Comment by kolanos
14 hours ago
> About $2.4 billion out of this is already frozen by Circle and Tether. Some of the big ones:
How does freezing crypto work in this context?
14 hours ago
> About $2.4 billion out of this is already frozen by Circle and Tether. Some of the big ones:
How does freezing crypto work in this context?
The smart contract for those tokens supports freezing. Tether just calls the freeze function on that address.
Can they forcibly reverse the transaction so that Binance gets their money back?
No. The last time this happened, it led to the Ethereum/Ethereum classic split, and that was 10 years ago.
However, the stablecoins are not “real” cryptocurrencies like e.g. BTC or ETH, but are built as smartcontracts on top of ETH, basically using it as a big replicated database. So they might(?) just manually “give back” the money to Binance, as in freezing money in the stolen account forever and “printing” an equal amount to Binance's credit.
Or, to put it in another way, no need to reverse an erroneous SQL transaction if you can just create a new one that fixes the data you altered.
And it's impossible to mix them because Ethereum is even anonymous than Bitcoin.
How so? If anything, Ethereum can host trustless mixers more easily than Bitcoin due to its smart contract execution being Turing complete.
Isn't it already too late at that point? The tokens would have moved already.
I think the idea is that they freeze them indefinitely, and then they no longer count against the centralised reserves, since they can never cash out. Now they can mint the equivalent amount back to Binance and remain solvent.
6 replies →
Moved where? Moving to a different wallet wouldn't prevent freezing. It's 5B, impossible to cash out or exchange for different crypto quickly.
4 replies →
Most crypto assets are operated by a smart contract that controls every transfer. So the contract can decide to not perform certain transfers.
Not your keys, not your crypto.
Keys? Hahaha, still not your crypto.
Unless it's Monero, the only currency to be declared illegal in most countries because it's too much like cash.
5 replies →
It doesn't, the hacker already loaned against it to get eth so they froze saves assets.