A digital exchange in the Philippines called PDAX sold Bitcoin (BTC) for $6,000 or roughly worth PHP288,000 (in Philippine Pesos). This comes from a report from Bitcoin.com (link here) about an incident that occurred in the middle of February 2021, amidst Bitcoin reaching new all time highs. Some users on the PDAX exchange noticed that BTC was selling for $6,000. That was at a time the rest of the market was selling BTC at prices over $50,000, so this was almost like a steal. Perhaps that was the way PDAX saw it because they are now asking for their Bitcoin back. It appears that there was a system glitch that caused an error when listing BTC prices. The exchange had also experienced an outage due to a surge in volume of network activity.
It sounds crazy to think that you can reverse transactions with Bitcoin. You won’t be able to because the blockchain is immutable and not modifiable. You cannot undo a transaction once it has been committed on a blockchain. According to the report, the exchange is requesting the users to return their BTC or else they will face legal action. Some accounts were even locked to prevent them from further activity. How can you force the users to return something they bought legally, which by all means was compliant to the rules and regulations set forth?
In all of this, the one thing that has been proven is that the blockchain does work the way it was intended. If the blockchain could be manipulated, then PDAX would have reversed the transactions already and this would probably not be reported. Users will lose the BTC they bought at $6,000 but will get a refund from the exchange. Instead, the blockchain secured the transaction and proved that it was allowed by PDAX. The BTC the users purchased can also not be confiscated by any entity because BTC requires the private key of the owner. It can be forcibly taken, but that would still require a user to grant access to their BTC through a digital wallet.
The users merely used the exchange to make their purchase and go about their way. This is how a blockchain is supposed to work and to think otherwise goes against the basic principles of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. How this case ends up is something to follow because we shall see how things unfold. Can an exchange require users to return digital assets due to unusual activity or are transactions on the blockchain final? I would like to think the latter but we shall see if further investigations reveal anomalies or will the ruling be in favor of the users.
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