[HN Gopher] North Korea Launders Billions in Stolen Crypto
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North Korea Launders Billions in Stolen Crypto
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 123 points
Date : 2025-03-18 13:25 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.coindesk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.coindesk.com)
| permo-w wrote:
| do we really think that an entire nation state is unable to set
| up the apparatus to cheat a few measly KYC checks?
|
| coin to coin exchanges do not require KYC, so hypothetically if
| they can beat KYC (which surely they can) they wouldn't even need
| to be depositing the actual coins they stole.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| The point of KYC isn't to make fraud impossible, but to make it
| expensive.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Isn't "expensive" only a problem if your cost basis is >$0 ?
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| still requires upfront cost. If that's priced out of reach
| for most people, it's still a deterrent.
| permo-w wrote:
| right but N Korea is not most people. hacking is one of
| their primary industries. they almost certainly already
| have systems in place for this
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| Systems are expensive. That's the point.
| permo-w wrote:
| yes, but they're not expensive if you already have them
| in place and you're a nation state with essentially free
| labour.
|
| once again, we're not talking about some random clowns
| who've accidentally stolen a usb stick with these coins
| on it, we're talking about _this article_ assuming that
| North Korea cannot circumvent KYC
| rtkwe wrote:
| It cost them something to train the groups that stole those
| coins; training, their higher standard of living, etc.
| permo-w wrote:
| your guess as to what % of $1.5bn that would be?
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| North Korea's cost basis is >$0. They have limited numbers
| of hacks per year that they can perform, and every road
| block in between the hack and unrestricted dollars will
| drain a couple percent of the profit, add a couple percent
| chance that they get caught or scammed while trying to
| launder the money. All or these have costs and reduce the
| take-home profit for Russia.
| permo-w wrote:
| even if you conscion the frankly risible assumption that
| they don't already have systems in place to do this, are
| you seriously trying to suggest that setting up a system
| to beat some KYC checks is going to put any kind of a
| dent into _billions of dollars_?
|
| I feel like you're struggling to grasp that I'm not
| saying "muh KYC is useless", I'm saying that _this
| article doesn 't seem to understand_ that it's useless in
| the face of a nation state for whom hacking is a major
| industry
| anonym29 wrote:
| Of course not. But it's still more work than passing the KYC
| checks on US Federal Reserve notes (there are none at all), or
| just printing fake US Federal Reserve notes that are so good it
| forces the Bureau of Printing and Engraving has to do expensive
| redesigns. Of course, America's own CIA has been long suspected
| of doing the exact same thing.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar if you want to
| learn more.
| magnuspaaske wrote:
| The problem with counterfeiting dollars is that it only works
| until the design is changed and it's hard to transfer your
| capabilities. On the other hand hacking is convenient since
| it can be use for political leverage, espionage and similar.
| bilekas wrote:
| Also I'm not expert but washing a significant amount of
| cash seems extremely more difficult than the Hacking
| enterprises?
| anonym29 wrote:
| The problem with hacking is that it's far easier to patch a
| vulnerability than it is to redesign a currency note and
| reissue new batches of them across an entire printing press
| while removing the old ones (some real, some fake) from
| circulation very slowly.
|
| Also, Bitcoin has never had the counterfeiting problem of
| currency notes, largely because there's no such capacity
| for bad actors to create or issue counterfeit Bitcoin, as
| Bitcoin backed by mathematical work that must be performed
| to in order to mine/"mint" new Bitcoin, unlike US Federal
| Reserve Notes, which are backed by nothing more than an
| Intaglio printing press, some engraving plates with
| publicly-available designs, and 3D security ribbons,
| ribbons featuring ink that is visible under a blacklight
| (you can find which chemicals exhibit this property on
| Wikipedia), some paper, and some linen. Oh, and every
| single one of those ingredients are are produced by a third
| party (NOT the US Bureau of Printing and Engraving), who
| all solemnly pinky promise they don't secretly keep and
| distribute any extras :)
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| America doesn't rescind or invalidate old money from
| circulation when a new design comes out though. No one is
| going to bat an eye at a 10 year old $100 bill coming
| through.
| anonym29 wrote:
| Well then I guess it's settled - the US Federal Reserve
| notes are truly inferior to Bitcoin in terms of
| counterfeit resistance!
|
| Humor aside, "When currency is deposited with a Federal
| Reserve Bank, the quality of each note is evaluated by
| sophisticated processing equipment. Notes that meet our
| strict quality criteria--that is, that are still in good
| condition--continue to circulate, _while those that do
| not are taken out of circulation and destroyed_. This
| process determines the lifespan of a Federal Reserve
| note. "
|
| Not only does the Federal Reserve routinely remove
| counterfeit notes from circulation, they even routinely
| remove non-counterfeit notes that are older or have
| physical damage from circulation!
|
| You'll also find on the source link below, typical
| lifespans of circulation for various notes, as follows:
|
| Denomination - Estimated Lifespan
|
| $1 - 6.6 years
|
| $5 - 4.7 years
|
| $10 - 5.3 years
|
| $20 - 7.8 years
|
| $50 - 12.2 years
|
| $100 - 22.9 years
|
| So no, nobody is going to bat an eye at a 10-year-old
| 100-dollar federal reserve note, but by 25 years old, it
| would be likely to have already been removed from
| circulation. The 10-year timeframe you mention is more
| appropriate for $20 and below, but those notes tend to be
| counterfeited less than larger notes.
|
| Source: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/how-long-is-
| the-life-spa...
| lesuorac wrote:
| > No one is going to bat an eye at a 10 year old $100
| bill coming through.
|
| Within the US mostly. Although sometimes you can have
| trouble with a $2.
|
| Outside the states you might.
| lupusreal wrote:
| If the Kim family suddenly decided to take the money and run to
| Dubai (or where-ever crypto scammers retire to), I wonder if
| anything in North Korea would even change.
| metalman wrote:
| crypto? Emperor Rocket Boy, has everything needed to go full
| ICBM NUKE, on a thumb drive, the crypto thing is just a side
| hobby, that shares time on whatever small mountain of GPU's
| that are used for all the rocket and submarine, nuke
| engineering that is going on in NK, which is his main hobby.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| If he took all the money and ran? Yeah, there would be a
| nuclear power vacuum and a massive migration crisis towards the
| south that requires the US, China and Russia to be cooperative
| on to deal with. It would be the most hilarious way to start
| WW3.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Well there was the time someone wanted to stop for a
| sandwich...
| throwawayffffas wrote:
| Riding a tiger is dangerous, climbing down is even more so.
| maeil wrote:
| Dubai is indeed where crypto scammers retire to.
| thrance wrote:
| They actually have an escape plan, with a base in Switzerland.
| Look it up, it's not even a secret.
|
| EDIT: OK, turns it it's not that easy to find. I saw it in a
| documentary from a pretty serious source [1]. Unfortunately for
| you, it's in French (there should be a German version too).
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/LdH7WYVYF8s
| yorwba wrote:
| Do you have a timestamp? Searching through the transcript
| doesn't produce any hits for "Suisse" at all.
| thrance wrote:
| Found it! I linked the wrong video. The correct one is
| https://youtu.be/1CsRF3XLRLg, and you can find the info
| around the 14th minute.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| There may be an awkward power vacuum as always with dictators
| setting up deliberately unclear lines of secession but chances
| are someone else with the most claim to 'legitimacy' would grab
| power. Just like how the royal bloodline dying out alone didn't
| mean there were no more kings.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| that's a really interesting question! My only $0.02 is that
| there isn't a coherent political apparatus to transition
| political power - as I imagine that the power dynamics among
| the secondary rank is adversarial.
| jandrese wrote:
| In short: the power vacuum would result in a bloodbath.
| wnc3141 wrote:
| Unless the international community jumps on it in a
| multilateral fashion(a la Balkans)
| codedokode wrote:
| What's the merit of doing this?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| They could sell it at market price (or slightly below) to the US
| strategic bitcoin reserve. I'm sure no one in the Trump
| administration would have any moral conundrums about this.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| How long until they get their hands on the US "strategic bitcoin
| reserve"?
| spraveenitpro wrote:
| learn about Bitcoin Multisig security and then you tell me how
| long it will take
| tenyrsmaxfrmnw wrote:
| No present security will be suficient once IBM or others
| breaksthrough with Quantum. This will happen for sure.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I20KgRZCZEI
| rtkwe wrote:
| There's no guarantees that breakthrough is coming anytime
| soon. Scaling up the number of qubits in a processor is
| very hard and it's why progress has been pretty slow over
| the last decade.
| aorloff wrote:
| Crypto is your guarantee that a quantum breakthrough has
| not already occurred
| snapcaster wrote:
| Unclear this will "happen for sure", but even if it did
| there are quantum-proof encryption techniques
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Maybe the strategic reserve constitution will be a way to
| actually give money to them in exchange for crypto.
|
| These days it feels anything is possible.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Maybe the reserve will buy wBtc that is on a L2 chain.
| pessimizer wrote:
| They don't have to. The creation of such a direct government
| subsidy to bitcoin holders will drive the price up anyway.
| abirch wrote:
| Until the NSA or Google uses a sufficiently powerful quantum
| computer: https://www.coinbase.com/learn/crypto-basics/is-
| quantum-comp... Then you can take anyone's crypto that you'd
| like.
| realharo wrote:
| If there's a strong enough consensus, everyone can just
| agree to migrate to some new technology and let the
| original go to zero.
| drdeca wrote:
| I believe, for bitcoin, that only works to spend coins from
| addresses that have already been used to spend coins,
| which, is therefore discouraged as a way to hold bitcoins?
| Instead, best practices are to, when sending from an
| address, to send all the unspent coins to addresses that
| have not been sent from yet. This does make things
| marginally harder for providing an address for people to
| send to though, because one has to change the address they
| are to send to at least every time one wants to spend what
| one has received.
|
| For chains where one uses one persistent address, in order
| to allow other important features, then it could be more of
| an issue.
|
| Still, I think solutions will probably be put in place
| before it becomes a real issue.
|
| ... hm, come to think of it, the use of public/private key
| pairs in cryptocurrencies, is, I think, pretty much
| exclusively used for signing, not for encrypting, right? In
| that case, it seems like an option based on hashes and
| ZKSNARKs should be able to play much the same role? So,
| even if all the purportedly quantum-safe alternatives to
| RSA and ECC end up vulnerable for the same reasons, I think
| probably something that only does the signing part should
| be possible? Or, hm, at least in the interactive setting...
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| You have it backwards. The purpose of the reserve is to turn
| their crypto into money.
| schainks wrote:
| So, they are banking with HSBC?
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