The fact is, shaking up the Bitcoin world, exchange platform BitFinex announced the hack

and cyber theft of 120,000 Bitcoins.

In 2016, BitFinex, based in Hong Kong, was one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges

in the world.

Broadly speaking, cryptocurrencies are these digital tokens, and there are different

kinds.

So there's Bitcoin, there's Ethereum, there's tens of thousands of other ones that people

have created, and they are just these basically digital records that people are transferring

from one person to the next, and the value, quote unquote, value of those Bitcoins or

those ether, whatever it is, depends very much on, you know, what's happening in the market.

And so the price is very volatile.

This is Molly White, a software engineer, writer, and researcher.

She's been researching crypto for a while now.

You can think of it sort of like the stock market, but it is actually very different from

the stock market because the stock market is highly regulated.

So anytime a company goes public, there's a huge number of hoops they have to jump through,

they have to make disclosures around their assets and their executives and things like

that.

Crypto, they've largely been able to dodge those regulations to date, which has allowed

for this enormous sort of volatile speculative industry to emerge.

Molly remembers this huge bit for next hack.

See, what you got to understand is that when it comes to crypto, users hold their coins

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