Bithumb's 620,000 BTC Copy? The Incident Shows the (Real) Importance of Bitcoin
Someone overseas lost a hard drive with 1,000 Bitcoins and went to a garbage dump. What nonsense. Just inputting the numbers would give you 2,000.
kys8** (12:58)
This is seriously serious. Sending something that doesn't exist is serious enough, but how can someone receive it and even trade it? Then how can you tell the difference between real and fake? chan** (12:46)**
But since they created and then retrieved Bitcoin that didn't exist, a new 60 trillion won worth of Bitcoin was created in the global Bitcoin market? LOL, what a ridiculous market. LOL
loan** (14:33)
Even employees at Bithumb can create tens of trillions of Bitcoin out of thin air if they want... Does that mean they can create 620,000 or 6.2 million? LOL, they could easily create 0.001 won in an instant.
The recent Bithumb "misdelivery of 620,000 Bitcoins" incident dramatically demonstrates why Bitcoin was created and why it remains important.
The danger isn't Bitcoin itself, but the intermediaries.
The Bitcoin printed on an exchange account doesn't represent real Bitcoin (existing on-chain).
It's essentially a "Promise of Understanding (IOU)."
This is a structure that has been repeated in traditional finance.
The banking system we use also moves far more numbers on the ledger than physical cash.
The problem isn't Bitcoin itself, but the systemic risk of the humans who run the centralized ledger.
Bitcoin was created to solve this very problem.
For example, suppose Bithumb or another exchange prints 1 million Bitcoins and dumps them on its ledger.
In that case, Bitcoin won't fail. Instead, the exchange's fake Bitcoin price will drop to zero, and the exchange will go under. (A rollback wouldn't prevent the failure, but a loss of trust would likely lead to its downfall.)