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North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

economist.com

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Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#61

Post by butterfi »

acidtakes1 wrote: post #47
NelsonMinar wrote: post #32

"mixers—large digital pools where crypto owners can deposit funds to obscure their origins." I have a quibble with articles about cryptocurrency fraud. They always get around to mixers and then they define it as if it were some relatively legitimate thing, like an odd bank. "large digital pools", "deposit funds". You have to get to the last phrase ("obscure their origins") to understand what mixers really are. A prop…

I don't understand why technology that provides a modicum of privacy must be demonized. It must be for money laundering and criminals. It can't have a legitimate use case. Is it used for nefarious activities? Of course, but not exclusively so.

Can you provide a legitimate use case for mixers? (I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious)

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#62

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bdcravens wrote: post #17
moremetadata wrote: post #3

Not bad for a supposedly backwards repressed regime, unless thats the least stolen compared to 1st world countries? It also exposes a wider problem the crypto community are not addressing.

The biggest risk with North Korea is seeing the state of the country, and underestimating the regime itself.

Spot on. I once heard the Kims described as multimillionaires with one of the largest armies in the world [1] and nukes.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_...

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#63

Post by throwaway290 »

axlee wrote: post #51
acidtakes1 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why technology that provides a modicum of privacy must be demonized. It must be for money laundering and criminals. It can't have a legitimate use case. Is it used for nefarious activities? Of course, but not exclusively so.

If 99% of BTC mixers' volume is helping laundering international drug trade money, arms or human trafficking, it's not exactly hard to demonize mixing itself. I have no data to base this on, but I assume that privacy absolutists are a tiny, tiny drop in the pool of blood and crime.

Privacy absolutists are free to deal in cash. Whatever amounts they send and receive, criminals and dictators do orders of magnitude more and people suffer as a result.

If it wasn't so sad it would be funny that the countries with highest levels of freedom and least corruption tend to be the ones with most vocal privacy absolutists...

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#64

Post by stirfish »

throwaway290 wrote: post #63
axlee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 99% of BTC mixers' volume is helping laundering international drug trade money, arms or human trafficking, it's not exactly hard to demonize mixing itself. I have no data to base this on, but I assume that privacy absolutists are a tiny, tiny drop in the pool of blood and crime.

Privacy absolutists are free to deal in cash. Whatever amounts they send and receive, criminals and dictators do orders of magnitude more and people suffer as a result. If it wasn't so sad it would be funny that the countries with highest levels of freedom and least corruption tend to be the ones with most vocal privacy absolutists...

>the countries with highest levels of freedom and least corruption tend to be the ones with most vocal privacy absolutists...

Correlation or causation?

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#65

Post by exo762 »

butterfi wrote: post #61
acidtakes1 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why technology that provides a modicum of privacy must be demonized. It must be for money laundering and criminals. It can't have a legitimate use case. Is it used for nefarious activities? Of course, but not exclusively so.

Can you provide a legitimate use case for mixers? (I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious)

Scenario one. Individual (while working in a startup) is receiving some tokens as a compensation. Time passes. Their remuneration being on-chain and visible is a problem when negotiating salary in the next job.

Scenario two. I want to have on-chain identity (e.g. exo762.eth domain name). To register it I need to have some ETH (gas, registration fee). If I sent this ETH directly from my "money" account, I will forever link my public identity to my money, which is like walking around with "my net worth is at least XYZ USD" banner.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#66

Post by acidtakes1 »

graeme wrote: post #59
acidtakes1 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/28/opinion/jack-dorseys-twit...

Signal is not a crypto mixer. The argument here is about the frequency a certain service is used for crime. For example, library records generally have a fair amount of privacy. Criminals sometimes consult libraries. Crime is not the dominant use of libraries. Mixers have a fair amount of privacy. Mixers are used by criminal, and crime is overwhelmingly the dominant use of mixers. To rebut this you’d need to show lar…

I'm only arguing the definition shouldn't be changed to something that is explicitly negative, even if the vast majority of the time it's used for nefarious reasons.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#67

Post by babypuncher »

acidtakes1 wrote: post #47
NelsonMinar wrote: post #32

"mixers—large digital pools where crypto owners can deposit funds to obscure their origins." I have a quibble with articles about cryptocurrency fraud. They always get around to mixers and then they define it as if it were some relatively legitimate thing, like an odd bank. "large digital pools", "deposit funds". You have to get to the last phrase ("obscure their origins") to understand what mixers really are. A prop…

I don't understand why technology that provides a modicum of privacy must be demonized. It must be for money laundering and criminals. It can't have a legitimate use case. Is it used for nefarious activities? Of course, but not exclusively so.

I agree in principal, however if the vast majority of a given service's users are using it for criminal activity then maybe there's room for some added scrutiny.

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#68

Post by crazygringo »

anonymousDan wrote: post #43
crazygringo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The crypto currency world is hyper focused on stopping this Can you explain how? I'm super curious because the whole point of crypto is you can't reverse transactions, and therefore crypto is only ever as secure as computer security generally, and there's nothing crypto can do about computer security generally. Or are people coming up with some new paradigm here that fixes this somehow?

Why 'generally'? Why can't crypto systems be designed to be more secure than other software given what is at stake (e.g. by making the effort to formally verify systems/applications). Not saying it will happen but don't see why it is impossible.

Because ultimately it all comes down to the security of your keys. Which are just information.

Keeping keys secure is no different from keeping anything else secure. That's why 'generally'.

And crypto doesn't do anything about key security. That's up to each person/org to figure out for themselves.

(North Korea didn't hack the blockchain. They hacked however people/orgs kept their keys.)

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#69

Post by davidguetta »

butterfi wrote: post #61
acidtakes1 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why technology that provides a modicum of privacy must be demonized. It must be for money laundering and criminals. It can't have a legitimate use case. Is it used for nefarious activities? Of course, but not exclusively so.

Can you provide a legitimate use case for mixers? (I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious)

sending money to ukraine when you are russian (like vitalik buterin did)

Re: North Korean hackers stole a record $1.7B of crypto last year

#70

Post by joyfylbanana »

butterfi wrote: post #61
acidtakes1 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why technology that provides a modicum of privacy must be demonized. It must be for money laundering and criminals. It can't have a legitimate use case. Is it used for nefarious activities? Of course, but not exclusively so.

Can you provide a legitimate use case for mixers? (I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely curious)

If you are transacting in a business environment, I think it is an added benefit if the counterparty in the transaction can't deduce information out of your transaction. Such as how much assets you have, to what other services have you been sending funds and so on. As Bitcoin does have public ledger, and if you just use single address and don't do any privacy enchancing practices, lots of information could be deductible using blockchain analysis.

I would also suspect that using data collected by governments is used for business advantage. Of course it is hard to prove quite often. Personally I think that in principle it just doesn't make sense to spread your data around, as the benefits are tiny and the potential downsides can be big.

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