Quote from: romec1701 on October 26, 2017, 07:46:02 PM

I never heard of Crypsy - but I am relatively new to crypto currency. How can the shutting down of one exchange cause the death of a coin (or many coins) I thought these things were supposed to be decentralised and immune to that sort of thing happening ?

Appreciate if someone could enlighten me cos I am worried about the future - if this happened once whats to stop it happening again??!

As I wrote above. Cryptsy wasn't so much about an exchange "closing" as it was about a person/company stealing a majority of the coins.

Imagine if that happened now, and imaging if it was an exchange like Bittrex. Millions of dollars a day in trades. All of a sudden if Bittrex claimed their wallet was hacked, and it closed and held/kept all coins in the exchange. All of a sudden you would have coins with a $100 million Market cap that have say 70% of the coins sitting in a theif's wallet.

The community could carry on like nothing happened, and knowing they are pouring $70 million into the theif's pocket to buyback the 70% coins that are stolen, or everyone could walk away stunned. Also people like myself (Yes I was dumb/naive at the time) having a few thousand dollars worth of coins suddenly vanish in an instant, just walk away from it all, killing any chance of having a community left to rebuild itself. I pretty much left anything crypto related for about a year.

Also, the publicity of something of that magnitude pretty much crushed the rest of altcoin market at that point. It was pretty much Altcoin's version of Black Monday.

Edit: Also to add. Decentralized means that no one is in control of the coin, It's running on its own. So when someone steals a decentralized coin, like if someone hacked your wallet and stole your coins, you don't have anyone to go back to in order to get things reversed. Not even the developer. Only option you (IE the developer) really has is the option of destroying part of the blockchain, or all of it, and doing a Hardfork, and seeing if it is accepted. This has been done in the past to a fix/revive a few coins that were 51% attacked but its rare. And with something like Cryptsy, there isn't a certain block that you can wipe to in order to fix anything, As people were feeding that coin to the exchange over the lifetime of the coin itself.

As for it happening in the future. There really is no guarantee it can't happen again. There is probably a good chance it WILL happen again. This is why all of us that have been in crypto for years always tell others to never leave coins on an exchange wallet no matter how big the exchange is, or if you do, to not to leave more than you are willing to lose.