It is unlikely anyone lost 200 BTC, we can't say for sure because Bitcoin wallets are pseudonymous. But what happened is that someone received a lot of BTC from a lot of different wallets.
I would hope that someone who owns 200 BTC would put a little thought into how to secure it and would not be affected by this hack.
And this is why BTC will never be mainstream. All it takes is a single misstep to lose all of your money forever. Why would average citizens take that deal over the security guarantees provided by the incumbent financial institutions?
The problem with your hypothetical is it will never happen because the system in place works much better than Bitcoin. Our current system doesn't have the flaw that you have to distribute your wealth in hundreds of wallets or you get perma-fucked and booted into the street.
What's your point? The nature of cryptocurrencies make them easily lost or stolen compared to money in the bank. Banks are regulated and insured so customers never risk losing their money due to ineptitude. They get nothing in exchange for the hassle and risk of cryptocurrency.
Raw Bitcoin is the equivalent of cash, not bank money. Bitcoin can be (and often is) regulated and insured.
It's possible to implement chargebacks on a smart-contract platform, or even at layer 0 as EOS and XRP do. What's so bad about the possibility of marrying the benefits of cash with the convenience of electronic money ?
> Cash in the bank already is "electronic money". Cryptocurrency doesn't add any benefits [...]
Why bother replying to comments in threads about cryptocurrency if they don't have any benefit ? Clearly now that cryptocurrency long speculators have pretty much all died, cryptocurrency should just disappear by itself if it doesn't have any use over fiat. Or do you not believe in your own opinion ?
> Why bother replying to comments in threads about cryptocurrency if they don't have any benefit
Am I not allowed to post if I think cryptocurrencies are useless?
> Clearly now that cryptocurrency long speculators have pretty much all died, cryptocurrency should just disappear by itself if it doesn't have any use over fiat. Or do you not believe in your own opinion
Why don't you just articulate some of the benefits instead of invoking bloviated sarcasm? The argument that "bitcoin exists so it must be useful" is pretty obviously fallacious logic.
You are the one making the sweeping claim ("CryptoCurrency doesn't add any benefit"), so unless your name is Donald Trump, the burden of formulating precise criticism actually falls on you.
It seems like you don’t want to hear dissenting opinions because you have a vested interest in crypto and it’s unpleasant to consider that you may be wrong. His opinion is just as valid as yours, and HN exists for such discussion. So, in the interest of hearing both sides, what benefits do you claim crypto provides that aren’t already provided by fiat currency?
I'm not making a sweeping claim, I'm asserting something more akin to a null hypothesis. The extraordinary claim is the one that suggests cryptocurrency has lots of benefits when all the available evidence points to the reality that it is mostly a toy.
Posting a page full of quora answers as your response is not a practical way to have a discussion. If you have a point to make I encourage you to lay it out here so that I can address it, I am not going to spend time constructing a response to a page of quora answers you took 30 seconds looking up on google.
Most of those are either bugs, not features, or just have nothing to do with cryptocurrency and can be (and have been) implemented on top of our existing banking infrastructure (or it's reasonably non-trivial to create new infrastructure for it).
Given how hard technology is at the moment, and how many issues people have with it, I highly doubt we're going to get to widespread literacy around bitcoin best practices.
I would hope that someone who owns 200 BTC would put a little thought into how to secure it and would not be affected by this hack.