It seems very unlikely they have $3-6B lying around ready to repay customer deposits. At the very least this would be catastrophic for them if they do lose all that money.

Have they re-enabled withdrawals yet? If I were a customer I'd be taking everything out as soon as possible.

Next time this happens to Binance though they won't have an emergency fund and possibly they'll be in debt, and that's when the users will be very screwed.

Their terrible security certainly indicates to me that future of Binance is not going to be a pretty one unless they make some enormous changes.

Only the government (e.g., federal, state, local) may bring a criminal suit.[1] But in both civil / criminal cases they are still a suit under the law seeking some form of ordered relief from the Court.

Essentially, you can think of "criminal" as a category of law and relief (e.g., prison) that is only accessible to the government.

Both the government and citizens may bring "civil" suits. Very generally, the remedies in civil suits are a court order to 1) stop doing a thing; 2) to do a thing required by law / agreement; 3) to transfer property, usually but not always money, from one party to another; or 4) to define a set of rules governing the parties going forward.

[1] There may be some obscure exception to this, but it is true for everything I've ever seen / heard of.

Sorry, what do you mean?

Basically, the historical origins of different bank regulations are quite complicated and also differ from place to place, and they were often put in place by (political) coalitions of people who already had not one single motivation but a whole spectrum of them.

And then in addition to historical reasons, you also need to ask why things are still in place. Inertia is one answer, but it's not the only one.

This is a funny take on things, and untrue. But traditional finance is way safer and better controlled than the crypto frontier. Someone like coffeezilla has to rely on patreon and ad revenue to do the sort of journalism that exposes how debased cryptocurrency finance is. There should be much more money in exposing the fraud, but our premier capitalists are complicit in the fraud. They are fraudsters at heart, which is why they have the money and influence they do.

> Regulations purposefully shrink or destroy markets.

Sometimes maybe, but that's a matter of corruption. Regulatory capture has been used to create regulation that protects monopolies, duopolies, and the broader oligarchy for a very long time. When politicians were representatives of their voters, things worked better. Post-citizens united, the incentives are broken and we have a congress full of duplicitous, self-interested idiots.

Not sure if I want it written and developed by North Korea or its enemies…

They're not in NK, though their family is.

Things like--

  * Minimizing attack surfaces by not running lots of software on the same server and not bloating feature sets beyond the minimum 
  * Limiting access so that most things can't be done by most users, there are *no* super-users, and escalating access is temporary ans requires multiple accounts to authorize
  * Encrypting data at rest

This used to be common before devops and cloud took over. Looks like it might make a comeback. Maybe with a new fancier job title

I've seen this a few times, and it's pretty annoying as a user, but ultimately it's not that bad usually. If you are ordering something at 3am, the physical shipment still occurs during daylight hours. Many banking operations are not actually instantaneous, they settle in a batch job overnight.

And this doesn't have to be binary. Providing a read-only interface provides lots of value while having a reduced attack surface.