Bitcoin – which has never been hacked – also provides a highly secure network thanks to its miners.
“The security of Bitcoin has been put in place by thousands of people around the world who are contributing resources to the network,” Di Iorio says. “Bitcoin is stronger than all of the supercomputers in the world put together. So if something were to be disrupted, they’d have to put together a stronger system to do that, which is theoretically impossible with the technology that’s available right now.”
The network itself may not be attackable at this point but individual machines and users are attacked. There are a lot of posts on this board from individuals losing bitcoins due to neglect of computer security.
There's a big difference, but wasn't there a problem in the early days with someone creating millions of extra coins? Not sure whether that was a 'hack' or not but I remember reading about it.
Here's the misconception though, when we say that we compare the Bitcoin miners and supercomputers as if they are the same. They are not. Most of the miners nowadays are ASICs which means that they are designed solely for mining Bitcoin (and any similar derivatives) and thus cannot be used for anything else. Their computing power is useless for any other problem. Whereas with supercomputers you can continually calculate new things once you solve a problem - just change the inputs and the 'program'.
And this is why I don't think its right to call them or it a supercomputer. Supernetwork perhaps?