YHK - yet another hacker news clone

'Elite North Korean hackers' blamed for $6.3B Binance hack

56 points tosh 2 hours ago 46 comments

jsw97 2 hours ago | parent

Their haul is over 20% of North Korea’s GDP.

JumpCrisscross 1 hour ago | parent

> North Korea’s GDP

Would note that nobody—including probably the Kims—knows what this figure is.

leosanchez 48 minutes ago | parent

Respected Comrade knows everything.

blitzar 11 minutes ago | parent

Something as trivial as knowing the GDP to the nearest cent in real time pales in comparison to Dear Leaders abilities

FabHK 47 minutes ago | parent

It's well understood that crypto (scams, hacks) has contributed a third to half of the DPRK's foreign exchange income over the last few years.

throw1234567891 39 minutes ago | parent

So a sixth?

kevmo314 25 minutes ago | parent

33% to 50%.

sigmoid10 1 hour ago | parent

>Estimated total impact: ~$6.3B, with ~$3B frozen on-chain so far, in coordination with our blockchain partners

I always find it amusing to read this. Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money? Either they are misguiding you about the core value of their product or their ability to execute traditional interventions in cases of theft. You can't have the conveniences of both at the same time.

schleck8 1 hour ago | parent

Crypto bros sure are quick to inform law enforcement and centralized financial authorities if their self governance fails

not-kinsale-joe 1 hour ago | parent

Stable coins are not Crypto, they are just built on top of crypto to avoid normal financial regulations.

virtualritz 1 hour ago | parent

Exactly.

It's called the oracle problem. It's the Achilles heel of the whole idea.

And it's unsolvable. As soon as you want to trade some coin for something real, you need an oracle.

Wanna buy a flat in a world where (for argument's sake) even the ownership of that asset is tracked on a blockchain?

Let's say I come home from holidays and someone else lives there.

How do I then prove it's mine? Because it says so in some computer?

Someone has to believe that is true and let me enforce that ownership tie.

Those persons (a judge, the police, even if robots by then) are the oracle.

And a more common scenario than theft is btw legal ownership transfer.

What if I die somehow before giving the blockchain keys needed for that to someone?

How will my brother inherit the flat?

Oracle.

sandworm101 44 minutes ago | parent

"Oracle" being the cover for crypto bros who dont want to admit they need "the legal system" to fix thier mess. Its all idiology and freedom when you are poor but once you actually own something of value, like a flat, suddenly you want lawyers and police to keep you safe from bad people.

treyd 28 minutes ago | parent

You're mixing up two issues. The need for oracles is a "hard problem" but it's not the problem in this case.

USDC has a central issuer that can freeze funds because that's the only way you can currently have an asset that "looks like" dollars on a crypto ledger. Someone gets a dollar, mints a unit of the bearer token, and pinky swears they'll redeem it. It's a systemic concern that calls into question the legitimacy of the system, but that's not an oracle.

boldaxolotl 1 hour ago | parent

I'd bet most of the frozen $3B is stablecoins and tokens with an admin freeze function. Tether and Circle can blacklist an address in minutes. Nobody can freeze BTC or ETH. So the money they got back is the part that was never decentralized in the first place, which supports your point from the other side

tokioyoyo 1 hour ago | parent

At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power. In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose.

locknitpicker 1 hour ago | parent

> At some point it clicked to me that crypto people don’t really care about the utility. Main purpose is creating new players in the world with immense amounts of power.

There are many types of crypto people. Some of them are not crypto people per se, but people who saw crypto as a means to an end. Among them, there are plenty of people who seem to be invested in sheer fraud.

It's also important to note that there are many sides to the scheme. There's for example the instant transactions side, and the long term bet in scarcity. For example, Russia has been leaning heavily on crypto to circumvent sanctions due to their invasion of Ukraine.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2025/08/russias-use-of-...

> In the end, it did produce a lot of rich people out of thin air, and I guess, served its purpose.

It was not out of thin air. This is literally a grift where the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich from it.

MiroslavPokorny 54 minutes ago | parent

Why would Russia need crypto, when they can trade with China or buy through middle men in Dubai or similar places ?

locknitpicker 34 minutes ago | parent

> Why would Russia need crypto, when they can trade with China or buy through middle men in Dubai or similar places ?

I'm not sure you understand how international sanctions work, particularly the scheme imposed on Russia.

For example, read up on Russia's rupee surplus

https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/india-russia-susp...

sigmoid10 39 minutes ago | parent

>the people holding the bag saw their money find its way to the pockets of those who got rich

This is the key issue. Crypto by itself created little to no actual additional value. Especially when it devolved into just another centralized currency with less government oversight. So the whole thing was a zero-sum game. People only got rich because they made others poor.

chinathrow 15 minutes ago | parent

It's another wealth transfer. No new money is generated.

deweller 13 minutes ago | parent

No new money was generated, but new utility was generated.

Before cryptocurrency, there was no decentralized way to transfer value on the internet.

mrtksn 26 minutes ago | parent

Traditional banking will block you on risk based assessments and US political decisions. It's useless for shady stuff unless you are very rich or have people in position.

Crypto lets plebs do shady stuff as well, its a democratization of shadiness. They may block you out as well but you start of position to be able to do it at first.

no-name-here 7 minutes ago | parent

> Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money?

Cheaper international transfers could be a specific valid use case. But I presume risk is too high for my taste.

lxgr 4 minutes ago | parent

> Why would you even bother with a decentralized currency that can move freely across the globe when some centralized institutions can always interfere in the way legacy banks used to do with your money?

Regulatory arbitrage. Not all centralized institutions are fast enough to actually make use of the theoretical capabilities available to them.

fsflover 1 hour ago | parent

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50296470

cedws 1 hour ago | parent

Random thought: when NK collapses, I wonder if there will be a rush to seize the crypto wallets. I guess the CIA will be there first.

monkeydust 1 hour ago | parent

If they are not already there!

boldaxolotl 1 hour ago | parent

Same unit as Bybit in Feb 2025 (TraderTraitor), and if the laptop reports are right, the same way in: one developer's machine. Bybit lost $1.5B through a compromised Safe{Wallet} dev box. Twenty months later the largest exchange in the world loses four times that, apparently the same way. I'd like to know what signing setup lets one engineer's laptop reach $6B

jdw64 1 hour ago | parent

It’s a pity. If he hadn’t been born in North Korea like that, he would have become a truly great programmer. My life is really hard and painful, but sometimes I think I’m better off than they are.

logicchains 38 minutes ago | parent

Maybe if he hadn't been born in North Korea he'd have lived his dream of opening a coffee shop; perhaps he got into hacking there because it's the only way to support his family.

vinyl7 36 minutes ago | parent

To be fair, people can't afford COL by opening a coffee shop in this day and age.

ButlerianJihad 30 minutes ago | parent

Look at the bright side: Dumb Starbucks probably wouldn't be shut down in North Korea!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_Starbucks

fhub 1 hour ago | parent

Sophisticated? Perhaps. But could also be run of the mill honey trap/romantic approach. Easier to slip by 2fas through a front door.

MiroslavPokorny 59 minutes ago | parent

My money is on an inside job.

Sol- 35 minutes ago | parent

How do they launder the coins generally? Given you traceable (most) cryptocurrency is by design, it seems you could sanction anyone who transacts with them? I understand it's likely not that simple, though.

sandworm101 10 minutes ago | parent

They deposit the coins into organisations that mix coins from various customers. Its just like a bank. You deposit a fake/stollen 100$ bill one day and, if they accept it, you can withdraw a totally different 100$ bill from an ATM the next day.

pavlov 11 minutes ago | parent

After long soul-searching, crypto has settled on two strong use cases:

1) unregulated gambling (a.k.a. "prediction markets"),

2) funding North Korea.

Heartening to see the beautiful web3 vision come alive.

rf15 11 minutes ago | parent

Supporting poorer countries, can there be a more moral course? /s

blitzar 9 minutes ago | parent

all this time people said it was useless ... just shows what they know

zb3 9 minutes ago | parent

That's impressive, I wish they published writeups..

At this point I don't understand - why not do this officially? They're already sanctioned to death...