bet they are celebrating.

Congratulations. Nice haul.

Same goes with startup banks - if you exceed FDIC limits, make sure the difference is in a large institutional bank. Nearly learned this one the hard way.

Trying to save a few basis points in txn fees in very volatile industries comes at a huge risk premium

https://nypost.com/2025/11/25/us-news/sam-altmans-ex-boyfrie...

idk to me that just seems intuitively like something you'd need to have to be credible? Cold is a different story...but how can hot not be covered?

I can't understand how you could let this happen. If they stored everything in fat hot wallets, that just seems like a recipe for disaster. Especially with the "features" of crypto. Math for the most part, doesn't care about your feelings, or money for that matter.

I'd be really curious to know what their security architecture was.

Bitcoin has no such concept.

When so much money is at stake (almost) everyone will have a price including insiders.

P.S. If you're really paranoid don't use a network-connected printer.

What are the countermeasures, is something frozen blocked marked as invalid?

I'm completely ignorant on anything related to cryptocurrencies.

fundsu were not in fact safu

Current largest was ~1B

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bybit

What I never get is how they plan of converting the stolen crypto to cash eventually. No exchanges are gonna take the coins.

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

Losing $5b is indeed a potential security issue.

Not a serious store of value.

Better general security yes, but the incentive to hack them is quite large and now more hackers have the ability to pull it off.

Same with any purpose built wallet you didn't make yourself: https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2026/10/23/ledge...

> It does look like a hack on Binance. Appreciate the quick freeze from Tether (~$971m) and Circle (~$823m).