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Comment by adgjlsfhk1 | Hacker News Reader

The point of KYC isn't to make fraud impossible, but to make it expensive.

Isn’t “expensive” only a problem if your cost basis is >$0 ?

North Korea's cost basis is >$0. They have limited numbers of hacks per year that they can perform, and every road block in between the hack and unrestricted dollars will drain a couple percent of the profit, add a couple percent chance that they get caught or scammed while trying to launder the money. All or these have costs and reduce the take-home profit for Russia.

even if you conscion the frankly risible assumption that they don't already have systems in place to do this, are you seriously trying to suggest that setting up a system to beat some KYC checks is going to put any kind of a dent into billions of dollars?

I feel like you're struggling to grasp that I'm not saying "muh KYC is useless", I'm saying that this article doesn't seem to understand that it's useless in the face of a nation state for whom hacking is a major industry

Notably, North Korea only made hacking an industry after it's "SuperDollar" USD counterfeiting industry became too expensive and difficult to run because the USD had a design update that introduced significant security upgrades.

You would think "just manufacture cash" would also offset billions and yet it didn't really. End result, there are way fewer counterfeit USD in circulation now.

I suppose the difference is that counterfeiting currency requires very rare information, some very specialised machines and [something similar to] whatever the hell dollars are made out of. you could put a few motivated and intelligent teenagers in a room with a laptop for a few days and they could probably find multiple ways to crack KYC. the same is not true for counterfeiting currency.

It cost them something to train the groups that stole those coins; training, their higher standard of living, etc.

your guess as to what % of $1.5bn that would be?

A few tens of millions maybe? Just a shot in the dark though.

still requires upfront cost. If that’s priced out of reach for most people, it’s still a deterrent.

right but N Korea is not most people. hacking is one of their primary industries. they almost certainly already have systems in place for this

Systems are expensive. That's the point.

yes, but they're not expensive if you already have them in place and you're a nation state with essentially free labour.

once again, we're not talking about some random clowns who've accidentally stolen a usb stick with these coins on it, we're talking about this article assuming that North Korea cannot circumvent KYC

KYC is easy to beat on most platforms. look into stealer logs, as in the cybersecurity terms— you get the victim's cookies and passwords and often can bypass 2FA. Often, they have enough information to beat KYC.

Depends on the scale. Withdrawing millions of dollars to a bank account will require more than the median user's cookies, passwords, & 2FA.

you're just repeating a stock phrase you've heard here without any actual regard for the discussion being had

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