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gradus_ad 1 hours ago [-]
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.
imguienjoyer 39 minutes ago [-]
multisig escrow + privacy will bring this new power structure
Arainach 12 minutes ago [-]
The challenge is not a technical one, and cannot be solved with technology.
malux85 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
gradus_ad 39 minutes ago [-]
Good luck
imguienjoyer 37 minutes ago [-]
good luck too
jstummbillig 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Lichtso 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
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), simply “undoing all transactions in a database” isn’t without victims either.
37 minutes ago [-]
altcognito 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
maerF0x0 11 minutes ago [-]
a 51% agreement could fork/reverse this.
paulpauper 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Shank 13 minutes ago [-]
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.”
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
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.
sandeepkd 3 hours ago [-]
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
robby_w_g 2 hours ago [-]
Add in Claude for some extra CYA:
> Dear Claude, please investigate the culprit of the attack and make no mistakes.
Zero evidence presented that this has anything to do with DPRK. "Trust us bro".
ilamont 3 hours ago [-]
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?
gejose 3 hours ago [-]
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.
10111001 3 hours ago [-]
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.
method_capital 2 hours ago [-]
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.
idlewords 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
gizajob 2 hours ago [-]
A monetary system also shouldn’t disproportionately reward the first users of that currency just for them accidentally being first in the pyramid (scheme).
lxgr 2 hours ago [-]
> 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?
jsty 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
10111001 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
ux266478 54 minutes ago [-]
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.
postalcoder 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
echoangle 2 hours ago [-]
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?
tintor 2 hours ago [-]
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.
echoangle 2 hours ago [-]
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.
httpz 1 hours ago [-]
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.
loeg 1 hours ago [-]
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.
retrac 2 hours ago [-]
10 million dollars in $100 bills weighs 100 kg. Distributing and fencing that much counterfeit is probably hard.
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.
plaidfuji 2 hours ago [-]
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.
lxgr 1 hours ago [-]
> Binance isn’t headquartered anywhere.
Don’t fall for their propaganda. Everybody is ultimately headquartered somewhere.
logicchains 3 hours ago [-]
>"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".
hungryhobbit 3 hours ago [-]
They are trying!
ktm5j 2 hours ago [-]
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.
method_capital 2 hours ago [-]
Do they really need to bother? Plenty to steal in cryptoland, and it's much much easier.
ktm5j 2 hours ago [-]
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.
paulpauper 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
_HMCB_ 2 hours ago [-]
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?
TrackerFF 1 hours ago [-]
How can they be brought to justice? They can't. That's the long and the short of it.
brohee 1 hours ago [-]
Justice can be brought to them tho... At some point someone will delete the building they work in with a cruise missile or two...
jrflo 10 minutes ago [-]
If the US bombs North Korea that would be the start of World War 3
dudisubekti 44 minutes ago [-]
Thing is they can delete buildings quite well too
WarmWash 1 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately their best friend is pretty strong.
whoanoway 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cosmicgadget 1 hours ago [-]
Retaliation, sanctions against the country behind the curtain. Geopolitical justice.
paulpauper 1 hours ago [-]
that is why they don't care about opsec that much. what are anyone gonnna do?
httpz 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Unless they travel abroad to cooperating countries, nothing is going to happen to them.
MengerSponge 1 hours ago [-]
They bought their tickets. I say let 'em crash! Those apes are likely gone.
paulpauper 1 hours ago [-]
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.
qntmfred 1 hours ago [-]
Trump needs to call up his boy over there and get our money back ig
overfeed 21 minutes ago [-]
They'll use that bitcoin to buy $100M worth of the Trump shitcoin and call it even, which may be cheaper than using mixers.
so_it_be 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
asftq 2 hours ago [-]
I didn't know there were Effective Altruists in North Korea. Will they do AI data centers next to increase NK's popularity?
paulpauper 1 hours ago [-]
Sam Bankman-fried jealous of their game
gsky 2 hours ago [-]
It makes no semse. Since Binance is Chinese company North Korea would not dare to attack it
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
Makes perfect sense. Laundered way to get westerner money into north korea with china looking at no fault.
csomar 21 minutes ago [-]
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.
cosmicgadget 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ratCola2001 1 hours ago [-]
#beastmode
pasquinelli 1 hours ago [-]
now if they weren't sanctioned they would've had no reason to do this. classic case of perverse incentives.
MisterMunchkin 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
anonymous908213 3 seconds ago [-]
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 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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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
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.
> Dear Claude, please investigate the culprit of the attack and make no mistakes.
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.
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?
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.
> ...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/binance/
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.
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.