In the world of crypto exchanges, there have been some, well, hiccups. One exchange in Canada had a bunch of Bitcoins in "cold storage," meaning they weren't accessible online. They were still password-protected, which should've been fine because this was an exchange. Surely they would've kept the passwords in more than one place, right?

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There was one sole holder of the cold storage password. That guy died suddenly. Boom, access to the cold storage crypto horde was immediately lost like it was protected by the dumbest Smaug imaginable. That horde included 26,000 Bitcoins, which are worth... *checks notes* ... a metric shit-ton of money. (It was a Canadian exchange, so we go with the metric unit.)
That's nothing compared to the insanity of Mt. Gox, formerly the trader of 80% of all Bitcoins around the world. It was also revealed to be a giant Ponzi scheme, the preferred scheme of the 21st Century.
Mark Karpeles, the head of the exchange, originally claimed that he 'misplaced' 850,000 Bitcoins but then miraculously recovered 200,000 of them in time to try and convince Japanese regulators that he was on the up-and-up. Of course, being even half-heartedly interested in their jobs, they promptly shut him down. It was a completely unforeseen end to what started as a Magic: The Gathering exchange because history is way, way dumber than we'd like to admit.
Now, if these coins had been held by a bank, a government could step in and make customers whole, especially in the case of such massive fraud. But that's not how this works because, again, crypto doesn't have a government behind it. There's no structure to make people whole for lost crypto.
You could have one, sure, but that would require, you know, a government. The thing crypto is specifically built to circumvent.