Their fix was to put a piece of paper over the passwords.
What a time.
Bitcoin, and really fintech as a whole, are beyond reckless.
With Bitcoin you do not get government bailouts like what happened with the beyond reckless banks in 2008.
It is not beyond imagination that the most popular Bitcoin blockchain (and thus, the label of being the "real" Bitcoin) could change at some point in the future.
"Bitcoin" is not immune from the implications of political fuckery.
I don't know what the specific mechanism would be, but I would bet that it relates to the billions of dollars backing the current ecosystem, and the interests of the people behind them. If the right event or crisis comes along, then people could be compelled to switch over to something else.
I'm sure there's someone out there still mining blocks on that chain with the exploit from 2010, but that's not where the mining power is. If the right series of events occurs, the miners will switch.
But if, say, a mere 99% of miners switch, it’s far from a given that people would follow. Having more mining capacity makes the chain more secure, but it’s not that big of a deal.
If miners suddenly fled en masse, it’s possible for the chain to be left stranded where the small number of miners remaining couldn’t realistically get to the next 2016-block interval to adjust the difficulty down to match the drastically decreased mining capacity. If mining capacity dropped by a factor of 1000 and it happened right after an adjustment, then bitcoin would be producing about one block every week, and it would take about 40 years (if mining capacity stayed constant) to reach the next adjustment.