Binance: $6bn stolen, and unregulated finance discovers risk

According to Le Monde, the US federal police said on Saturday that the North Korean hacking group TraderTraitor was behind the largest cryptocurrency theft ever recorded, with losses exceeding six billion dollars. The FBI speaks of the "heist of the century" and points the finger at North Korea. What the dispatch does not say: the methods used, the fate of the funds, the number of customers affected, or how they will, or will not, be compensated. We will not invent it. And at this stage, this is an accusation from an American authority, not a fact established by an independent investigation.

From there, here is our reading. First observation: six billion dollars does not come out of a factory. A cryptocurrency produces nothing, employs no one and creates no new value; it shifts promises of gain from one pocket to another. In the real economy, profit springs from the unpaid labour of workers, what Marx called surplus value. Here, the fortune that evaporated was largely speculative value, resting on confidence alone. When a heist can make that much disappear in a single night, it means the edifice rested on very little, apart from the conviction that there would always be a buyer coming next.

Second observation: "intermediary-free" finance promised to do away with banks, their rules and their regulators. It turns out it has recreated banks, that is to say platforms that pool other people's money, without the protections that go with them. The customers, for their part, are real people: savers, small investors, and perhaps people who put their savings there. If some have lost a great deal, there is nothing funny or glorious to be drawn from it, and we are waiting to learn who lost what.

Third point, geopolitics. Washington has long suspected Pyongyang of using hacking to finance a country strangled by sanctions. If the accusation were confirmed, the theft would also amount to a circumvention of the embargo: a state excluded from world trade acquires hard currency wherever surveillance is most lax. One can read in this, using Lenin's concepts on finance capital, the political face of the rivalry between powers: sanctions draw zones of exclusion, and capital, for its part, seeks out the cracks. Cryptocurrencies, conceived as a space beyond states, have become the battlefield.

Then there is the vocabulary. One will read everywhere that "the market is worried" or that "confidence has been shaken". Behind these formulas, platform executives chose their level of security, regulators chose not to regulate, and states chose their sanctions. The fetishism of the commodity consists in attributing a will to the market so as not to name those who decide. This "heist of the century" is first and foremost the result of choices, and it is these that will need examining when the investigation delivers its details.