Crypto enthusiasts misunderstand what a financial system/financial architecture is. It is not the fiat currencies themselves, but rather the power architecture that controls and oversees value and exchange in whatever form it takes. Crypto has been entirely subsumed into this architecture through the exchanges which are obviously beholden to the holders of real power, i.e. governments.
This is to say, the stated goal and the target of the crypto enthusiasts are misaligned. To transcend the institutions represented by the fiat system requires far more than creating some alternative "currency", rather it requires creating an entirely new power structure.
Crypto doesn’t care wether or not the transaction was for good or evil. It’s Switzerland, it’s neutral, and there really only one goal - to sidestep human control.
If a transaction was successful, it’s done its job.
Because of human nature fraud, theft, errors, disputes over assets etc. that go along with money whatever its form need to be properly dispositioned too. A block chain has no answer for that. And without dispute resolution methods the system will die or merely attract the underside or 1-off users of society.
Second, an automatic no to power is simplistic so as to distort solutions. Power is fine provided it's not corrupt and accountable. Getting that and keeping it is a hard problem, but there's no end-run either.
Finally, how many examples of frauds, thefts N must occur before crypto is associated with fraud, theft? That N was long ago surpassed.
Who are these "crypto enthusiasts" who, in 2026, have a "stated goal" of "some alternative 'currency'"?
Look at the schedule of any crypto conference - ethereum events in particular, but others as well - and you will find that your critique has already been widely adopted. The discussion is around replacing power structures and sources of injustice, not merely 'currency'.
I was reluctant to get involved in blockchain tech because I don't care for currency and don't view it as a likely organizing principle for humans for the next thousand years. That was in like 2016.
Today, nearly every blockchain project attempts to overcome challenges other than currency.
When fraud, theft occur and/or claims on insurance when fraud theft occurs a regulator must have a legal system to find facts, prove charges, make a judgement that can be enforced etc.. And that means, for one thing, anonymous users are an illusion. Identity to get accountability is required.
I don't know - it depends who specifically you're talking about.
You're the one who invented these "crypto enthusiasts" in order to rail against them - whom do you mean exactly? Got a particular talk from devcon? Let alone regens unite / schelling point / GFEL / some other radical ethereum event?
No, it wont, because you just made the same mistake they talked about. You assumed that its a currency implementation detail and not a power structure thats holding it back.
Can you give any evidence for this?
(I mean statistically significant evidence worthly of your global, sweeping claims and not a tiny sample of cherry picked anecdotes)
>Estimated total impact: ~$6.3B, with ~$3B frozen on-chain so far, in coordination with our blockchain partners
I always find it amusing to read this. Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money? Either they are misguiding you about the core value of their product or their ability to execute traditional interventions in cases of theft. You can't have the conveniences of both at the same time.
You're mixing up two issues. The need for oracles is a "hard problem" but it's not the problem in this case.
USDC has a central issuer that can freeze funds because that's the only way you can currently have an asset that "looks like" dollars on a crypto ledger. Someone gets a dollar, mints a unit of the bearer token, and pinky swears they'll redeem it. It's a systemic concern that calls into question the legitimacy of the system, but that's not an oracle.
But I don't see USDC being mentioned in my reply or the comment I replied to.
And calling the need for oracles a "hard problem" is a neat euphemism the point of which escapes me. It's not solveable.
As someone else wrote: when something goes sideways with their assets the crypto posse call for law enforcement. Or they bent their own rules (DAO/ETH hard fork, 2016 e.g.).
I assumed a basic level of abstract thinking since this is HN.
For the point I illustrated it does not matter. Everything is needed. The record somewhere will not be sufficient to get you your flat back when you return from holidays. Nor will a the police w/o a judge. Or the judge w/o having the the record to look at.
And re. "always a computer": trust me, in Germany where I live, it will not be a computer for years to come. Everything is paper here. :D
"Oracle" being the cover for crypto bros who dont want to admit they need "the legal system" to fix thier mess. Its all idiology and freedom when you are poor but once you actually own something of value, like a flat, suddenly you want lawyers and police to keep you safe from bad people.
At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power. In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose.
No? Cryptocurrency has a ton of utility: it simplified ransomware attacks, enabled the deployment of supplychain attacks to steal funds from unsuspecting users, made illegal gambling accessible to everyone, memecoins, efts and safe storage for any stolen or illicidly gained funds until they could be laundered and the list goes on likely exceeding the character limit.
The biggest benefit is that you can only withdraw what you need into the real world, if you gain millions of dollars you can life off that money for the rest of your life with tiny withdrawals of $2000~$5000 or so serving as a stable stream of income which allows you to have risk free investment into real-world activites that would normally strain your finances and induce sunk cost fallacy.
Losing $5000 doesn't mean anything when you know that you will have $5000 tomorrow.
> At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power.
There are many types of crypto people. Some of them are not crypto people per se, but people who saw crypto as a means to an end. Among them, there are plenty of people who seem to be invested in sheer fraud.
It's also important to note that there are many sides to the scheme. There's for example the instant transactions side, and the long term bet in scarcity. For example, Russia has been leaning heavily on crypto to circumvent sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine.
> In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose.
It was not out of thin air. This is literally a grift where the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich from it.
>the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich
This is the key issue. Crypto by itself created little to no actual additional value. Especially when it devolved into just another centralized currency with less government oversight. So the whole thing was a zero-sum game. People only got rich because they made others poor.
I KNOW how they work, i also know that many places IGNORE the idea of sanctions on Russia.
We all know that China for examples continue to trade freely with RU. There are many other examples of how Coca Cola sells a significant boost in numbers to border countries which are then driven across the border to RU. Everybody knows what is happening here, but nobody cares, business is business. Coke isnt the only one, far too many continue to trade even if its thru a middle man.
You can see a lot of vids on YT for example that show Russia supermarket shelves have more than enuff Coke and other brands, even though officially Coke is not trading with Russia in anyway.
> Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money?
Regulatory arbitrage. Not all centralized institutions are fast enough to actually make use of the theoretical capabilities available to them.
> Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money?
Cheaper international transfers could be a specific valid use case. But I presume risk is too high for my taste.
I'd bet most of the frozen $3B is stablecoins and tokens with an admin freeze function. Tether and Circle can blacklist an address in minutes. Nobody can freeze BTC or ETH. So the money they got back is the part that was never decentralized in the first place, which supports your point from the other side
Man, if only there existed some central societal body with the authority to essentially freeze accounts and unwind a transaction like this. What a security feature that would be.
what if the promotion of said non-fiat systems was done primarily by those looking to subvert that system? NK, Russia? What if it was further supported primarily by people to give great liquidity to illegal activity.
Something tells me that politicians that visit said locations on the 4th of July and their buddies business "leaders" looking to destablize the system are just not on the up and up. May even be corrupt.
The reversibility of transactions is often brought up but I don't think that is the main differentiator, or any at all really.
First, both cryptocurrencies and traditional finance systems have chosen to and have chosen not to reverse or freeze criminal transactions in the past. Decentralized blockchains have chosen to do so at least once [0]. The traditional finance system has chosen not to many times and even large sums [1] [2]. It really comes down to how much is stolen and how much influence the victim(s) have.
No, instead I think the main difference is the speed of transactions. Some blockchains operate within milliseconds while bank transactions take days. Even instant transfers are actually settled on a way longer cadence in reality.
That means attackers can do a fast sweep on blockchains, which is not possible with bank transactions because everything happens in slow motion and humans have way more time to react and step in.
I imagine it's possible to design a blockchain where transactions are 1) artificially delayed; and 2) can be blocked by anyone who has the key.
For example, take Bitcoin, except that each transaction must be posted twice to be considered to have modified the ledger between 7 and 14 days apart as measured by the number of intermediate blocks as a function of the difficulty requirement. If a "blocking" transaction makes it to the blockchain in between, then the transaction is deemed to have been cancelled. A "blocking" transaction must merely demonstrate ownership of one of the transaction inputs.
If you hold large funds, you could keep a remote monitoring system somewhere that is empowered to block your own transactions.
The blockchain design could be enhanced so that a blocking transaction proves ownership of the original inputs but cannot sign a transaction itself.
Failure mode: someone trying to legitimately block a transaction could find themselves unable to get their blocking transaction mined. But in practice they'd just up the transaction fee, and game theory should take care of it.
This was just a thought experiment. A point that comes to mind is that given this is possible, what you describe isn't an inherent property of cryptocurrency, so if there's a benefit to having this property then it could be done.
You are changing the process not the way technology operates.
Blockchain today cannot fix the problem that there will be examples where some guardian needs to reverse transaction because of fraud detection at some later stage.
How exactly can you sign the next entry in a block chain for a temporary period of time ? You cant. You either update it or you dont.
It wouldn't work if the realisation of fraud takes longer than the window of time you've given the owner to make a blocking transaction. Banks are superior here because they have the power and ability to correlate multiple different kinds of evidence, and then reverse the transaction even years later. They have financial statements, biological proof, social evidence, much more than just one cryptographic key.
The main reason it is a differentiator is that centralised money understands that its purpose is to be a system of social credit, so reversibility of transactions is just an acknowledgement that there is enough evidence to prove that this particular individual owns this particular sum, so it should go back to them. It is actually a much better and more honest system than the blockchain, because it doesn't treat money like a tangible resource in and of itself that can be "lost" which would be a much older and dumber way of doing things.
Yes but if your cryptocurrency is supported by courts then it is no longer decentralised money and on top of that some of it is going to have to be converted to fiat at some point just to engage with the legal system if nothing else.
It’s not always a choice. If value has been transferred onwards (ultimately in the form of e.g. cash withdrawn or something equally hard to trace, like physical goods handed over to a buyer), simply “undoing all transactions in a database” isn’t without victims either.
Whether undoing transactions or not is an option strongly depends on how fast value is allowed to move. Sometimes being slow is a feature as much as it is a bug.
> Whether undoing transactions or not is an option strongly depends on how fast value is allowed to move. Sometimes being slow is a feature as much as it is a bug.
Exactly, that is my point. It is less about reversibility and more so about speed. Being slow can be an advantage (for security).
I heard escrow keys are supposed to solve this. Can't we deposit escrow keys to a legacy bank running cobol in mainframes and let it do its kyc/aml sanctions check and anti fraud on all transactions? That should solve it
Except that banks often don't unwind or freeze transactions. I've seen cases of both criminal conduct, and human error, leading to millions in lost funds. And banks didn't reverse or freeze anything. Yes it would be a security feature, but it's not used the way you assume.
Yeah I know you are referring to the fiat-based financial system. Keep in mind, wire transfers generally cannot be reversed. There have been notable instances where money is lost/stolen this way, and no way to get it back.
Wire payments are definitely reversible, but you might need to involve the courts, and international wires are more complex [0]. Most notably, 900 million in accidental payments made by Citi were eventually fully reversed by appeals courts.
> A full recounting of it is outside the scope of this anecdote, but it rhymes with “If you and the United States federal government disagree whether a transaction is final, you are wrong.”
And if the creditor bank happens to be in Russia, Iran, the DRPK, or any number of other hostile financial systems, the debtor bank will likely find things practically impossible to unwind regardless.
Sometimes they get lucky though and the government passes a law allowing them to seize equivalent assets a few decades down the road.
Making transfers to those countries is almost impossible from Western banks. It would require sophisticated multi-bank international transfers to do that, which take a long time and are fairly easy to stop.
Do you think money is transferred by shoving bank notes into the Ethernet cables?
When you transfer a dollar from your account to Putin's account in a Russian bank, in reality your bank transfers a dollar from their account within the FRS (Federal Reserve System) to Putin's bank's account within the FRS.
It can be more complicated with more intermediaries, but it can be traced and reverted.
Most of it was stopped and some was even recovered but $66Million is still lost 10years later .
In both incidents protection are reliant on the authorities to minimize the damage ; tether and circle able to freeze tokens is not that different from the traditional finance doing it.
Crypto is only reinventing structures that evolved in every financial system over time.
Overtime they are going away from their founding theme of decentralization . Exchanges and stable coin issuers who can freeze wallets and coins are by definition centralization ; it is worse though as these organizations are less transparent than banks with less accountability
And as the stable coin operators and exchanges grow closer with governments and political elites they will add more and more controls in exchange for legitimacy.
wire fraud, credit card fraud, pig butchering (a different way to access the accounts really), etc.. The traditional system do have some safeties but it's not impenetrable.
Interestingly, this 18,270 BTC Binance theft is only the largest when measured in USD. In terms of pure BTC, it's not even close to the 2011-14 Mt. Gox loss of ~850,000 BTC.
I have read somewhere that ISIS mostly runs on cryptocurrency now because it's harder to block.
Oh here
> They delve in weapons and human trafficking, sometimes take part in drug smuggling, more and more engage in crypto mining and frauds related to the crypto industry - the whole Islamic State is now operating by crypto, whether it’s various European countries, West or East Africa, Asia, or such weird places like Costa Rica, Brazil or Argentina.
For you maybe, and those who have only lived, worked, and made businesses in one country. I have had several occasions where crypto would have made life a lot easier. I closed a bank account in Canada and they said the funds could not be sent by wire when it's being closed, only a paper bank draft, and assured me that my bank in Europe would accept it. My bank not only did not accept paper checks or bank drafts but told me no bank in the entire country accepts paper checks and drafts anymore.
Another time, I tried to book IMAX 70mm movie tickets for my trip to visit, the website IP region blocked me so I got on to VPN, then I could make the booking but the Visa SMS 2FA redirect IP region blocked my VPN IP so I could not complete the checkout. I had to get a friend to make the booking for me on their card. International banking is terrible.
This gets downvoted... People here really suddenly love The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse as long as it's against "evil crypto" that simultaneously is dangerous enough to supress but also useless.
Why is anonymous cash free of government and bank control equal to addictive drugs that can kill people?
Do you think making the internet and developing cryptography is evil as it means the government cannot control it as easily unlike the postal system or mass media?
Gambling is addictive and causes financial ruin like drugs.
Oppressive regimes like North Korea kill people. Crypto is proven to be a major source of funding for them (and sanctions circumvention for Iran and others).
The question is whether these are worth the benefits you perceive in crypto.
That's the nice thing, not everyone agrees about what is right or wrong morals. Free speech is seen as a good idea generally, why should not that extend to the most fundamental element of living in society ie money.
Like nearly everything in this modern world, the public statements or claims are never true and the opposite is the reality. Im thinking of those people worried about the government taking their money, and today we see the safety of crypto is fundamentally broken because ANYONE can take your money. Maybe its me, but i would rather trust the gov than ANYONE.
At this point it feels like they have made it a /dev/null for things which are not easy to resolve and one is still on the hook to provide some answers
A question: how come the North Koreans aren't draining banks in the U.S. and other countries of cash using equally sophisticated exploits against known technical and human vulnerabilities?
Probably because fiat, unlike crypto, is not decentralized and fraudulent transactions can be reversed. A North Korean hacker zeroing out an account balance and incrementing another, can be reversed.
Exactly. It turns out a lot of the things in the banking system that cryptocurrency people complain about are actually features, not bugs.
IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency. It's a solution with a noble goal: giving the individual complete control of their financial resources. Current form, however, has devolved into casino gambling and criminal laundering.
I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.
That is a category error, though. You can't entirely separate money from state power because ultimately all money represents a claim on resources within some political structure. And the place where you exchange money for those resources is always going to be within reach of the state, kind of by definition.
A monetary system also shouldn’t disproportionately reward the first users of that currency just for them accidentally being first in the pyramid (scheme).
> It's a solution with a noble goal: giving the individual complete control of their financial resources.
Indeed, but also complete responsibility for safeguarding these. It's hard to imagine a good situation where an individual has complete control but not complete responsibility, that way lies moral hazard.
> giving the individual complete control of their financial resources
This seems like a definitionally unachievable goal. How can you have finance without others that you ultimately need to trust, if only to be stable enough in their wants and needs to want to trade with you?
> Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency.
There’s already a solution, use the currency to buy assets denominated in that currency. Crypto was not needed when bonds, stocks, real estate, etc exist.
There are hundreds of trillions of dollars in assets to buy whose value increase over time may beat inflation, I’m surprised you’re not aware of this solution.
0.5% of my net worth is in cash, the other 99.5% is in dollar denominated assets. Cash is a unit of exchange and a unit of account, not an asset.
The cost of that reversible fiat system is ongoing inflation that is put as a hidden tax on everyone. I’d rather have those 6bn from speculators going to NK if that means we go back to sub-2% inflation for a while
That is bs. Before 1971 we had a gold-backed monetary system and no record of deflation in the history of mankind (individual outliers notwithstanding when looking at the last 6000 years as a whole).
So you claim that in the last 6000 years of history we had stagnation? I would claim the world economy did nothing but grow on asset-backend currencies - sure, there is some localized, small (as in relative to the timeframe) outliers that don't matter.
> So you claim that in the last 6000 years of history we had stagnation?
Yes. That's exactly my claim. Without instruments to support growth, the pre-industrial economy did not grow.
The European Industrial Revolution was kick-started by looted gold and other precious materials (like spices) that were looted from the colonies. It provided unexpected inflation by physically increasing the amount of available currency.
> I would claim the world economy did nothing but grow on asset-backend currencies - sure, there is some localized, small (as in relative to the timeframe) outliers that don't matter.
If you are bringing up 6000 years of stagnation, then our current economic growth is nothing but an outlier.
Yes you can pick individual outliers, but clearly the world economy has been growing on a gold-based (or other shiny object backed) currency for literally thousands of years all over the world. Picking out individual cases is literally like looking at the 0.1%. Or do you seriously claim we had stagnation in the thousands of years of civilization, and only started to have groth since 1971? Then I know who is the ignorant one.
So episodes of deflation that inevitably resulted in stagnation are "outliers" and thus don't matter.
> Or do you seriously claim we had stagnation in the thousands of years of civilization, and only started to have groth since 1971?
The economic systems have not been based on precious metals for quite a while. There simply has not been enough gold (or silver) to back up the economy for at least 200-300 years. Instead, the global economy was based on the _promise_ of getting gold.
No, I think that's approaching a strawman. Speaking as somebody that doesn't give a shit about cryptocurrency.
It's all tradeoffs. The same power that grants the ability to reverse transactions also grants the ability to reverse a transaction in bad faith and commit fraud. Will the system correct that? Would it surprise you to know that it doesn't have to? That same power also grants the ability to lock an entity out of any kind of monetary transaction, and things like debanking. Usable for good? Sure. I don't think it's controversial to say that it being leveraged against Hunter Biden was at all justified, however. Would you like to be on the receiving end of that? Would you like to see a world where an LLM gets to decide that kind of thing based on your presence in the surveillance panopticon?
To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode. To be clear, I don't necessarily agree with it myself, but you shouldn't be so uncharitable to people to assume disagreement is always a matter of delusional ignorance.
> To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode.
Another way to restate my comment is: cryptocurrency is technically interesting but the tradeoffs it made to focus on certain edge cases mean that for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
I think Darknet Diaries covers a bunch of these types of heists involving banks.
I suspect they just assess vulnerabilities and exploit them when/where they can. My understanding is that these thefts are big part of their (NK) economy.
Other question: why don’t they just forge currency? Surely with nation states resources you can create fake currency that easily fools most inspections? Is it that hard to launder cash? Or is the a red line and they are afraid of political measures?
There’s Superdollars but it doesn’t seem to be a really widespread problem so far, right?
Serial numbers of all old dollar bills are recorded when those bills are destroyed and replaced with newly printed bills AND when bills are deposited to banks. Even if fake bill is perfectly made, it will still be detected with this method. Fake and duplicate serial numbers will be detected when compared against official ones.
Can’t you just immediately use them? The person getting caught will be some random person that took the bill, not the one bringing it into circulation.
Trying to spend $1B with $100 bill at a time will take 10 million transactions. No one's going to accept large amount of cash without a credible source.
There are tons of youtube videos about this. much harder than it sounds to forge at scale. The feds are very good at coming down on forgery. Also, it would provoke strong action by the US, whereas stealing crypto apparently does not.
I think NK is a convenient target to blame, instead of highlighting that random events from random insiders across different financial operations are the actual cause.
>"draining banks in the U.S. and other countries of cash"
Cash sits in vaults. North Korea would need to physically send a team of bank robbers to extract it. The digital representation of USD is not cash, it's an entry in a ledger, and banks generally have systems that would not allow adding an entry with a sudden transfer of a large amount of money to "J. U. Kim, North Korea". That's why Bitcoin is called "digital cash".
They probably are. I used to write software for a financial institution and we saw a lot of traffic from Chinese and Russian IP's hitting our firewalls constantly (ssh login attempts with typical default passwords, random wordpress exploits, that sorta thing). It wasn't very sophisticated so I don't think it was state sponsored or anything, probably just random cyber criminals trying to hit US targets because their governments wouldn't care.
I mean, this was at least 15 years ago.. so it might be a different story. But when the game is throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, I imagine they're still going after whatever targets they can find.
I was going to ask, why would NK attack a China-based crypto firm? Then I learned that Binance isn’t headquartered anywhere. They’re literally asking to be hacked. Nobody will protect them.
How do they launder the coins generally? Given you traceable (most) cryptocurrency is by design, it seems you could sanction anyone who transacts with them? I understand it's likely not that simple, though.
They deposit the coins into organisations that mix coins from various customers. Its just like a bank. You deposit a fake/stollen 100$ bill one day and, if they accept it, you can withdraw a totally different 100$ bill from an ATM the next day.
Yes, but only if the organization is cooperative. Say you are a cop in Paris investigating some shady bitcoin transactions. But the mixer is in Japan. So you spend a year getting their records, only to point to another mixer in Canada. The goal isn't mathematical untraceability, just increasing the burden on investigators to the point they move on to easier targets. There are always lots of speeding tickets that need handing out.
Older mixers you could argue could kind of be traced but even then there’d still be difficulty and deniability.
There’s a newer class of privacy mixer though that basically is untraceable. On privacy chains you can’t see the transactions so from an outside perspective it looks like the money just went into a black hole and it wouldn’t show up until it got converted to public again. When it gets converted to public though, it has no connection to the original transaction and could be literally anyone else’s money who used the chain converting to public.
It could take a long time but you could basically just slowly do this and withdraw small enough amounts of money to not raise suspicion. Or do something like start your own coin and pump the price with the stolen funds then cash out the coin. There’s new privacy smart contract chains where this could be done without even signing slightly the stolen funds were used.
That's exactly what I thought as well, especially if the transaction is done electronically, it should be traced back to the person who made unlike with cash.
But then in turn I'm surprised that states haven't yet sanctioned the mixers themselves. I understand there's no proof that they might not also mix legitimate funds, but I wouldn't have expected this to be a big hindrance given that everyone seems to know that most of their use is for money laundering.
It's pretty much only money laundering. Supporters use the privacy euphemism but I've never heard of a legal use case for it, hence the tornado mixer sentence
Ask a bank. Banks do not keep individual piles of cash for each depositor. Why do they put everyone's money into one big pile? See the movie It's A Wonderful Life for the famous monologue justifying the practice.
It’s a pity. If he hadn’t been born in North Korea like that, he would have become a truly great programmer. My life is really hard and painful, but sometimes I think I’m better off than they are.
Maybe if he hadn't been born in North Korea he'd have lived his dream of opening a coffee shop; perhaps he got into hacking there because it's the only way to support his family.
>perhaps he got into hacking there because it's the only way to support his family.
North Korean hackers are state employees. They're selected for the role based on their academic ability (top achievers go to the nuclear programme). The state takes the bulk of the earnings, but it is a more comfortable existence than for the average North Korean.
Your typical North Korean doesn't have the kind of unrestricted access to the internet necessary to become a hacker.
How can they be brought to justice, as stated, if they’re state sponsored? And how do members get their crypto back? There’s 6+ billion in insurance to back what was stolen?
There is no way to bring them to justice unless the US were to somehow invade, or another country deals with it, or they leave Korea. All very unlikely. North Korea is the closet thing to an actual criminal state/hideout.
No surprises there - of course they linked it to NK... These parasitic intelligence firms are draining taxpayer money because law enforcement agencies lack blockchain expertise and constantly outsource their investigations. We’ve already seen cases where firms like Chainalysis and TRM provided flawed data that led to innocent people being wrongfully charged. Worse yet, their operations rely on backroom cooperation with private intelligence mercenaries, trading illegally obtained data on private citizens worldwide.
Yet, they consistently fail to trace truly sophisticated threat actors, like the 2017 Parity Wallet hacker or the KyberSwap exploiter. These individuals continue to cash out massive amounts year after year, completely undisturbed. Pathetic companies like SlowMist can only continue making wet dream Twitter posts each year, promising that they will "catch them soon!", looking even more pathetic.
That's my feeling, too. It's probably my TDS, but it just seems weird that the shady founder of Binance got busted for laundering money, then got a shady pardon from Trump, and now billions have mysteriously gone missing. Someone's gonna have to kick up a portion of that money to Trump; he'll lay it all on North Korea and we'll all move onto the next headline.
Binance is run by Chinese people. I don't think the Chinese government likes what they are running though. Binance itself is not legal/available in China.
They have chosen to run concentration camps and starve their own people for decades instead of becoming a rich country like South Korea. They can stop the sanctions whenever they want, by becoming a democracy.
Friendly reminder that this was never about democracy. The US imposed a military dictatorship on South Korea that was even more brutal than the North. The goal has always been promoting capitalism at all costs, and nothing else.
The people are starving because North Korea has been cut off from the global economy for its entire existence. In other words, the people sanctioning are responsible for the starvation. Sanctions obviously do nothing to hurt the ruling party or coerce them to change their views.
Same unit as Bybit in Feb 2025 (TraderTraitor), and if the laptop reports are right, the same way in: one developer's machine. Bybit lost $1.5B through a compromised Safe{Wallet} dev box. Twenty months later the largest exchange in the world loses four times that, apparently the same way. I'd like to know what signing setup lets one engineer's laptop reach $6B
A guy abducts a president of a sovereign state and puts him into New York prison without any legal basis. The whole country is complicit by allowing this to happen. Yet all you can think is Putin.
Calling any of these articles “news” is something of a stretch. “Why Trump Fell in Love with Kim Jong Un”. Seriously? These are entertainment articles, at best. Where’s the Buzzfeed Top 10 Reasons Trump loves North Korea link?
Crypto enthusiasts misunderstand what a financial system/financial architecture is. It is not the fiat currencies themselves, but rather the power architecture that controls and oversees value and exchange in whatever form it takes. Crypto has been entirely subsumed into this architecture through the exchanges which are obviously beholden to the holders of real power, i.e. governments.
This is to say, the stated goal and the target of the crypto enthusiasts are misaligned. To transcend the institutions represented by the fiat system requires far more than creating some alternative "currency", rather it requires creating an entirely new power structure.
As soon as you have an entirely new power structure you have a new government.
Different people may be on top, with different aims (...arguable, but let's pretend.)
But there will always be a government of some sort making the big decisions for the benefit of its ruling clique.
>But there will always be a government of some sort making the big decisions for the benefit of its ruling clique
That depends on how much resources said government can extract from the environment. Either by taking or by providing value in exchange.
One can imagine a level of technological advancement that makes violence impossible and trade unnecessary. Poof, no government.
Indeed. That's the point. We can't sidestep human control via technical means.
I think everyone is misunderstanding crypto…
Crypto doesn’t care wether or not the transaction was for good or evil. It’s Switzerland, it’s neutral, and there really only one goal - to sidestep human control.
If a transaction was successful, it’s done its job.
It's done its job? How tone deaf can you be?
Because of human nature fraud, theft, errors, disputes over assets etc. that go along with money whatever its form need to be properly dispositioned too. A block chain has no answer for that. And without dispute resolution methods the system will die or merely attract the underside or 1-off users of society.
Second, an automatic no to power is simplistic so as to distort solutions. Power is fine provided it's not corrupt and accountable. Getting that and keeping it is a hard problem, but there's no end-run either.
Finally, how many examples of frauds, thefts N must occur before crypto is associated with fraud, theft? That N was long ago surpassed.
And yet when crypto gets stolen the people who go around preaching this kind of philosophy immediately run to the government for help recovering it.
Absolutely agree. It's all awesome until it happens to oneself, then it gets real.
and any attempt to avoid government oversight simply hits a wall of being illegal
see monero getting outlawed by EU countries
If you perfectly evade government oversight being illegal doesn't matter much.
It's a weird idea of being physically present in the jurisdiction and not being subject to it's laws which kinda doesn't survive reality.
Who are these "crypto enthusiasts" who, in 2026, have a "stated goal" of "some alternative 'currency'"?
Look at the schedule of any crypto conference - ethereum events in particular, but others as well - and you will find that your critique has already been widely adopted. The discussion is around replacing power structures and sources of injustice, not merely 'currency'.
I was reluctant to get involved in blockchain tech because I don't care for currency and don't view it as a likely organizing principle for humans for the next thousand years. That was in like 2016.
Today, nearly every blockchain project attempts to overcome challenges other than currency.
When fraud, theft occur and/or claims on insurance when fraud theft occurs a regulator must have a legal system to find facts, prove charges, make a judgement that can be enforced etc.. And that means, for one thing, anonymous users are an illusion. Identity to get accountability is required.
Are they really attempting to replace the power structures I'm talking about? Are their methods sufficiently ambitious?
If not they're fooling themselves same as those focused on currency replacement.
I don't know - it depends who specifically you're talking about.
You're the one who invented these "crypto enthusiasts" in order to rail against them - whom do you mean exactly? Got a particular talk from devcon? Let alone regens unite / schelling point / GFEL / some other radical ethereum event?
Why would anyone trust CZ with their digital crime tokens?
Epstein knew what his investment was for.
multisig escrow + privacy will bring this new power structure
The challenge is not a technical one, and cannot be solved with technology.
That's a meme lizard people implanted into the conversation so you don't try hard enough.
No, it wont, because you just made the same mistake they talked about. You assumed that its a currency implementation detail and not a power structure thats holding it back.
it 100% will
arbitration without state control will supersede the old system
it is simply better UX to do business without the hive interjecting
a new power structure can only be achieved through technology. OP has no clue and just spouts orange reddit talking points to farm karma
Can you give any evidence for this? (I mean statistically significant evidence worthly of your global, sweeping claims and not a tiny sample of cherry picked anecdotes)
Or is all of your statements just "trust me bro"?
Good luck
good luck too
This seems like pure projection on your part.
>Estimated total impact: ~$6.3B, with ~$3B frozen on-chain so far, in coordination with our blockchain partners
I always find it amusing to read this. Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money? Either they are misguiding you about the core value of their product or their ability to execute traditional interventions in cases of theft. You can't have the conveniences of both at the same time.
Exactly.
It's called the oracle problem. It's the Achilles heel of the whole idea.
And it's unsolvable. As soon as you want to trade some coin for something real, you need an oracle.
Wanna buy a flat in a world where (for argument's sake) even the ownership of that asset is tracked on a blockchain?
Let's say I come home from holidays and someone else lives there.
How do I then prove it's mine? Because it says so in some computer?
Someone has to believe that is true and let me enforce that ownership tie.
Those persons (a judge, the police, even if robots by then) are the oracle.
And a more common scenario than theft is btw legal ownership transfer.
What if I die somehow before giving the blockchain keys needed for that to someone?
How will my brother inherit the flat?
Oracle.
You're mixing up two issues. The need for oracles is a "hard problem" but it's not the problem in this case.
USDC has a central issuer that can freeze funds because that's the only way you can currently have an asset that "looks like" dollars on a crypto ledger. Someone gets a dollar, mints a unit of the bearer token, and pinky swears they'll redeem it. It's a systemic concern that calls into question the legitimacy of the system, but that's not an oracle.
Yeah, you do not need an oracle for USDC.
But I don't see USDC being mentioned in my reply or the comment I replied to.
And calling the need for oracles a "hard problem" is a neat euphemism the point of which escapes me. It's not solveable.
As someone else wrote: when something goes sideways with their assets the crypto posse call for law enforcement. Or they bent their own rules (DAO/ETH hard fork, 2016 e.g.).
>> Those persons (a judge, the police, even if robots by then) are the oracle.
they are not. The oracle is always a computer. It is a record in gov db that says you own something.
Judge and the police are the enforcers.
I assumed a basic level of abstract thinking since this is HN.
For the point I illustrated it does not matter. Everything is needed. The record somewhere will not be sufficient to get you your flat back when you return from holidays. Nor will a the police w/o a judge. Or the judge w/o having the the record to look at.
And re. "always a computer": trust me, in Germany where I live, it will not be a computer for years to come. Everything is paper here. :D
"Oracle" being the cover for crypto bros who dont want to admit they need "the legal system" to fix thier mess. Its all idiology and freedom when you are poor but once you actually own something of value, like a flat, suddenly you want lawyers and police to keep you safe from bad people.
At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power. In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose.
No? Cryptocurrency has a ton of utility: it simplified ransomware attacks, enabled the deployment of supplychain attacks to steal funds from unsuspecting users, made illegal gambling accessible to everyone, memecoins, efts and safe storage for any stolen or illicidly gained funds until they could be laundered and the list goes on likely exceeding the character limit.
The biggest benefit is that you can only withdraw what you need into the real world, if you gain millions of dollars you can life off that money for the rest of your life with tiny withdrawals of $2000~$5000 or so serving as a stable stream of income which allows you to have risk free investment into real-world activites that would normally strain your finances and induce sunk cost fallacy.
Losing $5000 doesn't mean anything when you know that you will have $5000 tomorrow.
> At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power.
There are many types of crypto people. Some of them are not crypto people per se, but people who saw crypto as a means to an end. Among them, there are plenty of people who seem to be invested in sheer fraud.
It's also important to note that there are many sides to the scheme. There's for example the instant transactions side, and the long term bet in scarcity. For example, Russia has been leaning heavily on crypto to circumvent sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/08/russias-use-of-...
> In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose.
It was not out of thin air. This is literally a grift where the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich from it.
>the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich
This is the key issue. Crypto by itself created little to no actual additional value. Especially when it devolved into just another centralized currency with less government oversight. So the whole thing was a zero-sum game. People only got rich because they made others poor.
Why would Russia need crypto, when they can trade with China or buy through middle men in Dubai or similar places ?
> Why would Russia need crypto, when they can trade with China or buy through middle men in Dubai or similar places ?
I'm not sure you understand how international sanctions work, particularly the scheme imposed on Russia.
For example, read up on Russia's rupee surplus
https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/india-russia-susp...
I KNOW how they work, i also know that many places IGNORE the idea of sanctions on Russia.
We all know that China for examples continue to trade freely with RU. There are many other examples of how Coca Cola sells a significant boost in numbers to border countries which are then driven across the border to RU. Everybody knows what is happening here, but nobody cares, business is business. Coke isnt the only one, far too many continue to trade even if its thru a middle man.
You can see a lot of vids on YT for example that show Russia supermarket shelves have more than enuff Coke and other brands, even though officially Coke is not trading with Russia in anyway.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/japans-taiyo-oil-rec...
google "dubai airbus spares smuggles"...
It's another wealth transfer. No new money is generated.
No new money was generated, but new utility was generated.
Before cryptocurrency, there was no decentralized way to transfer value on the internet.
What were the druglords and criminals befre crypto I wonder?
Stable coins are not Crypto, they are just built on top of crypto to avoid normal financial regulations.
> Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money?
Regulatory arbitrage. Not all centralized institutions are fast enough to actually make use of the theoretical capabilities available to them.
> Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money?
Cheaper international transfers could be a specific valid use case. But I presume risk is too high for my taste.
Based on my 10 seconds of Googling, for transactions under $100, Bitcoin is actually more expensive to transfer.
Crypto bros sure are quick to inform law enforcement and centralized financial authorities if their self governance fails
The usual "Governments are evil until I need to be rescued" libertarian shuffle.
I'd bet most of the frozen $3B is stablecoins and tokens with an admin freeze function. Tether and Circle can blacklist an address in minutes. Nobody can freeze BTC or ETH. So the money they got back is the part that was never decentralized in the first place, which supports your point from the other side
Man, if only there existed some central societal body with the authority to essentially freeze accounts and unwind a transaction like this. What a security feature that would be.
what if the promotion of said non-fiat systems was done primarily by those looking to subvert that system? NK, Russia? What if it was further supported primarily by people to give great liquidity to illegal activity.
Something tells me that politicians that visit said locations on the 4th of July and their buddies business "leaders" looking to destablize the system are just not on the up and up. May even be corrupt.
The reversibility of transactions is often brought up but I don't think that is the main differentiator, or any at all really.
First, both cryptocurrencies and traditional finance systems have chosen to and have chosen not to reverse or freeze criminal transactions in the past. Decentralized blockchains have chosen to do so at least once [0]. The traditional finance system has chosen not to many times and even large sums [1] [2]. It really comes down to how much is stolen and how much influence the victim(s) have.
No, instead I think the main difference is the speed of transactions. Some blockchains operate within milliseconds while bank transactions take days. Even instant transfers are actually settled on a way longer cadence in reality.
That means attackers can do a fast sweep on blockchains, which is not possible with bank transactions because everything happens in slow motion and humans have way more time to react and step in.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO [1]: https://www.turkiyetoday.com/turkiye/german-bank-e100m-disap... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
I imagine it's possible to design a blockchain where transactions are 1) artificially delayed; and 2) can be blocked by anyone who has the key.
For example, take Bitcoin, except that each transaction must be posted twice to be considered to have modified the ledger between 7 and 14 days apart as measured by the number of intermediate blocks as a function of the difficulty requirement. If a "blocking" transaction makes it to the blockchain in between, then the transaction is deemed to have been cancelled. A "blocking" transaction must merely demonstrate ownership of one of the transaction inputs.
If you hold large funds, you could keep a remote monitoring system somewhere that is empowered to block your own transactions.
The blockchain design could be enhanced so that a blocking transaction proves ownership of the original inputs but cannot sign a transaction itself.
Failure mode: someone trying to legitimately block a transaction could find themselves unable to get their blocking transaction mined. But in practice they'd just up the transaction fee, and game theory should take care of it.
This was just a thought experiment. A point that comes to mind is that given this is possible, what you describe isn't an inherent property of cryptocurrency, so if there's a benefit to having this property then it could be done.
You are changing the process not the way technology operates.
Blockchain today cannot fix the problem that there will be examples where some guardian needs to reverse transaction because of fraud detection at some later stage.
How exactly can you sign the next entry in a block chain for a temporary period of time ? You cant. You either update it or you dont.
It wouldn't work if the realisation of fraud takes longer than the window of time you've given the owner to make a blocking transaction. Banks are superior here because they have the power and ability to correlate multiple different kinds of evidence, and then reverse the transaction even years later. They have financial statements, biological proof, social evidence, much more than just one cryptographic key.
The main reason it is a differentiator is that centralised money understands that its purpose is to be a system of social credit, so reversibility of transactions is just an acknowledgement that there is enough evidence to prove that this particular individual owns this particular sum, so it should go back to them. It is actually a much better and more honest system than the blockchain, because it doesn't treat money like a tangible resource in and of itself that can be "lost" which would be a much older and dumber way of doing things.
Is cash centralised money? Because just as courts can order cash transaction reversals they can also order cryptocurrency transaction reversals.
Yes but if your cryptocurrency is supported by courts then it is no longer decentralised money and on top of that some of it is going to have to be converted to fiat at some point just to engage with the legal system if nothing else.
It’s not always a choice. If value has been transferred onwards (ultimately in the form of e.g. cash withdrawn or something equally hard to trace, like physical goods handed over to a buyer), simply “undoing all transactions in a database” isn’t without victims either.
Whether undoing transactions or not is an option strongly depends on how fast value is allowed to move. Sometimes being slow is a feature as much as it is a bug.
> Whether undoing transactions or not is an option strongly depends on how fast value is allowed to move. Sometimes being slow is a feature as much as it is a bug.
Exactly, that is my point. It is less about reversibility and more so about speed. Being slow can be an advantage (for security).
I heard escrow keys are supposed to solve this. Can't we deposit escrow keys to a legacy bank running cobol in mainframes and let it do its kyc/aml sanctions check and anti fraud on all transactions? That should solve it
a 51% agreement could fork/reverse this.
On the other threads it was noted that some of it had been frozen via USDT contracts
Except that banks often don't unwind or freeze transactions. I've seen cases of both criminal conduct, and human error, leading to millions in lost funds. And banks didn't reverse or freeze anything. Yes it would be a security feature, but it's not used the way you assume.
Perhaps crypto should have a transaction delay with a user held reverse key for transactions above a certain user defined amount.
If a transaction is above that amount, you get alerts by email, SMS, push notification...
If it's expected you let it go though. If not, you take out the key, then reverse it.
Of course legit recipients would wait until the delay period is over before considering the transaction to be complete.
No worries if an attacker steals the key. Why would they reverse their own transaction?
Yeah I know you are referring to the fiat-based financial system. Keep in mind, wire transfers generally cannot be reversed. There have been notable instances where money is lost/stolen this way, and no way to get it back.
Wire payments are definitely reversible, but you might need to involve the courts, and international wires are more complex [0]. Most notably, 900 million in accidental payments made by Citi were eventually fully reversed by appeals courts.
> A full recounting of it is outside the scope of this anecdote, but it rhymes with “If you and the United States federal government disagree whether a transaction is final, you are wrong.”
[0]: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/no-payments-are-final...
Yes, they can.
If it's a significantly large sum, it may look like this:
Step 1: The CEO of the debtor bank calls the CEO of the creditor bank and asks to return the money.
Step 2 (only needed if there is disagreement): Lawyers of the debtor bank send a ton of legal papers to the creditor bank and figure it out.
But it's just one of nearly infinite number of scenarios.
And if the creditor bank happens to be in Russia, Iran, the DRPK, or any number of other hostile financial systems, the debtor bank will likely find things practically impossible to unwind regardless.
Sometimes they get lucky though and the government passes a law allowing them to seize equivalent assets a few decades down the road.
Making transfers to those countries is almost impossible from Western banks. It would require sophisticated multi-bank international transfers to do that, which take a long time and are fairly easy to stop.
That proves the value of a well-regulated financial system.
They are already excluded from the financial system.
Do you think money is transferred by shoving bank notes into the Ethernet cables?
When you transfer a dollar from your account to Putin's account in a Russian bank, in reality your bank transfers a dollar from their account within the FRS (Federal Reserve System) to Putin's bank's account within the FRS.
It can be more complicated with more intermediaries, but it can be traced and reverted.
6 billion in fiat is too large a figure to be irreversible. Do you have any examples?
A similar incident would be the 1Billion robbery of the Bangladesh central bank
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
Most of it was stopped and some was even recovered but $66Million is still lost 10years later .
In both incidents protection are reliant on the authorities to minimize the damage ; tether and circle able to freeze tokens is not that different from the traditional finance doing it.
Crypto is only reinventing structures that evolved in every financial system over time.
Overtime they are going away from their founding theme of decentralization . Exchanges and stable coin issuers who can freeze wallets and coins are by definition centralization ; it is worse though as these organizations are less transparent than banks with less accountability
And as the stable coin operators and exchanges grow closer with governments and political elites they will add more and more controls in exchange for legitimacy.
https://www.al.com/news/2026/10/mobiles-147-million-fraud-lo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
Most of the billion was frozen though if it was not frozen in time it would have probably evaporated just like these bitcoins getting into mixers.
And yet somehow nobody hears about North Korean hackers stealing billions from regular banks.
https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/cybersecurity-advisories/aa...
wire fraud, credit card fraud, pig butchering (a different way to access the accounts really), etc.. The traditional system do have some safeties but it's not impenetrable.
> the largest crypto theft on record
Interestingly, this 18,270 BTC Binance theft is only the largest when measured in USD. In terms of pure BTC, it's not even close to the 2011-14 Mt. Gox loss of ~850,000 BTC.
After long soul-searching, crypto has settled on two strong use cases:
1) unregulated gambling (a.k.a. "prediction markets"),
2) funding North Korea.
Heartening to see the beautiful web3 vision come alive.
North korea has enough cars for a traffic jam so that's definitely a win for the people's democratic republic of Korea, the only korea to exist.
all this time people said it was useless ... just shows what they know
I have read somewhere that ISIS mostly runs on cryptocurrency now because it's harder to block.
Oh here
> They delve in weapons and human trafficking, sometimes take part in drug smuggling, more and more engage in crypto mining and frauds related to the crypto industry - the whole Islamic State is now operating by crypto, whether it’s various European countries, West or East Africa, Asia, or such weird places like Costa Rica, Brazil or Argentina.
https://saladinaldronni.substack.com/p/recent-islamic-state-...
edit:
but it seems they have mostly moved to Monero
https://gnet-research.org/2025/02/18/combating-islamic-state...
You forgot ransomware
You say that like that's not spread by NK
[dead]
And crime.
and presidential bribery
NK seems to be /dev/null for unresolved issues. Wonder if they receive any monetary assistance for taking all the blames
For you maybe, and those who have only lived, worked, and made businesses in one country. I have had several occasions where crypto would have made life a lot easier. I closed a bank account in Canada and they said the funds could not be sent by wire when it's being closed, only a paper bank draft, and assured me that my bank in Europe would accept it. My bank not only did not accept paper checks or bank drafts but told me no bank in the entire country accepts paper checks and drafts anymore.
Another time, I tried to book IMAX 70mm movie tickets for my trip to visit, the website IP region blocked me so I got on to VPN, then I could make the booking but the Visa SMS 2FA redirect IP region blocked my VPN IP so I could not complete the checkout. I had to get a friend to make the booking for me on their card. International banking is terrible.
Hey, you forgot #3:
Selling sanctioned oil to India and buying unguided cruise missiles from Iran, through the Gulf state laundromats.
That's a good sign of it's resilience if true. Why don't you want a form of money that doesn't require doxxing yourself to a state or bank?
This gets downvoted... People here really suddenly love The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse as long as it's against "evil crypto" that simultaneously is dangerous enough to supress but also useless.
Methamphetamine made in home labs is both useless and dangerous enough to suppress. That's not an unusual combination to be regulated.
Is crypto "Breaking Bad" for nerds? Sounds about right...
Why is anonymous cash free of government and bank control equal to addictive drugs that can kill people?
Do you think making the internet and developing cryptography is evil as it means the government cannot control it as easily unlike the postal system or mass media?
Gambling is addictive and causes financial ruin like drugs.
Oppressive regimes like North Korea kill people. Crypto is proven to be a major source of funding for them (and sanctions circumvention for Iran and others).
The question is whether these are worth the benefits you perceive in crypto.
>sanctions circumvention for Iran and others
That's the nice thing, not everyone agrees about what is right or wrong morals. Free speech is seen as a good idea generally, why should not that extend to the most fundamental element of living in society ie money.
So does encrypted communication and cash dollars. Do you want to ban these two as well?
Is women being able to anonynmously buy contraceptives or other useful health items in a maga state evil to you for example?
lmao
Supporting poorer countries, can there be a more moral course? /s
Like nearly everything in this modern world, the public statements or claims are never true and the opposite is the reality. Im thinking of those people worried about the government taking their money, and today we see the safety of crypto is fundamentally broken because ANYONE can take your money. Maybe its me, but i would rather trust the gov than ANYONE.
Here is the underlying report from TRM: https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/north-korea-steals-us...
Zero evidence presented that this has anything to do with DPRK. "Trust us bro".
This is crypto we're talking about. "Trust us bro" is the gold standard
At this point it feels like they have made it a /dev/null for things which are not easy to resolve and one is still on the hook to provide some answers
Add in Claude for some extra CYA:
> Dear Claude, please investigate the culprit of the attack and make no mistakes.
Their haul is over 20% of North Korea’s GDP.
> North Korea’s GDP
Would note that nobody—including probably the Kims—knows what this figure is.
Ok their putative gdp. Given that the number is probably exaggerated maybe it’s 50%.
Respected Comrade knows everything.
Something as trivial as knowing the GDP to the nearest cent in real time pales in comparison to Dear Leaders abilities
It's well understood that crypto (scams, hacks) has contributed a third to half of the DPRK's foreign exchange income over the last few years.
> It's well understood
Where might one read more about this?
Here a few sources:
https://cybernews.com/crypto/north-korean-crypto-hackers-thi...
https://www.nknews.org/2024/03/north-korea-relies-on-crypto-...
https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10599201
https://www.nbcnews.com/world/asia/north-korea-stolen-billio...
https://www.state.gov/releases/2026/01/the-democratic-people...
https://msmt.info/view/save/2025/10/22/26294780-c396-407d-bb...
They teach that in schools. /s
So a sixth?
"<fraction> to <fraction>" means some value in between those endpoints.
You're thinking of "<fraction> of <fraction>".
33% to 50%.
A question: how come the North Koreans aren't draining banks in the U.S. and other countries of cash using equally sophisticated exploits against known technical and human vulnerabilities?
Probably because fiat, unlike crypto, is not decentralized and fraudulent transactions can be reversed. A North Korean hacker zeroing out an account balance and incrementing another, can be reversed.
Exactly. It turns out a lot of the things in the banking system that cryptocurrency people complain about are actually features, not bugs.
IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency. It's a solution with a noble goal: giving the individual complete control of their financial resources. Current form, however, has devolved into casino gambling and criminal laundering.
I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.
That is a category error, though. You can't entirely separate money from state power because ultimately all money represents a claim on resources within some political structure. And the place where you exchange money for those resources is always going to be within reach of the state, kind of by definition.
A monetary system also shouldn’t disproportionately reward the first users of that currency just for them accidentally being first in the pyramid (scheme).
> It's a solution with a noble goal: giving the individual complete control of their financial resources.
Indeed, but also complete responsibility for safeguarding these. It's hard to imagine a good situation where an individual has complete control but not complete responsibility, that way lies moral hazard.
> giving the individual complete control of their financial resources
This seems like a definitionally unachievable goal. How can you have finance without others that you ultimately need to trust, if only to be stable enough in their wants and needs to want to trade with you?
> Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency.
> ...
> I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.
It "solved" inflation by being deflationary (and then you have the massive volatility layered on top of that).
I think it's probably impossible to have a stable currency without some kind of dynamic governance, like a central bank.
> Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency.
There’s already a solution, use the currency to buy assets denominated in that currency. Crypto was not needed when bonds, stocks, real estate, etc exist.
There are hundreds of trillions of dollars in assets to buy whose value increase over time may beat inflation, I’m surprised you’re not aware of this solution.
0.5% of my net worth is in cash, the other 99.5% is in dollar denominated assets. Cash is a unit of exchange and a unit of account, not an asset.
The cost of that reversible fiat system is ongoing inflation that is put as a hidden tax on everyone. I’d rather have those 6bn from speculators going to NK if that means we go back to sub-2% inflation for a while
And the advantage of inflationary currency is growth. With deflation you only get stagnation.
That is bs. Before 1971 we had a gold-backed monetary system and no record of deflation in the history of mankind (individual outliers notwithstanding when looking at the last 6000 years as a whole).
You need an explicit /s tag.
( Eg: Collapse of the Spanish Empire )
So you claim that in the last 6000 years of history we had stagnation? I would claim the world economy did nothing but grow on asset-backend currencies - sure, there is some localized, small (as in relative to the timeframe) outliers that don't matter.
> So you claim that in the last 6000 years of history we had stagnation?
Yes. That's exactly my claim. Without instruments to support growth, the pre-industrial economy did not grow.
The European Industrial Revolution was kick-started by looted gold and other precious materials (like spices) that were looted from the colonies. It provided unexpected inflation by physically increasing the amount of available currency.
> I would claim the world economy did nothing but grow on asset-backend currencies - sure, there is some localized, small (as in relative to the timeframe) outliers that don't matter.
If you are bringing up 6000 years of stagnation, then our current economic growth is nothing but an outlier.
It's not _my_ claim, and it's very mild in comparison to your claim.
> small outliers that don't matter.
The Spanish Empire that spanned a globe and had a footprint in North America only recently eclipsed by the modern USofA is a "small outlier" ?
Uh-huh.
In the macroscopic view of civilization it is a total outlier, yes.
> That is bs.
I assume that you're just completely ignorant, and as such, you can't be educated.
> Before 1971 we had a gold-backed monetary system
We didn't.
> and no record of deflation in the history of mankind.
Germany, 1932-1933. US, 1927-1933. And so on.
Yes you can pick individual outliers, but clearly the world economy has been growing on a gold-based (or other shiny object backed) currency for literally thousands of years all over the world. Picking out individual cases is literally like looking at the 0.1%. Or do you seriously claim we had stagnation in the thousands of years of civilization, and only started to have groth since 1971? Then I know who is the ignorant one.
See also: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
So episodes of deflation that inevitably resulted in stagnation are "outliers" and thus don't matter.
> Or do you seriously claim we had stagnation in the thousands of years of civilization, and only started to have groth since 1971?
The economic systems have not been based on precious metals for quite a while. There simply has not been enough gold (or silver) to back up the economy for at least 200-300 years. Instead, the global economy was based on the _promise_ of getting gold.
In other words, fiat money.
Gold bug fever blinkers the mind.
No, I think that's approaching a strawman. Speaking as somebody that doesn't give a shit about cryptocurrency.
It's all tradeoffs. The same power that grants the ability to reverse transactions also grants the ability to reverse a transaction in bad faith and commit fraud. Will the system correct that? Would it surprise you to know that it doesn't have to? That same power also grants the ability to lock an entity out of any kind of monetary transaction, and things like debanking. Usable for good? Sure. I don't think it's controversial to say that it being leveraged against Hunter Biden was at all justified, however. Would you like to be on the receiving end of that? Would you like to see a world where an LLM gets to decide that kind of thing based on your presence in the surveillance panopticon?
To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode. To be clear, I don't necessarily agree with it myself, but you shouldn't be so uncharitable to people to assume disagreement is always a matter of delusional ignorance.
> To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode.
Another way to restate my comment is: cryptocurrency is technically interesting but the tradeoffs it made to focus on certain edge cases mean that for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
They have! There was a famous incident in 2016 where NK tried to wire a billion dollars out of the NY fed and managed to get away with $100 million.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
They do, here's one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
I think Darknet Diaries covers a bunch of these types of heists involving banks.
I suspect they just assess vulnerabilities and exploit them when/where they can. My understanding is that these thefts are big part of their (NK) economy.
Other question: why don’t they just forge currency? Surely with nation states resources you can create fake currency that easily fools most inspections? Is it that hard to launder cash? Or is the a red line and they are afraid of political measures?
There’s Superdollars but it doesn’t seem to be a really widespread problem so far, right?
Serial numbers of all old dollar bills are recorded when those bills are destroyed and replaced with newly printed bills AND when bills are deposited to banks. Even if fake bill is perfectly made, it will still be detected with this method. Fake and duplicate serial numbers will be detected when compared against official ones.
Can’t you just immediately use them? The person getting caught will be some random person that took the bill, not the one bringing it into circulation.
Trying to spend $1B with $100 bill at a time will take 10 million transactions. No one's going to accept large amount of cash without a credible source.
Forging doesn't scale. No one wants counterfeit for anything close to $1 per dollar. You have to pass off bad bills one at a time.
10 million dollars in $100 bills weighs 100 kg. Distributing and fencing that much counterfeit is probably hard.
They probably do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar
There are tons of youtube videos about this. much harder than it sounds to forge at scale. The feds are very good at coming down on forgery. Also, it would provoke strong action by the US, whereas stealing crypto apparently does not.
I think NK is a convenient target to blame, instead of highlighting that random events from random insiders across different financial operations are the actual cause.
>"draining banks in the U.S. and other countries of cash"
Cash sits in vaults. North Korea would need to physically send a team of bank robbers to extract it. The digital representation of USD is not cash, it's an entry in a ledger, and banks generally have systems that would not allow adding an entry with a sudden transfer of a large amount of money to "J. U. Kim, North Korea". That's why Bitcoin is called "digital cash".
They are trying!
They probably are. I used to write software for a financial institution and we saw a lot of traffic from Chinese and Russian IP's hitting our firewalls constantly (ssh login attempts with typical default passwords, random wordpress exploits, that sorta thing). It wasn't very sophisticated so I don't think it was state sponsored or anything, probably just random cyber criminals trying to hit US targets because their governments wouldn't care.
Do they really need to bother? Plenty to steal in cryptoland, and it's much much easier.
I mean, this was at least 15 years ago.. so it might be a different story. But when the game is throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, I imagine they're still going after whatever targets they can find.
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I was going to ask, why would NK attack a China-based crypto firm? Then I learned that Binance isn’t headquartered anywhere. They’re literally asking to be hacked. Nobody will protect them.
> Binance isn’t headquartered anywhere.
Don’t fall for their propaganda. Everybody is ultimately headquartered somewhere.
How do they launder the coins generally? Given you traceable (most) cryptocurrency is by design, it seems you could sanction anyone who transacts with them? I understand it's likely not that simple, though.
They deposit the coins into organisations that mix coins from various customers. Its just like a bank. You deposit a fake/stollen 100$ bill one day and, if they accept it, you can withdraw a totally different 100$ bill from an ATM the next day.
I never actually understood the whole "bitcoin mixer" scheme. Shouldn't all all the transactions still be traceable in the end?
Yes, but only if the organization is cooperative. Say you are a cop in Paris investigating some shady bitcoin transactions. But the mixer is in Japan. So you spend a year getting their records, only to point to another mixer in Canada. The goal isn't mathematical untraceability, just increasing the burden on investigators to the point they move on to easier targets. There are always lots of speeding tickets that need handing out.
Older mixers you could argue could kind of be traced but even then there’d still be difficulty and deniability.
There’s a newer class of privacy mixer though that basically is untraceable. On privacy chains you can’t see the transactions so from an outside perspective it looks like the money just went into a black hole and it wouldn’t show up until it got converted to public again. When it gets converted to public though, it has no connection to the original transaction and could be literally anyone else’s money who used the chain converting to public.
It could take a long time but you could basically just slowly do this and withdraw small enough amounts of money to not raise suspicion. Or do something like start your own coin and pump the price with the stolen funds then cash out the coin. There’s new privacy smart contract chains where this could be done without even signing slightly the stolen funds were used.
It’s kind of a mess.
That's exactly what I thought as well, especially if the transaction is done electronically, it should be traced back to the person who made unlike with cash.
But then in turn I'm surprised that states haven't yet sanctioned the mixers themselves. I understand there's no proof that they might not also mix legitimate funds, but I wouldn't have expected this to be a big hindrance given that everyone seems to know that most of their use is for money laundering.
The US used to. They just reversed that:
https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-announces-w...
Deregulation, doncha know.
Is that something that is actually needed for something or just money "laundering"?
It's pretty much only money laundering. Supporters use the privacy euphemism but I've never heard of a legal use case for it, hence the tornado mixer sentence
Ask a bank. Banks do not keep individual piles of cash for each depositor. Why do they put everyone's money into one big pile? See the movie It's A Wonderful Life for the famous monologue justifying the practice.
It’s a pity. If he hadn’t been born in North Korea like that, he would have become a truly great programmer. My life is really hard and painful, but sometimes I think I’m better off than they are.
Maybe if he hadn't been born in North Korea he'd have lived his dream of opening a coffee shop; perhaps he got into hacking there because it's the only way to support his family.
To be fair, people can't afford COL by opening a coffee shop in this day and age.
Look at the bright side: Dumb Starbucks probably wouldn't be shut down in North Korea!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_Starbucks
>perhaps he got into hacking there because it's the only way to support his family.
North Korean hackers are state employees. They're selected for the role based on their academic ability (top achievers go to the nuclear programme). The state takes the bulk of the earnings, but it is a more comfortable existence than for the average North Korean.
Your typical North Korean doesn't have the kind of unrestricted access to the internet necessary to become a hacker.
I didn't know there were Effective Altruists in North Korea. Will they do AI data centers next to increase NK's popularity?
Sam Bankman-fried jealous of their game
How can they be brought to justice, as stated, if they’re state sponsored? And how do members get their crypto back? There’s 6+ billion in insurance to back what was stolen?
How can they be brought to justice? They can't. That's the long and the short of it.
Justice can be brought to them tho... At some point someone will delete the building they work in with a cruise missile or two...
Thing is they can delete buildings quite well too
If the US bombs North Korea that would be the start of World War 3
Unfortunately their best friend is pretty strong.
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Retaliation, sanctions against the country behind the curtain. Geopolitical justice.
that is why they don't care about opsec that much. what are anyone gonnna do?
Binance has $155 in assets. Not sure how much of it is their own but they likely have more than $6B to cover the losses.
https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/binance/
how much of those are customer deposits though?
Unless they travel abroad to cooperating countries, nothing is going to happen to them.
They bought their tickets. I say let 'em crash! Those apes are likely gone.
Trump needs to call up his boy over there and get our money back ig
They'll use that bitcoin to buy $100M worth of the Trump shitcoin and call it even, which may be cheaper than using mixers.
3 billion was recovered.
There is no way to bring them to justice unless the US were to somehow invade, or another country deals with it, or they leave Korea. All very unlikely. North Korea is the closet thing to an actual criminal state/hideout.
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No surprises there - of course they linked it to NK... These parasitic intelligence firms are draining taxpayer money because law enforcement agencies lack blockchain expertise and constantly outsource their investigations. We’ve already seen cases where firms like Chainalysis and TRM provided flawed data that led to innocent people being wrongfully charged. Worse yet, their operations rely on backroom cooperation with private intelligence mercenaries, trading illegally obtained data on private citizens worldwide.
Yet, they consistently fail to trace truly sophisticated threat actors, like the 2017 Parity Wallet hacker or the KyberSwap exploiter. These individuals continue to cash out massive amounts year after year, completely undisturbed. Pathetic companies like SlowMist can only continue making wet dream Twitter posts each year, promising that they will "catch them soon!", looking even more pathetic.
"ThE iNdUsTry iS WaTcHiNg!"
That's impressive, I wish they published writeups..
At this point I don't understand - why not do this officially? They're already sanctioned to death...
Writeups are just a marketing tool, if you have nothing to advertise why would you waste the effort and make your targets more hardened?
North Korea could have the funniest softpower win if they setup a division to purely pirate and emulate Japanese console video games.
Sophisticated? Perhaps. But could also be run of the mill honey trap/romantic approach. Easier to slip by 2fas through a front door.
My money is on an inside job.
That's my feeling, too. It's probably my TDS, but it just seems weird that the shady founder of Binance got busted for laundering money, then got a shady pardon from Trump, and now billions have mysteriously gone missing. Someone's gonna have to kick up a portion of that money to Trump; he'll lay it all on North Korea and we'll all move onto the next headline.
Thats the brilliant weakness of crypto, anyone, anywhere in the chain can take a chunk and theres nothing anyone else can do to reverse.
I think it has evaporated the wealth of many young investors also.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50296470
#beastmode
Random thought: when NK collapses, I wonder if there will be a rush to seize the crypto wallets. I guess the CIA will be there first.
If they are not already there!
They're not.
There was a failed op to install a device to listen to comms about 2 years ago.
It makes no semse. Since Binance is Chinese company North Korea would not dare to attack it
Makes perfect sense. Laundered way to get westerner money into north korea with china looking at no fault.
I don't follow crypto by a quick search indicates they offshored a few years ago. This would presumably not sit well with the party.
Binance is run by Chinese people. I don't think the Chinese government likes what they are running though. Binance itself is not legal/available in China.
of course it's 'elite'. sounds much better that way.
Perfect crime. The kind of people holding crypto can't exactly go to the police. They'd have to show the receipts!
There are two kinds of people who hate KYC: conspiracy cranks and criminals.
North Korea needs to die, and this keeps it alive.
I am extremely disappointed.
What does it mean that a country "needs to die". And why NK needs to die?
Its government. Sorry, I don't mean the entire country. The people should be free.
The people who have managed to escape describe a real-life hellscape.
now if they weren't sanctioned they would've had no reason to do this. classic case of perverse incentives.
They have chosen to run concentration camps and starve their own people for decades instead of becoming a rich country like South Korea. They can stop the sanctions whenever they want, by becoming a democracy.
Educate yourself on history before lecturing us on democracy.
Friendly reminder that this was never about democracy. The US imposed a military dictatorship on South Korea that was even more brutal than the North. The goal has always been promoting capitalism at all costs, and nothing else.
The people are starving because North Korea has been cut off from the global economy for its entire existence. In other words, the people sanctioning are responsible for the starvation. Sanctions obviously do nothing to hurt the ruling party or coerce them to change their views.
Same unit as Bybit in Feb 2025 (TraderTraitor), and if the laptop reports are right, the same way in: one developer's machine. Bybit lost $1.5B through a compromised Safe{Wallet} dev box. Twenty months later the largest exchange in the world loses four times that, apparently the same way. I'd like to know what signing setup lets one engineer's laptop reach $6B
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A guy abducts a president of a sovereign state and puts him into New York prison without any legal basis. The whole country is complicit by allowing this to happen. Yet all you can think is Putin.
The number of people fawning over Trump, Putin and Kim in this thread is bizzare. The troll farms must have been very busy.
And "troll farms" is such a boring response, in any context.
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Calling any of these articles “news” is something of a stretch. “Why Trump Fell in Love with Kim Jong Un”. Seriously? These are entertainment articles, at best. Where’s the Buzzfeed Top 10 Reasons Trump loves North Korea link?
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Maybe stick to primary sources; the horses mouth, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8OG3U66X9w
Glad binance is posting updates directly on X so we don’t have to read propaganda
Since when is X anything other than propaganda and porn
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Since 2019ish.
What kind of updates are they posting on X and what is the propaganda?
The usual