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?

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gejose 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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10111001 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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method_capital 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		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 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> 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 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> 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 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> 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.

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littlecranky67 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The cost of that reversible fiat system is ongoing inflation that is put as a hidden tax on everyone. I’d rather have those 6bn from speculators going to NK if that means we go back to sub-2% inflation for a while

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ux266478 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	10111001 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> 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. 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.

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postalcoder 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery

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nphardon 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They do, here's one example: 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.

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echoangle 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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?

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tintor 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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echoangle 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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loeg 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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retrac 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

10 million dollars in $100 bills weighs 100 kg. Distributing and fencing that much counterfeit is probably hard.

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csomar 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They probably do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdollar

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paulpauper 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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logicchains 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>"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".

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hungryhobbit 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They are trying!

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ktm5j 4 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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method_capital 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Do they really need to bother? Plenty to steal in cryptoland, and it's much much easier.

	▲	ktm5j 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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paulpauper 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[dead]

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plaidfuji 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Binance isn’t headquartered anywhere. Don’t fall for their propaganda. Everybody is ultimately headquartered somewhere.