Binance has paused Bitcoin withdrawals “due to a stuck on-chain transaction”
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> With clients locked out of their bank accounts, mortgage accounts vanishing, small businesses reporting that they could not pay their staff and reports of debit cards ceasing to work, the TSB Bank computer crisis of April 2018 has been one of the worst in recent memory. The bank’s CEO, Paul Pester, admitted in public that the bank was “on its knees” and that it faces a compensation bill likely to run to tens of millions of pounds.
https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/03/case-study-epic-meltd...
I'm guessing Binance doesn't.
To complain, please fill out form 27-B-stroke-six.
"Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet [email] was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
"I took the initiative in creating the Internet." - Al Gore, 3/9/1999
Summary is that he is obviously referring to work around regulation, permitting, and oversight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
Vint Cerf is on record saying "Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development." https://www.theregister.com/2000/10/02/net_builders_kahn_cer...
> As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an “Interagency Network.” Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This “Gore Act” supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.
Though the trucks would, too.
There's giving someone the benefit of the doubt, then there's mocking one of the more corrupt Senators who claimed that an email was delayed by a few days due to what he was essentially calling network congestion, and using that as an argument against network neutrality -- while taking just truckloads of telecom lobbyist cash into his campaigns.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/22/washington/22stevens.html
You could in theory make a sound argument about why the internet is just a series of tubes and make honest arguments about their capacity and the capital investment needed to keep up with the growth in data and increase in bandwidth requirements. Stevens did none of those things.
The mockery from the tech community was out of proportion.
Jack Dorsey has the right idea with Web5, as did the ION folks at Microsoft. A middle ground is a hub-and-spoke model like Polkadot and Cosmos have, but we can get all the way to embarrassingly parallel systems.
The fact that you have to ask how many transactions per second some distributed system can support means there is a bottleneck somewhere. No one asks this about HTTP (Web) or SMTP (email) because the more computers join, the more you can support.
We are building Intercloud, which is the next thing after Blockchain. Here three years ago the CTO of Ripple stopped by our forum to discuss and debate its design:
https://community.intercoin.org/t/intercoin-technology-conse...
Seriously dislike this attitude some folks on HN has about crypto, yes there's massive fraudsters and there's lots of technical issues in this space. But so is most other spaces, fraudsters and criminals didn't happen to suddenly pop up after 2009 you know, they have been here always, everywhere. There's valid uses for crypto and the blockchain, I personally know several folks who were able to move away from war zones with some of their wealth intact thanks to crypto. I know people who send money to their parents back home thanks to crypto, minus the ridiculous fees predatory companies were charging them to send fiat before. Its not all roses sunshine and butterflies, but there's real people who are benefiting from this tech.
[1]https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/canadas-major...
[2]https://www.google.com/search?q=Bank+system+outage&source=ln...
>yes there's massive fraudsters and there's lots of technical issues in this space. But so is most other spaces, fraudsters and criminals didn't happen to suddenly pop up after 2009 you know, they have been here always, everywhere
The disdain of regulation that cryptobros have and the lack of regulation results in a free for all for fraudsters and criminals, compared to regular banking/finances.
Only the main BTC network is affected on Binance, other BTC networks and other coins are fine at the moment. You can convert and withdraw.
Celsius froze withdrawals for non-technical reasons. It reeks of rug pull.
The least generous read is that they’re testing their withdrawals halting system in preparation.
I bet they are doing waay more withdrawals today, many times over their usual volume so they are hitting some capacity issues, and you can't rush these things.
What they probably mean is that they have a transaction that consumes $1000000 on their address and creates two outputs: $100 withdrawal for client A, and $999900 on a "change" output. Later withdrawals have to link to that change output (bitcoin is a directed acyclic graph of inputs-outputs). If that transaction is not confirmed, then later txs also cannot be confirmed and backlog grows.
It is not very typical, I want to make that point. The front is not supposed to fall off.
For cryptos, the law doesn't make this promise for you, and even if they do, crypto being mathematically secure, the courts can't just declare an outcome that cannot be achieved in reality.
Finally, look up executive order 6102[0]. Where by decree due to those "evil" people who where hoarding their savings (as they should) got their gold seized.
The larger issue at hand is that some people believe they are better and smarter than others and therefore, they ought to have more control and say than the ignorant public.
I on the other hand do not know, nor presume to know, what is better or worse for anyone but myself.
Like I said, I'm not a fan of EO 6102 so I'm not necessarily one here arguing the government knows better than everyone else what to do with your wealth. I'm just arguing its not great for society if everyone just digs their own hole to store their acorns indefinitely. Its better for us to actually use our wealth instead of hoarding it away in negatively productive places.
I have a good bit of savings and retirements. Very little of it is in "money". Most if it is in some kind of productive asset actively building wealth not just in my investment but with the rest of society overall. If your retirement is based around holding a lot of paper (money) in a box under your mattress you're gonna have a bad time.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box... / https://archive.ph/DWsWh
The nation state of Venezuela can attest to that
1. This makes them utterly useless, because it turns out it's essentially impossible to transact without trusting a third party with those coins at some point. Unless you have literally mined every coin you've ever used, and never used escrow - the "Code is law" argument as above is a terrible paradigm for social transactions that require some form of trust. We have literal centuries of legal code built to attempt to resolve this precise issue for real tender, and crypto is a shitty, shitty attempt to replace it.
2. It turns out most of the "crypto crowd" isn't in it for using these things as actual currency, they're get-rich-quick fuckwads, and the actual ownership of the coin mattered very little when it was just an investment vehicle they were planning to convert back to dollars at some point.
these altcoin casino companies are ridiculous
The risk of these smaller exchanges is too high for me now.
So Binance's claims of network congestion are "true" on the surface, however there are a few interesting points that lead me to believe that they are acting fishy.
1. Why does Binance not have RBF enabled on their withdrawal transactions?
RBF mean "replace by fee" and it's a way you can mark an unconfirmed transaction as replaceable by a similar transaction that pays higher fees. This is extremely useful when you need to ram a transaction into a block by increasing the fee you're willing to pay miners to mine your transaction. I highly recommend you only use a wallet that allows you to use RBF & to have RBF enabled by default. Of course Binance knows about RBF so why aren't they using it?
CPFP is a little hard to understand if you don't understand that bitcoin transactions are linked together in a graph structure. In short, a bitcoin transaction is a data structure that points to previous transactions to spend. CPFP is when you make a new transaction that spends from your previous unconfirmed transaction (un-mined transaction in the mempool) and over pay in fees to cover the cost of both transactions. This incentivizes miners to include BOTH transaction in the same block. Once again Binance should be doing this. An ideal way to do this would be to batch a bunch of customer withdrawals in a single transaction. This would save a lot on network fees. They would make this big transaction payout a *large* amount back to themselves so that they could CPFP this batched withdrawal transaction.
Binance could easily prioritize their "stuck" withdrawal transaction in their pool's blocks. Of course if they didn't subsidize their miners for this they risk them switching to another pool. One would think that halting withdrawals is an existential risk to their business so temporarily paying their miners to ram transactions through should be worth it?
There are numerous tools at Binance's disposal. Why did they not work/why are they not using them? My hunch is that they don't have all of their ducks in a row & are running a fractional reserve. (this is pure speculation on my part) They likely had a lot of (your) bitcoin tied up in "risk-free" interest accounts (Celsius) and are scrambling to get ahold of bitcoin to give back to customers.
[1] https://mempool.space/ [2] https://mempool.space/mining/pool/binancepool
"Every thing old is new again." - They Might Be Giants