Bybit sees over $4B 'bank run' after crypto's biggest hack

Whose to say they don't get a cut on the back end? Sounds like a nice exit strategy to me if you want plausible deniability.

> is no different than if a bank CEO had his machine hacked and a wire initiated on his behalf

Those are not equivalent because the traditional banking sector is less vulnerable to North Korea. In theory a bank could be drained of $1b via a misdirected wire, but in practice that kind of plan is hampered by real-world controls and limitations applicable to international banking.[1] North Korean hackers instead focus on what works, which is crypto.

[1] https://pacforum.org/publications/yl-blog-89-crypto-north-ko...

Code is law: if the owners hadn't intended to fund North Korea, they wouldn't have done so. I hope you're not suggesting some kind of interventionist third party trying to revert what has already been inscribed on the blockchain?

It's like a token burn. These are always bullish.

How is North Korea possible dump $1 billion on the market when everyone trying to blacklist them? Hackers typically have access to much less liquidity as the coins are considered tainted, so they either are never sold or sold gradually on dark markets or OTC where there is no market impact.

There a wide spectrum between "some removed from circulation" vs "the entire thing ceasing to exist". think of this as a 400k token burn.

the price action shows surprising optimism despite such a large hack . This is a possible reason , among others.

As I understand it, the software surrounding and managing the wallets is always what’s compromised, right? So it’s really the exchanges are the only place that the money is being lost, because the protocol itself is sound.

You mean like the stories of people who lost their crypto because they lost the HDD they were stored on?

Sorry, I wrote this, but it is just a guess. I say that because of the size of exchanges, and I know most people are in this because they think they can sell for a profit later (both amateurs and professionals).

The truth is hard to know. I wonder how many people lost their coins to the ether by losing their keys or sending to the wrong wallets.

> But how would we hear about the ones who don't?

I hear stories about them and whether the con-artist got access to their digital wallet, whether they made it to a safe room in the home invasion and, of course, whether they got rights to mine the dump.

> The truly powerful promise of Web3/crypto decentralization is in creating alternative economic ecosystems that empower users and communities.

What does this mean? It’s indistinguishable from marketing chaff.

It occurs to me that the biggest recent successes in “alternative” ecosystems have absolutely nothing to do with cryptocurrencies. Mastodon comes to mind.

Bitcoin's initial release was in 2009. Web3 was coined in 2014 and the first NFT was minted soon after. These technologies are not infants, and they're not teething. They're just toothless.

Stop. The idea is dead. This is getting embarrassing.

We are beyond the teething stages and have seen alternative economic ecosystems that do stuff to users and communities but they mostly seem to be slave labour scam centers in Myanmar.

It seems if you give humans anonymous non reversible financial transaction technology the results are not all good. I think the problems are with the humans as much as the tech.

Bitcoin obviously. But many other major currencies are used for ecommerce as well.

USDC is becoming pretty popular. It's on every major chain, and has a native bridge by Circle. On Solana you can send millions of dollars in USDC, in a few seconds, for less than a penny.

Bitcoin. There are now many communities around the world that use bitcoin for normal transactions. E.g. where I live there are many restaurants that accept bitcoin, almost every merchant at the local farmers market accepts bitcoin (for veggies, coffee, etc), there are many people providing services that accept bitcoin (some of them only accept bitcoin). There are some cool success stories, for example a butcher who used to have a small stand on the corner of the street accepted bitcoin for 2+ years and that allowed him to get a brick and mortar store. He sells great selection and quality meat (and raw milk :) )

I'm trying to square your comment here and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43151500 .

It seems like this money is pretty censorable, it's just a different group doing the censoring.

The people running Bitcoin came together to fix things they didn't like, rolling back some 20+ blocks in the process, at least twice. The people running Ethereum have no problem with scams and child porn and drugs and money laundering, but hacking the DAO, that's unacceptable and was reversed.

If you look at the market cap of coins, it is obvious that nobody gives a flying fuck about the underlying technology.

Bitcoin copies/forks like Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash, jokes like Dogecoin and Shiba Ina, memecoins like $TRUMP are in the top 50, while innovative protocols like Chia are at rank 250 or so.

Finite amount of gold as well. Finite amount of bitcoin cash as well. Finite amount of real estate as well.

This is nonsense. Money supply is related to inflation, but not the same, and the graph you showed is the clearest proof of that - money supply shot up in the wake of the GFC, while inflation reared its ugly head only in the wake of supply side shocks due to war and pandemic.

Any savings beyond a few months worth of cushion should not be held in cash anyway, but in equity and debt, which support productive investments. These have yielded positive results over these timeframes. (And BTW, both US equity and US corporate debt have outperformed gold over the last century or so.)

Even if you go for risk-free treasuries: long term real rates have mostly been positive [0], while short real rates have been hovering around, but in the last decade and a half below, zero [1], granted. But these rates are determined by economy wide equilibrium processes that can't be overcome by some magic beans and a bad database.

(Note that there are some 10,000 coins with strictly limited supply. They will not ipso facto outperform the dollar.)

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/REAINTRATREARAT10Y

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/REAINTRATREARAT1MO

> The Dollar is expected to lose almost all value over the lifetime of a person. Warren Buffett once noted that the Dollar already lost over 90% of it's value during his lifetime. With Bitcoin, there is no such expectation.

You’ve taken the wrong lesson from this, and the fact that Warren Buffett isn’t a pauper should be your biggest clue.

This is why it’s important to invest real dollars in productive assets.

The actual issue that needs solving is that real wages haven’t been rising to match inflation for the last nearly fifty years.

Being able to create currency is a feature, not a bug.

The idea that an economy has a fixed amount of currency makes no sense. You want it to be available to facilitate transactions.

Well the number of BTC went from zero to ~twenty million in that time, not really zero inflation.

If the treasury could credibly say “we will only ever print 2^64 dollars”, that wouldn’t make it inflation free, just a maximum possible denominator.