They should at least say he is the owner of btc-e.com to give it context. The site was used by cyber criminals but it was also a legit operation, much like HSBC.
The difference is always the proportion, obfuscating that is pretty dishonest.
HSBC laundered something like $9 billion for the cartels from 2006 - 2009.[1] As of Dec 2009, they had $2.36 trillion in assets.[2] Money laundering is clearly illegal and $9 billion isn't a small amount of money, but their business wouldn't have changed at all without that 0.3% of dirty cash. You can absolutely make the case that the penalties should be larger (although $2 billion in fines is a pretty good start considering they didn't keep the deposited cash) and that executives should have criminal liability, but there's nuance to both of those things.
There's just no comparison to BTC-E (or any of the darknet markets that people insist are 'just like' eBay) who solely exist to launder money and facilitate illegal goods.
I have a feeling that the informed, consenting adults who have funds in that exchange will soon discover exactly why dealing with an unregulated, secretive foreign financial company (Whose owners keep their identities secret, so that they won't be arrested) is a bad idea.
HSBC has none of these properties (Which are more important to their legitimate users.)
If you're keeping coins on any exchange -- even Coinbase -- they are no longer your coins. You've just loaned them. And you may eventually discover why that is a very bad idea.
No one thinks "It could happen to me" until it's too late. Stop keeping coins on exchanges. Stop using third party wallets and other software. If you want to invest in coins because they might go up, that might make sense, but at least treat it like a serious investment.
If you're keeping coins on any exchange -- even Coinbase -- they are no longer your coins. You've just loaned them. And you may eventually discover why that is a very bad idea.
Since you have to use an exchange to obtain or sell crypto currency, this 'advice' is just pointing out the terrible flaws in bitcoin/ethereum/whatever. There will be plenty of users who were in the middle of cashing in/cashing out and have now lost all their money, and you're just saying "it's your own fault"
You don't have to use an exchange to obtain cryptocurrency. You have to use an exchange to convert conventional fiat money into cryptocurrency. If you buy or sell natively in bitcoin, you don't need an exchange.
Currency exchangers have been around for a very long time and there's nothing inherently bad about depending on one. All the other currencies do.
...But my 'serious' investments are handled by accounts through third parties that mediate my purchases on the exchanges. They're probably even lending out 'my' shares.
It's just a sign that cryptocurrencies are new (and insecure) that I can't do the same with them.
Seems like people want to treat currencies the same way people have been used to thinking about what traditional banking has become today.
For those among us that want to ignore the long history of banking and coinage in general, some depositors in greece may have recently seen similar analogues to why banking in a particular locale turned out to be a very bad idea.
Though you'll have people debate the relatively philosophical differences all day compared to the parties who have ended up on the wrong sides of the above.
What I'm more interested in is: how does all of this change the landscape of incentives of actors of all sizes, and what capabilities does it give to such that weren't accessible to such (or any) degree compared to before?
People who were only storing money in the exchange for the short term (To conduct trades) got robbed too.
When I open a trading account on a stock exchange, it's not longer my money. I've loaned it.
I do have more confidence that its owners won't be arrested for money laundering, followed by all my funds dissapearing to a Bahaman slush fund, though.
In another thread (About the SEC regulating ICOs), there were a number of people encouraging investment into and downplaying the risk of unregulated, opaque financial securities ran by persons not based in the US. Rail against the SEC all you want, but events like this are why it exists. Fraud erodes trust in the market.
The brokerage only owns the stocks in your account if you enable margin on the account (you dont even need to use margin, if you enable margin they own what's in the account and if they go bankrupt your account is gone too).
If you keep margin disabled, you'll eventually get it all back even if the brokerage goes bankrupt.
During the financial crisis, I asked a broker to disable margin on my account (never used it anyway). It took weeks before that happened. Some "technical holdup" that they assured me had nothing to do with loaning or pledging the contents of my account.
Do you know for sure that this is related to btc-e ? It's the most likely suspect (it is currently 'down for maintenance' and it was started in 2011, the same year mentioned in the AP story), but I can't find any concrete evidence of who the owners of btc-e actually were.
>A Russian national arrested in Greece on Wednesday on suspicion of laundering criminal funds by switching them into bitcoins is a key person behind the BTC-e crypto-currency exchange, two sources close to the exchange told Reuters.
BTC-E was run out of Bulgaria in the beginning, surprised this guy didn't learn from the dozens of arrests of Russian credit card processors who violated US gambling laws and went on vacation/lured to meetings into extradition areas like Greece or Turkey. This arrest was apparently over laundering Ransomware coins http://www.newsbtc.com/2017/07/26/btc-e-responsible-launderi...
BTC-E was famous for it's one word replies to technical support tickets like "works" and "try" when he wanted you to try something again, and of course the troll box on the front page that was a never ending source of problems like naive users being fished for information on their account details or tricked into pumping up the value of some altcoin.
Another interesting coincidence - yesterday Forbes published article namedropping BTC-e in a really bad way:
>As for where the criminals are cashing out, 95 per cent of ransom funds were cashed out at the Russian exchange BTC-E. That chimes with the indication that the biggest ransomware types are the produce of the biggest organized criminal gangs working out of Russia.
The only other possible bitcoin enterprise fitting their description may be bitmixer but I don't think it started in 2011 and I am certain it has not handled $4bn in transactions, btce probably has.
The fact is fine, the comment is bad. Starting comments with 'LOL!' doesn't fit with the usual style of hacker news (why is he even laughing???). Stating "another" and then immediately stating why it isn't "another" (an arrest is no conviction) sounds really manipulative. And the fact (that HSBC was involved in money laundering) was already heavily implied by the parent comment, making it less interesting as the only value of the comment.
Heavily implied? I thought OP had merely chosen an unfortunate example which coincidentally turned out to be one of the biggest money-launderers and then was minded to state that the individual had not yet been convicted of that offense unlike HSBC. I'm not sure how it is manipulative - to what end? But I take it that I rather ruined the joke.
