Nice article. While bitcoin the protocol and bitcoin the peer 2 peer system can NOT be hacked. The price of bitcoin CAN be hacked. How? The answer is 3rd party exchanges. They can engage in what is called Naked Short Selling. Meaning that they can short (or long) the price of bitcoin without proving that they hold any bitcoin. Here is an example. If you put 1,000 dollars onto a 3rd party exchange (like coinbase, this is an example not calling out coinbase), and never pull it out of the exchange they can naked short bitcoin. What they can do, is use your capital and pretend that you have that bitcoin. They can use that capital and "sell" bitcoin so that the price goes down. This is a practice called fractional reserve "banking" i guess its fractional reserve "bitcoining" as well. If everyone were to pull their money off of the exchanges (proof of keys) then there could be a "run" on the exchange. If they don't actually hold your bitcoin/money they would go belly up, and you would be shit out of luck. Get your money off of the exchanges and into a wallet where YOU hold the private keys. Good day!