Edward Snowden, a legendary NSA whistleblower, spoke in favour of bitcoin as a tool that solves all the problems of the global financial system. That was his response to the disaster that occured on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
A technical glitch at NYSE on Monday, June 3rd, triggered extreme volatility and erroneous pricing for several blue-chip securities, bringing trading to a temporary halt. The incident has reignited discussions around the robustness of traditional financial systems compared to decentralized alternatives like Bitcoin.
During the turmoil, shares of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and mining giant Barrick Gold witnessed dramatic plunges of around 99% in value, before the prices were corrected. Berkshire's stock, which normally trades above $622,000, briefly collapsed to just $185 per share due to the glitch.
The NYSE attributed the chaos to issues with circuit breaker mechanisms designed to curb excessive volatility during market hours. These safeguards were implemented after the 2010 "flash crash" that wiped out over $1 trillion in seconds due to runaway algorithmic trading.
In the aftermath, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden took to X (formerly Twitter), simply stating "Bitcoin fixes this" - an apparent endorsement of Bitcoin's decentralized design as a more reliable alternative to traditional centralized exchanges vulnerable to such disruptions.
While traditional markets have redundancies and circuit breakers in place, blockchain advocates argue that decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are fundamentally more resilient due to their distributed nature lacking single points of failure.
Monday's incident highlighted the fragility that still persists in major financial infrastructure despite safeguards. As digital assets gain mainstream traction, debates around ceding more control to decentralized systems look set to intensify.