On August 8, 2008, Bitcoin (a cryptocurrency) emerged. Cryptocurrencies are a form of money that can be used in online exchanges. Some would say it was inevitable, in that more and more business is done online, and there needed to be some kind of currency for online transactions other than the currencies of the various nations that issued currencies. A little history is in order. The Eurocurrency was created to have a common currency for nineteen countries of Europe, so that they would have one currency no matter what country you were in. Banking would be easier, and transactions would be easier, without having to switch from one currency to another while traveling in Europe, or exchanges from one nation to another. England decided not to join the European Union, so England still used the pound for transactions. Nineteen countries took the Euro as their currency. Banking and transactions became much easier.
Bitcoin was meant to be an international currency that could be used instead to physical money, as in cash or coins that are not impossible, but a pain, to transfer money for business transactions. Bitcoin also brought an anonymity in transactions, making it ideal for illegal transactions, which were taken up by criminals almost immediately. Bitcoin’s transactions were meant to be untraceable, making it ideal for buying drugs or other illegal things. The inventor of Bitcoin bragged that the transactions would be untraceable, but like so many other wonderful promises about software, the untraceable quality was soon to be broken. Software promises should be the twenty-first century definition of a lie.
Nonetheless, the qualities of a hard-to-trace computer-transferred currency was impossible to resist. Then emerges the Silk Road: “Silk Road was an online marketplace that facilitated the trade in narcotics and other illegal products and services. Sales were anonymous, using bitcoin.” The founder of Silk Road was Ross Ulbricht, who was arrested by the FBI in 2013 and convicted for: “engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, distributing narcotics by means of the internet, conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to traffic fraudulent identity documents, and conspiracy to commit computer hacking.” Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to two life sentences, but was pardoned by President Trump in 2025.
Not to be outdone, Samuel Bankman-Fried started a cryptocurrency exchange, (the FTX) in September 2021, became the 41st richest American in the Forbes 400 and by November 2023, was subsequently indicted for seven charges, “including wire fraud, commodities fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, and campaign finance law violations.” Bankman-Fried was convicted of the charges and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. How soon he will be pardoned will depend on whose campaign and how much he can contribute to. There are others who have done similar things, but financial crooks are only slightly less boring than finance textbooks.
None of this illegal activity has even remotely discouraged the proponents of cryptocoinage, with many new forms of cryptocoins emerging into the financial markets as time marches on. Enter a new crypto-thief North Korea. For those of you who don’t know, North Korea is a family-run dictatorship, with a population of almost seventeen million people. Supported by China and Russia, North Korea has a stranglehold on its population, with a large army ready to go to war with capitalist South Korea, directly to their south, which is supported by The United States, which North Korea also considers an enemy.
On February of 2025, North Korea stole 1.5 billion from Dubai-based exchange Bybit, making the theft “by far the biggest ever in digital asset history.” But it gets better. Dubai, is described by Arstechnica as “the isolated nation has long maintained a thriving cryptocurrency theft racket, in large part to pay for its weapons of mass destruction program.”
What are we to think? I never liked cryptocurrencies from the beginning. If you have invested in them, all I can say is good luck. What you own is a number on a computer chip, and nothing more. As we can see, cryptocurrencies and criminals go hand-in-hand. North Korea will not use the billions to feed its hungry population, it will use the money to build more weapons. To eventually kill more people. Welcome to the age of computer-generated currency. If and when you have nothing left, don’t come crying to me, and more importantly, don’t ask the government to reimburse you.
