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I mean fourth possibility is that binance is solvent right? I’m not assigning probabilities to any of them but taking their insolvency as a foregone conclusion

I mean fourth possibility is that binance is solvent right? I’m not assigning probabilities to any of them but taking their insolvency as a foregone conclusion seems pretty incorrect?

iudqnolq 4y ago
Assuming rational actors I can't see any reason to evade audits for years, even after litigation, unless the result of the audit would be bad.
- xvector 4y ago
  See Tether. Crypto is just a massive house of cards that will collapse and drag the economy with it.
  - WalterSear 4y ago
    It's too small. It's entire, and arguably entirely fantastical market cap is still smaller than Apple.
    - birracerveza 4y ago
      Yeah, but it makes for a fantastic scapegoat.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Scapegoat for what excatly?
        johnnymorgan 4y ago
        The economy collapsing...it's the first comment in this thread for context.
        hef19898 4y ago
        I thought Germany's dependency on Russian gas was the reason this time?
        birracerveza 4y ago
        It depends on how the media wants to spin it. My point was, even if the whole crypto ecosystem went to zero right now, the effects on the economy at large would be negligible. However, it would be the perfect scapegoat to finally crash the economy with no survivors. The media would not have a problem with just blaming it all on crypto: as you can see here, people are already very eager to do so! No other explanation needed to convince the masses!
        hef19898 4y ago
        Whom exactly would want to crash the whole economy?
        birracerveza 4y ago
        You are aware that the whole economy is a house of cards, right? Not just crypto? It is bound to crash down after the last decades of reckless policies and all-around fuckery going on. So why not do this "cleansing" while blaming it all on an already hated scapegoat? It doesn't matter if it's not real nor realistic, what matters is the narrative, which I'm sure everyone ITT will gladly lap up!
    - mbesto 4y ago
      > arguably entirely fantastical market cap The idea of using market cap as a frame of reference for crypto needs to die. There are much stricter controls about how a company issues more stock (and thus can inflate or deflate the price) than how a cryptocurrency issues more coins. Also, cryptocurrency market caps are denominated as an exchange of <insert your country> fiat, whereas a company's market cap is in the fiat in which the company is actually sourced (e.g. NASDAQ). You just can't compare the two.
  - deepsun 4y ago
    Crypto (coins, not graphy), is a superteeeny amount of "economy". Most serious finance players avoided doing anything serious with crypto mostly because it's just a very small market for them. Typical investment bank moves more money per day, than the whole cryptocurrency market is worth.
- cma 4y ago
  Maybe an audit shows they are too solvent, only achievable with profits from a prior leverage of protected customer funds that they don't want to reveal. Say with Tether instead, if they invested in junky stuff but none of it went bust and they made way more than investing in t-bills or whatever they promised, then they may not want an audit to reveal they have 3X more than enough to cover outstanding tether, something t-bills couldn't have achieved.
- heartbeats 4y ago
  Surely, the following two statements can be true at the same time? 1. Binance is run by criminals and all sorts of people would go to jail if anyone looked at their books. 2. Binance is solvent. Not saying this is the case, but there's many other reasons for a crypto firm to be shady than their insolvency.
- amluto 4y ago
  (Not an audit expert) I can imagine that a full audit would uncover dangerous skeletons in the closet that don’t necessarily imply insolvency. At the very least, Binance made no secret of using extremely dubious banking relationships to collect money from its clients.
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    Also not an audit expert, but my understanding is that they've released an audited point-in-time snapshot of their bank accounts. The problem is that there are various ways to make that number go up for an instant, so people want (amoung other things) the value of their bank accounts over a longer period. Audits aren't all-or-nothing, they've already paid an auditing firm to do a custom audit they designed. They could have made that audit much better without going into what you're mentioning.
Mistletoe 4y ago
While we can’t be sure of the minutiae of their assets we can be sure due to the beauty of the blockchain that they own an incredible amount of Bitcoin. https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.... #1, 5, 10… Same thing for Ethereum. https://etherscan.io/accounts https://etherscan.io/accounts This is very far from FTX in my opinion. Billion and billions of dollars of crypto in wallets we can see. And these are just the ones we know of.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  We know they hold a lot. That’s not the same thing as owning. The attestations Tether and Binance like to call audits are like printing off your house's appraised value of $1M. Real audits are the sort of thing that reveal you're underwater on its mortgage and leveraged its value to borrow another $1M to buy a pile of Beanie Babies.

I mean fourth possibility is that binance is solvent right? I’m not assigning probabilities to any of them but taking their insolvency as a foregone conclusion seems pretty incorrect?

iudqnolq 4y ago

Assuming rational actors I can't see any reason to evade audits for years, even after litigation, unless the result of the audit would be bad.

xvector 4y ago
See Tether. Crypto is just a massive house of cards that will collapse and drag the economy with it.
- WalterSear 4y ago
  It's too small. It's entire, and arguably entirely fantastical market cap is still smaller than Apple.
  - birracerveza 4y ago
    Yeah, but it makes for a fantastic scapegoat.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Scapegoat for what excatly?
      - johnnymorgan 4y ago
        The economy collapsing...it's the first comment in this thread for context.
        hef19898 4y ago
        I thought Germany's dependency on Russian gas was the reason this time?
        birracerveza 4y ago
        It depends on how the media wants to spin it. My point was, even if the whole crypto ecosystem went to zero right now, the effects on the economy at large would be negligible. However, it would be the perfect scapegoat to finally crash the economy with no survivors. The media would not have a problem with just blaming it all on crypto: as you can see here, people are already very eager to do so! No other explanation needed to convince the masses!
        hef19898 4y ago
        Whom exactly would want to crash the whole economy?
        birracerveza 4y ago
        You are aware that the whole economy is a house of cards, right? Not just crypto? It is bound to crash down after the last decades of reckless policies and all-around fuckery going on. So why not do this "cleansing" while blaming it all on an already hated scapegoat? It doesn't matter if it's not real nor realistic, what matters is the narrative, which I'm sure everyone ITT will gladly lap up!
  - mbesto 4y ago
    > arguably entirely fantastical market cap The idea of using market cap as a frame of reference for crypto needs to die. There are much stricter controls about how a company issues more stock (and thus can inflate or deflate the price) than how a cryptocurrency issues more coins. Also, cryptocurrency market caps are denominated as an exchange of <insert your country> fiat, whereas a company's market cap is in the fiat in which the company is actually sourced (e.g. NASDAQ). You just can't compare the two.
- deepsun 4y ago
  Crypto (coins, not graphy), is a superteeeny amount of "economy". Most serious finance players avoided doing anything serious with crypto mostly because it's just a very small market for them. Typical investment bank moves more money per day, than the whole cryptocurrency market is worth.
cma 4y ago
Maybe an audit shows they are too solvent, only achievable with profits from a prior leverage of protected customer funds that they don't want to reveal. Say with Tether instead, if they invested in junky stuff but none of it went bust and they made way more than investing in t-bills or whatever they promised, then they may not want an audit to reveal they have 3X more than enough to cover outstanding tether, something t-bills couldn't have achieved.
heartbeats 4y ago
Surely, the following two statements can be true at the same time? 1. Binance is run by criminals and all sorts of people would go to jail if anyone looked at their books. 2. Binance is solvent. Not saying this is the case, but there's many other reasons for a crypto firm to be shady than their insolvency.
amluto 4y ago
(Not an audit expert) I can imagine that a full audit would uncover dangerous skeletons in the closet that don’t necessarily imply insolvency. At the very least, Binance made no secret of using extremely dubious banking relationships to collect money from its clients.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  Also not an audit expert, but my understanding is that they've released an audited point-in-time snapshot of their bank accounts. The problem is that there are various ways to make that number go up for an instant, so people want (amoung other things) the value of their bank accounts over a longer period. Audits aren't all-or-nothing, they've already paid an auditing firm to do a custom audit they designed. They could have made that audit much better without going into what you're mentioning.

Mistletoe 4y ago

While we can’t be sure of the minutiae of their assets we can be sure due to the beauty of the blockchain that they own an incredible amount of Bitcoin. https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.html https://bitinfocharts.com/top-100-richest-bitcoin-addresses.... #1, 5, 10… Same thing for Ethereum. https://etherscan.io/accounts https://etherscan.io/accounts This is very far from FTX in my opinion. Billion and billions of dollars of crypto in wallets we can see. And these are just the ones we know of.

ceejayoz 4y ago
We know they hold a lot. That’s not the same thing as owning. The attestations Tether and Binance like to call audits are like printing off your house's appraised value of $1M. Real audits are the sort of thing that reveal you're underwater on its mortgage and leveraged its value to borrow another $1M to buy a pile of Beanie Babies.