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Comment by acc_297 | Hacker News Reader

There is a certain Bitcoin evangelist who will preach the gospel of a self governing currency that via a system of rules will automatically validate transactions between trust-less parties in a decentralized manner over a globe-spanning internet protocol but then complain when that same system does not prevent them from accidentally sending the entire contents of their "wallet" to an address in North Korea.

The system does not represent ownership the system only tracks of the validity of transactions and if the North Korean government proposes a valid transaction of your BTC or ETH to an address they control and a mining-node includes that transaction in a block which a majority of the network accepts then those assets are no longer yours they belong to North Korea.

The properties of the crypto-asset ecosystem which allow it to be ungoverned also make it ungovernable.

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I would imagine exchanges these days routinely monitor incoming and outgoing transactions, and if they suspect the funds are stolen, they are freezed. I would imagine North Korea doesn't have really an easy job laundering that BTC they have stolen.

You're right, many crypto exchanges operating on the right side of the law will freeze these funds.

For those interested in this, CT (crypto twitter) makes tracking North Korea's stolen winnings a bit of a sport.

samczsun, an excellent security auditor who's working at Paradigm these days, broke down some of the org in a post the other day.

https://x.com/samczsun/status/1906754853063565720?t=N4aqa6Vy...

Taylor Monahan at MetaMask also makes a habit of tracing funds and shares some pretty interesting finds around NK's laundering efforts.

You can imagine things all you want, the rest of us will be over here in the real world.

They are simply having to duplicate all the things Visa provides its customers.

BTC is inherently deflationary in the sense that once new coins cease to be mined the total number of BTC will decrease over time due to lose, theft and death. I know that I lost my wallet with the only BTC I owned 10 years ago. I can name several other people that have done the same. I would think this one property makes it undesirable for use as a currency.

> I know that I lost my wallet with the only BTC I owned 10 years ago. I can name several other people that have done the same. I would think this one property makes it undesirable for use as a currency.

How is this any different from losing your wallet with physical currency?

Because crypto wallets are more akin to bank accounts than wallets.

In many cases if you lose your physical wallet, someone else will find it and the cash will stay in circulation, but even if not, as physical currency is much more inflationary it's no big deal.

The second point is that most people keep a lot less money in a physical wallet, usually no more than say a few hundred dollars. Whereas a bitcoin wallet will often contain thousands or more so is more akin to a bank account.

Most of the lost coins will all be recovered by quantum computers. There is no way to update or fix the wallets they are stored in.

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