The answer to that is no unless you’re a North Korean hacker. North Korea’s state-owned Lazarus Group has been diligently ripping off crypto investors, cracking open wallets and generally causing mayhem for the past decade.
In the latest episode last week, the lads from Lazarus ripped open a wallet filled with Ethereum held by the Dubai-based ByBit exchange and helped themselves to $2.36bn worth of crypto goodies. It is a deep and abiding irony that these state hackers working for the glory of Kim Jong-un and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea aren’t permitted to own smartphones.
The volatility of crypto is breathtaking. Bitcoin pierced the $US100,000 mark largely on the election of Donald Trump last year. It was, crypto investors thought, the beginning of a golden age for investing in nothing. Yet when Donald Trump failed to mention crypto in his inauguration speech, the price of crypto plunged. Tariff and trade war talk has not helped either. Bitcoin rallied briefly and hit a record high of $US106,000 but in trading on Tuesday it was down to a more modest $US88,000.
On a much smaller scale, the central American republic El Salvador went head on into crypto, declaring bitcoin the nation’s secondary currency in 2022. The greenback has been the primary currency since 2001. The crypto pitch to El Salvadorans was $US40 of free bitcoin through the state-run payment system, which some helped themselves to, cashed in and never darkened the doors of the payment system again.
The system completely failed to check users’ photos, relying solely on the state’s national identity card number and date of birth. Unsurprisingly, massive identity fraud occurred and the 40 sovs on offer were lifted under the nose of the large bulk of El Salvadorans.
This month, the El Salvadoran government put the kybosh on bitcoin. It’s still legal to trade in it as it is in almost every corner of the world but it is no longer the currency of choice for the autocratic government. It turns out the people prefer greenbacks.
Meanwhile, the world of meme coin has taken an even bigger hit, which is unsurprising as meme coins are little more than a digitised penny stock pump and dump schemes.
Investors who bought the $Melania coin, issued two days before the Trump inauguration, are facing a wipe-out. Released at $13.14, the coin hit a high of $21.63 on inauguration day. Investors can buy as many as they want now at $1.14. $Trumpcoin issued on the same day still sits above its launch price of $13.58 but its high watermark of just under $120 lasted only a few days with the price now settling down at $20.
It might have offered a decent return for those in the know, who bought in the first few hours of its release but there aren’t many of them. Those profit takers sold out and those foolish enough to jump on in late January will be wearing barrels with shoulder straps to hide the fact they can no longer afford underwear.
Visiting meme coin investor pages like pump.fun is like taking a virtual walk into a casino full of fools soon to be parted from their money – if they haven’t been shaken down already. The atmosphere is one of stoic gloom. They know they are being taken to the cleaners by forces beyond their ken but opt to stay in for fits and giggles.
The problem with crypto and meme coins is that they are based on the principle of controlled scarcity and appeal to a get-rich-quick mentality. Investors might be squeaky clean but they are still investing in something littered with mass-murder money, drug money, North Korean stolen money. The big problem North Korea’s Lazarus Group now faces is one of laundering their ill-gotten gains. The best guess is they will be trying to convert their stolen Ethereum into bitcoin in the hope the purloined funds will gather greater value and give Kim Jong-un the money for that Burger King franchise he’s had his eye on.
The saddest story of loss goes to UK crypto investor James Howells. In 2013 he had 8000 bitcoin he had purchased for a low, low price. The only means of accessing the bitcoin was through a private key with its crypto coding stored on his hard drive. Long story short, the hard drive ended up in a landfill in Wales. If Howells still had that key, he’d be a billionaire now. Howell wanted to excavate the entire site but the local council demurred for environmental reasons. He then sued the council and lost. His latest plan is to buy the landfill. He has even offered the locals a slice of his buried treasure. It’s gone, mate. Face facts. Cry if you must but no one is listening nor cares.
That is the point about investing in nothing. It is, pun intended, ethereal. Deep down, investors should know that if everything went south in crypto, it would wipe somewhere north of $4 trillion from the global economy, and that would really be something.
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Crypto is the Seinfeld of investments. An investment in nothing. Sure, an investor in any one of the myriad coins will receive a digitised piece of paper with some numbers on it, but can you touch crypto? Can you smell it? Can you lick it?