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

(www.wsj.com)
125 points Bostonian | 2 comments | 03 Apr 25 13:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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Kapura ◴[03 Apr 25 14:00 UTC] No.43569809[source]▶
When i look around at all the positive innovations cryptocurrency has failed to deliver, it really does seem like they invented a currency exclusively useful for doing crimes.
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wil421 ◴[03 Apr 25 14:31 UTC] No.43570241[source]▶
My pet theory is some government agency created bitcoin for one of two reasons:

Tracking financial transactions (open ledger).

Funding dark ops.

The whole Natoshi riding into the sunset after bitcoin booms, like an old Western movie, is not very plausible IMHO.

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rtkwe ◴[03 Apr 25 15:10 UTC] No.43570887[source]▶
It is certainly odd there's been nothing from the inventors not even using the vast wealth they have squirreled away. The alternative which is honestly kind of funny is that they lost their keys so can't access the coins and thus coming forward as the inventor would just put a target on their back for people who might want to steal their keys.
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1. wil421 ◴[03 Apr 25 19:18 UTC] No.43574134{3}[source]▶
I like this idea. They should’ve been able to do some decent mining early on after losing the keys and make money.
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2. rtkwe ◴[03 Apr 25 20:02 UTC] No.43574669[source]▶
Depends a lot on when and how the keys were lost. If the creator(s) were sitting on it thinking they had this cache there's not much reason to mine so if they lost it later, say after home mining with single GPUs became woefully inefficient and ASIC farms ruled the roost it could have been out of economic reach to actually mine. Or they didn't realize for a while that they had lost the original keys, eg they forgot their passphrase or went to access the drive with the key on it and it has died or disappeared (lost in a move or something). There's also the off chance that they were simply pretty old and died before it really went crazy and their survivors just don't know that gramp's old flash drive actually had a fortune in coins on it.