“A Bithumb da Coreia do Sul distribui 44 bilhões de dólares em Bitcoin com um clique! Funcionário comete erro e cria o maior milagre de ‘ganhar sem pagar’ da história”
“O maior erro da história” A bolsa sul-coreana Bithumb, devido a uma falha no sistema, erroneamente transferiu aos usuários Bitcoin no valor de cerca de 40-60 bilhões de dólares (aproximadamente 600.000 BTC).
Evento de origem: A Bithumb realizou uma promoção (semelhante a um sorteio “Caixa Aleatória”) e pretendia enviar uma pequena recompensa de cerca de 2.000 won sul-coreanos (≈1,4-1,5 dólares) aos usuários ganhadores.
Erro fatal: O operador inseriu a unidade de recompensa incorretamente no backend, selecionando o menu suspenso errado (ou inserindo manualmente de forma errada), trocando “KRW” (won sul-coreano) por “BTC” (Bitcoin). Como resultado, cada usuário ganhador foi creditado com 2.000 BTC.
Affected users: a total of 695 people won and received erroneous distributions (some reports claim hundreds of people).
Total erroneous distribution: approximately 620,000 BTC (695 × ≈2,000 BTC, actual amount slightly varies due to rounding), valued at the time at about $40-44 billion (the BTC price fluctuated around $66,000-$71,000 during the incident, with slight differences in estimates from different media).
Bithumb's own reserves: according to some reports, the platform's actual BTC holdings at the time were only about 40,000-50,000 coins, with the erroneous distribution far exceeding the reserves (but this is just an internal ledger number, not a real on-chain transfer).
Flash crash: some users immediately understood 'a pie falling from the sky' and quickly placed sell orders. The price of BTC/KRW on the Bithumb platform plummeted instantly, reaching a low of about 81 million won per coin (equivalent to approximately $55,000), which is 10%-17% lower than the global price (local flash crash, while other global exchanges were hardly affected).
Amount sold: approximately 1,788 BTC (valued at about $100-200 million) was successfully sold/withdrawn (some reports indicate about 300 million won ≈ $210,000 was withdrawn).
Platform response: within 35 minutes after the incident, trading and withdrawal permissions for 695 affected accounts were frozen to prevent further losses.
Recovery situation: Bithumb recovered 99.7% (approximately 618,212 BTC) through internal reverse operations/freezing. The remaining 0.3% (≈1,788 BTC) has been sold, fully compensated by the platform using its own assets.
Final status: as of February 7 at 22:42 (Korea time), the platform's BTC asset consistency was restored to 100%, with no loss of user assets (official guarantee).
By the 17th year of BTC's birth, there was no basic risk control, and centralized exchanges could still change backend data at will, with no restrictions. This situation is something that only dog project teams would leave a backdoor for. It's unexpected that Bithumb, which holds significant sway in Korea, lacked even this risk control; entering hundreds of thousands of BTC was surprisingly successful, and this risk control is even worse than those dog project teams!
