Ethereum dev Virgil Griffith back in jail after checking $1M Coinbase account
protos.com
protos.com
This is pretty wild to me. The guy gave a talk in North Korea and gave them non-classified information they could easily find on YouTube or any other public website. And now he's facing 20 years.
The lack of empathy towards the North Korean people and the burden their regime imposes on them is absolute.
Embargoes just don't work in such a closed down country.
US of A and their war on [drugs|WMDs|insert other reason] happens outside of the country so the millions of dead doesn't matter?
As for your new question, I would argue that yes, this fits the US.
Also, the people of North Korea do not have access to the internet or Youtube as far as I know.
Anyone else using the internet not doing work for the North Korean government would be murdered if caught.
In North Korea they have the "intranet" which is an internal network of learning resources you can use at the local North Korean libraries and schools! It is all propoganda.
Not everyone who needs access has access. A select few who are at the mercy of the dictator do to do his work.
Some people have been known to try to sneak across the border and meet Chinese people in the woods to exchange goods.
Some people send balloons with notes from the outside world over the border to reach people inside.
Perhaps a select few have some garnered enough information about how to use the internet without getting caught they are willing to risk being murdered to do so if they find something dire enough using the internet for but to say people who "need" the internet fire up wiregaurd and call it a day before watching their daily stream of YouTube influencers is an understatement to say the least...
No idea what he had to gain by travelling to north korea, but more power to him. If it's public info then yeah this is a sham considering that the international financial system is a cartel.
Essentially the US does a lot of things well, like freedom of speech and private property. What it doesn't do well is genocide/murder/starvation, just like DPRK.
How do I tell you this? People in North Korea don't have access to YouTube and the internet.
Are you aware of what life is like for the people of North Korea?
Only a few select businessmen working for leaders of North Korea are ever allowed to leave and they usually travel to china for unknown business.
Giving a talk like this in North Korea is like teaching businessmen how to engage in moving criminal/ terrorism money without getting caught.
No normal citizen can run the internet/has access to the internet and if they were caught doing so they would be murdered so there's no way any of them could engage in this anyways.
I'm so sorry noone told you what North Korea is like.
Since when is that problematic? Should we lock up CIA agents for 20 years too? I thought USA was the land of the free.
Modulo local government laws.
I am not disagreeing with your larger opinion but we have to be careful about “it’s on the internet hence anyone can access it” line of argument.
For instance Pornhub is blocked in India. So if someone were to access it from within India through VPN or whatnot then they are breaking a law and have to face the consequences.
So, the ones that do have access to the internet, could in fact, as the parent suggests, just go on youtube and get that info. Am I missing something?
The Ethereum Foundation dev was arrested over a year ago after US authorities claimed then-36-year-old’s conference presentation contained info that North Korea could leverage to launder money and skirt sanctions.
Griffith was denied permission to travel to North Korea by the State Department but decided to attend the DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference anyway.
North Korea is reportedly keen to find ways to get around sanctions imposed by what it regards as a US-led financial system.
Very hard to feel sympathy for the guy.
This is over the top and unjustified.
Griffith was arrested and charged with conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in November 2019 after he travelled to North Korea to give a talk on blockchain and crypto.
Sanctions are one of the few tools that the US has to exert leverage against the North Korean regime, and Virgil Griffith is alleged to have travelled to North Korea specifically to help North Korea in violating those sanctions. What he is alleged to have done has been illegal for 70 years.
This is not just about one guy giving a talk.
Which facts you include and exclude is quite relevant to your bias, politics, etc.
Reading the original comment, what can construed as "too political" for HN? There wasn't any strong support or opposition.
1. An utterly reprehensible crime against humanity.
2. An accurate fact that's oft-repeated on HN
3. A highly political fact.
4. Utterly pointless to introduce in any conversation that is not closely related to wars.
5. A necessary reminder that our shit stinks.
Despite all that, it's 'too political' to bring it up in a thread like this - because it has nothing to do with the subject, other than to give people a reason to engage in a nationalistic pissing contest.
Sanctions seem to work for nothing. NK got nukes anyways. The middle east is still a mess. Iran is still a problem 50 years later. Cuba still a mess. China is arguably our biggest threat but no sanctions there. Russia has diversified itself away from the Petrodollar as much as possible for these reasons. This US Dollar empire is on its last legs. The US isn't 25% of global GDP anymore. None of this is sustainable.
At any rate, I'm sure Kim's hackers are incapable of learning cryptocurrency from any one of thousands of online resources. Crisis averted. Lock him up.
However, the United Nations did declare war on North Korea, with US support, and the US is the major participant in that war; and no peace treaty was ever signed, merely a cease fire.
The truth of the matter is that declarations of war are patently irrelevant regarding whether a nation is deemed hostile or not.
This isn't vague or arbitrary. The sanctions against NK are very specific, and lengthy.
No we are not. The constitution specifically says that only congress can declare war, and congress has made no such declaration.
Edit: I feel bad about being facetious, but I feel like the point is relevant. The US, in a practical sense, does not need congress to ok war. Pointing that out as a reason to doubt the basis for strict treatment of North Korea is like pointing out the speed-limit is 55 when someone travelling 56 gets T-boned.
Do note that the US never declared war on Iraq, and that did not stopped it from fighting two wars that were very real, both of which with the support of an international coalition.
There is no ambiguity in the classification of North Korea as a hostile regime. Not only there is the fact that the Korean war never ended with a peace treaty an only had an armistice, there is also the hostile and recently degrading relationship that in 2020 escalated to the total elimination of official communication lines between north and south Korea.
I should point out that there is nothing vague about sactions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctions_against_North_Korea
If a country like the US imposes sanctions on a country which includes, quite prominently, restrictions on investment and financial activities, and afterwards you go out of your way to provide assistance on how to circumvent those restrictions on investment and financial activities... Where's the surprise that your assistance gets you in jail?
You write as if Congress has not weighed in on this matter, simply because it has not declared war on North Korea. In fact, current North Korean sanctions were codified and authorized by Congress in the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act of 2016, which expanded upon the sanctions regime that had already been in place. Virgil Griffith’s alleged acts are not illegal because of a vague characterization of North Korea as being “hostile”, but because Congress explicitly made it illegal to travel to North Korea to give technical advice.
From thereon the relation between north Korea and south Korea/US degraded so badly that official communication lines between north and south Korea were officially severed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea%E2%80%93South_Kore...
This doesn't make any sense, and I feel really bad for people like Griffith getting ground beneath the treads of the unthinking legal machine here.
And shame on the judges for not slapping this law down, because that's they're job to protect people from unthinking and unfair application of the law.
Making something available on the internet has non-illegal purposes. Specifically flying somewhere that is sanctioned and presenting the information specifically to them has no non-illegal purpose.
If you drop a $20 bill on the street and a member of a terrorist organization picks it up, it's not really funding terrorism just because you didn't explicitly ensure whoever found it was allowed to have it.
If you go find a terrorist organization and give them $20, you've funded terrorism.
Intent matters.
Then again if you gave aviation lectures to Al Qaeda after 911, you're definitely doing something wrong, even if it's publicly available information.
Even if your assistance adds low-value, it's still assistance.
Moreover, I don't believe it's reasonable to ignore the fact that a renowned Ethereum dev providing assistance to a hostile regime, regardless of how lame, does have a goal of conveying credibility and help push public acceptance. As a similar example, see for example how Snowden was blindsided by a guy trying to leverage Snowden's attendance as a way to buy him credibility.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epndnz/the-bizarre-case-of-s...
Hell, if you’re still dead set on doing what you think is right, why wouldn’t you obtain a different citizenship and abandon your American one first?
America is the world “police” when it wants to be, and as wrong as that is, it’s also something you ignore at your own peril.
How does that work?
Yes, it can work, but in order for it to do that, it sort of requires the world to remember you next week. I’m not sure the world even cared this week.
TL;DR you should not try and do business or share certain information with certain countries or you violate international sanctions.
He isn’t facing 20 years in jail. Not because we don’t uphold our sanctions, but because our justice system isn’t insane.
From Wikipedia: "In 2016, he was fired from the Tor team for attempting to sell de-anonymized Tor2web traffic."
Alot of people don't WANT to leave either and have been so brainwashed they are terrified of the outside world and believe it is a lawless land filled with gang warfare and burning trashcans, according to one of my friends who got to tour there which is a very rare privilege and outsiders are supervised every moment on a state sponsored tour after being forced to leave flowers at the dictators picture upon landing in North Korea and anyone who refuses to do so before following their sanctioned state sponsored tour (no unsupervised interactions with any citizens is allowed the entire time) is sent back on the plane immediately. The tour guide asked him how he had survived the outside world so long and if he was so relieved to finally be in a safe place when he got on....
I'm not sure the dictator is suddenly going to allow them to download Google chrome and install metamask and pretend he doesn't know what's going on and watch his country be overthrown he would more likely nuke his own people first.
1) mine Ethereum
2) buy nuclear materials/secrets with ETH abroad circumventing sanctions
3) nuke US
wow. that's all huh? just a talk
Would you allow a “talk” instructing North Koreans on how to better leverage ransomware to extort money from municipalities?
Save the fake outrage for a real injustice, because there are plenty of those.
"Griffith was denied permission to travel to North Korea by the State Department but decided to attend the DPRK Cryptocurrency Conference anyway."
It may have just been a talk, but a talk is a service, and he knew it was a serious federal crime.
If he planned to rely on the "It was all public information anyway" argument, he is a fool.
Interesting. Now do everyone in the last thirty years who helped create the situation where North Korea has nuclear weapons. Starting with Jimmy Carter.
If you sold weapons to terrorists you'd be facing similar charges.
I'm sure that there are plenty of nice people in the US, but that country as a whole is bug F#$% crazy in my mind. I felt safer in Argentina and Ecuador than the thought of going into the US.