There’s a great podcast called “The Lazarus Heist” that goes into North Korea’s activities in stealing huge sums of money. Well worth a listen.
Crypto really is a perfect target for this kind of bank robbery, nobody can really feel too bad about it. It adds nothing to society, since you can’t even buy anything with it beside drugs and is mostly used for speculation and creating pollution. Also 99% of it is owned by people who already have enough or too much wealth to begin with.
I personally think there could be practical uses for crypto, such as getting around banking monopolies, but it’s poorly secured at the moment, and the main usecase being pushed by its users are “get rich quick” schemes often involving fraud.
In a way crypto has fulfilled the promise of “banking the unbanked”… Its just that the main group of ”unbanked” people happened to be criminals and scammers.
Its been a huge boom for scammers, before this you had to convince people to use wester union or something and convince a person they are talking to some inconvenienced soon to be oil barron, now all they do is throw up a website with tradingview charts and people will throw money at them.
Its the only way to make anonymous payments (XMR) in a world where everything tracks and spies on you. And it’s not only used to buy illegal stuff https://kycnot.me/ . I think of it like the TOR browser. Its great for people who are trying to escape an authoritarian government, but it can be used for bad things as well. But it should exist as I believe privacy is a human right.
Okay I get the hate for capitalism and global warming, but can we stop acting like anonymous payments for drugs and web hosting are a bad thing?
Do you like to get stoned and/or to trip balls? Do you like watching pirated movies? I fucking do at least, I imagine most people do lol.
Your thinking seems to assume the liberal society as static and unchanging and seek to make life within it more tolerable, even with things that are mostly just product of current society and it’s ills.
Well yeah in a better society where art was distributed freely and certain recreational substances weren’t illegal we wouldn’t need them.
That’s not the reality we live in today, however, nor will it be for a very long time, unfortunately.
In short, Bybit was abysmally sloppy with their security.
How did you reach this conclusion from the article? It seemed for the most part Bybit was following good security practices
“For the most part” really doesn’t cut it in an industry like this.
Some employees though, not so much
Good for them honestly
In history is funny given crypto is like the most recent possible thing to eist worth stealing at this level. Its like a decade and a half?
What proportion of their GDP is that?
$29.6 billion (2023). $1,217 GDP per capita. So about 5.01% of it’s GDP.
GDP isn’t a particularly useful measurement when a nation is that sanctioned, but it’s a still a pretty hefty cash influx in the exact kind of currency that lets them evade those sanctions.
This, flat GDP really only accurately measures US economy and maybe the Euro zone. With others it becomes increasingly useless in really estimating anything concrete about that economy. Doubly so if they are sanctioned.
Internet says gdp of 23.34B so 6ish% of GDP.
Payment for the soldiers they sent to the grinder
Dont believe the NK story. As soon as the coup fund (USAID) gets raided 1,5B of money goes up in spoke takwn by *checks notes, the north koreans… The president and first lady are doing rug pulls one month in office, I’d wager the op came from our side.
I’m glad you felt empowered to write that.
I, too, unironically support free speech on principle
Angry upvote
that’s great stuff, that, all north korea had to do was be patient, and be smarter than those who were charged with coding the protection. if you aren’t smart enough, or vigilant enough, to protect the asset, it’s as good as investing pyrite and funneling your money directly to terrorists.
