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Comment by DantesKite | Hacker News Reader

Fun fact: South Korean government officials believe Do Kwon is currently hiding in Serbia.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-63940181#:~:text=South%20K....

I've spent a lot of time in Serbia. Put it like this: If they put a bounty on his capture, Do Kwon isn't going to last five minutes. (I can tell you right now that he's 80% likely to be holed up in a condo in one of the new Belgrade Waterfront developments. He'd stick out like a sore thumb anywhere else.)

An interesting fact about Serbia is that all visiting foreigners are required to register at their neighborhood police station & provide the cops with an address, passport details, and contact details. Usually the hotels will do this for you automatically. Basically, though, what this means for Do Kwon is that he already has a searchable file.

Hey... Wait... do these new SEC charges mean that there is now a bounty? Maybe I ought to make some calls.

The bounty has to be higher than the bribe Do Kwon can pay

He can't bribe thousands of people, can he?

It’s Serbia. They will take the bribe, and then still capture him to take the bounty. Double prize.

The bribe would involve him getting the f out of course

The bribe would get him into a truck. Will the truck go to safety, or to higher profits? Have you never watched a movie?

I assume he isn’t that stupid but when things close in fast he probably have no choice or time to arrange a fool proof exchange

Well with the amount of money he absconded, he can probably afford a passport of someone that looks relatively like him.

Absconded means to leave in a secret hurry, not to take something. If you put 'money he absconded with' that would make sense.

> he already has a searchable file

Wouldn’t one use an alias?

Not at all. He is making ZERO EFFORT TO HIDE!

The foreigner address registration thing isn't actually enforced. No one bothers to do it anymore, at least not if they're staying at a private residence.

https://www.srbija-nekretnine.org/en/apartments/for-sale/bel...

Some nice places down there! Didn't realize Belgrade was so chic.

I guess it's technically correct that riverfront is waterfront...

Those prices are shockingly expensive to me for such small, outdated apartments in a less-desirable country like Serbia!

Belgrade is (was?) a world-class city. At least top 100

Real estate prices are way up in Belgrade recently due to refugees coming from Ukraine and Russia. Probably some money laundering as well. The listings linked above are for the new Belgrade Waterfront development, which is a fairly desirable location.

Would a refugee from Ukraine go to Serbia? My impression is that both ultra nationalism and support for Putin’s invasion are common in Serbia.

Depending on which side of the divide they were from, yes, sure. Also lots of ethnic Russians that found their environment suddenly a lot less friendly from the Baltics.

Most ethnic Russians I know from Ukraine don’t support the invasion.

One had weird men show up to her neighbourhood in Donetsk for years, that didn’t speak Russian like anyone else from Donetsk, and violently confront locals and then the police. This is the “violence against ethnic Russians” that Putin made up.

It has to be so frustrating for the many ethnic Russians in Ukraine to see their lives upended like this and to be negatively associated with something that they had absolutely no say in. I recall a bit of video footage from early on in the war where a native Russian from the South East of Ukraine told a bunch of Russian soldiers to go home and leave the people there in peace. They were getting along quite well until Russia stirred the pot. Some of them now even refuse to speak Russian.

> all visiting foreigners are required to register at their neighborhood police station & provide the cops with an address, passport details, and contact details

Yeah, because a criminal mastermind is going to be bothered with a detail like that. Most tourist don't do this bureaucratic step.

We're talking about a white collar conman, not Scarface, here.

Also a Korean in a rather ethnically homogeneous European country.

China has been cultivating closer ties with Serbia in order to establish a presence in Europe. Chinese people no longer attract any attention in Belgrade.

Still if he's tracked down to a neighbourhood or a village, anyone will be able to say where the Asian guy lives.

> Chinese people no longer attract any attention in Belgrade

Not helpful if you’re the one Korean!

There's a Chinese community in Belgrade, but it's fairly small, very blue-collar, and their residences aren't concentrated in any one neighborhood or location. (There is a "Chinese mall" where they hang out. This is a run-down place, nearly half of which was recently destroyed by fire, where you can buy cheap electronics and Chinese-import foods.) These Chinese immigrants are rarely able to speak or understand English and mostly speak Mandarin and Serbian.

They have nothing in common with Do Kwon, and it's unlikely that he'd be able to hide among them.

US bounties are not reliable. The government pays of it feels like it.

Bail bonds bounties are a different thing, but I don’t think federal courts use them

They are required to do so, but nobody ever does. I've been there for work several times over the last years and had checked up on that before going and people there told me not to bother and that the police really didn't care and might not even do the registration.

If you stay at a hotel, they usually take care of it for you automatically. That is, the hotel will send your relevant details to the nearest police office, in a batch with everybody else who checked in that day. You typically won't be aware of it.

It's not a universal practice, though. But I'd bet that somebody like Do Kwon, like most people, stayed at a hotel for at least a few nights after landing in Belgrade.

Ah good point, yes, you are probably right. I did not stay in hotels though. But your point is well taken, the same used to be the case in France for hotels and even campings.

It was my understanding that every country requires this, even the US. More recently I've also noticed it on Airbnb rentals.

Take note, crypto people. The days of instructing people about how the code is the contract, centralized exchanges are DeFi, Web 3.0 fixes all the issues, etc. - those days appear to be numbered.

There was nothing DeFi about Terra. They coopted the term. The chain was completely centralized and controlled by them.

The problem is that most of the DeFi is either actually centralized in some way and are lying to the clients, or they are truly decentralized and therefore any bug in the programming will take it down immediately, see dozens of "hacks" of DeFi bridges just last year alone, each one in tens or hundreds of millions in equivalent.

> those days appear to be numbered

There's a block chain for that!

Hey, have you heard about BarnCoin? It's the newest cryptocurrency on the block, and it's a game-changer. The beauty of BarnCoin lies in its ability to do anything as long as the blockchain is co-resident with the hashgraph. Any sensible DeFi runs the co-residency requirements over the actions in this way, anyway.

For those who don't know, a hashgraph is a distributed ledger technology that is known for its speed and security. When combined with a blockchain, it creates an incredibly powerful platform that can handle virtually any transaction. BarnCoin is the first cryptocurrency to take advantage of this technology, and the results are incredible.

Because the blockchain is co-resident with the hashgraph, BarnCoin can process transactions faster and more efficiently than any other cryptocurrency on the market. It's also incredibly secure, which means you don't have to worry about your transactions being hacked or tampered with.

But it's not just speed and security that makes BarnCoin stand out. The possibilities for what can be done with this cryptocurrency are endless. From simple transactions like buying and selling goods and services, to more complex applications like voting systems and smart contracts, BarnCoin can handle it all.

So, if you're looking for a cryptocurrency that can do anything, look no further than BarnCoin. With its unique combination of blockchain and hashgraph technology, it's the future of digital transactions.

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