Why the Steem hacks are good for us

I know being hacked sucks and I'm not trying to make light of what has happen to people's accounts. Luckily we have a development team and leaders who are committed to making this platform succeed.

Now the reason I say this is overall a positive thing is that in the tech world, getting hacked is pretty much a right of passage. No successful company can totally avoid this from happening. It is impossible for any organization to completely secure every issue before going live with a product. There are just too many possible vectors for attack and you can only test for the ones you are aware of. Steemit's release and subsequent rise has brought the attention of those that are angry that this project has out shined theirs, want the attention for attacking a highly visible target, or just plain old greedy. What ever the reason is, it makes Steemit a prime target.

So even though Steemit has become fairly large in the crypto-currency sphere it is not even a drop in the bucket of what it can potentially be. These attackers are helping us get Steemit ready for the a wider audience. They are finding vulnerabilities that need to be fixed now not later. If these things were happening when Steemit was 10x or 100x bigger the fallout would be massive. We are barely at the edges of reaching mainstream media. Think of these hackers as collecting bug bounties for showing us issues that need to be fixed. Of course it not fair to those affected but it is a small price to pay now for what Steemit will become in the future.

One additional benefit is that it helping to teach new users how to properly secure their account. Now that many people have seen the affects of a hack they will be more likely to take action. So instead of a few paranoid security folks giving out warnings we have an army of new users who we can help spread the word to future users.