There are many many uses that aren't camping. People work in places with no cell or wifi doing jobs that require driving or walking or helicoptering in. Then they want access to data to look something up. Geology / oil industry for example.
I've done every kind of camping, all over the world. I take a little Garmin puck with me to ensure I'm never ever stranded in an emergency. I suspect you don't actually go camping.
Agreed. I live in NZ where the rule of thumb is to keep a PLB on your person at all times and time from pulling the PLB to having a SAR helicopter overhead can be as low as two hours (it can be significantly longer depending on weather).
Most people I know who spend significant time outdoors here have one and keep it on our person whenever we're on something more intense than a well marked day hike. This is true of everybody I know from those of us who do 2-3 night backpacking trips between marked campsites to backcountry skiing to mountaineering. It's one of the first things that is advised to tourists here is to borrow one from a gear shop or visitor centre before going into the backcountry.
Here at least it is viewed as common sense safety on the same level as carrying layers and water.
Do you have data on this? I suspect opinions on this are over the map, and I doubt any of us have enough information to claim that someone else’s opinion on camping is rare.
I assumed we were talking about the moral argument. Is stealing still stealing if there is no government? If grok takes food from brog in the cave, is that not still wrong?
If someone looks away from ads while they're playing on TV, then watches the show they like, they haven't stolen anything. It's a technical point, not a moral one.
I think that's their point - the subjects of the article should be working instead of hiking. But someone with an H1B visa, yet lacking any special skills, has a job instead of them.
I don't agree with their premise, just restating it.
Why should we believe Binance when they say all customers will be made whole, and how will they do that, with what money?
It seems very unlikely they have $3-6B lying around ready to repay customer deposits. At the very least this would be catastrophic for them if they do lose all that money.
Have they re-enabled withdrawals yet? If I were a customer I'd be taking everything out as soon as possible.
their stated plan, for what it’s worth, is that they have $6.34B of company funds set aside, most of it already in the same coins that were taken, plus the SAFU emergency fund at about $1B. around $3B of the stolen money is frozen at Tether, Circle and others, and CZ’s own post on X put the rest of the gap at about $2B.
withdrawals have been paused since Thursday night. binance says it will reopen them in stages from Sunday and publish proof of reserves by Monday, which is the thing that would actually answer your question.
They don't need need money. What was stolen was some sort of "digital assets". How are they going to cover that, I have no idea, but let's not equate crypto assets with money. If someone would have stolen my bike, i wouldn't be saying "they stole $1000". They stole a bike, which could or could not be recovered, and which was or wasn't covered by insurance.
And if thieves stole a bag of paper from you, that happen to have the number $100 and some other artwork written on them by the government, what then? It's not money, it's just some "paper asset"? You're just showing your own personal bias about what the definition of money is.
$3.5B stolen was "stable coins", which you could equate to a piece of paper with a dollar amount written on it.
Those are largely freezable by the issuer of the paper.
Then we have $2.4B in Bitcoin and ETH stolen. Those are not directly freezable.
However, if that does create a liquidity challenge for these exchanges, what if the price just so happens to drop by 60% after trading is restricted? That liability might shrink in actual value.
What if the bag of paper "money" is in a foreign currency? You'd still happily call it money, but then the distinctions you're trying to draw with crypto don't really apply. Think of crypto as a foreign currency, it still functions as money.
Crypto isn't foreign currency. The price may fluctuate wildly based on sentiment and action taken by exchanges such as Binance, which would directly impact their obligation here.
Comparing crypto to actual currency typically connected to large, real economies is not relevant here.
The crypto economy isn't real, it's a pointless wealth redistribution scheme.
Anyway, that and your question are hardly relevant to the fact that Binance and their cabal own the crypto exchanges and consequently could manipulate the price to reduce the size of their obligation denominated in crypto rather than currency or stable coins.
So like, three exchanges, one of which died? Even if we assume everyone in the group is willing to tank crypto values, that's not a very big power level increase beyond what Binance has by itself.
Believe whatever you want about Binance's influence.
I understand Binance alone accounts for a third of the market, and their ability to coordinate with other exchanges is hardly restricted to the participants we know were in that specific group chat.
I think the point stands that a liability in eg. USD is much different from one denominated in crypto.
This isn't about what I want to believe, it's that at the slightest requests for clarification/evidence you've gone from "the fact that Binance and their cabal own the crypto exchanges" to "ability to coordinate".
Yeah Binance itself is big but it'll take a lot more than one exchange, an exchange everyone is now handling with extra suspicion, to cause a crash.
> I think the point stands that a liability in eg. USD is much different from one denominated in crypto.
If course it's different but that's so much weaker of a point. And the foreign currency comparisons weren't to particularly stable currencies.
They still need to find buyers at that price. The price is what it is because there are no buyers below that price. If they artificially drop the price there won't be any buyers at the new price so they won't be able to buy any bitcoin so they won't be able to give it to the customers it was stolen from.
I wasn't thinking about some fake price they set on their own exchange, but actions that could tank the market, which I understand Binance alone makes up 30% of.
Crypto at it's current price has a market cap around $2.6T. Obviously the liquidity is questionable, and since crypto isn't connected to any mention worthy real economic activity, a change in sentiment can quickly crash the price and liquidate leveraged positions.
While that's of course true for other assets also, crypto not being connected to production of real value, combined with the comparative lack of regulation, makes it much easier to manipulate.
To me it's clear that crypto is worthless, so I don't see a point in such an action.
In my view their interest, which aligns with that of all other major owners of crypto, is to acquire as much real currency as possible.
Acquiring more crypto by decreasing its valuation is not furthering that.
Maintaining a high valuation and positive sentiment in order to convert buyer's real currency into profit to cash out is what I believe their strategy is.
Yes, and we could have a paper money system where a registry of stolen serial numbers is kept and they can’t be deposited at any bank or used to pay the government ever again.
Binance and its former CEO, Changpeng Zhao, were previously sued for willfully evading anti-money laundering (AML) controls. In that instance, the government ruled their compliance failures were not an accident, but a deliberate criminal enterprise. Binance paid $4.3 billion in fines and forfeitures to settle with the DOJ, CFTC, and FinCEN in November 2023.
Fines are paid out over time by taking loans against your very profitable business. Do you want to loan money to someone who just had one of the biggest thefts in history and has secondary obligations and risks.
It looks to me like Binance will be able to scrape together enough money to make their customers whole, so your probably right.
Next time this happens to Binance though they won't have an emergency fund and possibly they'll be in debt, and that's when the users will be very screwed.
Their terrible security certainly indicates to me that future of Binance is not going to be a pretty one unless they make some enormous changes.
Except that banks often don't unwind or freeze transactions. I've seen cases of both criminal conduct, and human error, leading to millions in lost funds. And banks didn't reverse or freeze anything. Yes it would be a security feature, but it's not used the way you assume.
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