The linked article (and so AutoTL;DR) is not very accurate. If you’re interested in this incident, read the original post, which is short and compact. General media articles are only quoting or re-quoting this thread, typically with some misunderstanding.
Specifically (about this post): Among other things, multisig is only suggested; nothing has been decided yet.
Generally (in many similar articles): Probably a specific local machine was hacked, though no one really knows yet what happened. It’s unlikely that the Monero network itself was hacked.
Since I’m a Monero supporter, obviously I tend to say good things about it, but frankly, the ironical fact here is, Monero is so privacy-focused that when something like this happens, it’s difficult to identify the attacker—i.e. by design Monero also protects the identity of the attacker. Some Monero users are having this weird, paradoxical feeling: it would be nice if we could catch this evil attacker, but being able to catch the attacker would be in a way very bad news for Monero (if you know what I mean) 😕
I used to be an old school supporter of cryptocurrency too, until that is when the scammers got their mitts into it and it went from a funny little technical hobby worth nothing to an overinflated shitfight that’s robbed many people of their life savings.
Honestly, the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem is a parody of its former self and nothing the original inventors of it wanted it to become.
Exactly, except not “the entire”, but “almost entire”?
Monero has been largely detached from CEXes, no companies, no middle men… Many users still have that idealism, a cypherpunk philosophy, that which Bitcoin tried to achieve originally. It’s community-based and crowd-funded… Some of that fund was stolen, so we’ve got to admit that the Monero community was not so smart after all… Yeah, a bit embarrassing tbh. To err is human, I guess.
For example, we do have a zero-fee donation site kuno.anne.media and recently help some girl buy a laptop or doing things like that. Some of Monero users are idealists by nature, maybe silly dreamers or naive philosophers, but definitely not greedy HODLERs. Weird people, either way, haha 😅
I actually used to think crypto is a “weird fad and some thing people use to try getting rich”. But then sanctions happened, and now I ADORE Monero. It allows me to easily pay for things I would’ve otherwise had to jump through hoops for. I am so happy that we at least somewhat have a payment system that can’t be controlled)
Originally Bitcoin had nothing to do with “get rich quick”. It felt vaguely like Freenet. It was experimental, philosophical, mathematical, cypherpunk… Almost no one had imagined that investors were going to be interested in it and something like that fad would happen.
Unfortunately it’s not easy to get Monero. In several countries, CEXes don’t support it (delisted). Besides, getting Monero from CEX is not ideal privacy-wise. So, a typical Monero user gets it no-KYC, without using CEX. Which is legal, but rather complicated. That’s why I wouldn’t recommend Monero to regular people.
As you said, Monero is such a great way for payment in a practical sense. Very low fees (~1 cent, no matter how much you send), private (only you can authorize transaction, no need to get a permission from someone else). The community is relatively small (monero.town on Lemmy), but generally nice and cozy. We seldom, if ever, talk about investment… It’s so different from what people think when they hear “crypto”. It’s understandable that some people assume it’s just one of those alt sh*tcoins.
I would not use CEX under any circumstances - they require submitting ID, and I would not trust a random company to keep such data safe. But yea, discovery of sellers is a problem. Was going to go with a Localmonero one before finding someone IRL who sells for cash.
https://monero.town/post/894750 So you did f2f… Glad it works, though. But how to buy it is irrelevant to the OP and is off-topic, so we shouldn’t be talking about that here.
Basically I’d never recommend anyone to buy a significant amount of crypto hoping that you can get rich quick with that. Yes, it might go up, but it may go down. Encouraging such sketchy gambling would be crazy and irresponsible, and more importantly that’s not the original purpose of this technology. Yet you already even know localmonero, so yeah, you’re simply one of us. If you’d like to you can join monero.town or subscribe it from your instance :)
Nah, I don’t have much in the wallet - just for the actual expenses)
What would be some examples of things you pay for with monero that you’d usually have to jump through hoops for?
VPS and domain, primarily.
As you yourself out it, the issue with monero is that it is designed to protect attackers.
I think I know what you’re trying to say, and that’s actually a difficult point. Privacy is double-edged.
By that logic, you’d have to support chat control, e2e backdoor, eIDAS 45, etc. and ban Tor, Tails, VPN, BitTorrent, or encrypted communication in general because sometimes criminals can (and do) abuse such technology too. While such logic is understandable, I’m a privacy advocate and can’t agree with that. Most libre people, EFF, FSF, etc. have been fighting against that very logic for more than 20 years. I’m one of them.
NSA playing around with their new quantum toys maybe. Joking.
I’m just making a wild guess, but it was probably the North Korean Cyberattack Force. They have been behind some of the largest crypto heists before in order to get clams in the goverments coffers.
The blockchain analytics provider attributed the attack to the North Korean state-sponsored Lazarus Group, which it says has stolen more than $2 billion across several heists.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) Nailed it
The linked article is inaccurate and misleading. Your wild guess is based on that.
Currently the best blockchain analytics publicly available about the incident is this by Moonstone, and even though it seems that the victim shared the secret key with them, nothing much is known due to the nature of the privacy coin. No way other analytics providers could tell more.
Check the original source and some of the comments there before making an irresponsible accusation like the attackers must be North Korean (or Russian, Muslim, Romany, …). A knee-jerk suggestion like that does not only promote unfair racism/stereotypes, but it helps cover up the real mastermind. Although, it’s not your fault that the article is misleading, and we can’t rule out any possibility including what you suggested. The real problem here is this confusing, poorly-written article…
Actually I based my wild guess at reporting that NPR did a couple of years back regarding different thefts of crypto and that the intelligence community determined it was a hacker group in North Korea that was supported and funded by their own government as a way to get around the sanctions.
My subsequent confirmation came from reading the article, but I already had the same suspicions, however I will admit my error if it indeed turns out it wasn’t North Korea (haven’t been able to read the links you provided yet)
