I going to pretend you are actually serious about this. Let's make a strawman that actually makes it easier to suggest that this is "the same as banks". Let's

I going to pretend you are actually serious about this. Let's make a strawman that actually makes it easier to suggest that this is "the same as banks". Let's pretend for a minute that we're dealing with a non-FDIC insured bank (like some of the original online banks), with none of the regulatory controls that obviously provide a lot of protections. Let's pretend for a minute that the bank stupidly keeps all of its holdings as cash that are held on site at the bank. It doesn't use notes or other securities for transactions, only cash. Let's pretend that the bank also self-insures those holdings (which basically means no insurance). Okay, so I compromise the bank's security, take every bit of cash. I disappear to some island in the Pacific with every last cent. How badly is the bank screwed? How badly are the customers of the bank screwed? Actually, not that badly. I only wiped out the bank's reserves. That means both the bank and its customers have a short term liquidity problem, but not necessarily a significant asset problem. A regulated bank would have 10% of all deposits in its reserves. Unregulated banks often have far less, but let's pretend it is 10%. The bank loses 10% of its value. If it can stay solvent, then nobody loses any money, but it might take a few days before people can make withdrawals (which could cause a bank run, but that's a whole different problem). If the bank can't stay solvent, it goes bankrupt, and depositors become creditors. It'll take a while to resolve the legal process, so liquidity is killed, but when it all ends, depositors are going to get back something close to 90% of their money back. The key thing is that the bank lends out most of the money it takes in. Even if you rob the bank of all its cash, the bulk of the "assets" of the bank are all the IOU's from lendees, which is value that is really hard to "steal", because lendees tend to only pay their lender, and then tend to do so in installments over a great deal of time. THIS IS WRONG: Hacking Coinbase would be more akin to hacking say Visa, and redirecting all payments to you instead of the intended merchant.... if Visa's transactions were all cash based, instead of credit based... and Visa was unregulated... and even then it is kind of different because Visa is a middle man between two banks... UPDATED: Okay, I just read they are actually storing the bitcoins in the cloud, rather than just exchange the coins between the two parties.... So actually, it's not like hacking Visa, unless Visa didn't reconcile their transactions with its customers for extended periods of time and held all of the float as cash.