How Much Damage Will This Do To Bitcoin?

At present, the political climate is rather tough. Tensions between the United States and (to be honest) most of Asia seem to be having a huge impact on financial markets all over the globe. By the day, currencies seem to be getting weaker and stocks are in decline too. Things aren’t looking great and sadly, this could eventually have an impact on Bitcoin too.

We turn to stories from North Korea to explore this a little further. Now you could argue that actually, Bitcoin’s current success is down to political turmoil, with more people turning to Bitcoin as a result of financial instability across the world, however, news from North Korea specifically is having a negative impact on Bitcoin’s reputation. As it stands, many people in the US are fearful of Bitcoin, recent reports suggest that this fear is only going to go deeper eventually.

According to NewsBTC:

“A new report from the United Nations that claims that North Korea has used cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin that they have stolen from crypto exchanges in cyberattacks, to amass over $2 billion that it’s put toward further developing its nuclear and missile programs.”

These reports are linking to the idea that Bitcoin could be weaponised in the future, indeed, if these findings are accurate, it does seem that North Korea could be exploiting the blockchain in order to fund their own weapon programmes further afield:

“The report says that Pyongyang used cyberspace to launch increasingly sophisticated attacks to steal funds from financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges to generate income. North Korea has been linked to attacks of cryptocurrency exchanges in South Korea for some time now, and according to the UN report have been highly successful – to the tune of $2 billion in funds.”

As we now, anything that North Korea does usually causes alarm in the United States, it seems this instance is no different, with President Trump even starting to air his views on Bitcoin over Twitter in the wake of this. Trump recently tweeted:

“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”

Oh dear.

Whether this is just needless hysteria or evidence that the US could take a new approach towards cryptocurrencies in the future, we can’t really tell. For now, we’ll have to wait and see what happens in order to see how the US will eventually respond to this.