North Korea Launders Billions in Stolen Crypto

I believe, for bitcoin, that only works to spend coins from addresses that have already been used to spend coins, which, is therefore discouraged as a way to hold bitcoins? Instead, best practices are to, when sending from an address, to send all the unspent coins to addresses that have not been sent from yet. This does make things marginally harder for providing an address for people to send to though, because one has to change the address they are to send to at least every time one wants to spend what one has received.

For chains where one uses one persistent address, in order to allow other important features, then it could be more of an issue.

Still, I think solutions will probably be put in place before it becomes a real issue.

… hm, come to think of it, the use of public/private key pairs in cryptocurrencies, is, I think, pretty much exclusively used for signing, not for encrypting, right? In that case, it seems like an option based on hashes and ZKSNARKs should be able to play much the same role? So, even if all the purportedly quantum-safe alternatives to RSA and ECC end up vulnerable for the same reasons, I think probably something that only does the signing part should be possible? Or, hm, at least in the interactive setting…

If there's a strong enough consensus, everyone can just agree to migrate to some new technology and let the original go to zero.

There's no guarantees that breakthrough is coming anytime soon. Scaling up the number of qubits in a processor is very hard and it's why progress has been pretty slow over the last decade.

Unclear this will "happen for sure", but even if it did there are quantum-proof encryption techniques

North Korea's cost basis is >$0. They have limited numbers of hacks per year that they can perform, and every road block in between the hack and unrestricted dollars will drain a couple percent of the profit, add a couple percent chance that they get caught or scammed while trying to launder the money. All or these have costs and reduce the take-home profit for Russia.

It cost them something to train the groups that stole those coins; training, their higher standard of living, etc.

still requires upfront cost. If that’s priced out of reach for most people, it’s still a deterrent.

Depends on the scale. Withdrawing millions of dollars to a bank account will require more than the median user's cookies, passwords, & 2FA.

The problem with hacking is that it's far easier to patch a vulnerability than it is to redesign a currency note and reissue new batches of them across an entire printing press while removing the old ones (some real, some fake) from circulation very slowly.

Also, Bitcoin has never had the counterfeiting problem of currency notes, largely because there's no such capacity for bad actors to create or issue counterfeit Bitcoin, as Bitcoin backed by mathematical work that must be performed to in order to mine/"mint" new Bitcoin, unlike US Federal Reserve Notes, which are backed by nothing more than an Intaglio printing press, some engraving plates with publicly-available designs, and 3D security ribbons, ribbons featuring ink that is visible under a blacklight (you can find which chemicals exhibit this property on Wikipedia), some paper, and some linen. Oh, and every single one of those ingredients are are produced by a third party (NOT the US Bureau of Printing and Engraving), who all solemnly pinky promise they don't secretly keep and distribute any extras :)

America doesn't rescind or invalidate old money from circulation when a new design comes out though. No one is going to bat an eye at a 10 year old $100 bill coming through.

Also I’m not expert but washing a significant amount of cash seems extremely more difficult than the Hacking enterprises?

What is this reference?

Found it! I linked the wrong video. The correct one is https://youtu.be/1CsRF3XLRLg, and you can find the info around the 14th minute.

Unless the international community jumps on it in a multilateral fashion(a la Balkans)