Hackers stole billions in crypto to keep North Korea’s regime afloat

You're right, many crypto exchanges operating on the right side of the law will freeze these funds.

For those interested in this, CT (crypto twitter) makes tracking North Korea's stolen winnings a bit of a sport.

samczsun, an excellent security auditor who's working at Paradigm these days, broke down some of the org in a post the other day.

https://x.com/samczsun/status/1906754853063565720?t=N4aqa6Vy...

Taylor Monahan at MetaMask also makes a habit of tracing funds and shares some pretty interesting finds around NK's laundering efforts.

They are simply having to duplicate all the things Visa provides its customers.

BTC is inherently deflationary in the sense that once new coins cease to be mined the total number of BTC will decrease over time due to lose, theft and death. I know that I lost my wallet with the only BTC I owned 10 years ago. I can name several other people that have done the same. I would think this one property makes it undesirable for use as a currency.

You can imagine things all you want, the rest of us will be over here in the real world.

It is a reference to Magic The Gathering. Blue decks are known for wildly changing the rules of the game. Black decks are known for interacting with death and the graveyard which is where cards go after they are used.

A paraphrasing of the GP without using magic terminology is to say that they are playing by the rules in an unexpected way using unexpected combinations and sequences. More briefly "playing by the rules as written".

> You can't provide a service and also charge for it in the exact same instant.

Sometimes you can, and it's those cases that I'm thinking of.

But even when you can't, why not create the transaction up front and include the conditions under which it should or should not proceed at a later date? If you want a third party as a mediator, just in case, why not make that part of the transaction too? Why not ensure now, that the money you'll be paid later, actually exists and can't be spent on something else in the meantime?

So much becomes possible if both parties are on the same page yet neither had to build that page from scratch.

> How much waste are we talking about here?

Well there's all the business that doesn't happen because while I'm a bit curious about your service, I'm not curious enough to give you my credit card and trust your pinky-promise that you'll charge me like you said you would.

And then there's the business that doesn't happen because micropayments are required for the business model (many tiny credit card transactions being prohibitively expensive).

And then there's all the money that gets wasted when resolving disputes in court when mediators could've been bound to the transaction up front--mediators who are more familiar with the parties and the situations and who have access to a single source of truth about the nature of the disagreement rather than having to reconcile both versions of some "handshake agreement".

And then there's maintenance for all that billing pipeline code which is implemented over and over again--slightly differently by each company but rarely meaningfully so--which has to account for two worlds: one which creates debts, another which eliminates them, just to align the conjunction of those worlds to an arbitrary cadence (typically monthly) which has no correspondence with the product's usage. If you offload the accounting to public infra immediately, then you don't have to build and maintain infra which keeps both worlds in sync.

All told, I think it's quite a lot. As for the waste heat from bitcoin--yes, bitcoin is stone-age crypto. What we need for this probably doesn't exist yet.

Maybe there were better words I could have used there, sorry.

You can of course track it however you want, but the complexity of what you end up tracking explodes if you're operating on something like a monthly billing cycle. Especially if you have more than one financial institution with an opinion about whether money should/did get moved.

I've been involved with the maintenance of several billing pipelines and having to handle events like maybe the bank was only able to collect half of this person's bill but it took them a few days to let us know that, but we've already sent that money over here so now we' have this deficit and do we shut off their service over a deficit of just $5...

It's a nightmare that's totally orthogonal to the business that's being run. Nobody wants to be on the billing team, but it's viewed as a necessary evil. But I'm saying that it's an unnecessary evil. If you can very quickly settle up for practically nothing, then you can just build the app to withhold service for a few milliseconds until payment clears and then there's no debts to keep track of and resolve later. And having it on a public blockchain means that if you're collaborating with other companies over how the pie gets sliced, there's a single source of truth for how big the pie actually is.

We already have that. It's called courts.

I'm not proposing that this all happen on an L1, of course you need some time for various parties to decide whether settlement should proceed. Nor am I saying that all ledgers everywhere would benefit from this change.

I'm just saying that many businesses would benefit (or become feasible in the first place) if the time between service-rendered and payment-pending were sub-second and built into the product and instead of relying on month-long-billing cycles. It would also be beneficial if the infrastructure for handling that process were common to both parties rather than having each of them track it separately hoping they agree on what is owed after the fact.