alt Hacker NewsSo was Mt Gox. No lessons were learned. No lessons will be learned this time.
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People got out of crypto after the Mt Gox thing. The ones who stayed accepted the risk.
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.
The lession learned is: Tether now exists as a casino chip central bank. They can just freeze and print more and provide a backstop to the major CEXs.
Of course, Tether runs completely counter to any of the idealistic claims about crypto.
Well I've learnt my lesson after having lost 3 bitcoins as a student on Mt gox I finished writing my thesis on blockchain technology and then never touched crypto again.
How do you prevent it though? My understanding is that it’s genuinely hard in crypto. Any automated access control must be baked into smart contracts, which are very limited in terms of the logic they can implement (in practice - in theory Solidity is Turing complete Id imagine).
A bank API can be 10-100s+ kloc if they need that to implement access controls.
Mt Gox was widely reckoned to be a clown show long before they got hacked (it was originally a Magic the Gathering trading site for chrissake).
Binance's reputation is hardly impeccable, but by crypto standards they're kinda sorta the adults in the room. Then again, so was FTX.
To put things in perspective, I used to dunk on crypto because of how dysfunctional and how people kept losing money in scams, hacks, or even by accident.
I no longer dunk on crypto.
Not because crypto got better, but because the joke got old. I got tired of dunking on it.
The difference is that Bittance loses only a few percent of their reserves and the dance continues. Gdox did ~70% of the daily volume for crypto and wrecked the entire ecosystem when they got 100% pwned. Maybe they've learned something!