A question: how come the North Koreans aren't draining banks in the U.S. and other countries of cash using equally sophisticated exploits against known technical and human vulnerabilities?
They probably are. I used to write software for a financial institution and we saw a lot of traffic from Chinese and Russian IP's hitting our firewalls constantly (ssh login attempts with typical default passwords, random wordpress exploits, that sorta thing). It wasn't very sophisticated so I don't think it was state sponsored or anything, probably just random cyber criminals trying to hit US targets because their governments wouldn't care.
I mean, this was at least 15 years ago.. so it might be a different story. But when the game is throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, I imagine they're still going after whatever targets they can find.
Probably because fiat, unlike crypto, is not decentralized and fraudulent transactions can be reversed. A North Korean hacker zeroing out an account balance and incrementing another, can be reversed.
Exactly. It turns out a lot of the things in the banking system that cryptocurrency people complain about are actually features, not bugs.
IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency. It's a solution with a noble goal: giving the individual complete control of their financial resources. Current form, however, has devolved into casino gambling and criminal laundering.
I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.
A monetary system also shouldn’t disproportionately reward the first users of that currency just for them accidentally being first in the pyramid (scheme).
> It's a solution with a noble goal: giving the individual complete control of their financial resources.
Indeed, but also complete responsibility for safeguarding these. It's hard to imagine a good situation where an individual has complete control but not complete responsibility, that way lies moral hazard.
> giving the individual complete control of their financial resources
This seems like a definitionally unachievable goal. How can you have finance without others that you ultimately need to trust, if only to be stable enough in their wants and needs to want to trade with you?
That is a category error, though. You can't entirely separate money from state power because ultimately all money represents a claim on resources within some political structure. And the place where you exchange money for those resources is always going to be within reach of the state, kind of by definition.
> Crypto was supposed to be a solution to your government devaluing the rewards of your residual labor in the form of their currency.
There’s already a solution, use the currency to buy assets denominated in that currency. Crypto was not needed when bonds, stocks, real estate, etc exist.
There are hundreds of trillions of dollars in assets to buy whose value increase over time may beat inflation, I’m surprised you’re not aware of this solution.
0.5% of my net worth is in cash, the other 99.5% is in dollar denominated assets. Cash is a unit of exchange and a unit of account, not an asset.
No, I think that's approaching a strawman. Speaking as somebody that doesn't give a shit about cryptocurrency.
It's all tradeoffs. The same power that grants the ability to reverse transactions also grants the ability to reverse a transaction in bad faith and commit fraud. Will the system correct that? Would it surprise you to know that it doesn't have to? That same power also grants the ability to lock an entity out of any kind of monetary transaction, and things like debanking. Usable for good? Sure. I don't think it's controversial to say that it being leveraged against Hunter Biden was at all justified, however. Would you like to be on the receiving end of that? Would you like to see a world where an LLM gets to decide that kind of thing based on your presence in the surveillance panopticon?
To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode. To be clear, I don't necessarily agree with it myself, but you shouldn't be so uncharitable to people to assume disagreement is always a matter of delusional ignorance.
> To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode.
Another way to restate my comment is: cryptocurrency is technically interesting but the tradeoffs it made to focus on certain edge cases mean that for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
The cost of that reversible fiat system is ongoing inflation that is put as a hidden tax on everyone. I’d rather have those 6bn from speculators going to NK if that means we go back to sub-2% inflation for a while
That is bs. Before 1971 we had a gold-backed monetary system and no record of deflation in the history of mankind (individual outliers notwithstanding when looking at the last 6000 years as a whole).
So you claim that in the last 6000 years of history we had stagnation? I would claim the world economy did nothing but grow on asset-backend currencies - sure, there is some localized, small (as in relative to the timeframe) outliers that don't matter.
Yes you can pick individual outliers, but clearly the world economy has been growing on a gold-based (or other shiny object backed) currency for literally thousands of years all over the world. Picking out individual cases is literally like looking at the 0.1%. Or do you seriously claim we had stagnation in the thousands of years of civilization, and only started to have groth since 1971? Then I know who is the ignorant one.
>"draining banks in the U.S. and other countries of cash"
Cash sits in vaults. North Korea would need to physically send a team of bank robbers to extract it. The digital representation of USD is not cash, it's an entry in a ledger, and banks generally have systems that would not allow adding an entry with a sudden transfer of a large amount of money to "J. U. Kim, North Korea". That's why Bitcoin is called "digital cash".
I think Darknet Diaries covers a bunch of these types of heists involving banks.
I suspect they just assess vulnerabilities and exploit them when/where they can. My understanding is that these thefts are big part of their (NK) economy.
Other question: why don’t they just forge currency? Surely with nation states resources you can create fake currency that easily fools most inspections? Is it that hard to launder cash? Or is the a red line and they are afraid of political measures?
There’s Superdollars but it doesn’t seem to be a really widespread problem so far, right?
Serial numbers of all old dollar bills are recorded when those bills are destroyed and replaced with newly printed bills AND when bills are deposited to banks. Even if fake bill is perfectly made, it will still be detected with this method. Fake and duplicate serial numbers will be detected when compared against official ones.
Can’t you just immediately use them? The person getting caught will be some random person that took the bill, not the one bringing it into circulation.
Trying to spend $1B with $100 bill at a time will take 10 million transactions. No one's going to accept large amount of cash without a credible source.
There are tons of youtube videos about this. much harder than it sounds to forge at scale. The feds are very good at coming down on forgery. Also, it would provoke strong action by the US, whereas stealing crypto apparently does not.
I was going to ask, why would NK attack a China-based crypto firm? Then I learned that Binance isn’t headquartered anywhere. They’re literally asking to be hacked. Nobody will protect them.
I think NK is a convenient target to blame, instead of highlighting that random events from random insiders across different financial operations are the actual cause.
At this point it feels like they have made it a /dev/null for things which are not easy to resolve and one is still on the hook to provide some answers
Binance is run by Chinese people. I don't think the Chinese government likes what they are running though. Binance itself is not legal/available in China.
How can they be brought to justice, as stated, if they’re state sponsored? And how do members get their crypto back? There’s 6+ billion in insurance to back what was stolen?
There is no way to bring them to justice unless the US were to somehow invade, or another country deals with it, or they leave Korea. All very unlikely. North Korea is the closet thing to an actual criminal state/hideout.
Man, if only there existed some central societal body with the authority to essentially freeze accounts and unwind a transaction like this. What a security feature that would be.
Yeah I know you are referring to the fiat-based financial system. Keep in mind, wire transfers generally cannot be reversed. There have been notable instances where money is lost/stolen this way, and no way to get it back.
Most of it was stopped and some was even recovered but $66Million is still lost 10years later .
In both incidents protection are reliant on the authorities to minimize the damage ; tether and circle able to freeze tokens is not that different from the traditional finance doing it.
Crypto is only reinventing structures that evolved in every financial system over time.
Overtime they are going away from their founding theme of decentralization . Exchanges and stable coin issuers who can freeze wallets and coins are by definition centralization ; it is worse though as these organizations are less transparent than banks with less accountability
And as the stable coin operators and exchanges grow closer with governments and political elites they will add more and more controls in exchange for legitimacy.
wire fraud, credit card fraud, pig butchering (a different way to access the accounts really), etc.. The traditional system do have some safeties but it's not impenetrable.
And if the creditor bank happens to be in Russia, Iran, the DRPK, or any number of other hostile financial systems, the debtor bank will likely find things practically impossible to unwind regardless.
Sometimes they get lucky though and the government passes a law allowing them to seize equivalent assets a few decades down the road.
Making transfers to those countries is almost impossible from Western banks. It would require sophisticated multi-bank international transfers to do that, which take a long time and are fairly easy to stop.
Do you think money is transferred by shoving bank notes into the Ethernet cables?
When you transfer a dollar from your account to Putin's account in a Russian bank, in reality your bank transfers a dollar from their account within the FRS (Federal Reserve System) to Putin's bank's account within the FRS.
It can be more complicated with more intermediaries, but it can be traced and reverted.
Wire payments are definitely reversible, but you might need to involve the courts, and international wires are more complex [0]. Most notably, 900 million in accidental payments made by Citi were eventually fully reversed by appeals courts.
> A full recounting of it is outside the scope of this anecdote, but it rhymes with “If you and the United States federal government disagree whether a transaction is final, you are wrong.”
what if the promotion of said non-fiat systems was done primarily by those looking to subvert that system? NK, Russia? What if it was further supported primarily by people to give great liquidity to illegal activity.
Something tells me that politicians that visit said locations on the 4th of July and their buddies business "leaders" looking to destablize the system are just not on the up and up. May even be corrupt.
The reversibility of transactions is often brought up but I don't think that is the main differentiator, or any at all really.
First, both cryptocurrencies and traditional finance systems have chosen to and have chosen not to reverse or freeze criminal transactions in the past. Decentralized blockchains have chosen to do so at least once [0]. The traditional finance system has chosen not to many times and even large sums [1] [2]. It really comes down to how much is stolen and how much influence the victim(s) have.
No, instead I think the main difference is the speed of transactions. Some blockchains operate within milliseconds while bank transactions take days. Even instant transfers are actually settled on a way longer cadence in reality.
That means attackers can do a fast sweep on blockchains, which is not possible with bank transactions because everything happens in slow motion and humans have way more time to react and step in.
It’s not always a choice. If value has been transferred onwards (ultimately in the form of e.g. cash withdrawn or something equally hard to trace, like physical goods handed over to a buyer), simply “undoing all transactions in a database” isn’t without victims either.
Whether undoing transactions or not is an option strongly depends on how fast value is allowed to move. Sometimes being slow is a feature as much as it is a bug.
> Whether undoing transactions or not is an option strongly depends on how fast value is allowed to move. Sometimes being slow is a feature as much as it is a bug.
Exactly, that is my point. It is less about reversibility and more so about speed. Being slow can be an advantage (for security).
The main reason it is a differentiator is that centralised money understands that its purpose is to be a system of social credit, so reversibility of transactions is just an acknowledgement that there is enough evidence to prove that this particular individual owns this particular sum, so it should go back to them. It is actually a much better and more honest system than the blockchain, because it doesn't treat money like a tangible resource in and of itself that can be "lost" which would be a much older and dumber way of doing things.
Yes but if your cryptocurrency is supported by courts then it is no longer decentralised money and on top of that some of it is going to have to be converted to fiat at some point just to engage with the legal system if nothing else.
I imagine it's possible to design a blockchain where transactions are 1) artificially delayed; and 2) can be blocked by anyone who has the key.
For example, take Bitcoin, except that each transaction must be posted twice to be considered to have modified the ledger between 7 and 14 days apart as measured by the number of intermediate blocks as a function of the difficulty requirement. If a "blocking" transaction makes it to the blockchain in between, then the transaction is deemed to have been cancelled. A "blocking" transaction must merely demonstrate ownership of one of the transaction inputs.
If you hold large funds, you could keep a remote monitoring system somewhere that is empowered to block your own transactions.
The blockchain design could be enhanced so that a blocking transaction proves ownership of the original inputs but cannot sign a transaction itself.
Failure mode: someone trying to legitimately block a transaction could find themselves unable to get their blocking transaction mined. But in practice they'd just up the transaction fee, and game theory should take care of it.
This was just a thought experiment. A point that comes to mind is that given this is possible, what you describe isn't an inherent property of cryptocurrency, so if there's a benefit to having this property then it could be done.
It wouldn't work if the realisation of fraud takes longer than the window of time you've given the owner to make a blocking transaction. Banks are superior here because they have the power and ability to correlate multiple different kinds of evidence, and then reverse the transaction even years later. They have financial statements, biological proof, social evidence, much more than just one cryptographic key.
You are changing the process not the way technology operates.
Blockchain today cannot fix the problem that there will be examples where some guardian needs to reverse transaction because of fraud detection at some later stage.
How exactly can you sign the next entry in a block chain for a temporary period of time ? You cant. You either update it or you dont.
I heard escrow keys are supposed to solve this. Can't we deposit escrow keys to a legacy bank running cobol in mainframes and let it do its kyc/aml sanctions check and anti fraud on all transactions? That should solve it
Except that banks often don't unwind or freeze transactions. I've seen cases of both criminal conduct, and human error, leading to millions in lost funds. And banks didn't reverse or freeze anything. Yes it would be a security feature, but it's not used the way you assume.
Crypto enthusiasts misunderstand what a financial system/financial architecture is. It is not the fiat currencies themselves, but rather the power architecture that controls and oversees value and exchange in whatever form it takes. Crypto has been entirely subsumed into this architecture through the exchanges which are obviously beholden to the holders of real power, i.e. governments.
This is to say, the stated goal and the target of the crypto enthusiasts are misaligned. To transcend the institutions represented by the fiat system requires far more than creating some alternative "currency", rather it requires creating an entirely new power structure.
No, it wont, because you just made the same mistake they talked about. You assumed that its a currency implementation detail and not a power structure thats holding it back.
Can you give any evidence for this?
(I mean statistically significant evidence worthly of your global, sweeping claims and not a tiny sample of cherry picked anecdotes)
Crypto doesn’t care wether or not the transaction was for good or evil. It’s Switzerland, it’s neutral, and there really only one goal - to sidestep human control.
If a transaction was successful, it’s done its job.
Who are these "crypto enthusiasts" who, in 2026, have a "stated goal" of "some alternative 'currency'"?
Look at the schedule of any crypto conference - ethereum events in particular, but others as well - and you will find that your critique has already been widely adopted. The discussion is around replacing power structures and sources of injustice, not merely 'currency'.
I was reluctant to get involved in blockchain tech because I don't care for currency and don't view it as a likely organizing principle for humans for the next thousand years. That was in like 2016.
Today, nearly every blockchain project attempts to overcome challenges other than currency.
I don't know - it depends who specifically you're talking about.
You're the one who invented these "crypto enthusiasts" in order to rail against them - whom do you mean exactly? Got a particular talk from devcon? Let alone regens unite / schelling point / GFEL / some other radical ethereum event?
They have chosen to run concentration camps and starve their own people for decades instead of becoming a rich country like South Korea. They can stop the sanctions whenever they want, by becoming a democracy.
Friendly reminder that this was never about democracy. The US imposed a military dictatorship on South Korea that was even more brutal than the North. The goal has always been promoting capitalism at all costs, and nothing else.
The people are starving because North Korea has been cut off from the global economy for its entire existence. In other words, the people sanctioning are responsible for the starvation. Sanctions obviously do nothing to hurt the ruling party or coerce them to change their views.
No surprises there - of course they linked it to NK... These parasitic intelligence firms are draining taxpayer money because law enforcement agencies lack blockchain expertise and constantly outsource their investigations. We’ve already seen cases where firms like Chainalysis and TRM provided flawed data that led to innocent people being wrongfully charged. Worse yet, their operations rely on backroom cooperation with private intelligence mercenaries, trading illegally obtained data on private citizens worldwide.
Yet, they consistently fail to trace truly sophisticated threat actors, like the 2017 Parity Wallet hacker or the KyberSwap exploiter. These individuals continue to cash out massive amounts year after year, completely undisturbed. Pathetic companies like SlowMist can only continue making wet dream Twitter posts each year, promising that they will "catch them soon!", looking even more pathetic.
Like nearly everything in this modern world, the public statements or claims are never true and the opposite is the reality. Im thinking of those people worried about the government taking their money, and today we see the safety of crypto is fundamentally broken because ANYONE can take your money. Maybe its me, but i would rather trust the gov than ANYONE.
ChrisArchitect | 17 hours ago
ilamont | 17 hours ago
hungryhobbit | 17 hours ago
ktm5j | 16 hours ago
method_capital | 16 hours ago
ktm5j | 16 hours ago
gejose | 17 hours ago
10111001 | 17 hours ago
IMHO, cryptocurrency is technically interesting but for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
method_capital | 16 hours ago
I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.
gizajob | 16 hours ago
jsty | 16 hours ago
Indeed, but also complete responsibility for safeguarding these. It's hard to imagine a good situation where an individual has complete control but not complete responsibility, that way lies moral hazard.
lxgr | 15 hours ago
This seems like a definitionally unachievable goal. How can you have finance without others that you ultimately need to trust, if only to be stable enough in their wants and needs to want to trade with you?
10111001 | 15 hours ago
> ...
> I'm hoping someone invents a new iteration that's better.
It "solved" inflation by being deflationary (and then you have the massive volatility layered on top of that).
I think it's probably impossible to have a stable currency without some kind of dynamic governance, like a central bank.
idlewords | 14 hours ago
quickthrowman | 12 hours ago
There’s already a solution, use the currency to buy assets denominated in that currency. Crypto was not needed when bonds, stocks, real estate, etc exist.
There are hundreds of trillions of dollars in assets to buy whose value increase over time may beat inflation, I’m surprised you’re not aware of this solution.
0.5% of my net worth is in cash, the other 99.5% is in dollar denominated assets. Cash is a unit of exchange and a unit of account, not an asset.
ux266478 | 15 hours ago
It's all tradeoffs. The same power that grants the ability to reverse transactions also grants the ability to reverse a transaction in bad faith and commit fraud. Will the system correct that? Would it surprise you to know that it doesn't have to? That same power also grants the ability to lock an entity out of any kind of monetary transaction, and things like debanking. Usable for good? Sure. I don't think it's controversial to say that it being leveraged against Hunter Biden was at all justified, however. Would you like to be on the receiving end of that? Would you like to see a world where an LLM gets to decide that kind of thing based on your presence in the surveillance panopticon?
To that sense, it's really just a disagreement on what tradeoffs are acceptable. People who have a utopian view of cryptocurrency are looking at some tradeoffs as preferable to others, it's a different failure mode. To be clear, I don't necessarily agree with it myself, but you shouldn't be so uncharitable to people to assume disagreement is always a matter of delusional ignorance.
10111001 | 13 hours ago
Another way to restate my comment is: cryptocurrency is technically interesting but the tradeoffs it made to focus on certain edge cases mean that for pretty much every use-case, the preexisting technologies are superior and/or cryptocurrency is practically unworkable.
littlecranky67 | 14 hours ago
cyberax | 10 hours ago
littlecranky67 | 3 hours ago
defrost | 2 hours ago
( Eg: Collapse of the Spanish Empire )
littlecranky67 | an hour ago
defrost | an hour ago
> small outliers that don't matter.
The Spanish Empire that spanned a globe and had a footprint in North America only recently eclipsed by the modern USofA is a "small outlier" ?
Uh-huh.
littlecranky67 | an hour ago
cyberax | 2 hours ago
I assume that you're just completely ignorant, and as such, you can't be educated.
> Before 1971 we had a gold-backed monetary system
We didn't.
> and no record of deflation in the history of mankind.
Germany, 1932-1933. US, 1927-1933. And so on.
defrost | 2 hours ago
littlecranky67 | an hour ago
See also: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
logicchains | 17 hours ago
Cash sits in vaults. North Korea would need to physically send a team of bank robbers to extract it. The digital representation of USD is not cash, it's an entry in a ledger, and banks generally have systems that would not allow adding an entry with a sudden transfer of a large amount of money to "J. U. Kim, North Korea". That's why Bitcoin is called "digital cash".
nphardon | 17 hours ago
I think Darknet Diaries covers a bunch of these types of heists involving banks.
I suspect they just assess vulnerabilities and exploit them when/where they can. My understanding is that these thefts are big part of their (NK) economy.
postalcoder | 16 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
echoangle | 16 hours ago
There’s Superdollars but it doesn’t seem to be a really widespread problem so far, right?
tintor | 16 hours ago
echoangle | 16 hours ago
httpz | 15 hours ago
retrac | 16 hours ago
loeg | 15 hours ago
[OP] paulpauper | 15 hours ago
csomar | 14 hours ago
plaidfuji | 16 hours ago
lxgr | 15 hours ago
Don’t fall for their propaganda. Everybody is ultimately headquartered somewhere.
MiroslavPokorny | 8 hours ago
sandeepkd | 17 hours ago
robby_w_g | 16 hours ago
> Dear Claude, please investigate the culprit of the attack and make no mistakes.
nusoone | 17 hours ago
ram1500natrluvr | 17 hours ago
nusoone | 17 hours ago
mcmcmc | 17 hours ago
cosmicgadget | 15 hours ago
asftq | 16 hours ago
[OP] paulpauper | 15 hours ago
ano-ther | 16 hours ago
anonymous908213 | 15 hours ago
pluc | 12 hours ago
gsky | 16 hours ago
asdff | 16 hours ago
cosmicgadget | 15 hours ago
csomar | 14 hours ago
_HMCB_ | 16 hours ago
[OP] paulpauper | 15 hours ago
There is no way to bring them to justice unless the US were to somehow invade, or another country deals with it, or they leave Korea. All very unlikely. North Korea is the closet thing to an actual criminal state/hideout.
httpz | 15 hours ago
https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/binance/
[OP] paulpauper | 15 hours ago
MengerSponge | 15 hours ago
TrackerFF | 15 hours ago
[OP] paulpauper | 15 hours ago
cosmicgadget | 15 hours ago
brohee | 15 hours ago
WarmWash | 15 hours ago
dudisubekti | 15 hours ago
jrflo | 14 hours ago
qntmfred | 15 hours ago
overfeed | 14 hours ago
csomar | 15 hours ago
jstummbillig | 15 hours ago
[OP] paulpauper | 15 hours ago
inknight | 15 hours ago
manquer | 15 hours ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
Most of it was stopped and some was even recovered but $66Million is still lost 10years later .
In both incidents protection are reliant on the authorities to minimize the damage ; tether and circle able to freeze tokens is not that different from the traditional finance doing it.
Crypto is only reinventing structures that evolved in every financial system over time.
Overtime they are going away from their founding theme of decentralization . Exchanges and stable coin issuers who can freeze wallets and coins are by definition centralization ; it is worse though as these organizations are less transparent than banks with less accountability
lokar | 13 hours ago
sidewndr46 | 15 hours ago
csomar | 15 hours ago
Most of the billion was frozen though if it was not frozen in time it would have probably evaporated just like these bitcoins getting into mixers.
gregschlom | 15 hours ago
skinfaxi | 15 hours ago
csomar | 15 hours ago
pllbnk | 14 hours ago
If it's a significantly large sum, it may look like this:
Step 1: The CEO of the debtor bank calls the CEO of the creditor bank and asks to return the money.
Step 2 (only needed if there is disagreement): Lawyers of the debtor bank send a ton of legal papers to the creditor bank and figure it out.
But it's just one of nearly infinite number of scenarios.
AlotOfReading | 14 hours ago
Sometimes they get lucky though and the government passes a law allowing them to seize equivalent assets a few decades down the road.
pllbnk | 13 hours ago
lokar | 13 hours ago
YesThatTom2 | 13 hours ago
cyberax | 11 hours ago
When you transfer a dollar from your account to Putin's account in a Russian bank, in reality your bank transfers a dollar from their account within the FRS (Federal Reserve System) to Putin's bank's account within the FRS.
It can be more complicated with more intermediaries, but it can be traced and reverted.
Shank | 14 hours ago
> A full recounting of it is outside the scope of this anecdote, but it rhymes with “If you and the United States federal government disagree whether a transaction is final, you are wrong.”
[0]: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/no-payments-are-final...
altcognito | 15 hours ago
Something tells me that politicians that visit said locations on the 4th of July and their buddies business "leaders" looking to destablize the system are just not on the up and up. May even be corrupt.
Lichtso | 15 hours ago
First, both cryptocurrencies and traditional finance systems have chosen to and have chosen not to reverse or freeze criminal transactions in the past. Decentralized blockchains have chosen to do so at least once [0]. The traditional finance system has chosen not to many times and even large sums [1] [2]. It really comes down to how much is stolen and how much influence the victim(s) have.
No, instead I think the main difference is the speed of transactions. Some blockchains operate within milliseconds while bank transactions take days. Even instant transfers are actually settled on a way longer cadence in reality.
That means attackers can do a fast sweep on blockchains, which is not possible with bank transactions because everything happens in slow motion and humans have way more time to react and step in.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO [1]: https://www.turkiyetoday.com/turkiye/german-bank-e100m-disap... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery
lxgr | 14 hours ago
Whether undoing transactions or not is an option strongly depends on how fast value is allowed to move. Sometimes being slow is a feature as much as it is a bug.
Lichtso | 14 hours ago
Exactly, that is my point. It is less about reversibility and more so about speed. Being slow can be an advantage (for security).
dreambuffer | 13 hours ago
rlpb | 11 hours ago
dreambuffer | 10 hours ago
rlpb | 12 hours ago
For example, take Bitcoin, except that each transaction must be posted twice to be considered to have modified the ledger between 7 and 14 days apart as measured by the number of intermediate blocks as a function of the difficulty requirement. If a "blocking" transaction makes it to the blockchain in between, then the transaction is deemed to have been cancelled. A "blocking" transaction must merely demonstrate ownership of one of the transaction inputs.
If you hold large funds, you could keep a remote monitoring system somewhere that is empowered to block your own transactions.
The blockchain design could be enhanced so that a blocking transaction proves ownership of the original inputs but cannot sign a transaction itself.
Failure mode: someone trying to legitimately block a transaction could find themselves unable to get their blocking transaction mined. But in practice they'd just up the transaction fee, and game theory should take care of it.
This was just a thought experiment. A point that comes to mind is that given this is possible, what you describe isn't an inherent property of cryptocurrency, so if there's a benefit to having this property then it could be done.
dreambuffer | 12 hours ago
MiroslavPokorny | 8 hours ago
Blockchain today cannot fix the problem that there will be examples where some guardian needs to reverse transaction because of fraud detection at some later stage.
How exactly can you sign the next entry in a block chain for a temporary period of time ? You cant. You either update it or you dont.
maerF0x0 | 14 hours ago
timcobb | 14 hours ago
Muromec | 13 hours ago
bravoetch | 13 hours ago
aussieguy1234 | 12 hours ago
If a transaction is above that amount, you get alerts by email, SMS, push notification...
If it's expected you let it go though. If not, you take out the key, then reverse it.
Of course legit recipients would wait until the delay period is over before considering the transaction to be complete.
No worries if an attacker steals the key. Why would they reverse their own transaction?
ratCola2001 | 15 hours ago
gradus_ad | 15 hours ago
This is to say, the stated goal and the target of the crypto enthusiasts are misaligned. To transcend the institutions represented by the fiat system requires far more than creating some alternative "currency", rather it requires creating an entirely new power structure.
imguienjoyer | 15 hours ago
gradus_ad | 15 hours ago
imguienjoyer | 15 hours ago
malux85 | 14 hours ago
imguienjoyer | 4 hours ago
arbitration without state control will supersede the old system
it is simply better UX to do business without the hive interjecting
a new power structure can only be achieved through technology. OP has no clue and just spouts orange reddit talking points to farm karma
malux85 | an hour ago
Or is all of your statements just "trust me bro"?
Arainach | 14 hours ago
Muromec | 13 hours ago
NooneAtAll5 | 14 hours ago
see monero getting outlawed by EU countries
Muromec | 13 hours ago
It's a weird idea of being physically present in the jurisdiction and not being subject to it's laws which kinda doesn't survive reality.
TheOtherHobbes | 13 hours ago
Different people may be on top, with different aims (...arguable, but let's pretend.)
But there will always be a government of some sort making the big decisions for the benefit of its ruling clique.
Muromec | 13 hours ago
That depends on how much resources said government can extract from the environment. Either by taking or by providing value in exchange.
One can imagine a level of technological advancement that makes violence impossible and trade unnecessary. Poof, no government.
gradus_ad | 13 hours ago
alfiedotwtf | 10 hours ago
Crypto doesn’t care wether or not the transaction was for good or evil. It’s Switzerland, it’s neutral, and there really only one goal - to sidestep human control.
If a transaction was successful, it’s done its job.
CrazyStat | 9 hours ago
jMyles | 13 hours ago
Look at the schedule of any crypto conference - ethereum events in particular, but others as well - and you will find that your critique has already been widely adopted. The discussion is around replacing power structures and sources of injustice, not merely 'currency'.
I was reluctant to get involved in blockchain tech because I don't care for currency and don't view it as a likely organizing principle for humans for the next thousand years. That was in like 2016.
Today, nearly every blockchain project attempts to overcome challenges other than currency.
gradus_ad | 13 hours ago
If not they're fooling themselves same as those focused on currency replacement.
jMyles | 8 hours ago
You're the one who invented these "crypto enthusiasts" in order to rail against them - whom do you mean exactly? Got a particular talk from devcon? Let alone regens unite / schelling point / GFEL / some other radical ethereum event?
gigatexal | 13 hours ago
bravoetch | 13 hours ago
cyanydeez | 11 hours ago
pasquinelli | 15 hours ago
MisterMunchkin | 14 hours ago
anonymous908213 | 14 hours ago
The people are starving because North Korea has been cut off from the global economy for its entire existence. In other words, the people sanctioning are responsible for the starvation. Sanctions obviously do nothing to hurt the ruling party or coerce them to change their views.
lioeters | 13 hours ago
78401-236124950 | 13 hours ago
Yet, they consistently fail to trace truly sophisticated threat actors, like the 2017 Parity Wallet hacker or the KyberSwap exploiter. These individuals continue to cash out massive amounts year after year, completely undisturbed. Pathetic companies like SlowMist can only continue making wet dream Twitter posts each year, promising that they will "catch them soon!", looking even more pathetic.
"ThE iNdUsTry iS WaTcHiNg!"
MiroslavPokorny | 12 hours ago
pmarreck | 11 hours ago
I am extremely disappointed.