You see, like ̶A̶l̶ ̶G̶o̶r̶e̶ Ted Stevens said, it's really all a series of tubes. You put ten dollars in and it gets whisked away to a centralized location. Unfortunately, the location of the stuck tenner is right at the junction where all ATM transactions pass through. It's an unanticipated feature of our new centralized system.
To complain, please fill out form 27-B-stroke-six.
The "series of tubes" comment was Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, not Al Gore.
"Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet [email] was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday [Tuesday]. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially. [...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."
Read the quote directly above the comment you're replying to.
There's giving someone the benefit of the doubt, then there's mocking one of the more corrupt Senators who claimed that an email was delayed by a few days due to what he was essentially calling network congestion, and using that as an argument against network neutrality -- while taking just truckloads of telecom lobbyist cash into his campaigns.
You could in theory make a sound argument about why the internet is just a series of tubes and make honest arguments about their capacity and the capital investment needed to keep up with the growth in data and increase in bandwidth requirements. Stevens did none of those things.
It's not the most coherent explanation, but the "series of tubes" metaphore was perfectly fine for it's audience when trying to explain that contention for bandwidth is a thing.
The mockery from the tech community was out of proportion.
> As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an “Interagency Network.” Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This “Gore Act” supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.
It’s actually worse than that. Blockchains make you send every transaction in the world to every potential miner, and then the block size is a limited resource that they all compete for. And then everyone stores the state of everything in the world. It’s like if BitTorrent seeders stored every time. No wonder SSTORE is so expensive in Ethereum.
Jack Dorsey has the right idea with Web5, as did the ION folks at Microsoft. A middle ground is a hub-and-spoke model like Polkadot and Cosmos have, but we can get all the way to embarrassingly parallel systems.
The fact that you have to ask how many transactions per second some distributed system can support means there is a bottleneck somewhere. No one asks this about HTTP (Web) or SMTP (email) because the more computers join, the more you can support.
We are building Intercloud, which is the next thing after Blockchain. Here three years ago the CTO of Ripple stopped by our forum to discuss and debate its design:
Yes. UK 2018 TSB bank IT meltdown shutdowns all accounts for weeks:
> With clients locked out of their bank accounts, mortgage accounts vanishing, small businesses reporting that they could not pay their staff and reports of debit cards ceasing to work, the TSB Bank computer crisis of April 2018 has been one of the worst in recent memory. The bank’s CEO, Paul Pester, admitted in public that the bank was “on its knees” and that it faces a compensation bill likely to run to tens of millions of pounds.
You do realize this is not something that's unique to the crypto space. [1][2]
Seriously dislike this attitude some folks on HN has about crypto, yes there's massive fraudsters and there's lots of technical issues in this space. But so is most other spaces, fraudsters and criminals didn't happen to suddenly pop up after 2009 you know, they have been here always, everywhere. There's valid uses for crypto and the blockchain, I personally know several folks who were able to move away from war zones with some of their wealth intact thanks to crypto. I know people who send money to their parents back home thanks to crypto, minus the ridiculous fees predatory companies were charging them to send fiat before. Its not all roses sunshine and butterflies, but there's real people who are benefiting from this tech.
Did that coincide with a huge drop in the value of the Canadian dollar and happen to stop people selling CAD for other currencies like USD? Didn't think so. Your point would be more valid if that were true.
>yes there's massive fraudsters and there's lots of technical issues in this space. But so is most other spaces, fraudsters and criminals didn't happen to suddenly pop up after 2009 you know, they have been here always, everywhere
The disdain of regulation that cryptobros have and the lack of regulation results in a free for all for fraudsters and criminals, compared to regular banking/finances.
(paraphrasing from Twitter) It means they have to let the mafia pull out their money first so that no one ends up murdered. Then they'll let the normal folks withdraw.
One possible example: their usual transactions to fill up the hot wallet are not going through because too low fees, or timelocks/multi sig issues, and now unexpectedly they need to go to the cold wallet and this takes time.
I bet they are doing waay more withdrawals today, many times over their usual volume so they are hitting some capacity issues, and you can't rush these things.
What they probably mean is that they have a transaction that consumes $1000000 on their address and creates two outputs: $100 withdrawal for client A, and $999900 on a "change" output. Later withdrawals have to link to that change output (bitcoin is a directed acyclic graph of inputs-outputs). If that transaction is not confirmed, then later txs also cannot be confirmed and backlog grows.
Got my popcorn ready and the satisfaction of knowing I invested $0 into crypto. Also makes me super grateful I ignored and turned down a bunch of offers from crypto startups when I was looking for a new job ~6 months ago.
Bitcoin is not stuck. Transaction Fees are a little high, almost $0.60. No telling what’s going on with Binance. They may have been fractionally reserved.
no it's not your gold technically - but the law gives you the ownership, because the bank is only a custodial owner.
For cryptos, the law doesn't make this promise for you, and even if they do, crypto being mathematically secure, the courts can't just declare an outcome that cannot be achieved in reality.
You're cute that you think someone is going to go to jail for "losing" items from your box. Happens all the time. Safety deposit boxes are unregulated so there's nobody to complain to and the local police will shrug and say it's a civil matter.
Eh, I was more commenting on the difference between regulated/reversible vs unregulated/non-reversible spaces. Didn't know that deposit boxes were unregulated, so my point doesn't stand. Thanks for saying I am cute tho :)
You should really look up the policies and expectations on a safe deposit box with banks. This is definitely not the case.
Finally, look up executive order 6102[0]. Where by decree due to those "evil" people who where hoarding their savings (as they should) got their gold seized.
While I don't agree with EO 6102, a society hoarding its wealth in precious metals buried in pits in the ground isn't great. Its far better for that value to be used productively.
Gold is money. You’re effectively saying “the people shouldn’t have access to savings or retirements, as we know better than them.”
The larger issue at hand is that some people believe they are better and smarter than others and therefore, they ought to have more control and say than the ignorant public.
I on the other hand do not know, nor presume to know, what is better or worse for anyone but myself.
I'm not saying "the people shouldn’t have access to savings or retirements", I'm just saying that savings and retirements locked up in paper currency under a mattress or precious metals in a hole in the ground doesn't really do much for society as a whole and is negatively productive overall. Money shouldn't be what's valued, investments should be what's valued.
Like I said, I'm not a fan of EO 6102 so I'm not necessarily one here arguing the government knows better than everyone else what to do with your wealth. I'm just arguing its not great for society if everyone just digs their own hole to store their acorns indefinitely. Its better for us to actually use our wealth instead of hoarding it away in negatively productive places.
I have a good bit of savings and retirements. Very little of it is in "money". Most if it is in some kind of productive asset actively building wealth not just in my investment but with the rest of society overall. If your retirement is based around holding a lot of paper (money) in a box under your mattress you're gonna have a bad time.
But the government broke open the Snitkos’ private space on March 22, 2021, when FBI agents raided U.S. Private Vaults. The raid was the result of an indictment accusing U.S. Private Vaults, the business, of money laundering and other crimes. But in executing the warrant, the government didn’t just seize the company’s business property. Upon the pretense of wanting to take a relatively worthless metal rack of boxes, federal agents broke into every security deposit box and emptied them of their contents. The FBI made a video record of the contents of each box, including opening up sealed envelopes and holding the letters they contained up to the camera. And the FBI initiated civil forfeiture proceedings against millions of dollars of property, without telling box holders what they were accused of doing wrong.
1. This makes them utterly useless, because it turns out it's essentially impossible to transact without trusting a third party with those coins at some point. Unless you have literally mined every coin you've ever used, and never used escrow - the "Code is law" argument as above is a terrible paradigm for social transactions that require some form of trust. We have literal centuries of legal code built to attempt to resolve this precise issue for real tender, and crypto is a shitty, shitty attempt to replace it.
2. It turns out most of the "crypto crowd" isn't in it for using these things as actual currency, they're get-rich-quick fuckwads, and the actual ownership of the coin mattered very little when it was just an investment vehicle they were planning to convert back to dollars at some point.
> Only a single network, the Bitcoin network, is impacted due to the stuck batch of transactions. Users can withdraw $BTC on Ethereum or BNB Chain while our team works to resolve this temporary pause.
This probably means wBTC (wrapped BTC) which is a ERC20 token on the Ethereum Network. They seem to have a more-or-less 1:1 peg to BTC and they seem to be transparent about their holdings (https://wbtc.network/dashboard/audit) - there's a list of addresses that's verifiable on-chain.
Disclaimer: I've never used them and the info above comes after 3 minutes of skimming their website ;)
Fair question, the quotes are from my general unease with claims of being backed and audited in the crypto space — see Tether — means for now with crypto I assume these are marketing claims until there’s more meaningful regulation in multiple countries.
there are actually more than a dozen ways to cash out that I can immediately think of but nobody is cashing out if you look at the on-chain metrics and CEX/DEX data
Reminds me of Mike Burry on The Big Short when all the investment banks were "having systems issues" when he tried to close his highly profitable trades.
I would like to provide some context to people unfamiliar with how the bitcoin mempool works and what you can do to avoid getting your transaction stuck.
The mempool is all of the transactions that have ben gossiped about but have not yet been mined (finalized) into a block. Each node has their own mempool. You can see [1] that there are roughly 6 hrs worth of transactions in this node's mempool (everyone should have a similar mempool, though not identical).
So Binance's claims of network congestion are "true" on the surface, however there are a few interesting points that lead me to believe that they are acting fishy.
1. Why does Binance not have RBF enabled on their withdrawal transactions?
RBF mean "replace by fee" and it's a way you can mark an unconfirmed transaction as replaceable by a similar transaction that pays higher fees. This is extremely useful when you need to ram a transaction into a block by increasing the fee you're willing to pay miners to mine your transaction. I highly recommend you only use a wallet that allows you to use RBF & to have RBF enabled by default. Of course Binance knows about RBF so why aren't they using it?
2. Why does Binance not use 'Child Pays for Parent'?
CPFP is a little hard to understand if you don't understand that bitcoin transactions are linked together in a graph structure. In short, a bitcoin transaction is a data structure that points to previous transactions to spend. CPFP is when you make a new transaction that spends from your previous unconfirmed transaction (un-mined transaction in the mempool) and over pay in fees to cover the cost of both transactions. This incentivizes miners to include BOTH transaction in the same block. Once again Binance should be doing this. An ideal way to do this would be to batch a bunch of customer withdrawals in a single transaction. This would save a lot on network fees. They would make this big transaction payout a *large* amount back to themselves so that they could CPFP this batched withdrawal transaction.
3. Binance has their own mining pool with 11% of the network hash[2].
Binance could easily prioritize their "stuck" withdrawal transaction in their pool's blocks. Of course if they didn't subsidize their miners for this they risk them switching to another pool. One would think that halting withdrawals is an existential risk to their business so temporarily paying their miners to ram transactions through should be worth it?
So what is the take away from all of this?
There are numerous tools at Binance's disposal. Why did they not work/why are they not using them? My hunch is that they don't have all of their ducks in a row & are running a fractional reserve. (this is pure speculation on my part) They likely had a lot of (your) bitcoin tied up in "risk-free" interest accounts (Celsius) and are scrambling to get ahold of bitcoin to give back to customers.
