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Hey y’all,
I watched a documentary over the weekend that I think everyone interested in trading, and especially crypto, should probably check out.
It’s on Netflix, and it’s called The Biggest Heist Ever.
It starts out straightforwardly enough:
Two hackers reach into Bitfinex and steal $72 million worth of Bitcoin from their users accounts. Over time, thanks to the Bitcoin Halving Windows and the crypto boom, the value of the stolen money ballooned to $4.5 billion.
Things took an interesting turn when one of the hackers, Heather Morgan, created an online persona, Razzlekhan, and started vlogging her life — and releasing the worst rap videos you’ve ever seen.
This documentary is truly an experience…
But I don’t mention it just to give you a Netflix recommendation. I think there’s a lot of interesting info in there for folks like me who are less intimately familiar with the crypto space.
It left me with some interesting questions, like:
How secure is crypto really?
Crypto is supposed to be this kind of ultimate untraceable, secure kind of money — no central bank, no physical wallet you can steal, etc…
But if a hacker can reach into the back end of a crypto exchange and take everyone’s money, there’s clearly still work to be done there.
Are crypto’s greatest strengths also its greatest weaknesses?
Interestingly, once the Bitcoin was stolen, all of the things that make crypto so secure became an obstacle for the government to recover it.
They could track the crypto, but they couldn’t access or seize it without the password to the wallet it was stored in.
The couple, now known as “Bitcoin Bonnie and Crypto Clyde,” were busily laundering the money to disguise its sources, dwindling the amount that the government could eventually recover.
What obligations should crypto exchanges have to their customers?
BitFinex does not cover itself with glory in the documentary.
They ended up refunding their customers a very small amount of money after the couple was caught — nothing short of the collective $4+ billion the consumers would have had if they’d held Bitcoin in their BitFinex accounts the whole time.
But the heist was completely the fault of holes in BitFinex’s security — so why do they get off easy?
It was an interesting documentary that left me with a lot of interesting questions… check it out, and let me know what you think!
To your prosperity,
Stephen Ground
Editor-in-Chief, ProsperityPub
