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was there ever $600m of real money? reading messages on that funny google docks tracker suggests it was mostly shitcoins.

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Does it matter? Even if the hacker could only extract 1% of the notional value it would still be life-changing money.

It matters because if the dollar amount is real this is probably the largest heist in history.

Well the Bangladesh Bank heist managed to transfer close to US$1B over SWIFT. Of course since this is the traditional banking system we’re talking about, most of the transactions were either quickly blocked or since recovered. According to Wikipedia about $63M remained unrecovered as of 2018.

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

In that hack, they attempted to transfer out $1B, but only managed about $100m, because the other transfers were blocked. And a portion of that 100m was eventually recovered.

They tried to steal $1B. They succeeded with $101M. They got away with $63M.

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