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Fear buying Bitcoin? A little focus can go a long way in making smart choices
From hacks to data breaches, Bitcoin buyers must employ courage and resilience to make bank
- PUBLISHED: Fri 19 Sept 2025, 1:50 PM
A decade ago, when Bitcoin first entered my awareness, I said all the ignorant things people say when they don’t understand it. I had the impression it was designed for some sort of dystopian society, and that made no sense to me at all.
So, while the smart people were buying a whole Bitcoin for just a few hundred US dollars, I was saying nonsense like: “But if there’s an apocalypse and there’s no Internet, how would anyone access their Bitcoin anyway?”
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It made sense in my head at the time. If it’s money for a digital world, and the digital world disappears, how is it useful?
One of the things I’ve since come to realise, of course, is that Bitcoin wasn’t created for the end of the world. It was created as an immutable, decentralised and scarce store of value — one that no government can dilute or manipulate. And that’s what it has grown into as its primary function. As I’ve gone from completely ignorant to about 10 per cent of the way to educated, and leaned into Bitcoin as an investment — one that I believe will grow over time because of scarcity and adoption — there is one thing I have not spent a lot of time thinking about.
Until last week, when I logged onto my crypto group and saw that someone had shared this alarming message: “Hackers hijack npm packages in what is being called the largest supply chain hack in history.”
Press pause
Charles Guillemet, chief technical officer of Ledger, a cold wallet crypto storage system, advised everyone invested in crypto to refrain from making transactions.
We were told that ‘malware’ and ‘malicious code’ — two of my new least favourite terms — meant they could be redirected, aka stolen and gone forever.
I also got a little lesson on the difference between a “hack” and an “exploit”. The first gains unauthorised access to a system, the second, which is what we were dealing with, takes advantage of a vulnerability that already exists in a system.
Of course, my immediate instinct was to check on all my crypto and somehow secure it, but knowing there was nothing I could do about any of it, I just went to sleep.
By morning this situation seemed to be much less pressing, and a few days later, it has been all but forgotten.
Either way, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what had actually happened. A few days later, a piece in Milk Road Crypto — one of my favourite newsletters — boiled it all down for me.
Npm packages are bundles of code in JavaScript, the most-used programming language in the world. Developers use them to save time in their work, billions of times per week. So, when a hacker managed to gain access to one of those developer’s npm accounts and work in some bad-acting code, the damage could have been enormous. The good news is that this was caught early, and the damage was minimal. I’ve heard varying amounts, but Milk Road Crypto put it at just $503.62 (Dh1,849).
The lesson here is crypto may be immutable, but the world it runs on is anything but that. Our Internet isn’t invincible. Our devices aren’t secure. And a rogue line of code or one bad actor can drain your wallet.
Still, much as we are in life, people in the crypto and Bitcoin world are getting on with things, with this possibility running in the background. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week, Bitcoiners shared a podcast clip in which he talked about his conviction it would become a powerful global store of value.
However, as he often did, Kirk said the quiet part out loud: “Quantum is the only asterisk on all of this.” This refers to the possibility that quantum computing — technology that is a few years away — could one day crack the encryption that protects not only blockchain, but the entire digital financial system.
The great threat
This is something no crypto or Bitcoin enthusiast wants to think about. And as the people on the podcast with Kirk pointed out, if quantum computing can take down Bitcoin, well, it can take down pretty much everything else too. Thankfully, there are a number of projects devoted to solving this very problem.
For now, I believe in preparing for the best and assuming we’ll land somewhere in the middle. I can’t worry about everything; if I did, I wouldn’t do anything. This is the challenge for a lay person like myself, interested and investing in a space I only fractionally understand.
People worked behind the scenes swiftly to contain this npm situation from becoming much bigger. I can only hope they are equipped to deal with other, bigger threats, too. Really.
When it comes to crypto, trust no one.