No! We need more "web3 nonsense" like this. This is the closest the internet has felt to the cyberpunk dreams of the 90s. Outlaw Hackers exploiting bugs in automated smart contract to hijack cryptocurrency is the future Gibson promised us.
From my vantage point, it seems to be mostly bored twentysomethings.
North Korean cryptocurrency hacks are a bit distinctive. Rather than finding logical bugs in contracts, they tend to use traditional spearphishing / social eng to get targeted people to run malware which they try to pivot to stealing keys / access credentials. Then after a hack, most crypto hackers try to obfuscate and store their stole coins on chain somewhere. North Korea already has a large and practiced money laundering network, so after a hack the money immediately starts going to hundreds of different places in the real world, perhaps to mules or to faked accounts in Southeast Asia.
Google: "North Korea Ransomware"
"The future is already here, just unevenly distributed" and boring
Is it really supposed to be open-source? A common cyberpunk trope is that mega corporate conglomerates own verything. Cyberdecks are modified and reverse-engineered, yes. But generally come from a mega corp.
We have all that, although most of it from smaller Chines manufacturers. More than that we do have truly open source hardware, you can download schematics for almost anything, modify and design your own chips and circuits based on open designs, dream up your own hardware, and if know the right people in Shenzhen you can email it all to them and they'll build it for you.
The reason so few people take advantage of any of this is that it didn't turn out to be that useful.
Maybe they are... Perhaps this is the new way the CIA is financing their off the books activities.
So long as people aren't running around with too much bad money.
https://blog.mollywhite.net/celsius-letters/ https://blog.mollywhite.net/voyager-letters/
I could see point if we were talking of hundreds, but we are talking of sums of over hundred of thousand. Which to me is very wealthy on global scale at least.
It's not just the wealthy, it's the cab driver giving crypto tips now.
Or at least they where before investing in crypto...