Security of decentralized cryptocurrencies is a huge topic. Some say that investing in it for an ordinary person has too much downside risk due to hacking, even if the price goes up, you can lose all to a blink of an eye.
The following chart represents data collected by cryptoaware.org and designed by howmuch.net shows a group image describing the size of the hack and the timeline with the logo of the exchange/wallet where it lets us observe how frequently and to what degree the crypto-market have been attacked over recent past.
Over time, cryptocurrency hacks have grown more in size and frequency, especially after the summer of 2016 when the market began to show enormous gains, before that stage, "Mt.Gox" hack was of a significant story where more than $450M was spoofed.
The second biggest hack occurred in the recent crypto era with the Tokyo based exchange "Coincheck" with close to $400M. The only other hacks coming close to these two were Parity's Ether wallet ($160M) and the BitGrail hack ($170M).
If we would take all these thefts into consideration, the average crypto hack would be a whopping $37M in value, however, as we all know, the value of these assets are changing every second that is why the graph represents the value of the cryptocurrency at the time the theft occurred. That means the Mt. Gox hack which represented $450M in wealth in 2014 when the BTC price was about $560 would be worth more than $3 billion as for the end of 2018.
My big question is, would it be possible for exchanges and wallet providers to begin establishing a system where it is possible to prevent crypto thefts without any central government administrations? Price manipulations, instant crashes, hacks all show that these platforms have to step up their game and do a better job securing the value and help mass adoption of cryptocurrencies.
