Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran (opens in new tab)

Ah, I finally understand NFTs now

That's called a dead drop.

Hmm, doesn't this work equally well with a wad of $10 and $20 notes? I mean, yes, notes could be clandestinely marked. But aren't bitcoins also traceable after the first transaction?

But do people actually do this? How would you find someone to give you bitcoin for your gold? Are there online markets? Honest Q

Sounds like a setup to get robbed tbqh.

How do you avoid them just putting a bullet in you and just taking your cash without the Bitcoin though? It doesn't seem like a great option.

True, but this does not happen for large transactions, due to being vulnerable to the $5 wrench attack (1)

For big transactions where something of actual value is exchanged, both parties will want an escrow, and this is where a public exchange comes in.

1 - https://xkcd.com/538/

> Doesn't matter, tbh.

It does matter, for non-Americans, that America isn't the world police and doesn't dictate laws, norms and how other countries behave. Maybe it used to be relatively fringe to have this point of view, but last few years really vindicated this point of view, and I agree that many countries in the world should continue focusing on decoupling themselves from the US, this particular issue highlights one motivation for doing just so.

That's a rather narrow view of crypto's uses. What about subverting democracy by bribing the President?

Well, you could also use it to buy a pizza and find out it that your pizza cost a billion dollars a few years later.

Money laundering has always been a core feature of cryptocurrency, not an edge case.

When I think about it, I know people that have been involved in all of those areas (always on the wrong non-criminal end). However, I'm not sure I know a single person that has made a regular transaction in some cryptocoin.

You forgot gambling on crypto exchanges.

Not that snark isn't warranted in this situation but you have to consider that the ability to turn energy into globally accepted (but notably not-actually-untraceable) cash-equivalent is a key piece of the corrupt bitcoin puzzle. It offer opportunities to everyone from third world oligarchs and pariahs to those who happen to be able to tap an electrical grid. Technically, this is indeed "theft without recourse" but you're reply seems to imply this kind is marginal.

Moreover, the chances are the reason Binance nixed the investigation of bitcoin going to Iran is because so much of the bitcoin economy is driven by entities like Iran (google AI say they have 4.5% of global mining plus random search link [1]).

Edit: Iran also wants bitcoin sent to it because bitcoin isn't actually untraceable so getting clean money for dirty matters.

[1] https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/iranian-crypto-activity-geo...

You were getting it wrong all this time. The #1 use case for crypto is buying illegal stuff. Mostly drugs, but also weapons and child pornography.

Crypto is just temporary regulatory arbitrage. Same as BNPL which is totally not just payday loans.

Back in 2011 I remember a lot of people talking about how the Chinese oligarchs were using it to evade currency controls and funnel their wealth out of China.

Isn't it just a subset of #3?

I just want to exploit over worked border security by buying semi legal drugs they dont have the capacity to follow up prescriptions for.

I like to amuse myself that if Robert Preston had lived another 20 years that Stephen Colbert or John Oliver would have paid him a heap of money to explain cryptocurrency to us all and it never would have happened.

I think you missed buying illegal goods over the internet and making absolutely inane videos and comment about crypto-shit that you spew all over the internet.

What a deeply troubling and cynical comment.

As far as I know, nowhere in the Bitcoin white paper or the original code base. Does it say anything about what you seem to think it's use cases are.

Bitcoin has one main use, digital cash, that can be sent instantly and for free or a very low fee.

Edit: I would agree though, that anything other than that is probably a scam.

There's a major distinction, however, in that it's a heck of a lot harder to safely and reliably lug briefcases or suitcases full of $100 bills from Chicago to Tehran, than it is to click and transfer some Bitcoin. Which is the whole point.

> Just because criminals and evildoers use US $100 bills doesn't mean they are not useful and valuable to honest people too.

Like all of the ATMs near a dispensary that was always out of cash because 20 individual $20 bills runs out a lot faster than 4 $100 bills. Until dispensaries became legal, it was rare for me to see an ATM with anything other than $20s. Now, I see $20, $50, $100 dispensing machines regularly.

I knew someone who ran an exchange house (like the kind you find in airports)

He said that euros are very popular because there are 500 euro bills.

I guess they stopped making them.

A briefcase of $100 notes is just around 1 million. That's like a tip you give to a waiter these days in the world of crypto.

At the scale of cryptocrime, you'd be looking at trucks filled with $100 notes.

Only because in this case they used a centralized exchange. The amount of actual circulation to countries like Iran and North Korea is likely many orders of magnitude higher that what is knowable.

In the case of bitcoin, surely.

Some other coins not so much trackable, and that's the reason some countries don't like them: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/binance-delist-monero-zcash-4...

I think it’s part of the Origin Story.

Bitcoin was created by Satoshi Nakamoto almost 20 years ago. There are a number of wallets that people believe belong to Satoshi (have they proven they belong to SN?)

Yet the identification of Satoshi has eluded a global hunt to identify him. Maybe law enforcement has not been involved, but the mystery definitely suggests that BitCoin can help mask identity.

Bitcoin ist pseudonymous. If you never attach your real identity to your Bitcoin you remain pseudonymous. Now that's a very big if and why states heavily try to enforce KYC for exchanges.

The reality is a lot more messy. Different chains have different properties. Things like CoinJoins for Bitcoin or TornadoCash for Ethereum exist which aim to break the money trail. Mixers are a thing which are a trusted entity doing the same on a "trust me bro" basis.

Monero seeks to be untracable by design using zero knowledge proofs and ring signatures over multiple possible sources for every transaction.

Even with standard Bitcoin it's more complicated. One time change addresses make tracking harder. Say I send you 1 BTC in a transaction. Now you want to spend 0.5 of these Bitcoin. However with Bitcoin you can only ever use an incoming transaction in full. Every transaction has a number of inputs (a previous incoming transaction) that it spends and a number of outputs. An output can only be unspent or spent. The amount of the outputs must match the amount of inputs. So what you do is you use that input of 1 BTC and create two output of 0.5 BTC each. One is to the recipient address and one is to an address of your own (the change address). If you create a new change address for every transaction nobody but the recipient can know which output belongs to the recipient and which is your change address.

In reality that is a weak defense and there are many usage patterns (e.g. one output being a round number and the other one not) that can give away which one the change address is.

The truth is there are some currencies that are by design untrackable—monero and zcash, for example, which use privacy preserving techniques to avoid tracking. (IMO zcash is a better implementation than monero, but shrug.)

Bitcoin and ethereum and most other crypto currencies are absolutely traceable in the sense that anyone can see who you send your money to. And all of the implementations have the core challenge of getting back to fiat—at some point, you withdraw cash or otherwise pay a real person to do something for you. There’s no way around that.

It's the overconfidence of 90s kids who knew how to program the VCR and use the modem.

> The #1 use case for crypto is that it's anonymous like cash. And yes, this enables people to use it for crime... just like they use cash.

Not quite like cash: collecting and transferring US$1.7B in cash—actual physical paper—is probably more logistically challenging than BTC.

I understand the argument for freedom, but depending on the scale/dosage many things that could be fine in small quantities aren't as good in large ones.

I'll bet $100 that the percentage of crypto used for crime is higher than the percentage of cash used for crime.

Exchanges are not anonymous at all though. They are directly linked to your identity as required by US law, but physical btc can be traded anonymously as its technically just a string of letters and numbers. You could transact with it through just telling someone this string if you trust them enough.

OFAC already sanctions crypto wallets. https://ofac.treasury.gov/faqs/594

You can't track individual coins, so you'd have to "taint" entire wallets. Using a mixer would taint the mixer and every wallet it sent to. I'd think this would end up tainting almost everything before too long.

Bitcoin also doesn't require the receiver to authorize a transaction, so if you had control of a tainted wallet, you could taint other wallets at will, wielding it like a weapon.

Doesn't seem feasible. Not that this always stops legislators.

That's not universally true, there is a class of privacy coins whose txs are not (at least in theory) traceable.

I'd argue that's actually a more anarchist original view and transparent ledger is a bug of the first implementation, not a feature, and creates problem of the original money people are trying to solve (i.e. have electronic money without a government overreach, US using modern banking system as a political pressure tool, etc)

> Every US company/citizen [...] if they bring it back to the US

Is that relevant here?

> Binance Holdings Ltd., branded Binance, [...] was founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao. Binance was initially based in China, then moved to Japan, subsequently left Japan for Malta, and currently has no official company headquarters.

The founder seems to have been born in China and is Canadian.

I still also don't understand if Iran is supposed to be banned on Binance or not.

It's not like Western(-ish) nations have much of a choice here. As soon as your banks and financial system depend on the USD in any way, it comes with a mandatory dose of US imperialism and extraterritorial jurisdiction.

Wild that Binance's primary concern was that the privacy of the people committing crimes with their service was being violated.

Hear no evil, and let the money roll in.

This is correct. They will A/B test titles AND update the title w/o warning over time, often 3-6 times per article post publication.

They used to change the URL a bunch of times after publication! Seems crazy because it is but they did. Caused a whole problem on Wikipedia because “title + day + work + url” suddenly wasn’t stable.

You can see https://bsky.app/profile/nytdiff.bsky.social for some examples of how the NYT frequently revises titles and abstracts after publication. Most of them seem harmless at least.

They A/B test titles. You can see it in the URL, where the recessive title often lives on. They may also use different titles for print/digital.

it's more than just that:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacheverson/2026/02/09/trump-st...

> Binance holds about 87% of USD1, the stablecoin issued by a Trump family crypto venture—a greater concentration than any other major stablecoin has at a single exchange, roughly $4.7 billion of the $5.4 billion total supply.

If we censor the names, it reads like a fascist regime from a "shithole" country.

They'd have to invest more than adelson, ~250M.

Isn't it the case for all big enough tech companies operating in the US ?

Do you mean this? https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-... the malicious code wasn't injected, it was served with their captcha.

They shouldn't have used users to ddos someone's blog, but this seems like a one off attack against a perceived threat to the service's privacy. I don't condone that ddos attack, but it's been a very useful service over the years.

Here's a more functional alternative: https://pressreleased.alwaysdata.net/

Is there a micropayment option or something? I wish I could friction-free, buy access to these sites al al carte without dealing with them directly or setting up a recurring subscription directly with them.

Copyright isn't being circumvented - the content of the website is made available for the public and the website just grabs what is publicly available.

I'm a subscriber, but not everyone is.

They should learn to code.

I don't know why this is downvoted, it's the truth. NYT actually has a "gift article" functionality that makes it easy to share articles with non-subscribers.

You are 100% correct. I find the attitude that everything should be free a bit tedious. But then again, why does the truth have to be paywalled while lies are free. I believe it is a detriment to society that we cannot publicly find reporting. Yes I know now come the cynics who will argue bias. But that’s just a failure of reading comprehension, not fair reporting doctrine.

So yes. I’m with you 100%.