Cryptocurrency glitch briefly made them think they were rich

To those who are reluctant to get started, cryptocurrency can seem like a wild, reckless, even dangerous business. It creates wacky mottos, ties to popular TV characters, and of course a lot of people get ripped off. A good example of the more dubious nature of the business came on Tuesday, when CoinMarketCap, a utility that aggregates data from the crypto market, suffered a small glitch. What size? Big enough to make its users believe that they were all suddenly billionaires or trillionaires for about an hour.

Late in the day, those monitoring their crypto accounts on the service saw that their prices, market caps and more had skyrocketed. That includes Bitcoin, whose market cap has shot up to an explosive $ 14.7 quintillion.

But it was not to be. At around 5 p.m. EST, the operators of CoinMarketCap admitted that “the engineering team is aware of the incorrect price information appearing on [CoinMarketCap]. We are currently investigating and will update this status when we have more information. “

The issue was resolved, and then the service’s Twitter team rubbed salt on the wound, writing, “How does it feel to be a billionaire for a few hours?”

The bizarre event received extensive social media coverage, with people posting screenshots of their crypto numbers too big to be real, and joking about everything they were going to buy with their totally real and real alternative currencies and now empty.

Either way, surely there is nothing to worry about when questionable and under-regulated forms of currency briefly turn many people into the richest humans on the planet before reminding them that they don’t. again have nothing.

(Going through The block)