'Elite North Korean hackers' blamed for $6.3B Binance hack
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
If not they're fooling themselves same as those focused on currency replacement.
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?
see monero getting outlawed by EU countries
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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
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.
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.
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'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...
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"...
Before cryptocurrency, there was no decentralized way to transfer value on the internet.
Regulatory arbitrage. Not all centralized institutions are fast enough to actually make use of the theoretical capabilities available to them.
Cheaper international transfers could be a specific valid use case. But I presume risk is too high for my taste.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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?
> 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...
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.
Sometimes they get lucky though and the government passes a law allowing them to seize equivalent assets a few decades down the road.
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 the billion was frozen though if it was not frozen in time it would have probably evaporated just like these bitcoins getting into mixers.
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
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.
1) unregulated gambling (a.k.a. "prediction markets"),
2) funding North Korea.
Heartening to see the beautiful web3 vision come alive.
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...
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.
Selling sanctioned oil to India and buying unguided cruise missiles from Iran, through the Gulf state laundromats.
Is crypto "Breaking Bad" for nerds? Sounds about right...
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?
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.
> Dear Claude, please investigate the culprit of the attack and make no mistakes.
Would note that nobody—including probably the Kims—knows what this figure is.
Where might one read more about this?
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...
You're thinking of "<fraction> of <fraction>".
IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.
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.
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.
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?
> ...
> 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.
( Eg: Collapse of the Spanish Empire )
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.
> 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.
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.
See also: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
There’s Superdollars but it doesn’t seem to be a really widespread problem so far, right?
Don’t fall for their propaganda. Everybody is ultimately headquartered somewhere.
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.
https://www.fincen.gov/news/news-releases/fincen-announces-w...
Deregulation, doncha know.
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.
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.
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!"
At this point I don't understand - why not do this officially? They're already sanctioned to death...
There was a failed op to install a device to listen to comms about 2 years ago.
There are two kinds of people who hate KYC: conspiracy cranks and criminals.
I am extremely disappointed.
The people who have managed to escape describe a real-life hellscape.
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.