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Comment by TheAlchemist | Hacker News Reader

What's even more funny is that Binance make it look like they are a stable financial institution, and it's thanks to their high standards that they won't acquire FTX. Binance is most probably much more of a fraud than FTX.

Binance doesn't even have physical headquarters in any country in this world - and the reason is that they are being actively investigated or banned almost everywhere.

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I don't know about it, Binance has become a gold standard in crypto exchange business. Here on HN it was always about Coinbase likely because its an American company but for the rest of the world, it's all about Binance and the rest of the world is huge. How huge? About an order of magnitude to Coinbase.

If Binance goes, crypto isn't coming back.

> Binance has become a gold standard in crypto exchange business

This was FTX and Alameda like a week ago.

Not really, FTX was barely in the top 10 for spot, though better in futures. Plus there are DEX and AMM.

FTX was #2 globally. Binance is #1. I'm not sure exactly what ranking mechanism is used to determine that, but that seems to be consensus from a variety of sources.

I've never even heard of FTX and I've been in the crypto space for many years. Binance however was always near the top since it came out. There was one american exchange that used to be nr.1 but became irrelevant after they weren't allowed to serve non-americans anymore. I can't remember the name and it isn't in the top 300 anymore, maybe they had to shut down.

EDIT: I just checked and FTX was only founded 3 years ago

I hate to gatekeep, but I find it pretty impossible that you are "in the crypto space" in any meaningful sense but somehow have not heard of FTX. That's like being "in the crypto space" but not knowing what Ethereum is.

Unfortunately I can echo the crypto space sentiment for as long as such an expression can exist

I’ve never touched Bitfinex/FTX/Binance or any exchange that allows options or leverage. I am a US citizen. Bitstamp Gemini or Coinbase are the only ones I’ll touch

And I’m pissed off that coinbase removed the BTC/USDC trading pair because it had low volume

Why will I not touch them? That’s a long story but I see history repeating itself - fractional reserve Bitcoin banks paying ponzi interest

How about Kraken? They've weathered a few winters.

Kraken I trust but I've never used. For perspective, I've traded roughly a million dollars worth of BTC specifically. Most of that was as the knife was falling after the 2017/2018 ATH.

DCA-ing since then, selloff at the top in 2021, pull my limit sell orders, let it crash.

Doing it again now, kinda hard not to take advantage of deflationary 4-year super cycles

Never heard of FTX either until this whole implosion happened. I’m certainly not super active in crypto, but it seems to me there are worlds between Binance and FTX.

Binance is also incredibly dodgy and will also collapse along with buttoned, tether and multiple other frauds in this space.

It's absolutely possible to have missed FTX. It really isn't that well known or hyped. It's certainly not comparable to Ethereum....

FTX was actually based out of a headquarters and wasn’t on the run from governments.

And all the while was actually committing fraud. Pays to pay to play.

mtgox was bigger too. There are other reasons for a crypto winter like high interest rates and a newly credible us central bank. Rest of the world is not bigger when it comes to non residential real estate: private equity, venture, tech, finance.

MtGox had over 80% of volume during its peak.

However there wasn’t really any competition. Bitstamp and handful of crap exchanges. Coinbase was an OTC frontend.

speaking of mtgox, where's a good place to sell my MtG cards now?

Somewhat ironic that popular MtG podcast Limited Resources is sponsored by FTX (and popular card marketplace Channel Fireball).

in Europe, cardmarket.com is very good.

Europe is usually CardMarket. In the US TCGPlayer seems the most popular with CardKingdom behind them. I've used both TCGPlayer and CardKingdom on the buy side without issues, but you can also list cards for sale (no idea what the process is like).

If you want to get maximum value in exchange for doing more legwork and probably assuming more risk, Ebay or Facebook groups.

Correct until the last I think. Every exchange is looking international because they know what you’re saying too. If Binance goes, there’s a mix of enough international toeholds from regulated exchanges and enough defi to keep the markets live.

All exchanges suffer the same fate. There is just no reason for exchanges to be solvent. The industry is unregulated and there is too much money to be made. Binace will go. Coinbase will go.

I believe "crypto" will always be around. It's an MLM for the digital age. It will always be nonsense.

Bitcoin, however, I do believe is different.

Binance does have significantly lower trading fees than coinbase - so while they do have about 8x the trade volume, it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison, because lower fees mean tighter spreads and more money bouncing around within the system per unit of (deposit -> withdrawal in different currency)

So, I'm not sure "an order of magnitude larger" is necessarily an accurate description. Wouldn't say it's inaccurate either, but just missing some nuance.

> If Binance goes, crypto isn't coming back

Interesting statement for a decentralized asset

What decentralised asset?

Sorry, crypto.

I don’t know much about the topic and sometimes I get confused with the concepts crypto, currency, non fungible, token and I call it asset asset to generalize. So, what makes a crypto to be a crypto?

That's just the label, nothing decentralised is left. See, as it turns out, to trade you need to find people and people are found in central locations. Okay, there are still many exchanges but this is mostly incidental and it makes sense to end up with single exchange eventually.

I'm enjoying the irony that practical crypto could not possibly be less like an decentralised peer-to-peer system for exchanging value if it tried to be.

As you soon as someone creates an exchange - and especially as soon as they start packaging funds into absolutely any kind of financial instrument/service - they've effectively reinvented deregulated banking with no deposit protection and extra risk.

and additionally who run these exchange has no economical background whatsoever. Like an ignorant trying to reinvent the wheel into a squared one and poaching it as a new invention.

But is "decentralized"...

Don't let the schadenfreude and confirmation bias get to you. Centralized exchanges never had anything to do with the value proposition of cryptocurrency. And trading on them is just speculation with no relation to crypto. It's what gets views in the press, though.

Whenever news like these occur there is always a bunch of "I knew it would all fall down" self-validation comments in HN. Yet it really doesn't fall down, after over a decade. Perhaps it's time to consider that you are looking at the wrong thing and barking at the wrong tree.

Of all these collapses there is 0 decentralized exchanges (i.e. on-chain) involved. Pretty much because they can't, by design. That's the value proposition. Unstoppable exchanges, transparent, publicly verifiable, highest availability.

What you have seen all this year is more and more validation that centralized finance is problematic by design (3AC, Celsius, BlockFi, FTX...) while decentralized finance comes unscathed (Uniswap, Aave, Curve, MakerDAO...).

It’s interesting because it is wrong. MtGox had far larger dominance in crypto trading than Binance, flopped significantly, and it didn’t prevent crypto from coming back.

In dollar amounts it was a tiny tiny exchange though

If Binance goes, cryptocurrency is certainly coming back.

Also, cryptography isn’t going anywhere.

cryptography was not invented for cryptocurrency, I don't understand why it should go anywhere lol

It has many applications far beyond cryptos lol

I was lamenting that crypto means cryptocurrency instead of cryptography now.

^this ... The whole space seems like a mirage

It seems like it because it is.

No regulations, no protections, only idiots "invest" in this garbage.

It's just one scam after another

The only way to make a buck is for someone else to lose a buck. There's nothing else in the exchange here so it's just perverse.

But I wouldn't call people idiots that invest but uninformed and/or desperate and/or uncaring. If someone has an extra $1000 in the bank they think what's the worst that can happen? It's a mistake but you can see how these exchanges are worth billions all of a sudden and the dollars being pulled in to make these billionaires have to come from someone else.

"Not your keys not your coins". I wonder how people can trust those CEX to store their funds. Private keys should be hosted on a cold wallet, period.

They are banned mainly because they like to skirt KYC and similar regulations. It doesn't mean their financial engineering is poor. Those two issues are completely orthogonal.

Binance KYC's process is a joke. I've been using them for years, suddenly they needed more KYC and their automated process failed me more than 4 times in couple of months.

Glad they failed me though, life turned out pretty great without me gambling on meme coins.

The question in my mind with Binance is how reliant they are on BTC. The non-BNB part of their SAFU (a pair of wallets they call an emergency insurance fund) is roughly half BTC, the other half being BUSD which I wouldn't 100% trust if Binance was in trouble. Could they survive a FTX-style panic if BTC had dropped below $10k? I hope so, at least.

BUSD is issued not by Binance, but by Paxos that is regulated in the state of New York under BitLicense.

It is one of the toughest licenses to get in the world, so I would be surprised if BUSD somehow collapses.

Ah, if only that were true! Your claim smelled funny, so I looked it up:

https://paxos.com/2022/04/07/busd-issued-by-paxos-on-ethereu...

Tl;Dr: Paxos issues something called BUSD on Ethereum, which is regulated. Binance issues something that's kinda sorta related but not really, that's fully unregulated, only usable in their private chain, ALSO called BUSD, that is just monopoly money. They happen to have the same name, but hey, you fell for it!