The past couple months have been quite the roller coaster in the world of public blockchains. $125 million has been stolen and the communities of Bitcoin and Ethereum have been scrambling to pick up the pieces.

First there was the $50m Ether heist from The DAO, a company which had raised over $150 million based on the premise that its management was a distributed autonomous organization. Now the Bitcoin community is faced with a $75 million loss from what was the largest exchange, Bitfinex. The thefts are roughly the same size, but there have been two completely different reactions from their respective communities. Understanding these reactions are very important when thinking how to leverage one of these blockchains.

In my article, “Why The Bitcoin Blockchain Matters For Your Company Or Startup”, I explained the 4 main value additions a blockchain can provide as an infrastructure. The most important attribute of a blockchain I mentioned was asset settlement, the ability to directly move value nearly instantly and almost for free. This is something that has implications in the world of global payments and beyond with far superior transfer speeds and costs, but for the time being, this can only be done with payments through public blockchains.

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