OMG how could that happen...
Bitfinix, a Hong Kong exchange for Bitcoin and one of the world's largest, halted trading on it's exchange this week after their system was hacked and tens of millions of dollars were stolen from customer accounts.
The company posted in a blog post that the exchange was " investigating the breach to determine what happened, but we know that some of our users have had their bitcoins stolen".
The thief's made off with 119,756 bitcoins in total. With a bitcoin going for $563 currently that equals 67.4 million. Not a bad bank heist.
I don't know about you but I never truly understood the Bitcoin phenomena. They are created. They are mined. They are used to remain anonymous and therefore are used by drug traffickers and for other illegal activity. I know 100,000 merchants accept bitcoin. I don't know about you, but I don't see many at all... It certainly is not used to every day transaction purposes.
The one thing that seems fairly certain to me, is things like this event will happen, where suddenly there is a hack and the electronic bitcoins are stolen from accounts. How could that happen? I doubt the "authorities" have the wherewithal to solve that heist (or to return the bitcoin to the rightful owners). You see that fall in price in the chart above, I get the feeling it was the robbers getting rid of the loot. You can sell down to $1 and still make a profit if you are never caught.
So there will now be $67 million of bitcoin sloshing around, looking for the next sucker who will buy it from the thiefs. When that is done and funds converted to dollars, the heist will be complete. The losers will be the poor suckers who will subsequently check their cryptocurrency wallet only to find, they can't buy the drugs they wanted with the anonymous currency of the future. Bummer.
