Comment by decimalenough
4 months ago
A normal bank was robbed of $1B back in 2016, likely by North Korea, and the global reaction was pretty much a collective shrug:
4 months ago
A normal bank was robbed of $1B back in 2016, likely by North Korea, and the global reaction was pretty much a collective shrug:
According to that page, the global reaction was to block most ($850M) of the fraudulent payments, recover a third of the remainder, add additional security to the SWIFT network and raise standards for banks, and push for penalties for the criminals who participated. That seems like more than a shrug.
And we are likely to see the same response here. Those coins are easily tracked, so the attacker is going to be lucky to get 25% of the value by selling them to someone prepared to take the risk of laundering them.
A crypto exchange does not have the same political influence as a national bank, which makes the situations very different, aside from all crypto stuff.
That’s not a given, and it wouldn’t be the same in any case since the victim is still out 100% of the loss as opposed to 10-15%.
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Say what you want about CBDCs, but they would fix this specific failure mode of digital assets where an enemy nation-state can steal $1.5 billion worth of the token.
I’d also add the number of cases where people holding Bitcoin are being threatened/tortured into transferring it. One less appreciated benefit of a system with reversible transactions is that it makes it significantly harder to do something like that.