Cryptocurrency & Hacks: Will It Ever End!

Cryptocurrency & Hacks: Will It Ever End!

Hacks in cryptocurrency are about as rare as a rainy day in England (i.e not very rare). Crypto exchanges are well-known for being hacked, this is one of the reasons that cryptocurrency hasn’t reached mainstream adoption yet and it isn’t hard to understand why.

Many hacks are done for the sake of pumping or dumping the cryptocurrency exchange rate, some are insider jobs whereas some are just exit scams. Inexperienced market players begin to withdraw tokens to fiat when hearing bad news quickly.

Here are two of the biggest hacks throughout Bitcoins history. Sometimes it isn’t the hackers that are behind the theft of thousands of Bitcoins though...

Bitcoinica

Just two months after the Linode exchange hack, in March of 2012, the Bitcoinica exchange was hacked and lost just under 18,500 Bitcoins. The CEO Zhou Tong was barely able to prevent the loss of 30,000 more on top of this too! The site was shut down for security reasons immediately.

Even though he is the co-founder of Ethereum today, at the time he was a writer and the co-founder for Bitcoin Magazine where he wrote:

“Unfortunately, given the financial stress that Bitcoinica was already in after the Linode theft two months ago, even this smaller loss turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

Mt. Gox

What kind of a list would this be if we didn’t mention Mt. Gox? In March of 2014, Mt. Gox lost 850,000 Bitcoins which left the exchange forced to shut down.

As reported by Hackernoon:

“The hacker(s)/insider(s) gained access to a large number of BTC, began to control the input and output of funds, as well as deposits. During 2 years (2012–2013), a hacker was emptying wallets, but the Mt. Gox systems was interpreting the spending as deposits, crediting some users with up to about 40,000 extra BTC.”

Five years on from this disaster, Mt. Gox is still one of the biggest hacks to occur in the crypto space.

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