
North Korea Is Dodging Sanctions with a Secret Bitcoin Stash - devy
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-11/north-korea-hackers-step-up-bitcoin-attacks-amid-rising-tensions
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strebler
I'm sorry, but a country of 25 million people is "dodging sanctions" with tens
of millions of dollars in bitcoins?

That's not really an amount of money to dodge much of anything at all.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
Imagine going long - very long - with a stash that big.

The pundits-in-the-know often semi-seriously state they expect 1 BTC to rise
to $100,000 USD within 10 years - looking at the past 5 years that's not an
unreasonable statement to make. This is based on BTC's deflationary nature,
and its increasing prevelance in the world. Imagine if you owned one
28,000,000th of the Internet economy - that would still be a _lot_ of money.
What if you owned 10x or 100x of that? In BTC it's still an amount affordable
by a large organisation or nation state, but in 10 years' time it would be
like having your own Fort Knox.

~~~
wahern

      pundits-in-the-know
    

That's an oxymoron. And I'm not even trying to be cynical. People in-the-know
aren't pundits, they're the ones the pundits are talking about. You can tell
because pundits suddenly have alot less to say, and are much more
circumscribed, when they're discussing topics with which they have
contemporaneous, first-hand knowledge--pretty much the complete opposite
situation of someone publicly predicting the USD price of BTC 10 years down
the road.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
There are people like John McAfee who clearly understand Bitcoin and
frequently post punditry to their Twitter feeds - and make jokes about BTC's
future price:
[https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/887024683379544065...](https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/887024683379544065?lang=en)

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castis
Isn't this a tenet of bitcoin? Not being outright controllable by the will of
a government?

~~~
sand500
Except they still need to be able to spend the bitcoin and ship goods back to
NK. If a country is willing to trade with them, then it doesnt matter if its
using bitcoin or trading with something else. The important part is that
bitcoin is something with monetary value that is able to be stolen easily.

~~~
russdpale
Huh? Could you explain? Perhaps the exchange is unsafe, but the coin itself is
most certainly not.

~~~
sand500
In the article, it basically talks about NK straling the bitcoin. My point is
that to spend the bitcoin has the same hurdles as spending other money or
trading something because the other country has to ship NK the physical goods
they bought. Its less that nk is using bitcoin to get around sanctions and
more its convenient for them to get a hold of.

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Taniwha
Have you guys actually read the article? it's not claiming they're mining the
bitcoins, they claim they are stealing them

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patrickg_zill
Cross ref with Jaime Dimon's comments on bitcoin ... interesting .

“You’re wasting your time with Bitcoin! Virtual currency, where it’s called a
bitcoin vs. a U.S. dollar, that’s going to be stopped,” said Dimon. “No
government will ever support a virtual currency that goes around borders and
doesn’t have the same controls. It’s not going to happen.”

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gcb0
> "They also breached an English-language bitcoin news website and collected
> bitcoin ransom payments from global victims of the malware WannaCry,
> according to the researcher."

the article claims they can steal btc from any wallet. thats preposterous and
if they could do that, stealing btc would be the least of my worries because
that would prove several cryptography building blocks might be obsolete.

~~~
matt4077
The article says no such thing.

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dharma1
There's a lot of ETH and BTC volume at South Korean exchanges. There's
probably a reason for it aside from excitement

~~~
uncoder0
Korean exchanges don't have any fees on trades, only withdraw and deposit, so
they're used almost exclusively for wash trading and other manipulation.

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LyndsySimon
Mining makes much more sense - if they could acquire mining hardware from
China (where it's manufactured) in trade, they could use that to mine cryptos,
which they in turn can spend on the (relatively) open market.

Getting funds to agents in foreign territory is particularly easy if you're
doing this.

~~~
tristanj
I don't think North Korea has the electrical capacity to mine
cryptocurrencies. They don't have enough electricity to keep their cities lit
at night.

~~~
LyndsySimon
I'm certainly not an expert on the capabilities of North Korea, but my
intuition says that if they can build a hydrogen bomb, they can power a few
shipping containers full of ASICs.

My impression was that they aren't electrified because it isn't a national
priority for them to be, not because they lacked the capable to develop the
infrastructure.

~~~
koolba
On the contrary, it's probably part of their operating plans. Electricity and
other creature comforts of modern society give people the free time needed to
plan a revolt.

It's in their interests to keep the people alive yet stagnant.

~~~
DaiPlusPlus
If the NK elite want to continue to live in luxury they will have to do
something about their underclass eventually. Bill Gates, et al, wouldn't have
their present lifestyles if they didn't have well-educated (and well-
nourished) people doing their work.

Serious question: If you're an elite NK party member with your own private
home theatre set-up, who do you call when your Plex server stops working?

~~~
njarboe
Kidnap some Japanese techs?

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decentralised
This is indistinguishable from old time FUD to me.

There have been a series of articles in a specific type of media lately trying
to link NK or China or Russia with Bitcoin and blockchain technologies.

It reeks of fear. To me this means that Bitcoin is winning.

~~~
KirinDave
You should consider reading the article.

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boomboomsubban
The proof they provide is "Fireeye said it." Must be legit, it's not like
they're a company run by an Air Force vet with ties to the FBI, and there's no
chance they'd make a ton of money off a cyber war with North Korea.

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nnfy
Unfortunate display of the intrinsic value of bitcoin as an anonymous[1],
decentralized store of value.

1\. Please don't tell me that btc is not anonymous; the fact that I can trace
transaction histories is irrelevant, since I still need to deanonymize the
initial address.

~~~
shemnon42
That's not anonymity, that's pseudonymity.

~~~
nnfy
No, by the conventional definitions of anonymous [1], the protocol is fully
anonymous. Saying that it is pseudo anonymous is in my opinion misleading.
There is a different word to describe the weakness of a deanonymized address.
I dont know what that word is, but we will confuse and possibly turn
interested parties and laymen away with the misnomer of pseudoanonymity.

I would compate this mislabeling to claiming that btc is insecure because of
the mt. Gox hack; the fact that you can steal bitcoin's from people doesn't
mean that bitcoins are insecure. Similarly, the fact that I can trace your
transaction trail does not mean that your transactions themselves weren't
fully anonymous.

1\. Dictionary.com/browse/anonymous

~~~
Pils
pseudo anonymity != pseudonymity. In laymans terms, "pseudonymity" means "fake
name" whereas pseudo anonymity would mean "fake anonymity". shemnon42 is using
the exact terminology you are referring to.

In this case, the conventional definition of anonymous is less useful than
domain-specific definition of anonymity, since different currencies have
different levels of anonymity. Recent HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14672691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14672691)

~~~
nnfy
I have been misreading that word for a few months now. I didnt catch that
people were using the root pseudonym.

I didnt even know that pseudonymous was a word until today, thank you.

