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?
>"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".
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.
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?
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.
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.
I think NK is a convenient target to blame, instead of highlighting that random events from random insiders across different financial operations are the actual cause.
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
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.
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?
Man, if only there existed some central body imbued with authority by society, that could essentially freeze accounts and unwind a transaction like this. What a security feature that would be.
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.
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.
And if the creditor bank happens to be in Russia, Iran, the DRPK, or any number of other hostile financial systems, the debtor bank will likely find things practically impossible to unwind regardless.
Sometimes they get lucky though and the government passes a law allowing them to seize equivalent assets a few decades down the road.
Making transfers to those countries is almost impossible from Western banks. It would require sophisticated multi-bank international transfers to do that, which take a long time and are fairly easy to stop.
Do you think money is transferred by shoving bank notes into the Ethernet cables?
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.
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.”
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.
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 at least once, even large sums like 10^7 € [1]. 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.
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, like physical goods handed over to a buyer), simply “undoing all transactions in a database” isn’t without victims either.
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.
> 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).
The main reason it is a differentiator is that centralised money understands that its purpose is to be a system of social credit, so reversibility of transactions is just an acknowledgement that there is enough evidence to prove that this particular individual owns this particular sum, so it should go back to them. It is actually a much better and more honest system than the blockchain, because it doesn't treat money like a tangible resource in and of itself that can be "lost" which would be a much older and dumber way of doing things.
Yes but if your cryptocurrency is supported by courts then it is no longer decentralised money and on top of that some of it is going to have to be converted to fiat at some point just to engage with the legal system if nothing else.
I imagine it's possible to design a blockchain where transactions are 1) artificially delayed; and 2) can be blocked by anyone who has the key.
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.
It wouldn't work if the realisation of fraud takes longer than the window of time you've given the owner to make a blocking transaction. Banks are superior here because they have the power and ability to correlate multiple different kinds of evidence, and then reverse the transaction even years later. They have financial statements, biological proof, social evidence, much more than just one cryptographic key.
You are changing the process not the way technology operates.
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.
I heard escrow keys are supposed to solve this. Can't we deposit escrow keys to a legacy bank running cobol in mainframes and let it do its kyc/aml sanctions check and anti fraud on all transactions? That should solve it
Except that banks often don't unwind or freeze transactions. I've seen cases of both criminal conduct, and human error, leading to millions in lost funds. And banks didn't reverse or freeze anything. Yes it would be a security feature, but it's not used the way you assume.
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.
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.
Can you give any evidence for this?
(I mean statistically significant evidence worthly of global your global conclusions and not and tiny sample of cherry picked anecdotes)
Crypto doesn’t care wether or not the transaction was for good or evil. It’s Switzerland, it’s neutral, and there really only one goal - to sidestep human control.
If a transaction was successful, it’s done its job.
Because of human nature fraud, theft, errors, disputes over assets etc. that go along with money whatever its form need to be properly dispositioned too. A block chain has no answer for that. And with dispute resolution methods the system will die or merely attract the underside or 1-off users of society.
Second, an automatic no to power is simplistic so as to distort solutions. Power is fine provided it's not corrupt and accountable. Getting that and keeping it is a hard problem, but there's no end-run either.
Finally, how many examples of frauds, thefts N must occur before crypto is associated with fraud, theft? That N was long ago surpassed.
Who are these "crypto enthusiasts" who, in 2026, have a "stated goal" of "some alternative 'currency'"?
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.
When fraud, theft occur and/or claims on insurance when fraud theft occurs a regulator must have a legal system to find facts, prove charges, make a judgement that can be enforced etc.. And that means, for one thing, anonymous users are an illusion. Identity to get accountability is required.
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.
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 goal has always been promoting capitalism at all costs, and nothing else.
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.
No surprises there - of course they linked it to NK... These parasitic intelligence firms are draining taxpayer money because law enforcement agencies lack blockchain expertise and constantly outsource their investigations. We’ve already seen cases where firms like Chainalysis and TRM provided flawed data that led to innocent people being wrongfully charged. Worse yet, their operations rely on backroom cooperation with private intelligence mercenaries, trading illegally obtained data on private citizens worldwide.
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.
Like nearly everything in this modern world, the public statements or claims are never true and the opposite is the reality. Im thinking of those people worried about the government taking their money, and today we see the safety of crypto is fundamentally broken because ANYONE can take your money. Maybe its me, but i would rather trust the gov than ANYONE.
100 comments
[ 61.8 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadCash 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".
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
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.
> Dear Claude, please investigate the culprit of the attack and make no mistakes.
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.
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.
> 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...
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 at least once, even large sums like 10^7 € [1]. 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...
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
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).
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.
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?
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.
arbitration without state control will supersede the old system
it is simply better UX to do business without the hive interjecting
a new power structure can only be achieved through technology. OP has no clue and just spouts orange reddit talking points to farm karma
Or is all of your statements just "trust me bro"?
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.
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.
Crypto doesn’t care wether or not the transaction was for good or evil. It’s Switzerland, it’s neutral, and there really only one goal - to sidestep human control.
If a transaction was successful, it’s done its job.
Because of human nature fraud, theft, errors, disputes over assets etc. that go along with money whatever its form need to be properly dispositioned too. A block chain has no answer for that. And with dispute resolution methods the system will die or merely attract the underside or 1-off users of society.
Second, an automatic no to power is simplistic so as to distort solutions. Power is fine provided it's not corrupt and accountable. Getting that and keeping it is a hard problem, but there's no end-run either.
Finally, how many examples of frauds, thefts N must occur before crypto is associated with fraud, theft? That N was long ago surpassed.
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.
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.
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!"
I am extremely disappointed.