There's Been a Disturbance in the Force!

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So yesterday I got really bad anxiety all of a sudden.

I just felt like something was wrong or would go wrong.
This is very unusual for me.
I mean I have high social anxiety,
but in this case I was just at home diddling around on my computer.
I ignored the feeling for several hours.

Then I hop onto Discord 5 hours later just to see if anything weird happened.

BSC bridge had been hacked for $500M.

BSC bridge hack Twitter Link

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Wow that is so random.

Reminds me of people who know family members have died without being told. I remember in college a friend of mine was hanging out with me because he had an extremely toxic on/off relationship with his ex-girlfriend. He wakes up in the morning after a night of partying and tells me:

Kate is pregnant

What?

Kate is pregnant, I had this crazy dream last night.

Yeah okay... but she's not though.

And then he calls her up right there and asks her, and she's all like how the fuck did you know that, nobody knows that, even I just found out about it.

Really goes to show you that there is a lot of weird unexplainable energy floating around in the world that we honestly know nothing about. Is every ghost story a hallucination or some other kind of trick, or is the truth of some of these matters far more strange than we could ever imagine?

To be clear, I don't think that me having anxiety and Binance getting hacked are somehow connected. How sad would that be? The power of the universe at my fingertips and I use it to divine the status of a centralized shitcoin. lol. That's just depressing. I don't want to live in that world, so I won't.

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And shortly thereafter... this started circulating:

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Haha... ha

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It's pretty unclear if BSC actually has the level of decentralization that Binance constantly claims it does. I mean... you can't trust Binance on the matter, as they have an extreme financial incentive to make the claim that they don't control it, otherwise it would be an obvious security and investment contract with Binance corporation.

I did a tiny bit of research into how BSC operates a few months back. If I recall correctly it uses something called proof of authority. In theory, all nodes on BSC could be run by random community members. However, proof of authority gives Binance the ability to veto any block validator they wish. This in combination with Binance's seemingly never ending stack of BNB means they could easily be controlling every aspect of the network from the shadows. CZ acting like he's watching this all go down from a distance? Yeah, that feels like theater to me, but who knows.

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Last time I posted this pic was within the context of the Steem/Steemit hostile takeover. Situations like these certainly do tend to have sock-puppet vibes. Binance says they are pushing an "upgrade" to the network. Oh, you mean you're forking away the hackers funds? The exact thing that created the Ethereum Classic DAO hack split? Of course with Binance it is guaranteed that there will be no fork. Why? Well we could argue that there isn't really a community.

The only way for the community to fork the BSC blockchain is to pick a new authority or eliminate those veto rights entirely. Is the BSC community capable of such a thing? I mean... probably? But maybe not, and even if so it would only happen if Binance was editing the chain in an unacceptable way. Taking away hacker funds is an acceptable change.

But once again this just brings up the idea of censorship resistance. If Binance can just change whatever they want, isn't it basically guaranteed that one day they will simply go to far, or even worse be captured by regulators. How long will the BSC community tolerate that kind of tomfoolery before they decide to fork the chain or create a new one? It's possible that it's only a matter of time before this kind of drama occurs. Not a matter of 'if' but 'when'.

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We've already seen this pattern of behavior from Binance before. CZ knows exactly what he is doing. He walks the line well. Everything he builds is for a reason. If he builds a thing that has some decentralization built into it, it's only a little bit, and just enough to that Binance can claim they don't control the thing, even if they do.

We also see this with the Mandala exchange. Technically Binance corporation has fallen into KYC compliance and does not allow users to pseudo-anonymously access the system, but Mandala is allowed to use the "Binance cloud". So essentially what has happened here is that Binance bought out another company... integrated them into the system, and let's people use Mandala without KYC all the while acting like it isn't Binance... even though it's the exact same security and liquidity pools being used. Honestly it's impressive that he knows exactly how to tweak the system to squeeze through these loopholes.

Conclusion

Situations like this show us just how centralized most projects are. If anyone that builds on BSC gets hacked: deal with it. If Binance themselves gets hacked, they freeze the chain instantly and push an "upgrade" to the system. It's very obvious that this is a rules-for-thee-not-for-me scenario.

We still haven't even come close to seeing regulators move into this space. So far all they have done is issued a few fines for selling unregulated securities. None of these fines have actually destroyed any networks/tokens. Any token that has crashed to zero has done so because of the lack of its own merit.

However, it's quite obvious that soon regulators will try to flex a lot harder on certain networks. Already BSV (Bitcoin Faketoski's Vision) has created a blacklist that allows the miners to censor transactions that the government (or whoever else) doesn't like. The community and Craig Wright act like this is a huge accomplishment. As someone who actually appreciates censorship-resistance, I find it to be quite pathetic on every level.

It would be foolish to think that this same tactic will not be applied to Ethereum as well. How many people does the government have to strongarm to bring the entire network to heel? Two?

What I'm ultimately trying to say here is that these regulation crackdowns are going to cause a wave of hostile takeovers and subsequent forks that boot the bad actors off of the community run chains. As we all know, this is a grueling process that nobody wants to go through, but is necessary to maintain the independence and sovereignty of a digital nation. It's a very painful experience that creates an obscene amount of drama and lost value in the short term.

When these dominos begin to fall, many will look to the communities that have already had their "devastating hardfork" moment rather than stick it through on a chain that may or may not survive the attack. Bitcoin is safe. Can you think of another one?

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta



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20 comments
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Could it be that the pump on Hive is connected? That finally some people appreciate the decentrlization? Or just coincidence?

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Coincidence me thinks.
We got an upgrade coming with HF26
But for the most part the TA lined up with a pump or dump.
The Koreans loves to gamble gambles.

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(Edited)

I dont think its Korea this time. Maybe the hacker like Hive :D

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Binance chain uses proof of authority(PoA) while binance smart chain(BSC) uses Proof of staked authority(PoSA).

PoSA based on my research is a combination of PoA and DPoS where the network first relies on a central body to assign a group of "reputable validators" to be officially voted in to secure the network by coin or token holders.

As in the case of BSC, 21 validators are voted in by coin holders, based on my research.

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This seems to align with the research that I have done as well.

The thing is that Binance has enough stake to elect 21 sock-puppet witnesses, and even if they didn't have enough stake they could just veto every single block producer that wasn't one of their nodes. Not a great look.

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check out Rupert Sheldrake's books if you are interested in PSY phenomena - they definitely exist

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Wow, Instructive news and story.

Lesson Learnt: Never trust CZ or vitalik, only trust Satoshi!

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Man, I haven't thought about Craig Wright in months.
I feel like I'm being mocked. Here's a painting

and here's the artist

See. He has a paintbrush and everything.

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Dodgy stuff going down there on BSC, especially the centralized control of the blockchain. And yet it is in the top 5 global market cap. I shudder at the fragility and vulnerability, as well as the massive drift away from the original core principle of decentralization propounded by Satoshi and BTC.

How legit is Hive blockchain and its PoS system with only 20 or 30 witnesses? Is it also dPoS? I would be keen to know.

Posted Using LeoFinance Beta

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LOL 😂 Your captha of CZ was great. I'm glad your sixth sense kicked in for blockchain stuff and not WWIII.

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Funny I was thinking the same thing and never verbalized it.

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