North Korea Is Dodging Sanctions with a Secret Bitcoin Stash

> looking at the past 5 years

How much it extrapolates in 20 years then? 100 million?

  pundits-in-the-know

That's an oxymoron. And I'm not even trying to be cynical. People in-the-know aren't pundits, they're the ones the pundits are talking about. You can tell because pundits suddenly have alot less to say, and are much more circumscribed, when they're discussing topics with which they have contemporaneous, first-hand knowledge--pretty much the complete opposite situation of someone publicly predicting the USD price of BTC 10 years down the road.

It's certainly possible that they stole the bitcoins and paid for a few days (a week?) worth of goods.

But 1) the article does not provide any real evidence to support for this theory, 2) it's not a sufficient amount to be a viable strategy, and 3) the evidence even linking the thefts to NK sounds somewhere between non-existent and very flimsy.

When the FireEye report's leading point states: "...there are no clear indications of North Korean involvement", it's not good support for such a broad statement as the title of the article.

Again, it's definitely possible, but too little information appears to be available to draw this conclusion.

Yes, but some actors might be willing to trade with NK in bitcoin, but not, say USD. The same thing happens with $100 notes.

Huh? Could you explain? Perhaps the exchange is unsafe, but the coin itself is most certainly not.

I'm certainly not an expert on the capabilities of North Korea, but my intuition says that if they can build a hydrogen bomb, they can power a few shipping containers full of ASICs.

My impression was that they aren't electrified because it isn't a national priority for them to be, not because they lacked the capable to develop the infrastructure.

> They don't have enough electricity to keep their cities lit at night.

They certainly don't devote enough capacity to do that, but that could be in part priorities for use.

You assume that "keeping their cities lit at night" is higher priority than "obtaining more cash for covert purchases of equipment for the nuclear program", for example.

And they have to ask themselves that question for every new kilowatt of generating power that they install.

NK is mostly mountains, it has plenty of potential hydro-electricity available. The hard part is building / maintaining the infrastructure and logistics required to get the electricity to each and every building, that's the hard part.

No, by the conventional definitions of anonymous [1], the protocol is fully anonymous. Saying that it is pseudo anonymous is in my opinion misleading. There is a different word to describe the weakness of a deanonymized address. I dont know what that word is, but we will confuse and possibly turn interested parties and laymen away with the misnomer of pseudoanonymity.

I would compate this mislabeling to claiming that btc is insecure because of the mt. Gox hack; the fact that you can steal bitcoin's from people doesn't mean that bitcoins are insecure. Similarly, the fact that I can trace your transaction trail does not mean that your transactions themselves weren't fully anonymous.

1. Dictionary.com/browse/anonymous