[HN Gopher] Hackers stole billions in crypto to keep North Korea...
___________________________________________________________________
Hackers stole billions in crypto to keep North Korea's regime
afloat
Author : Bostonian
Score : 105 points
Date : 2025-04-03 13:03 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| Bostonian wrote:
| https://archive.is/1vkXG
| josefritzishere wrote:
| As a currency... crypto just seems worse and worse. There is no
| FDIC for crypto.So this is just gone.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| What's worse, it's just a repeat of the 1920's as described
| here [1]
|
| [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU [video][8
| mins][cnn interview]
| Kapura wrote:
| When i look around at all the positive innovations cryptocurrency
| has failed to deliver, it really does seem like they invented a
| currency exclusively useful for doing crimes.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| And how much money was made off of companies that were created
| to support cryptocurrencies?
|
| Does anyone around here know of any?
|
| Bueller?
| Pixelbrick wrote:
| Dirty money for dirty deeds...
| madcow2011 wrote:
| and these dirty deeds weren't even done dirt cheap!
| af78 wrote:
| This is the opinion of Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman too, in
| his post Crypto is for Criming
| https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/crypto-is-for-criming.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman famously estimated in 1998
| that the impact of the Internet on the economy will be no
| more than that of the fax machine.
| af78 wrote:
| That's fair. Making predictions is risky business,
| economist or not. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-
| krugman-internets-eff...
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Krugman's response:
|
| > First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the
| Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by
| someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun
| and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I
| mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having
| more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction,
| just a thought-provoker.
|
| > But the main point is that I don't claim any special
| expertise in technology -- I almost never make
| technological forecasts, and the only reason there was
| stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment
| required that I do that sort of thing. The issues about
| Bitcoin, however, are not technological! Everyone agrees
| that it's technically very sweet. But does it work as
| money? That's a very different kind of question.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/paul-krugman-responds-to-
| int...
| yayitswei wrote:
| Same Krugman who wrote "Bitcoin is Evil" in 2013.
| wil421 wrote:
| My pet theory is some government agency created bitcoin for one
| of two reasons:
|
| Tracking financial transactions (open ledger).
|
| Funding dark ops.
|
| The whole Natoshi riding into the sunset after bitcoin booms,
| like an old Western movie, is not very plausible IMHO.
| rtkwe wrote:
| It is certainly odd there's been nothing from the inventors
| not even using the vast wealth they have squirreled away. The
| alternative which is honestly kind of funny is that they lost
| their keys so can't access the coins and thus coming forward
| as the inventor would just put a target on their back for
| people who might want to steal their keys.
| hylaride wrote:
| Lost keys is the most probable explanation, considering it
| was near worthless for a good chunk of its start. They
| likely didn't have backups or shrugged and moved on.
| wil421 wrote:
| I like this idea. They should've been able to do some
| decent mining early on after losing the keys and make
| money.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Depends a lot on when and how the keys were lost. If the
| creator(s) were sitting on it thinking they had this
| cache there's not much reason to mine so if they lost it
| later, say after home mining with single GPUs became
| woefully inefficient and ASIC farms ruled the roost it
| could have been out of economic reach to actually mine.
| Or they didn't realize for a while that they had lost the
| original keys, eg they forgot their passphrase or went to
| access the drive with the key on it and it has died or
| disappeared (lost in a move or something). There's also
| the off chance that they were simply pretty old and died
| before it really went crazy and their survivors just
| don't know that gramp's old flash drive actually had a
| fortune in coins on it.
| shaky-carrousel wrote:
| Most of the time, the difference between crimes and ventures
| depends on the hand holding the stick.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| I got into bitcoin around 2011ish for some time. I was never a
| True Believer but I was a 'soft believer'. At the time, when
| people asked me if Bitcoin is the future I would always say "I
| think it or something like it will be very useful". Fast
| forward 10 years and there's been no actual use of crypto. No
| killer app. No disrupting the finance world. It seems to be
| used exclusively by smart people as a means of extracting
| wealth from people who don't understand it.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Cryptocurrencies is one of those things that makes me
| embarrassed for the whole tech industry. I wish it was the
| only thing...
| Retric wrote:
| The quiet majority who avoids such things are easily lost
| among all the pump and dump nonsense. A ~single digit
| percentage of the general population has basically zero
| morality, but they can have a huge impact.
|
| I realized it was likely a profitable long term investment
| back when bitcoin was ~10-15$, but I objected to it on
| moral grounds and didn't get involved. It's not even
| something I regret, just another life choice.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| which moral grounds? how does that involve buying and
| holding, the most passive outcome possible
| Retric wrote:
| If I buy and hold 1 kg of gold, in 50 years humanity
| still has that same 1kg of gold but it lost all the
| resources required to secure that gold from being stolen.
| As such buying gold "to hold" is actively harmful for
| humanity, the same is true of crypto.
|
| I object to doing things that bring me wealth at the
| expense of humanity as IMO it's just a diffuse form of
| theft. While you may disagree, I hope you can understand
| that such a stance is based on my personal morality.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| In this framework, what kinds of assets are you allowed
| to own the title towards, and what forms of income and
| revenue are you allowed to have? are there other forms of
| wealth - like non-financial/social - that you weigh?
| Retric wrote:
| Personally I think most productive investments are a net
| positive which opens many options here. It's mostly zero
| sum / predatory behavior like the worst pay to win games
| or online casinos that I have a problem with. A fast food
| restaurant isn't serving particularly healthy food, but
| it is providing a service people want and minimizing food
| borne illnesses etc.
|
| Similarly buying a T-Bill may arguably support some of
| the horrors that the US government does, but what are the
| alternatives revolutions and lawless societies suck.
|
| What about you? What do you the externalities of various
| investments are?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| so basically this framework only excludes spot
| commodities. yeah its not common for people to be
| permanently bullish on commodities outside of a few
| niches like bitcoin and precious metals, so you don't
| hear too much about that aside from those communities.
|
| yeah that makes it easy to adhere to, while many other
| asset classes dont really revolve around scarcity of the
| asset's existence and ownership does convey access to a
| productivity. I understand your criteria now.
|
| For me I don't have that criteria and don't mind zero sum
| things. Its an entertaining and stressful player versus
| player match in a massive multiplayer game. Some kinds of
| trades I make are not zero sum, but it's not an important
| distinction for me.
|
| I do have a criteria related to human suffering: I mainly
| avoid exposure to some sectors like defense contracting
| and publicly traded prisons. Because the incentives are
| out of whack and dehumanize people while hoping they
| suffer, said in obtuse terms.
|
| I think there is a flaw in the resource exchange logic
| you presented. Where you owning 1 kg of gold means the
| effort to extract that gold had gone to waste. In spot
| commodities the scarcity and continued demand at higher
| prices of the commodity is what justifies the further
| investment into extracting that commodities from harder
| to reach places. If a single market participant finds
| utility from the use of that commodity, distinct from
| hoarding, then acquiring access to more is beneficial.
| Your hoarding helped. The main difference here is that
| you are looking at the resource expenditure to acquire
| the unit you are owning, as opposed to the future utility
| created by the scarcity you contribute to. That's a
| choice, I wonder if there is room to re-evaluate that
| principle, as I'm not sure we are operating on the same
| information.
| Retric wrote:
| > If a single market participant finds utility from the
| use of that commodity, distinct from hoarding, then
| acquiring access to more is beneficial. Your hoarding
| helped.
|
| Talking about marginal quantity for tiny fractions of a
| commodity get abstract so let's scale it up and the
| assign a fraction of the difference to that 1kg.
|
| Total quantity of gold in earths crust is constant, so
| let's assume what changes is the timing of when a mine
| gets opened. IE a bit of land is either mined in 1975 vs
| 2025.
|
| Everything else being equal it's more efficient to mine
| today vs 50 years ago both from an effort perspective and
| environmental impact. EV mining equipment for example is
| a lot more common today than 50 years ago, they are also
| a lot safer. Thus removing 1kg of gold from the market
| for 50 years is also a dead loss.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Correct, and that EV mining equipment was only pursued
| because that 1kg of gold is $100,000 now instead of
| $5,750 in 1975. because of that constant quantity that is
| now unavailable. If gold was still worth $5,750/kg, it
| wouldn't matter what policy changes about mining
| regulations were done, nobody would pursue creating the
| more expensive equipment and mining gold.
|
| The conclusion in your stated logic is to actually hoard
| as much gold as possible so that mining in the year 2075
| is even more EV+ and safer.
| Retric wrote:
| You're missing two important points.
|
| Gold mining alone has basically zero impact on
| Caterpillar's R&D into EV mining equipment. The mining
| industry mines vastly more copper, iron, tin, etc ore and
| gold is at such low concentrations it's basically
| indistinguishable from other types of mining until
| chemical separation.
|
| If nobody was holding gold as a store of value there'd be
| a glut of gold for industry and ~zero gold mining the
| next ~hundred years. Holding gold ultimately means mining
| _sooner_ not later.
| jspash wrote:
| Well at least we redeemed ourselves with NFTs huh?
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| Honestly with POTUS and his family releasing NFT's I'm
| not sure whether you're joking.
| lifestyleguru wrote:
| > Fast forward 10 years and there's been no actual use of
| crypto. No killer app. No disrupting the finance world.
|
| Just today I answered call on my mom's phone from unknown
| number. Regarding payout from blockchain investment account.
| Not the killer app and disruption we deserve, but the only
| one we got.
| amrocha wrote:
| The killer app is crime. Old scams have flourished. Entire
| new forms of scam have been invented. Crypto currency has
| been a game changer for criminal organizations.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| We built useful, legitimate services off crypto (think paying
| people out for doing work online). But the regulation became
| insurmountable.
|
| I will admit however, almost everyone "interested" in crypto
| has never made a transaction.
| dylan604 wrote:
| How did crypto solve something that
| Zelle,PayPayl,cashapp,venmo, etc did not also solve for
| paying people remotely?
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > It seems to be used exclusively by smart people as a means
| of extracting wealth from people who don't understand it.
|
| I'm all for an era of crypto feudalists
| dylan604 wrote:
| > It seems to be used exclusively by smart people as a means
| of extracting wealth from people who don't understand it.
|
| How is that any different from other financial markets? A
| fool and his money are easily parted, while targeting
| desperate people with get rich quick schemes are also an easy
| play. The crypto/stocks/etc are just different tools to
| achieve the same result.
| bogwog wrote:
| > How is that any different from other financial markets?
|
| It's unregulated.
|
| Although to be fair, it seems everything else is going in
| that direction too (https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/doge-
| targets-sec-next-for-...)
| deadbabe wrote:
| I've never see a "good" crypto millionaire/billionaire.
|
| They're always a smug racist/sexist/misogynist/ablist tech bro
| with fucked up visions of the future.
| mhluongo wrote:
| Hm, is that perhaps how you feel about all billionaires? Can
| you name one you think is "good"?
|
| I've made some money in the space, have kids and a family,
| and care deeply about special needs and access (partner is a
| former SpEd teacher, I've volunteered and donate to related
| causes), and have invested heavily in reproductive rights.
| Does that make me "good"?
|
| In my experience, and by my values, there are plenty of good
| and neutral people in the space. They aren't often the ones
| that ham it up for the media, but it should be obvious why
| that is.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Probably not a crypto millionaire/billionaire.
| shakow wrote:
| Isn't that tech billionaires in general?
| amrocha wrote:
| Sure, but crypto millionaires are acting like they're
| billionaires.
| deadbabe wrote:
| They tend to use their projected future gains to raise
| influence and clout _today_.
| rchaud wrote:
| Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mark Cuban....they're not like
| this. Granted it's a pathetically short list.
| mhluongo wrote:
| This is so incredibly ill-informed it's hard to respond to.
| Thanksfully, it's incumbent on the person making the
| extraordinary claim...
|
| > currency exclusively used for doing crimes
|
| ... to provide extraordinary evidence.
|
| On my end, my home is financed by a trust-minimized loan
| against my BTC, using a stablecoin. And I greatly prefer
| stablecoins to wires for paying international vendors.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Obviously - if you are doing things that are legal - you have
| no need for Crypto.
|
| Now, I think some crypto people will argue that there are many
| good and ethical things you _could_ do which are illegal that
| you now _can_ do with crypto.
|
| However, all none of those things _are_ happening. All that
| _is_ happening is speculation and unethical crime.
| corford wrote:
| The only obvious mainstream "success" to come out of crypto is
| stable coins (Tether/Bitfinex is something like the 5th or 6th
| largest buyer of US treasuries ...and amusingly keeps all the
| yield from them). Ironically, this use case also happens to be
| one that doesn't really require a decentralised ledger (would
| work equally well with a few cross-border validators, ala DNS
| root server approach) and lends itself very well to tradfi
| involvement (since you need pegging to fiat).
|
| For me crypto today looks like ~1998/~2000 ish internet. Big,
| powerful traditional entities have fully woken up to it and
| will now take it over and ensure whatever useful use cases
| exist will be controlled by them with profits also accruing to
| them. The speculative, lawless days of the crypto wild west
| (fuelled by oceans of QE & stimmy money); and promises of a
| satoshi enabled future are well and truly over.
|
| In terms of ushering in a new decentralised monetary order, it
| has failed completely.
| horacemorace wrote:
| If cryptocurrencies are self-regulating, aren't the techniques
| used by these hackers actually the best and most effective way to
| play the game by its own rules? Calling this behavior "cheating"
| smells of sore-loserism.
| acc_297 wrote:
| There is a certain Bitcoin evangelist who will preach the
| gospel of a self governing currency that via a system of rules
| will automatically validate transactions between trust-less
| parties in a decentralized manner over a globe-spanning
| internet protocol but then complain when that same system does
| not prevent them from accidentally sending the entire contents
| of their "wallet" to an address in North Korea.
|
| The system does not represent ownership the system only tracks
| of the validity of transactions and if the North Korean
| government proposes a valid transaction of your BTC or ETH to
| an address they control and a mining-node includes that
| transaction in a block which a majority of the network accepts
| then those assets are no longer yours they belong to North
| Korea.
|
| The properties of the crypto-asset ecosystem which allow it to
| be ungoverned also make it ungovernable.
| earnesti wrote:
| I would imagine exchanges these days routinely monitor
| incoming and outgoing transactions, and if they suspect the
| funds are stolen, they are freezed. I would imagine North
| Korea doesn't have really an easy job laundering that BTC
| they have stolen.
| mhluongo wrote:
| You're right, many crypto exchanges operating on the right
| side of the law will freeze these funds.
|
| For those interested in this, CT (crypto twitter) makes
| tracking North Korea's stolen winnings a bit of a sport.
|
| samczsun, an excellent security auditor who's working at
| Paradigm these days, broke down some of the org in a post
| the other day.
|
| https://x.com/samczsun/status/1906754853063565720?t=N4aqa6V
| y...
|
| Taylor Monahan at MetaMask also makes a habit of tracing
| funds and shares some pretty interesting finds around NK's
| laundering efforts.
| mvdtnz wrote:
| You can imagine things all you want, the rest of us will be
| over here in the real world.
| strangattractor wrote:
| They are simply having to duplicate all the things Visa
| provides its customers.
|
| BTC is inherently deflationary in the sense that once new
| coins cease to be mined the total number of BTC will
| decrease over time due to lose, theft and death. I know
| that I lost my wallet with the only BTC I owned 10 years
| ago. I can name several other people that have done the
| same. I would think this one property makes it undesirable
| for use as a currency.
| hiatus wrote:
| > I know that I lost my wallet with the only BTC I owned
| 10 years ago. I can name several other people that have
| done the same. I would think this one property makes it
| undesirable for use as a currency.
|
| How is this any different from losing your wallet with
| physical currency?
| jmholla wrote:
| Because crypto wallets are more akin to bank accounts
| than wallets.
| morepork wrote:
| In many cases if you lose your physical wallet, someone
| else will find it and the cash will stay in circulation,
| but even if not, as physical currency is much more
| inflationary it's no big deal.
|
| The second point is that most people keep a lot less
| money in a physical wallet, usually no more than say a
| few hundred dollars. Whereas a bitcoin wallet will often
| contain thousands or more so is more akin to a bank
| account.
| KumaBear wrote:
| Most of the lost coins will all be recovered by quantum
| computers. There is no way to update or fix the wallets
| they are stored in.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| It appears crypto is just speed-running the last few hundred
| years on their way to modern financial regulation
| rchaud wrote:
| These are but pricey bug bounties. This will lead to a more
| efficient and secure cryptocurrency market, as participants
| will insist on better financial controls, threatening to flee
| to the regulated fiat markets if their needs are not met. /s
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > These are but pricey bug bounties.
|
| This isn't sarcasm to me, but the rest of your comment is.
| strangattractor wrote:
| "The shocking theft at WazirX, India's largest cryptocurrency
| exchange..."
|
| Oddly I am not in the least bit shocked. Now if we found out
| that this was an inside job I would again not be the least bit
| shocked.
| blakesterz wrote:
| Apparently the title of this story changed at The WSJ. That word
| "Cheat" seems wrong, while the old title makes more sense.
| "How Hackers Stole Billions in Crypto to Keep North Korea's
| Regime Afloat"
|
| The archive link from the @Bostonian comment below has the
| original I guess: https://archive.is/1vkXG
| dang wrote:
| OK, we've put that in the title above. Thanks!
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Kim Jong Un's keys: Kim Jong Un's coins.
|
| Blockchain is a perfect, transparent trustless global ledger that
| can't be hacked, so it's a misnomer to characterise these
| transactions as "cheating", "crimes" or "theft".
| cvoss wrote:
| If you unlawfully or immorally gain access to information, such
| as my private keys, and then use that information to move
| money, you have absolutely committed a crime, cheated, and/or
| stolen from me.
|
| If you deceive me into executing a transaction voluntarily by
| misrepresenting the destination (which is immoral and often
| illegal), you have absolutely committed a crime, cheated,
| and/or stolen from me.
| cmurf wrote:
| Don't crypto advocates claim it needs nothing at all from
| government?
|
| What's the basis of unlawful? What contract is controlling
| these concepts and their adjudication?
| dwater wrote:
| What laws are a North Korean subject to that they have
| broken? Who decides when a transaction was cheating or
| stealing without a central authority and enforcer?
| cvoss wrote:
| Moral laws and natural law, and moral people in a candid
| world. It's the same principle by which one people accuses
| another, over which they have no jurisdiction, of crimes
| against humanity or war crimes or of violating Nature's
| Laws. See the US Declaration of Independence for a short
| treatise on this topic.
| tgv wrote:
| To add to the other comments: do you really have a right to
| whatever it is that the bits unlocked by that key represent?
| Who granted you that? AFAICT, it's the systems running the
| blockchain that grants you that, and it's not governed by any
| contract outside the blockchain.
| cvoss wrote:
| What is your theory for why you own any physical
| possessions? Do you only own things at the pleasure of your
| government which bestows you that privilege? I would think
| that if a coup replaced your government by force with one
| that did not respect rights of private ownership, you would
| cry "immoral", would you not? Or would you shrug and say
| "might makes right"?
| rchaud wrote:
| What NK hackers are alleged to have done here is fraud,
| something that the US head of state has been convicted of, by
| courts in his own country. NK on the other hand, has not been
| tried nor convicted.
|
| What possible legitimacy does the US even have to mark others
| as "thieves"?
| cvoss wrote:
| Theft is first a moral concept, and only secondly a legal
| one, so there is no need to invoke the legitimacy of nation
| states' authority to have a meaningful discussion about
| theft.
| rchaud wrote:
| Theft is a moral concept, but the legitimacy of a justice
| department to comment on it rests on its record of
| enforcing the legal limits consistently in its own remit.
| That is openly not the case anymore, voiding the
| legitimacy it may otherwise have held.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >transparent trustless global ledger that can't be hacked
|
| 51% attack says it isn't
| benrutter wrote:
| Tangential recommendation, but anyone interested in North Korean
| hacking should check our the BBC World Service's Lazarus Heist
| podcast[0].
|
| 0. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvg9/episodes/downloads
| bdavbdav wrote:
| The book is great too.
| rsanek wrote:
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58959520-the-lazarus-
| hei...
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| What we were promised: Crypto currencies would liberate
| journalists and dissidents
|
| What we got: pedos, terrorists, and hostile countries got rich
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| In fairness, NK is not rich - perhaps slightly less poor...
| seanw444 wrote:
| So... the same balance of good and evil present in literally
| every technology?
| os2warpman wrote:
| Cheated?
|
| From an outsider's perspective their methods seem typical.
| TheBlight wrote:
| Super skeptical of all hacking attribution claims made by MSM.
| MyOutfitIsVague wrote:
| Who is MSM?
| pasquinelli wrote:
| [M]ain[S]tream [M]edia
| stepupmakeup wrote:
| I've been skeptical ever since they were trying to claim the xz
| backdoor was from a state actor. All it took was 3 sockpuppet
| accounts, a lot of time and actual code contributions,
| something literally anybody with a computer science degree can
| do. Name: Jia Tan? Must be a CCP agent, never mind the fact
| that anybody can make their name and timezones anything...
| chasing wrote:
| I thought this was one of crypto's primary use cases? A kind of
| "anything goes, anything you can get away with is allowed" sort
| of approach.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Sure, in the same way that a primary use case of cash is that
| somebody can punch you in the face and take your money and
| whatever you can get away with is allowed.
| chasing wrote:
| The primary use of cash is to buy goods and services. That's
| not the primary use of crypto. The primary use of crypto, as
| far as I can tell, is to try to make money appear out of thin
| air whether via speculation or fraud. And, admittedly, to
| occasionally buy JPGs.
| rchaud wrote:
| > Hackers then send the ether to "mixers"--crypto platforms that
| co-mingle tokens from various users, obscuring their ownership.
| After that, the ether is swapped for bitcoin and then converted
| into tether, a token whose value is linked to the U.S. dollar.
|
| Good timing for the US to lift sanctions on Tornado Cash [0].
|
| Too many people think "lock them up" is the solution to crime,
| without considering that crime relies on certain types of
| infrastructure to remain in business. And that people who are
| "tough on crime" often have good reasons to keep operational the
| things that facilitate said crimes.
|
| [0] https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sb0057
| yieldcrv wrote:
| adding sanctions to a smart contract address that cannot appeal
| itself was not a winning position in the US courts
|
| and determing that a smart contract deployment was a "foreign
| asset" was also not a winning position in the US courts, as its
| not clear if it was deployed on a node outside of the US to
| begin with, or if the person that actually sent the deployment
| transaction was a non-US citizen
|
| The Treasury with its new head just short circuited that
| challenge and stopped wasting taxpayer money on this
|
| yeah, stick with prosecuting the actual crime instead of the
| laziest approach of calling everyone a criminal for using a
| sanctioned smart contract
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| North Korea launders its stolen cryptocurrency through every
| available means. Including Tornado Cash, quite aggressively,
| which is why they were sanctioned. It is very hard to
| understand why the Trump administration would reverse those
| sanctions unless they are trying to aid this kind of money
| laundering.
| mhluongo wrote:
| Because code had never been sanctioned before, and it's a
| clear freedom of speech issue?
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| It's pretty incredible that a sizable percentage of North Korea's
| GDP derives from crypto theft. Actually about the same percentage
| as Spain was pulling from the Americas at the end of the colonial
| period.
| benlivengood wrote:
| Satoshi identified!
| rsanek wrote:
| For others wondering, it's about 2%: 2023's GDP was $29.6b, and
| this article mentions that the $6b was "over a decade."
| whatever1 wrote:
| This is the only promise that cryptocurrency held. Avoid
| government barriers. So we should celebrate the fact that it was
| not a complete scam.
| earnesti wrote:
| It held also the promise of making me very, very rich.
| dylan604 wrote:
| How'd that work out?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I disagree. There's a tremendous amount of waste in the economy
| related to reconciling different companies' records of who owes
| what to whom and then getting that info to the bank and then
| hearing back from the bank about whether the debt was fully or
| partially paid and then relating that to whether the service
| continues to be rendered.
|
| Moving from an accounts-receivable/accounts-payable model to a
| insert-coin-receive-service model would be a huge advantage.
|
| It just hasn't happened because the vibes are wrong and it
| appears that they'll stay wrong for a while.
| woleium wrote:
| i agree smart contracts are the way forward, but you don't
| need crypto or blockchain to implement them. You do need a
| trusted third party, to adjudicate when things go wrong.
| breakyerself wrote:
| We already have that. It's called courts.
| ty6853 wrote:
| I'm not saying smart contractors are more effective but
| they might be more accessible to the plebs than hiring a
| lawyer to prosecute your case.
| breakyerself wrote:
| Maybe if they're well regulated otherwise they'll just
| become another vehicle for corporations to take advantage
| of the same plebs.
| AliAbdoli wrote:
| What if there was a way for the masses to regulate them
| in a decentralized matter. Oh wait
| breakyerself wrote:
| Lmao, our Lord and Savior the market?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Some people just ignore the courts, or delay them more or
| less indefinitely. This whole figure-it-out-after-the-
| fact-if-something-goes-wrong thing we're doing has a lot
| of opportunity for improvement.
| wyldfire wrote:
| > It just hasn't happened because the vibes are wrong and it
| appears that they'll stay wrong for a while.
|
| No. A civil society needs to be able to issue judgments that
| override transactions / seize assets. And therefore they
| cannot have automatons determining where the assets belong.
|
| When criminals are caught with their hand in the cookie jar,
| we can't just shrug and say "gee I wish we had a way to get
| that money back."
|
| I'm a big fan of bitcoin and to some extent cryptocurrency. I
| think it has real value. But I'm not deluded enough to think
| it can somehow replace all ledgers everywhere.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I'm not proposing that this all happen on an L1, of course
| you need some time for various parties to decide whether
| settlement should proceed. Nor am I saying that all ledgers
| everywhere would benefit from this change.
|
| I'm just saying that many businesses would benefit (or
| become feasible in the first place) if the time between
| service-rendered and payment-pending were sub-second and
| built into the product and instead of relying on month-
| long-billing cycles. It would also be beneficial if the
| infrastructure for handling that process were common to
| both parties rather than having each of them track it
| separately hoping they agree on what is owed after the
| fact.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Moving from an accounts-receivable /accounts-payable model
| to a insert-coin-receive-service model would be a huge
| advantage._
|
| Why would the method of payment affect how you track accounts
| payable/receivable in your books?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Maybe there were better words I could have used there,
| sorry.
|
| You can of course track it however you want, but the
| complexity of what you end up tracking explodes if you're
| operating on something like a monthly billing cycle.
| Especially if you have more than one financial institution
| with an opinion about whether money should/did get moved.
|
| I've been involved with the maintenance of several billing
| pipelines and having to handle events like maybe the bank
| was only able to collect half of this person's bill but it
| took them a few days to let us know that, but we've already
| sent that money over here so now we' have this deficit and
| do we shut off their service over a deficit of just $5...
|
| It's a nightmare that's totally orthogonal to the business
| that's being run. Nobody wants to be on the billing team,
| but it's viewed as a necessary evil. But I'm saying that
| it's an unnecessary evil. If you can very quickly settle up
| for practically nothing, then you can just build the app to
| withhold service for a few milliseconds until payment
| clears and then there's no debts to keep track of and
| resolve later. And having it on a public blockchain means
| that if you're collaborating with other companies over how
| the pie gets sliced, there's a single source of truth for
| how big the pie actually is.
| feoren wrote:
| > There's a tremendous amount of waste in the economy related
| to reconciling different companies' records of who owes what
| to whom and then getting that info to the bank and then
| hearing back from the bank about whether the debt was fully
| or partially paid and then relating that to whether the
| service continues to be rendered.
|
| Is all that really a _tremendous_ waste, in the days of
| databases and instant communication? How much waste are we
| talking about here? I 'd wager a lot of money it's at least
| one order of magnitude less than the literal heat waste
| produced by validating bitcoin transactions. Crypto is _much_
| more wasteful.
|
| > Moving from an accounts-receivable/accounts-payable model
| to a insert-coin-receive-service model
|
| The monetary system isn't what's preventing this. You can't
| provide a service and also charge for it in the exact same
| instant. If I hire a contractor to renovate my bathroom,
| there's a ton of negotiation, possible disagreements about
| whether the work is "done" or not, payment deadlines, etc.,
| and crypto vs. fiat currency changes none of that.
| ty6853 wrote:
| And pretty unique online irreversible near instant
| transactions. For this reason it was often the cheapest way to
| buy bullion online in a way that cleared in less than an hour,
| since most banks charge for a wire and credit cards (or vendor
| risk departments) charge high vendor premiums on bullion
| transactions.
| smallstepforman wrote:
| Extraordinary claims with no way to verify, typical for WSJ. Now
| the question is which group benefits from policies aimed to
| combat this? Follow the money to see who misleads you ...
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Who benefits from policies aimed to combat this? Western
| society.
| logicchains wrote:
| Nobody in western society benefits from KYC laws, they make
| life hard for small business and destroy financial privacy
| while the big players get away with a slap on the wrist.
| There's absolutely zero empirical evidence of KYC leading to
| a reduction in the rate of any kind of crime.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > There's absolutely zero empirical evidence of KYC leading
| to a reduction in the rate of any kind of crime.
|
| We are discussing an article about a crime that KYC
| trivially solves.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Before there was crypto North Korea stole 1000 Volvo cars from
| Sweden. They simply ordered them and never payed.
| abidhusain wrote:
| The issue of cybersecurity in crypto is becoming more critical by
| the day. The scale at which nation-state actors are targeting the
| crypto world shows just how vulnerable many systems still are.
| starwin1159 wrote:
| Why are North Korean hackers so skilled? Are their technical
| skills top-tier?
| micah94 wrote:
| They work for a government that can help with the threats,
| bribery and social engineering required to get access to
| employees of exchanges.
| OutOfHere wrote:
| Something tells me that WazirX's cold wallet wasn't actually cold
| - it was multisig but hot. The only thing that leaves the
| hardware running a cold wallet is a signed transaction that is
| limited in scope to the signed amount and recipient.
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