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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

> We strongly advise against depositing

Wait, withdrawls are completely frozen and the company is done for, but they are still accepting deposits?!

I'm not familiar with any of the listed currencies, but in a properly-designed cryptocurrency a deposit to a given public key is just any transaction[0] that includes a output to that public key. There's no such thing as accepting or not accepting deposits, at most they could actively refund them, which bankruptcy presumably prevents them from doing.

IOW, they're saying: "If you give us money, we will (/may) be forced to give it to our creditors rather than back to you, so don't do that.".

0: IE, a message published by Alice to the effect of "[Alice's public key] gives [Bob's public key] X [coin]s. [Alice's signature for this message]", published on the distributed ledger. Note that Alice can create and publish such a message without any input from Bob.

They've at least turned off signups.

There are still people who believe. This is the top comment on FTX on Coinmarketcap, posted yesterday:

$FTT -- Take a screenshot of this post

1. Someone is going to buy out FTX and this exchange is not shutting down. By someone I mean Elon Musk kind of people.

2. No. FTT isn't going to wipeout if we talk about the fall, most of the cryptos have all fallen significantly. So a crypto going down from $24 to $3 doesn't mean the are going out for good.

3. $8 Billion Dollars as some here are fidgeting to understand isn't a large number if you look at the entire market cap of the crypto sitting at $800 Billion and $3 Trillion sometime back.

There are people who truly believe. And there are those who exploit that belief.

So sad, it’s like the people who sell their shoes for one more bet at the track..

The thing is, if there are enough believers they will validate each other in the short term by re-inflating the hype bubble

This sound suspiciously close to what has happened by getting so many retail traders into the market in the last few years.

I don’t think it’s possible to stop someone from depositing something into a wallet/key. That’s an issue with things like doxxing or spreading humiliating media of someone. You can push anything via the protocols to any address.

How would they be able to stop people making deposits?

By no more accepting deposits?

I don’t think you have a choice to accept a deposit or not, do you? You can’t stop people sending you coins. And sending them back costs you money so you wouldn’t do that.

What address do you think people would send to? You can't send to some random address that you think is owned by an exchange and have it show up in your account. They give you an address to send to when you say you want to make a deposit. How did you think it worked?

many other exchanges and wallets force users to store an address book of addresses associated with them. this user experience will result in deposits to their old addresses at FTX. there is nothing FTX can do to prevent that.

They can send it back just as easily

yes, could. in practice even functioning exchanges opt not to bother. it is a poor practice we should call out, this is definitely something that a regulatory framework could address and carve out procedures for. (people could do spam attacks, so there is a line on how much to bother)

Once there are regulations that are penned and enforced by a centralised authority what is the use of cryptocurrency?

running and using an exchange to custody assets is entirely optional and also not the point of cryptocurrency

the regulations apply to people that chose to do that and don't apply to people that use cryptocurrency

Most users will have stored their deposit addresses in other exchanges and wallets rather than look them up and enter them each time.

> They give you an address to send to when you say you want to make a deposit. How did you think it worked?

And then people can keep sending to the same address. The way crypto works there’s no way to stop someone doing that I’m afraid - just how it works.

They could send it back (spending money) but you can’t stop it being sent.

They can either send it back or add it to their ledger. You are conflating sending to an address with an exchange keeping a balance. A cryptocurrency and an exchange are two very separate things.

I can transfer cryptocurrency to any address of yours right now, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to prevent it.

Hadn't really thought about it before. But sounds like a good way to frame someone for a crime.

You can even add turbocash to the mix lol

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