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Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao Agrees To Step Down, Plead Guilty (wsj.com) 42

Posted by msmash from the breaking-news dept.
The chief executive of Binance, the largest global cryptocurrency exchange, plans to step down and plead guilty to violating criminal U.S. anti-money laundering requirements, in a deal that may preserve the company's ability to continue operating, WSJ reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. From the report: Changpeng Zhao is scheduled to appear in Seattle federal court Tuesday afternoon and enter his plea, the people said. Binance, which Zhao owns, will also plead guilty to a criminal charge and agree to pay fines totaling $4.3 billion, which includes amounts to settle civil allegations made by regulators, the people said. The deal would end long-running investigations of Binance. [...] The deal would allow Zhao to retain his majority ownership of Binance, although he won't be able to have an executive role at the company. He would face sentencing at a later date.
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Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao Agrees To Step Down, Plead Guilty More

Binance Founder Changpeng Zhao Agrees To Step Down, Plead Guilty

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  • subject to manipulation one way or another. The whole point of crypto is to be decentralized, and not subject to the whims of any given central banks's ability to digitally print a couple of trillions.

    • Yes, those evil central banks and their terrible plan of making sure that their money has more or less the same value from one week to the next and that it's usable for normal people to earn money for their work and then buy food to feed their children. Totally key to keep them away from crypto. Can't have it actually being useful for something.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by whitroth ( 9367 )

        You forgot the users avoiding taxes, leaving the rest of us to pay them.

        Ban crypto users from driving on US streets (paid for by taxes).

      • If only... how much money did the FED and ECB print out of thin air during the past 10 years and what was the impact of that move on currency debasement? (hint: any inflation calculator utility will tell you). Also, the ECB is still printing money out of thin air and selectively spending it to buy the debt of some EU member states but not others, essentially imposing QE on some member states and QT on others, thus exercising political power (and favoritism): https://jeroenblokland.substac... [substack.com]

        The reason a

        • Tether can print whenever they want.

          • If you are holding Tether, I've got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. They are not even pretending there's 1 USD in reserves for every Tether out there anymore (instead they claim Tether is backed by some vaguely-defined assets) but still promise an 1:1 exchange rate.
            • Worse than that, only certain companies can redeem Tether for USD. So it prevents a run on the bank, allowing them to just print as much as they want.
              • Lol, imagine if a bank run on Tether does happen and all the John Does who own Tether are faced with the prospect of having to sell their coins at way below 1:1 exchange rate in the open market, but Tether still being nominally "pegged" to 1:1 with USD with some lucky companies being able to redeem their Tether for USD at that exchange rate. It's a complete inversion of the basic principles of cryptocurrencies where every token is equal no matter who holds it. And that's before the fact they can print Tethe

      • If that's their job then they're terrible at it.

        • I think you can't work with absolutes in this case. Only compare them with the alternatives. Other solutions to the problem in history have been yet worse.

    • Re:All centralized crypto exchanges are (Score:4, Insightful)

      by taustin ( 171655 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @01:27PM (#64021851) Homepage Journal

      Instead, they're subject to manipulation by whoever has the most money to begin with, with basically no oversight by anyone who answers to the public. Resulting in . . . what we see on this very web site every day, about exchanges collapsing, founder disappearing with millions (or hundred of millions, or billions) of dollars of other people's imaginary money.

      That's so much better!

      • The goal of cryptocurrency is not to pool your money at a bank except for investment purposes. The reason these systems donâ(TM)t work because cryptocurrency cannot be centralized, yet it is a good way of burning your cash before a depression which is exactly what happened - tons of pre-pandemic value still is locked up in crypto, the dollar has lost significant value in the mean time while investors diversified the value they âoeburnedâ across the globe.

        If everyone lost so much money in cryp

    • Coinbase allows you to view the addresses of your wallets and the transaction hash of every transaction so you can use a third-party blockchain parser to verify the transactions, so I consider it a cut above the rest. In other words, commingling customer funds with investment funds and lying about it for years in an SBF-esque manner is not possible when you can verify the transactions yourself. Of course. since they have ownership of your wallets nothing prevents them from raiding your wallets overnight if

      • There exists a whole class of non-custodial exchanges where the wallet remains in your control. Unfortunately, the overall market has yet to prefer actual security over centralized exchanges, which are practically the antithesis of the underlying assets they are trading.

        • Unfortunately, the overall market has yet to find another sucker to take this pointless crypto of everyone's hands, so here we are still pretending it has value for anything actually legal.
    • because that's not how humans work. In any system we build there are winners and losers. The winners take their winnings and use them to get more winnings. That in turn gives them power which they use to build systems to protect their winnings and get more of them and so on so on so forth.

      The only counter balances to this are Democracy, education and teaching critical thinking and claims evaluation skills. Basically advanced citizenship. Groups of people coming together to watch, control and regulate th

      • Nothing you posted has anything to do with decentralization, especially not in the context of public blockchains.

    • Re:All centralized crypto exchanges are (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Stuntmonkey ( 557875 ) on Tuesday November 21, 2023 @03:57PM (#64022209)

      The real problem is that cryptocurrencies are a shitty technology. Ledger transactions are 4-5 orders of magnitude more expensive than traditional monetary transactions – they aren't "currencies" at all. They are long-hold assets at best.

      Exchanges like FTX/Binance came along to paper over that shittiness with off-ledger transactions. But it's a scammer's paradise and moreover it violates the whole point of crypto which is to not have to trust a central authority.

  • Stop letting Chinese millionaires do ANYTHING in our company. After Obama let a Chinese firm buy Newegg, literal weeks later they committed loan fraud. That's just how the culture is over there and if you've provably gotten ahead, there's exactly one way how you did it and it's no with morals or business ethics.
    Maybe we should stop Chinese firms from buying all our real estate too? Hmmm.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ratbag ( 65209 )

      He's Canadian. But don't let that get in the way of a good rant.

    • Stop letting Chinese millionaires do ANYTHING in our company.

      Because, yes, the USA is a company. A gigantic megacorporation, not a real country.

    • That's just how the culture is over there and if you've provably gotten ahead, there's exactly one way how you did it and it's no with morals or business ethics.

      Sounds like the culture hear honestly. I think people are upset because the Chinese people aint white. If China was some bastion of white people, people would be a lot less upset with them.

      • I'm sure the racism is part of it.
        CEC-P ought to be angry at the billionaires, but they've trained him to point his anger in the wrong direction.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Funny, Chinese people used to be white. The term "white" was basically created so the major European countries could refer to themselves and people the admired, like the Chinese.

        Don't worry, any country that dares to get big enough to potentially challenge the US will get the same treatment. And if they're annoying enough the'll get kicked out of the white club too. Like Mexico.

  • Another Tuesday, another crypto scammer getting their come-uppance from the Department of Justice.

    Only thousands more to go.

  • "Satoshi" is obviously from North Korea. Only a nation state as corrupt as them could have concocted such a climate destroying, drug distributing, terrorism financing scheme as effective as Crypto. CZ should be investigated for links to NK.

    • "Satoshi" is obviously from North Korea. Only a nation state as corrupt as them could have concocted such a climate destroying, drug distributing, terrorism financing scheme as effective as Crypto. CZ should be investigated for links to NK.

      Hey! We are perfectly capable of creating fucked up things and tricking people into them. Like deregulation.

  • If CZ doesn't want to spend the rest of his life dodging extradition or rendition then so be it, but Binance is mostly outside the reach of the Feds. Only Binance.us is at risk, and only because Binance did more than just license a name to that exchange.

  • SBF was like : all your crypto belong to us!
    If SBF would have kept his Caroline under control, Binance would have never been investigated by the SEC.

  • Foreign company robbed of 4 billion dollars.

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