🤔

Same way banks are getting away, and the main reason the crypto community always push "not your keys, not your coins".

He's getting away because not enough people withdraw their coins to a local wallet immediately after purchase, as they should. Far too many people are still stuck in the old way of thinking, by leaving everything they have on the exchange.

When the economy gets bad there's a phenomena called "bank runs". This used to happen with the old banks too back in the days. That is when everyone tries to withdraw their wealth at the same time, something that should obviously be possible.

Now with Bitcoin, "bank runs" can happen very fast, as it's digital and there's no withdrawal limits. Traditional banks on the other hand don't allow you to withdraw your wealth digitally, you have to withdraw physical cash, and the only place to get cash is from an ATM, the bank just set a withdrawal limit or refuse to fill up the ATM's.

Then for no reason at all, like magic, there is no longer a bank run and everyone's money just disappears. Like cockroaches when light comes on.

So what happened on FTX is that their own centralized database said this user has x Bitcoin, this other user has y Bitcoin and so on. But there never was any, just a number on the screen.