Bitcoin Forum

Second South Korean exchange hacked (Bithumb) causing the latest sudden Bitcoin price drop of less than 2% today, June 19.
Not as bad as the last big sudden price drop, which was also due to a hack on another South Korean exchange (Coinrail); by June 11 the price dropped more than 6%
Mean while yesterday on June 18 the price shot up around 3% due to an app (Cash by Square) getting approval for a "BitLicense" issued by the New York State Department of Financial Services

Seems that people are less likely to panic sell as news of hacks emerge. Anyone who really knows how these things work know that bitcoin doesn't really have security flaws and that it's always the incompetence of users and by extension the exchanges that are prone to vulnerabilities.

It's interesting to note that the Cash app has 7 million users and Square (SQ) has been traded on the New York stock exchange since November of 2015; while the Korean exchanges seem to be limited in users in comparison to Square's Cash app which actually has been selling bitcoin since last November.

So the ONLY reason for any sudden price drops (outside of massive market manipulation as was the case to the rise and drop from the 20K price) is due to sudden bad news about bitcoin, usually regarding exchanges being hacked...

Yet any good news regarding bitcoin is a reason for sudden price surges. There's a lot of good news to come, but no bad news? What do you guys think?

I would think the good news would cause much bigger price surges but maybe the main effect is subtle and long term, assuming people do care.... Or maybe Koreans are paranoid and Americans are inattentive and careless... On the other hand if they were so paranoid they shouldn't be using such unregulated exchanges anyways...

Just remember that last week has been the lowest Bitcoin has gotten in recent times. I recommend buying and holding! It can only go up. However never invest anything that you aren't willing to lose... Bitcoin may not be forever, but cryptocurrency certainly will be.

bitcoin isn't really that big that when a good news comes out it rises 2-3% and when a bad news comes out it goes down 2-3%. these types of change don't really have to have any reasons they are just market fluctuations. you blink and 2% change happens, that is just how the market is.

if things you mentioned here were really effective then price would have changed at least 10% meaning if the hack was a real thing then price would have fallen down to $5800 and if the other was positive enough the price would have gone up to $7k range. which obviously didn't so they are just noise like 100s of other news out there both positive and negative.

This is simply wrong. Look at the market for yourself. I am talking about SUDDEN jumps. And in the past 8 days, there have only been 3 sudden jumps. Two drops and one surge. And each jump had a specific news event tied to it. Sure it increases and decreases around 3% over an hour or so, but it simply NEVER jumps more than 1.5% within 20 minutes without a specific event. That's just not how any market works. Of course that event could be a whale or group of people dumping/pumping all at once creating a bear/bull run, but nevertheless sudden movements are always triggered by a singular event

I was flabbergasted to see it rise 4% in 20 minutes, but lo and behold within hours there were news articles announcing the approval of the cash app, explaining the surge. I don't ever expect any event and assume it's due to general volatility, but three strikes and you're out. Only the willfully ignorant would ignore such indicators.

will always appear a variety of new news, the news can be positive and also negative. we should always give positive pressure because then the bitcoin price will move with increasing. different when we hear more negative news it will divide the price of bitcoin declining. this is the consequence of having bitcoin, therefore we must be ready to accept any risks that may happen.

I am with Pursuer on this one. A 2-3% change cannot be linked to any kind of news. Those price changes literally happens everyday on all cryptocurrencies. And I don't blame you for believing in such thing as all the famous but unreliable news providers are feeding our brains with news that they themselves are connecting to have relations with the price changes of Bitcoin. It makes them have a juicy article to spread in the web thus giving them more traffic for their website.

It's simple logic. If I am wrong and you are right, then find any news events regarding btcoin in the last 9 days that DIDN'T affect bitcoin. Three significant events happened. Find me equally significant events that were completely inconsequential. If you can, then you will have a logically valid and sound argument

Until then, what you are saying is simply INVALID in the face of facts that validate what you are attempting to oppose

Bitcoin's market cap is still very tiny and the market as a whole very young. Of course news like this, positive or negative, have an immediate impact on the price.
But the impacts have less strength compared to 2-3 years ago. However it is still very easy to manipulate the market. That's what we have to deal with as early adopters. Just hold long term and you'll be fine.
This morning I woke up, read about the hack, checked the price and thought: "Meh whatever." :D

that would require the traders to be sitting behind their computers and refreshing all the news websites continuously and as soon as an article is published take action based on it! which is obviously not realistic. these sudden jumps are simply the market reacting to some rise/fall or it is even possible that a big order went through. for example currently price is $6630 and if someone sells about 50BTC it will reach $6600 in one sweep and that will cause a bigger follow up drop where others sell and you suddenly see 200BTC is sold after that leading the price down to $6490 which is about 2% drop. just like that...

I didn't know a great deal about S Korea until it became crypto hot.

The more I learn, the more of an incompetent fuckhole it seems. The exchanges are bent, leaky and run by children. The government is too dim to regulate or tax them or notice this monster appear out of nowhere like Battlestar Galactica.

How do they manage to get the trains running on time?

It's like the norm for the current ecosystem nowadays. Exchanges will be hacked every now and then and then there will be quite an effect in the market for a little while and then it will just shrug it off. Bithumb is the largest South Korean exchanges IIRC and also one of the exchanges to hit $20k during the bull run, so it's a shame still that they got 'hacked' despite being known for their intelligence regarding cybersec and datasec (SoKor in general). Surprisingly though, not much fuzz was made about the hack this time, and it looks like a typical Wednesday for traders since there seems to be not much effect on the markets for now.

Is is really the biggest exchange? Damn! I think this means that Bitcoin is actually in very stable condition. But really they should have seen this coming; not even 10 days since the last hack

LMFAO this explains everything? But seriously how were they hacked; they got cutting edge technology and everything (I was about to buy Samsung SSD)

Maybe yeah though, perhaps someone just walked into the server room, cntrl a cntrl c ctrnl v gg ez wp no re

Or maybe when the bitcoin hack happened all the South Koreans noticed their coins were having problems so they told everyone and other people got scared and there was a panic sell...
And when the Mobile Cash app got approved for Bitcoin trading everyone who
It's simply how society's work. Stop and actually think about what bitcoin news events actually mean with respect to human behavior...

Now that I think about it this is HUGE
An Android and iPhone Bitcoin trading app approved by Wall Street! 7 million users that already use it to send cash to each other!!!!

Technology counts for nothing if you're lazy and stupid.

Coincheck in Japan lost $500 million of XEM because they kept ALL of it in a hot wallet available to plunder by anyone who found it. XEM has multi sig baked in to the fucking protocol but they were too bone idle to make use of it.

Even if they couldn't be bothered to multi sig they could've saved half a billion dollars with one $90 Trezor. That's how mindless most of these people are.

I am not denying that news affects the price and human behavior. I am saying if these particular news articles were indeed affected the price then it should have moved a lot more than just 2-3% and also it would have taken a lot longer then a couple of minutes. this rise you are talking about in 19th only took about 6-7 minutes and the volume was about 300BTC and it literary happened exactly as I explained above. a big buy order happened then the rest followed in a FOMO buying fashion.

https://i.imgur.com/Q2JKYcs.jpg

Yeah and even though btc dipped, it isn't that significant compared to other times when major exchanges get hacked. I'm just a little confused why such a big exchange like bithumb can't up their security. I mean you compromise people's money here if you lack off in it right

This situation also shows us that many people do not want to sell BTC anymore (new dip?). The selling volume was relatively low and also the decrease of the price was negligible (from 6750 to 6550 and now 6600+ according to Poloniex and Bitfinex)

The way I see it, there are two possible reasons for this:

One, it's possible that weak hands have already been shaken out. There haven't been any crazy slides that can be attributed to one or two things happening worldwide, so it's certainly possible that there are far less panic sellers at the market nowadays.

Two, it's possible that people have already been desensitized to exchanges being hacked. Nearly everyone who has spent some time in crypto would know not to keep their money in exchanges anymore because it is already assumed that poor security is a given.

But yeah I guess we can only really speculate. It seems to be working both ways because no piece of good news can power a surge either.

I see it as this, the market is just tired of seeing the same hack issue every now and then and it just continues on its merry way. We've been bombarded by these 'x exchabges i hacked' for the past 2 or 3 years and every time an exchange goes off, the effect on the market goes less severe as time goes by. It could be that there are just no scared-ass holder of the coins left in the market and everyone now is just busy accumulating despite the bad news and such. But from what I see, negative news or positive news, the price doesn't move that much; are we past the phase of bitcoin being moved by shoddy journalism and news? I hope so.

May be exchange owners stole own money and said this hacks? Too many hacks last time, in a week ago same happened with Coinrail...

Really, do you believe in exchange hacks?

I'm actually quite surprised at the way that markets didn't move much despite the hack.

In fact, there is no significant drop in value in bitcoin whatsoever.

Even though this is the case, I don't think that it's safe to say that we're entering a period of bullishness yet which is what some people are suggesting. The markets are still pretty bearish sentimented. However, I do see a lot of support at $6.5k or so as seen by the price movements in spite of this hack. It could either mean that markets have become increasingly insensitive to hacks now, or that prices are close to the true bottom.

What you're describing is basically how all exchanges were run 5-6 years ago. There's been too many "hacks" to count. Given that Koreans weren't very interested in cryptocurrencies before 2017, it's not exactly a surprise to find some of their exchanges are sub-par one year later.

Also, you might consider that South Korean exchanges are being heavily targeted (http://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-hacking-war-bitcoin-exchanges-part-biggest-global-sting-752161) by North Korean hacking groups. This is probably being sponsored by the North Korean government (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-21/north-korea-said-to-be-suspect-in-hack-of-seoul-bitcoin-exchange).

Just 50-60 years ago, South Korea was on par with the poorest African countries. It's now #14 richest in the world while being very poor in natural resources. I'm pretty sure it's not "an incompetent fuckhole"......

Such news don't have much effect on bitcoins nor altcoins. The exchange total volume is small  compared to what individuals and other cryptocurrency exchange hold. It can't have much effect

I am still in doubt if it was really the hack that caused the drop in the price of bitcoin because even before we started noticing the change in the price if bitcoin, the Korean exchange haven't got hacked but the price  was dipping seriously. The changes in the price can be as a result of anything though not only from the exchange hack.

what are you talking about? Bithumb was the 6th exchange in daily trading volume when it got hacked! and that is huge among hundreds of exchanges with different volume levels. them going down hit a lot of users and the hack itself has been huge also. it is $30 million dollar worth of crypto.

You don't have to doubt it, bitcoin was back to $6,700 which came back earlier than what we're expecting. And the hack didn't affected the price that much but there's a little bit of pain that we felt.

It was one of the biggest exchange although it's based on South Korea and about the effect of such news, you're wrong.

That's how the manipulators are doing to make the market shake, they create such news.

When it comes to this area, it most certainly is.

Their crypto markets seemingly became bigger than their actual stock market for a bit. Despite this there was literally no financial regulation or taxation applied to their exchanges.

All you needed to open one was an ecommerce licence, the same type of licence required to sell tyres or Hello Kitty backpacks. No requirement to protect funds, no requirement for ID, no accountability for anything, zilch. And it was totally untaxed.

I genuinely cannot believe any other developed country would be that incompetent in allowing something so potentially disastrous to spring up unchecked. At the very least they could've applied laws from other areas as a stopgap.

I read about this hack news yesterday and I was worried and expecting another dump again but thank God this do not happen.  I believe bitcoin has started building strong muscles to resist negative news and bad events.  I think we should be happy that this hacked do not have effect on price.

I am a little surprised that the price hasn’t dropped more due to this hack. It could still drop more but it’s also possible that the price has hit a bottom and that there are enough buyers right now to keep Bitcoin from dropping any lower. As long as there is enough buy support, even bad news may not move the price very much lower, but it’s very hard to predict what investors will do.

Actually, there is a news before where koreans hacked the market prices in order for the value of bitcoins to drop because it was very expensive so every news can really affect the thoughts of different investors and the price can pump or dump depending on the situation in the market.

There must have been some kind of buying pressure that has gone long on their positions while it seemed like prices were going to crash down due to this news. Based on this, there may be a possibility of a temporary rally which may take bitcoin prices up to $7k+ before corrections downwards.

But the main thing that I took away from the fact that the hack didn't really result in anything tangible in terms of price movements is that markets have simply matured a lot. No longer is it dominated by one exchange that everyone uses, but there is a variety, and if one has a problem, it's unlikely to affect the entire btc market much.

This is cause for more optimism in the next bull market, as institutional investors are already starting to invest in bitcoin directly or indirectly (through purchasing existing exchanges or building their own).

You're talking about like an eight-month period. How fast do you think governments move, LOL? It's always foolish to hastily pass laws. They released new regulations in January of this year (obviously their primary concern was KYC).

Are you sure cryptocurrency/exchanges didn't fall under any existing laws, or that exchanges were following all laws? I don't see why exchanges would be absolved of custodial responsibilities (especially with fiat money), or requirements to protect data, pay taxes, etc. just because cryptocurrency isn't legally defined.


I'm genuinely surprised at your disbelief. :D

Chinese exchanges operated the same way for many years. Until.......last year? You could fund accounts anonymously (fiat or cryptocurrency), no licenses, no ID (which is why so many westerners used Okcoin.cn). Accountability for anything? Haha, that's funny. I'm fairly sure the major Chinese exchanges were shadow banks, on top of it all.