trotro

Bybit covered $1.5B last year, so it shouldn't be surprising that Binance, a much larger exchange, is able to cover 4x more.

I think people here underestimate how profitable these exchanges are.

These companies are selling subscriptions for what is basically AGI, yet you think they should have the same valuation as Crocs (yes, the footwear company) ?

If the goal is just to buy and hold, then you wouldn't use perps, not only because of counterparty risk but also because the funding rate is typically positive, meaning you pay (usually ~10% APR) to be long.

The point of perps is:

- Easy access to leverage. Unlike options or futures, there's no need to roll over.

- It's the easiest way to short a coin. Most of the time you even get paid the funding rate to be short.

- Trading fees are typically much lower than for spot.

- Volume and liquidity can be better for perps than for spot. The BTC/USDT perp did 10x the volume of the spot pair in the last 24h on Binance.

Feels like a Temu version of Ramanujan's constant [0].

[0] https://mathworld.wolfram.com/RamanujanConstant.html

FYI you can go to wa.me/<phone-number> on your browser to start a WhatsApp conversation without having to create a new contact.

But formalization is the easy part for humans. I'm sure every mathematician would be be happy if the only thing required to prove a result was to formalize it in Lean and feed it to the AI to find the proof.

The methods are know, but the solutions to the IMO problems weren't. So the AI did extrapolate a solution.

Also, there's no reason to affirm that an eventual cure for cancer requires fundamentally new methods. Maybe the current methods are sufficient, it's just that nobody has been "smart" enough to put the pieces together. (disclaimer: not an expert at all)

So how do these huge buybacks actually work? Like, do they just buy them in the open market? Or is it all OTC?

Notwithstanding the extremely low probability of winning, lotteries aren't even fair, i.e. the ticket price is far lower than the expected earnings. I wonder if it would make sense to democratize cheap high risk, high rewards instruments, for example deep out of the money options, to replace lotteries. At least their prices should be fairer (under the efficient market hypothesis).

They don't depend on the blockchain, but the fact is that most recent research on these topics has come from the blockchain/cryptocurrency space.

One interpretation is that crypto companies need security and privacy, while big tech doesn't seem to care all that much.

I know this is tongue in cheek, but there's a lot more to crypto than the scams and failed projects exposed on web3isgoinggreat.

One example is all the amazing new research in zero-knowledge proofs, MPC, FHE, and modern cryptography in general, that is motivated and funded by cryptocurrency projects.

I also recommend https://cryptohack.org to practice exploiting common cryptographic vulnerabilities.

Same here, it's also by far the most convenient way I've found to share files between devices on my network.

Porn. What you're missing is porn.

Or generally, anything that's much better experienced directly than through a screen. Think about virtually hiking Mt Everest, diving the Mariana Trench, walking on Mars, etc. The technology certainly isn't there yet, but I can imagine a future where for a majority of the population, especially those with lower income, VR provides the only affordable* escape from reality.

* In a few years obviously, $3500 is far from affordable.

And that's how you get people that think that every website starting with "https" is secure and legit, even though it's trivial for malicious sites to use TLS.

Fundamental cryptographic primitives (encryption, signatures,...) don't require any advanced math to understand if you don't go into the concrete instantiations. The technical community should really try to better teach these concepts to the general public as we move further into the digital age.

Crypto allows irreversible transfers, but traditional reversible transfers are also possible on smart contract chains, although definitely not the norm.

The real bug is that irreversibility, and immutability in general, isn't possible in centralized systems. Which is why you can never be 100% sure that your bank account won't be empty next time you check. This doesn't happen in crypto.

Didn't think I'd see a "I've got nothing to hide" argument on HN. Are you also against E2E messaging apps for the same reason?

Being able to anonymously transfer value should be a fundamental right, as part of our fundamental right to privacy. In the past, cash could be used for that, but with society going increasingly cashless and some governments trying to make large cash transfers illegal, crypto is now the only way to keep this right.

> You "need" a stable coin because you're trying to have your cake and eat it too: US dollar-like liquidity and value preservation without US dollar financial regulation.

What about transferring value anonymously? Apart from cash and stable coins, every way of transferring stable assets (wire transfer, Venmo, WU,...) requires a copious amount of KYC and hence a complete loss of privacy (as well as serious security risks given how some of these private companies can misuse personal data).

I don't mind people criticizing Binance, CEXs, and even the crypto industry in general, but I find it quite sad to see people, especially here on HN, essentially advocating for the end of any sort of financial privacy.

Good think about crypto is that you can just look at the code!

Here is the Tether USDT contract https://etherscan.io/token/0xdac17f958d2ee523a2206206994597c....

There is a map `isBlackListed: address => bool` that stores blacklisted accounts. Then the transfer function starts with

  function transfer(address _to, uint _value) public whenNotPaused {
      require(!isBlackListed[msg.sender]);
      ...
  }

So a blacklisted account cannot send USDT.

The closed forms of S(n) are known and are related to Bernouilli numbers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulhaber%27s_formula.

> I have never once wished my identity could be involved in a cryptocurrency for any reason.

Worldcoin tries to solve this exact problem. There's already a way to involve your identity in crypto, namely centralized exchanges using KYC. I don't have data to back this, but I would guess most crypto accounts are in some way doxxed via links to KYCd exchanges. Worldcoin provides a way to prove you're a human (that doesn't already own an account) without having to provide any info about yourself, except a scan of your iris.

I share the overall negative sentiments about Worldcoin, mainly due to it being a VC-backed for-profit project. But you cannot ignore that it solves a real problem in crypto: Sybil resistance without access to hardware (mining in PoW) or capital (staking in PoS).