It's an important distinction, even in this thread someone has already confused the difference. I have warned people off of bitcoin for years with the specific explanation of the difference, and how no real system is secure (regardless of the underlying cryptosystem being correct).

Yet it's somehow acceptable for companies to collect massive amounts of personal information for profit and get hacked. So my realization is that it doesn't matter, a system is useful because of it's value, and hacks are a part of that expected value. You know who sounds like an incompetent, the company that leaked 230 million people's personal information. You know who sounds like a crook, the companies that said they would stop selling geo location data, but continue to anyway.

Some companies store money directly in servers, and some are barely punished for leaking personal information (meaning the economic incentive to stop that behavior is not there; the loss of value is externalized). To an extent one of those sounds more honest to me, and it's not the traditional one. This is not a problem with bitcoin, this is a problem with capitalism, bitcoin just makes it obvious.

How can it be anything else? This even concerns individual account security "The hackers "had the patience to wait" and acquire access to a number of accounts before withdrawing the huge haul of bitcoins, according to Binance.".

In this case customers in the end won't lose money, as binance can cover the loss from their own assets. And similar has been happened with most hacks in the past - as only hot wallet is emptied, the cost is manageable.

Though IMO 7000btc is too much for hot wallet in any case...

Cue a dozen bitcoin haters explaining how "the difference between exchanges and the protocol doesn't matter and how bitcoin shouldn't be valuable anymore because exchanges gets hacked."

Checking in! Yes, security is hard. But seriously just about everyone is doing generally fine with this. It's especially hard to run an exchange. But bitcoin isn't an exchange. Lots of people own their own security and run their bitcoin without exchanges and that all works fine. Lots of exchanges even run these days without issues (Coinbase has like a decade under them now). Seriously, it's not even a lot of money.

Name a technology that isn't susceptible to crooks or incompetence. Bitcoin isn't worse than anything else in that respect.

It's pretty obviously worse in practice as massive heists like this are vanishingly rare except in blockchain token land.

Really?

https://news.google.com/search?q=Theft+stolen+-bitcoin

You can equivocate all you'd like, but the reality is that having your cash stolen from the bank is a non-issue while having your bitcoin lost or stolen is pretty much an inevitability without careful OpSec. Your disingenuous link to a google search for "theft+stolen - bitcoin" reflects poorly on your argumentation skills.

How is it disingenuous? You said that heists were "vanishingly rare" outside of Bitcoin.

As it happens, your cash in the bank is being slowly devalued via inflation as the banks are constantly making new money in the form of loans.

Bitcoin being the way it is is a feature, not a bug. If you don't get it, that's fine, but don't make ridiculous claims like only bitcoin is susceptible to crime and incompetence.

> How is it disingenuous? You said that heists were "vanishingly rare" outside of Bitcoin.

It's disingenuous because what I actually said was:

"MASSIVE HEIGHTS LIKE THIS are vanishingly rare except in blockchain token land."

Emphasis added to highlight your deliberate misreading of what I wrote.

Oh, so your point is that bitcoin-specific problems aren't a problem outside of Bitcoin. Gotcha.

I wouldn't outright call everyone who makes a security mistake incompetent.

However, most third persons involved with implementing bitcoin-the-actual-token don't get hacked.