Hackers stole billions in crypto to keep North Korea’s regime afloat

If cryptocurrencies are self-regulating, aren’t the techniques used by these hackers actually the best and most effective way to play the game by its own rules? Calling this behavior “cheating” smells of sore-loserism.

What does this sentence even mean?

There is a certain Bitcoin evangelist who will preach the gospel of a self governing currency that via a system of rules will automatically validate transactions between trust-less parties in a decentralized manner over a globe-spanning internet protocol but then complain when that same system does not prevent them from accidentally sending the entire contents of their "wallet" to an address in North Korea.

The system does not represent ownership the system only tracks of the validity of transactions and if the North Korean government proposes a valid transaction of your BTC or ETH to an address they control and a mining-node includes that transaction in a block which a majority of the network accepts then those assets are no longer yours they belong to North Korea.

The properties of the crypto-asset ecosystem which allow it to be ungoverned also make it ungovernable.

I would imagine exchanges these days routinely monitor incoming and outgoing transactions, and if they suspect the funds are stolen, they are freezed. I would imagine North Korea doesn't have really an easy job laundering that BTC they have stolen.

It is a reference to Magic The Gathering. Blue decks are known for wildly changing the rules of the game. Black decks are known for interacting with death and the graveyard which is where cards go after they are used.

A paraphrasing of the GP without using magic terminology is to say that they are playing by the rules in an unexpected way using unexpected combinations and sequences. More briefly "playing by the rules as written".

You're right, many crypto exchanges operating on the right side of the law will freeze these funds.

For those interested in this, CT (crypto twitter) makes tracking North Korea's stolen winnings a bit of a sport.

samczsun, an excellent security auditor who's working at Paradigm these days, broke down some of the org in a post the other day.

https://x.com/samczsun/status/1906754853063565720?t=N4aqa6Vy...

Taylor Monahan at MetaMask also makes a habit of tracing funds and shares some pretty interesting finds around NK's laundering efforts.

It appears crypto is just speed-running the last few hundred years on their way to modern financial regulation

These are but pricey bug bounties. This will lead to a more efficient and secure cryptocurrency market, as participants will insist on better financial controls, threatening to flee to the regulated fiat markets if their needs are not met. /s

> These are but pricey bug bounties.

This isn't sarcasm to me, but the rest of your comment is.

You can imagine things all you want, the rest of us will be over here in the real world.

"The shocking theft at WazirX, India’s largest cryptocurrency exchange..."

Oddly I am not in the least bit shocked. Now if we found out that this was an inside job I would again not be the least bit shocked.

They are simply having to duplicate all the things Visa provides its customers.

BTC is inherently deflationary in the sense that once new coins cease to be mined the total number of BTC will decrease over time due to lose, theft and death. I know that I lost my wallet with the only BTC I owned 10 years ago. I can name several other people that have done the same. I would think this one property makes it undesirable for use as a currency.

> I know that I lost my wallet with the only BTC I owned 10 years ago. I can name several other people that have done the same. I would think this one property makes it undesirable for use as a currency.

How is this any different from losing your wallet with physical currency?

Because crypto wallets are more akin to bank accounts than wallets.

In many cases if you lose your physical wallet, someone else will find it and the cash will stay in circulation, but even if not, as physical currency is much more inflationary it's no big deal.

The second point is that most people keep a lot less money in a physical wallet, usually no more than say a few hundred dollars. Whereas a bitcoin wallet will often contain thousands or more so is more akin to a bank account.

Most of the lost coins will all be recovered by quantum computers. There is no way to update or fix the wallets they are stored in.