CPU performance can be hight even with a cheap VPS, there are providers who resell slices of dedicated servers from Hetzner or other data centers, and have low user tenancy on the machines. There are CPU/disk benchmarks all over the place showing this (eg. on LowEndTalk). A VPS with 1 Ryzen core & 2 GB RAM goes for less than 2€/month with decent performance. Eg. these VPSs from my own comparison page.

For the past several hours I evaluated whether BTCC could be a viable alternative to mainstream derivative exchanges. The more I looked into it, the more red flags I collected:

• BTCC confiscates the entirety of your deposit if it amounts to less that $120:
  (the minimum deposit amount for BTC is 0.0021 =~ $120)
  
  
• the withdrawal fee for BTC is also $120, documented in the fee schedule
• for all currencies, an additional 6% withdrawal fee is levied if your account has ever used the "buy crypto" function of the exchange, as documented here. For example, this would be an additional $60 out of a withdrawal of $1000
• the trading API reference documentation is hastily written like a careless high school assignment by someone with no comprehension of either English or JSON:
  
  

I am a Binance user in Italy, I received this email from Binance; it informs that by now taxes are automatically withheld on balances held on the exchange.

https://imgur.com/YmtW0Fj.png

Translation follows.

---

Dear Binance User,

Please read carefully the content of this communication ⤵️

Following the changes introduced by law 197/2022, the year-end balances of crypto assets are subject to taxation, whether they are held through non-custodial wallets (e.g. Ledger, Metamask, Trustwallet) or through exchanges like Binance. This is in line with what currently happens for traditional financial instruments.

Every Crypto Asset Service Provider active on the Italian territory has the obligation to pay the stamp duty: for this reason, you will find a limitation in the [Withdrawals section] equal to the amount of stamp duty to be paid (the rest is fully available for withdrawal).

✅ Binance Italy S.r.l., Crypto Asset Service Provider (CASP) registered with the OAM, is responsible for fulfilling its regulatory obligations with the highest standards.

As this is a new circumstance for us as well, we had to dedicate the necessary time to verify all the technical, fiscal and legal aspects.

🎁 This time was useful for us to decide how to give you a voucher on the trading fees to be used for future transactions on the Binance platform. This means that you will receive a voucher of the same value as the stamp duty paid, up to a maximum of 1,000 USDT.

Practical example:

Stamp duty paid: 10€

Voucher on the fees: 10 USDT approx.

For example, with trading fees of 0.1% on Binance, it is possible to trade crypto without paying fees up to 10,000 USDT of volume generated.

How do I pay the stamp duty?

On 31.12.2023 23:59 UTC, Binance, as required by law, calculated the stamp duty due for your account; in the [Withdrawals section], by clicking on deduct now, you will see a pop-up with the amount of stamp duty to be paid. If you have already paid the stamp duty in the previous days, we advise you to check again for any remaining amounts to be paid.

Your withdrawals are limited as you can only withdraw the amount exceeding the stamp duty to be paid.

To remove this limitation, you can press the "deduct" button in the [Withdrawals section] and pay the stamp duty in EURO immediately. If you do not have a sufficient balance in EURO, you can use the Convert section to convert your crypto into Euro (instant and zero fees), recharge your account in Euro through the services available here or deposit crypto from external wallets/exchanges for conversion.

In case you have not clicked and paid the tax by 19.02.2024 16:00 UTC, in the following days an automatic debit will be executed on your fiat and/or crypto balance present in your Binance account equal to the amount of stamp duty due.

In case the balance of your account is lower than the stamp duty due, you can convert your crypto into euro or recharge euro in your account and proceed as described in point 3 and 4.

As for the discount voucher on the trading fees, you will receive precise instructions by February 15, 2024.

In the following weeks, you will receive a statement attesting the balance of your account at 31.12.2023 and the relative stamp duty paid.

To sum up, what do I have to do?

Option A (recommended): Until 19.02.2024 16:00 UTC it is possible to proactively pay the stamp duty by pressing the "deduct now" button in the [Withdrawals section] and pay Binance the amount due in Euro as explained in point 3.

Option B: Wait for the automatic debit as described in point 4.

If the balance of your account is lower than the stamp duty:

Before the automatic debit, you can convert your crypto into Euro or recharge Euro as described in the Convert section or recharge your account in Euro through the services available here.

We thank you for your cooperation and we remain at your disposal for any clarification.

Binance Italy S.r.l.

I have some EUR already loaded on my card's balance, will I be able to spend it after October 31?

The card expires on Jan 2024.

How do you know about this, or where do I check this information?

All their audits for the past months show constant Tether reserves at about $18 billion.

https://www.binance.com/en/proof-of-reserves

Since he was 20 his only arguments on hackernews were about deceitful marketing, spam generation, selling fake food supplements, techniques of consumer persuasion, and pumping and dumping of companies with VC capital followed by quick exits. Not hard at all to imagine this guy at the steering wheel.

From the little I understood, the fees that ING would charge to me are:

• 30€ for the SWIFT payment alone. This British bank that Kraken uses to receive deposits does not accept SEPA payments, so ING would use SWIFT instead.
• 1.5% for conversion from EUR (my balance) to GBP (recipient bank's balance). The British bank has its account denominated in GBP, so currency conversion is done automatically upon depositing EUR.

The easy solution that I couldn't find earlier is to select a different beneficiary bank, in Liechtenstein, to send the EUR deposit to.

The problem with the UK bank is that ING would send the euro payment via SWIFT instead of SEPA, and that's expensive. I discovered that to deposit on Kraken it's possible to select a different beneficiary bank in Liechtenstein and the whole process remains in euro and goes over SEPA, for free.

I tried to deposit euros to Kraken via SEPA. Their new bank coordinates now identify a bank account in the United Kingdom, and the money transfer is considered "extra-SEPA". I remember that years ago Kraken accepted deposits into a bank in Germany, and the SEPA transfers were free. Now with their bank in the UK, my bank (ING) charges 30€ plus a 1.5% fee for currency conversion from EUR to GBP.

Is there a cheaper way to deposit?

Are there any dex'es that allow trading bitcoin or altcoins against a stablecoin with leverage or derivatives?

What are the latency and spread?

To the best of my understanding, as of June 2023 Binance has terminated derivatives trading in the following EU / ex-EU countries:

• Cyprus
• France
• Germany
• Ireland
• Italy
• Netherlands
• Spain
• UK

This should be the complete list that reflects the current situation.

People reported that France and Poland have enacted the same regulation: https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/13wkueu/monero_and_all_other_privacy_coins_are_banned_in/

I received this email notification from Binance, it appears that privacy currencies are being terminated throughout Italy. Translated from Italian:

One reason for the restriction is that stablecoins move national currency into foreign banks, depriving local banks of fractional reserve from which they draw interests.
Another reason is that such bans are put in place solely to stabilize the economy and protect investors from malinvestments.

But one of the these two reasons is BS.

In case you are still evaluating, Kraken allows SEPA withdrawal to a personal bank account for a fee of 0.09€; this excludes non-personal bank accounts like Transferwise. Binance is also gradually reinstating SEPA withdrawals (see fees) beside having never disabled P2P transactions.

About two weeks ago Binance had a giveaway of free hoodies to users who submitted a general questionnaire explaining their opinion about different functionalities of the exchange. Considering that they recently gifted a $10 voucher to anyone completing KYC identification, which can be spent on trading fees, and the number of these beneficiaries had to be in the thousands at a minimum, and possibly higher, it doesn't seem a comparative larger burden to giveaway a few hundred hoodies.

Today Binance terminates all derivative trading for existing Italian users. Newly-registered users were already forbidden from derivatives since last summer.

The email I received follows.

Thanks didn't know that. However this API key has been active for about two years with a whitelisted IP address. Only the checkbox for futures permission was toggled off, the key itself and the spot permission remained on.

The authorization to trade on fapi.binance.com/fapi/v1/ was spontaneously toggled off on my primary API key; the error message that flooded my logfile was:


As I 'm a verified user from Italy, where derivative trading was clarified to be illegal sometime in August, I thought this was the end for me. But after finding those errors in my logfile, I searched for news regarding the introduction of additional restrictions on Binance concerning legal compliance. I couldn't find any. Then I toggled the authorization back on and the API resumed working.

Hopefully this wasn't some preliminary test.

Trading bots commonly found online are pure incompetence. This stuff is designed by script kiddies with no experience and no competitive edge on the market, who run their scripts from cheap unprotected VPSs.

You haven't confirmed whether the theft occurred via API, but as a general advice sharing your API secret keys with these guys is naive. It's akin to giving a perfect stranger your account password and 2fa token.

The bulk of anomalous trades you saw are a known technique to steal funds without having to authorize a withdrawal: the trades are paired against low capitalization coins on which your counterpart places trades against you.