I used to joke that it is weird that hackers keep breaking into banks to steal email addresses, when the banks also have money, but of course it isn’t. It’s not that the hackers don’t want to steal the money; it’s that they can’t. The banks guard the money much much much much much more carefully than they guard the email addresses.

guarding the crypto is pretty existential for a crypto exchange too but, you know. Young industry, lightly regulated, move fast and break things, etc.; some exchanges were not particularly good at it.

The lesson here is that if you are really dedicated to hacking Coinbase, you can bribe a customer service employee, get some customer email addresses and use them for scams and social engineering projects. But you can’t bribe the person with the keys to give you Coinbase’s crypto. The crypto industry has grown up.

The people who make billions of dollars tend to be very competitive, and surely at least some of them care about their precise spot in the rankings. Being the richest person in the world does seem cooler than being the second-richest person on the world, though I doubt that your consumption basket changes much between those two spots.