Heartening to see the beautiful web3 vision come alive.
himata4113 4 hours ago [-]
North korea has enough cars for a traffic jam so that's definitely a win for the people's democratic republic of Korea, the only korea to exist.
blitzar 5 hours ago [-]
all this time people said it was useless ... just shows what they know
dmitriy_ko 4 hours ago [-]
You forgot ransomware
ffsm8 4 hours ago [-]
You say that like that's not spread by NK
whoanoway 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
goalieca 3 hours ago [-]
And crime.
Yizahi 4 hours ago [-]
Hey, you forgot #3:
Selling sanctioned oil to India and buying unguided cruise missiles from Iran, through the Gulf state laundromats.
4 hours ago [-]
summerisending 4 hours ago [-]
For you maybe, and those who have only lived, worked, and made businesses in one country. I have had several occasions where crypto would have made life a lot easier. I closed a bank account in Canada and they said the funds could not be sent by wire when it's being closed, only a paper bank draft, and assured me that my bank in Europe would accept it. My bank not only did not accept paper checks or bank drafts but told me no bank in the entire country accepts paper checks and drafts anymore.
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.
karel-3d 4 hours ago [-]
I have read somewhere that ISIS mostly runs on cryptocurrency now because it's harder to block.
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.
Supporting poorer countries, can there be a more moral course? /s
hardbass 4 hours ago [-]
That's a good sign of it's resilience if true. Why don't you want a form of money that doesn't require doxxing yourself to a state or bank?
akimbostrawman 4 hours ago [-]
This gets downvoted... People here really suddenly love The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse as long as it's against "evil crypto" that simultaneously is dangerous enough to supress but also useless.
pavlov 4 hours ago [-]
Methamphetamine made in home labs is both useless and dangerous enough to suppress. That's not an unusual combination to be regulated.
Is crypto "Breaking Bad" for nerds? Sounds about right...
hardbass 4 hours ago [-]
Is women being able to anonynmously buy contraceptives or other useful health items in a maga state evil to you for example?
hardbass 4 hours ago [-]
Why is anonymous cash free of government and bank control equal to addictive drugs that can kill people?
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?
pavlov 52 minutes ago [-]
Gambling is addictive and causes financial ruin like drugs.
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.
2 hours ago [-]
sigmoid10 6 hours ago [-]
>Estimated total impact: ~$6.3B, with ~$3B frozen on-chain so far, in coordination with our blockchain partners
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.
virtualritz 6 hours ago [-]
Exactly.
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.
treyd 5 hours ago [-]
You're mixing up two issues. The need for oracles is a "hard problem" but it's not the problem in this case.
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.
risyachka 5 hours ago [-]
>> Those persons (a judge, the police, even if robots by then) are the oracle.
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.
sandworm101 5 hours ago [-]
"Oracle" being the cover for crypto bros who dont want to admit they need "the legal system" to fix thier mess. Its all idiology and freedom when you are poor but once you actually own something of value, like a flat, suddenly you want lawyers and police to keep you safe from bad people.
tokioyoyo 6 hours ago [-]
At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power. In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose.
himata4113 4 hours ago [-]
No? Cryptocurrency has a ton of utility: it simplified ransomware attacks, enabled the deployment of supplychain attacks to steal funds from unsuspecting users, made illegal gambling accessible to everyone, memecoins, efts and safe storage for any stolen or illicidly gained funds until they could be laundered and the list goes on likely exceeding the character limit.
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.
chinathrow 5 hours ago [-]
It's another wealth transfer. No new money is generated.
deweller 5 hours ago [-]
No new money was generated, but new utility was generated.
Before cryptocurrency, there was no decentralized way to transfer value on the internet.
omnimus 4 hours ago [-]
What were the druglords and criminals befre crypto I wonder?
locknitpicker 6 hours ago [-]
> At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power.
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.
> 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.
sigmoid10 5 hours ago [-]
>the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich
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.
MiroslavPokorny 6 hours ago [-]
Why would Russia need crypto, when they can trade with China or buy through middle men in Dubai or similar places ?
5 hours ago [-]
locknitpicker 5 hours ago [-]
> Why would Russia need crypto, when they can trade with China or buy through middle men in Dubai or similar places ?
I'm not sure you understand how international sanctions work, particularly the scheme imposed on Russia.
Stable coins are not Crypto, they are just built on top of crypto to avoid normal financial regulations.
lxgr 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
Regulatory arbitrage. Not all centralized institutions are fast enough to actually make use of the theoretical capabilities available to them.
no-name-here 5 hours ago [-]
> 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?
Cheaper international transfers could be a specific valid use case. But I presume risk is too high for my taste.
IshKebab 5 hours ago [-]
Based on my 10 seconds of Googling, for transactions under $100, Bitcoin is actually more expensive to transfer.
5 hours ago [-]
schleck8 6 hours ago [-]
Crypto bros sure are quick to inform law enforcement and centralized financial authorities if their self governance fails
TheOtherHobbes 4 hours ago [-]
The usual "Governments are evil until I need to be rescued" libertarian shuffle.
boldaxolotl 6 hours ago [-]
I'd bet most of the frozen $3B is stablecoins and tokens with an admin freeze function. Tether and Circle can blacklist an address in minutes. Nobody can freeze BTC or ETH. So the money they got back is the part that was never decentralized in the first place, which supports your point from the other side
jsw97 7 hours ago [-]
Their haul is over 20% of North Korea’s GDP.
JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago [-]
> North Korea’s GDP
Would note that nobody—including probably the Kims—knows what this figure is.
jsw97 5 hours ago [-]
Ok their putative gdp. Given that the number is probably exaggerated maybe it’s 50%.
leosanchez 5 hours ago [-]
Respected Comrade knows everything.
blitzar 5 hours ago [-]
Something as trivial as knowing the GDP to the nearest cent in real time pales in comparison to Dear Leaders abilities
FabHK 5 hours ago [-]
It's well understood that crypto (scams, hacks) has contributed a third to half of the DPRK's foreign exchange income over the last few years.
AlecSchueler 2 hours ago [-]
> It's well understood
Where might one read more about this?
throw1234567891 5 hours ago [-]
So a sixth?
zahlman 4 hours ago [-]
"<fraction> to <fraction>" means some value in between those endpoints.
You're thinking of "<fraction> of <fraction>".
kevmo314 5 hours ago [-]
33% to 50%.
Sol- 5 hours ago [-]
How do they launder the coins generally? Given you traceable (most) cryptocurrency is by design, it seems you could sanction anyone who transacts with them? I understand it's likely not that simple, though.
sandworm101 5 hours ago [-]
They deposit the coins into organisations that mix coins from various customers. Its just like a bank. You deposit a fake/stollen 100$ bill one day and, if they accept it, you can withdraw a totally different 100$ bill from an ATM the next day.
Sol- 2 hours ago [-]
But then in turn I'm surprised that states haven't yet sanctioned the mixers themselves. I understand there's no proof that they might not also mix legitimate funds, but I wouldn't have expected this to be a big hindrance given that everyone seems to know that most of their use is for money laundering.
smnc 4 hours ago [-]
I never actually understood the whole "bitcoin mixer" scheme. Shouldn't all all the transactions still be traceable in the end?
onetrickwolf 4 hours ago [-]
Older mixers you could argue could kind of be traced but even then there’d still be difficulty and deniability.
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.
Tryvrsakjo10 4 hours ago [-]
That's exactly what I thought as well, especially if the transaction is done electronically, it should be traced back to the person who made unlike with cash.
sandworm101 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, but only if the organization is cooperative. Say you are a cop in Paris investigating some shady bitcoin transactions. But the mixer is in Japan. So you spend a year getting their records, only to point to another mixer in Canada. The goal isn't mathematical untraceability, just increasing the burden on investigators to the point they move on to easier targets. There are always lots of speeding tickets that need handing out.
is_true 4 hours ago [-]
Is that something that is actually needed for something or just money "laundering"?
schleck8 4 hours ago [-]
It's pretty much only money laundering. Supporters use the privacy euphemism but I've never heard of a legal use case for it, hence the tornado mixer sentence
maxglute 4 hours ago [-]
North Korea could have the funniest softpower win if they setup a division to purely pirate and emulate Japanese console video games.
fhub 6 hours ago [-]
Sophisticated? Perhaps. But could also be run of the mill honey trap/romantic approach. Easier to slip by 2fas through a front door.
MiroslavPokorny 6 hours ago [-]
My money is on an inside job.
cedws 6 hours ago [-]
Random thought: when NK collapses, I wonder if there will be a rush to seize the crypto wallets. I guess the CIA will be there first.
monkeydust 6 hours ago [-]
If they are not already there!
jdw64 6 hours ago [-]
It’s a pity. If he hadn’t been born in North Korea like that, he would have become a truly great programmer. My life is really hard and painful, but sometimes I think I’m better off than they are.
logicchains 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe if he hadn't been born in North Korea he'd have lived his dream of opening a coffee shop; perhaps he got into hacking there because it's the only way to support his family.
rgblambda 3 hours ago [-]
>perhaps he got into hacking there because it's the only way to support his family.
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.
vinyl7 5 hours ago [-]
To be fair, people can't afford COL by opening a coffee shop in this day and age.
ButlerianJihad 5 hours ago [-]
Look at the bright side: Dumb Starbucks probably wouldn't be shut down in North Korea!
That's impressive, I wish they published writeups..
At this point I don't understand - why not do this officially? They're already sanctioned to death...
bitfilped 3 hours ago [-]
Writeups are just a marketing tool, if you have nothing to advertise why would you waste the effort and make your targets more hardened?
expedition32 2 hours ago [-]
Perfect crime. The kind of people holding crypto can't exactly go to the police. They'd have to show the receipts!
There are two kinds of people who hate KYC: conspiracy cranks and criminals.
boldaxolotl 6 hours ago [-]
Same unit as Bybit in Feb 2025 (TraderTraitor), and if the laptop reports are right, the same way in: one developer's machine. Bybit lost $1.5B through a compromised Safe{Wallet} dev box. Twenty months later the largest exchange in the world loses four times that, apparently the same way. I'd like to know what signing setup lets one engineer's laptop reach $6B
NicoJuicy 7 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nylonstrung 7 hours ago [-]
It takes a lot of derangement to see a story about North Korea hackers attacking a Chinese exchange and process it in terms of Donald Trump
GJim 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
f6v 6 hours ago [-]
A guy abducts a president of a sovereign state and puts him into New York prison without any legal basis. The whole country is complicit by allowing this to happen. Yet all you can think is Putin.
GJim 4 hours ago [-]
The number of people fawning over Trump, Putin and Kim in this thread is bizzare. The troll farms must have been very busy.
f6v 3 hours ago [-]
And "troll farms" is such a boring response, in any context.
flohofwoe 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nyanmatt 6 hours ago [-]
Calling any of these articles “news” is something of a stretch. “Why Trump Fell in Love with Kim Jong Un”. Seriously? These are entertainment articles, at best. Where’s the Buzzfeed Top 10 Reasons Trump loves North Korea link?
1) unregulated gambling (a.k.a. "prediction markets"),
2) funding North Korea.
Heartening to see the beautiful web3 vision come alive.
Selling sanctioned oil to India and buying unguided cruise missiles from Iran, through the Gulf state laundromats.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Before cryptocurrency, there was no decentralized way to transfer value on the internet.
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...
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.
Would note that nobody—including probably the Kims—knows what this figure is.
Where might one read more about this?
You're thinking of "<fraction> of <fraction>".
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_Starbucks
At this point I don't understand - why not do this officially? They're already sanctioned to death...
There are two kinds of people who hate KYC: conspiracy cranks and criminals.