>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 1 days 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 1 days 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.
virtualritz 19 hours ago [-]
Yeah, you do not need an oracle for USDC.
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.).
risyachka 24 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.
virtualritz 19 hours ago [-]
I assumed a basic level of abstract thinking since this is HN.
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
sandworm101 1 days 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 1 days 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 24 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 1 days ago [-]
It's another wealth transfer. No new money is generated.
deweller 1 days 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 24 hours ago [-]
What were the druglords and criminals befre crypto I wonder?
locknitpicker 1 days 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
Why would Russia need crypto, when they can trade with China or buy through middle men in Dubai or similar places ?
1 days ago [-]
locknitpicker 1 days 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.
I KNOW how they work, i also know that many places IGNORE the idea of sanctions on Russia.
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.
Stable coins are not Crypto, they are just built on top of crypto to avoid normal financial regulations.
lxgr 24 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 24 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 24 hours ago [-]
Based on my 10 seconds of Googling, for transactions under $100, Bitcoin is actually more expensive to transfer.
1 days ago [-]
schleck8 1 days ago [-]
Crypto bros sure are quick to inform law enforcement and centralized financial authorities if their self governance fails
TheOtherHobbes 23 hours ago [-]
The usual "Governments are evil until I need to be rescued" libertarian shuffle.
boldaxolotl 1 days 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
pavlov 1 days ago [-]
After long soul-searching, crypto has settled on two strong use cases:
Heartening to see the beautiful web3 vision come alive.
himata4113 24 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 24 hours ago [-]
all this time people said it was useless ... just shows what they know
dmitriy_ko 23 hours ago [-]
You forgot ransomware
ffsm8 23 hours ago [-]
You say that like that's not spread by NK
whoanoway 23 hours ago [-]
[dead]
goalieca 23 hours ago [-]
And crime.
natebc 18 hours ago [-]
and presidential bribery
sandeepkd 17 hours ago [-]
NK seems to be /dev/null for unresolved issues. Wonder if they receive any monetary assistance for taking all the blames
Yizahi 23 hours ago [-]
Hey, you forgot #3:
Selling sanctioned oil to India and buying unguided cruise missiles from Iran, through the Gulf state laundromats.
23 hours ago [-]
summerisending 23 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.
hardbass 23 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 23 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 23 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 23 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 20 hours 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.
hardbass 15 hours ago [-]
>sanctions circumvention for Iran and others
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.
hardbass 16 hours ago [-]
So does encrypted communication and cash dollars. Do you want to ban these two as well?
hardbass 23 hours ago [-]
Is women being able to anonynmously buy contraceptives or other useful health items in a maga state evil to you for example?
22 hours ago [-]
karel-3d 23 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.
"<fraction> to <fraction>" means some value in between those endpoints.
You're thinking of "<fraction> of <fraction>".
kevmo314 1 days ago [-]
33% to 50%.
Sol- 1 days 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 1 days 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.
smnc 23 hours ago [-]
I never actually understood the whole "bitcoin mixer" scheme. Shouldn't all all the transactions still be traceable in the end?
onetrickwolf 23 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 23 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 23 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.
Sol- 21 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.
Is that something that is actually needed for something or just money "laundering"?
schleck8 23 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
sandworm101 19 hours ago [-]
Ask a bank. Banks do not keep individual piles of cash for each depositor. Why do they put everyone's money into one big pile? See the movie It's A Wonderful Life for the famous monologue justifying the practice.
maxglute 23 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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
My money is on an inside job.
jimt1234 13 hours ago [-]
That's my feeling, too. It's probably my TDS, but it just seems weird that the shady founder of Binance got busted for laundering money, then got a shady pardon from Trump, and now billions have mysteriously gone missing. Someone's gonna have to kick up a portion of that money to Trump; he'll lay it all on North Korea and we'll all move onto the next headline.
MiroslavPokorny 13 hours ago [-]
Thats the brilliant weakness of crypto, anyone, anywhere in the chain can take a chunk and theres nothing anyone else can do to reverse.
deadlast2 19 hours ago [-]
I think it has evaporated the wealth of many young investors also.
mac3n 18 hours ago [-]
of course it's 'elite'.
sounds much better that way.
cedws 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
If they are not already there!
andrewinardeer 16 hours ago [-]
They're not.
There was a failed op to install a device to listen to comms about 2 years ago.
jdw64 1 days 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 1 days 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 22 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 1 days ago [-]
To be fair, people can't afford COL by opening a coffee shop in this day and age.
ButlerianJihad 1 days ago [-]
Look at the bright side: Dumb Starbucks probably wouldn't be shut down in North Korea!
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 1 days 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 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
nylonstrung 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
GJim 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
f6v 1 days 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 23 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 22 hours ago [-]
And "troll farms" is such a boring response, in any context.
flohofwoe 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
nyanmatt 1 days 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?
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.
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...
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"...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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>".
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.
There was a failed op to install a device to listen to comms about 2 years ago.
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.