It is not uncommon, which is why any crypto believer will still slightly contradict their own confidence in the industry and tell anyone to never leave their coins on an exchange. 

It would be foolhardy though to believe this sort of complacency and incompetency in crypto exchange operations is unique to crypto. Shall we talk about a certain, highly regulated and 'above the board', industry that took a billions of D grade home loans, pooled them together and then sold them as a bundle that was magically AAA rated because all of a sudden it was diversified... look how that turned out :)

Funny thing is, even though I am and come across as a proponent of crypto, to be honest i have no idea what its utility will be in the future. I genuinely believe there will be one, I just don't know what. It feels like Bitcoin is like gold - its shiny, has some industrial use but is kept mostly for the bling factor, but the real power horse is iron - cheap, versatile and universally used. What the crypto version of iron will be.. time will tell.

Wow... my above example about the home loan calamity that kicked off the GFC - you'd think they would have learnt?

Apparently not:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mortgage-market-reopens-to-risky-borrowers-11566379802

As a complete noob to crypto - the only real use I can see in it is that you can trade commodities / shares or futures type of stock exchange transactions - and being so volatile it has the opportunity to make a decent profit quickly (or die a horrible death) .

That seems to be a meta-crypto transaction as you are betting on the value without owning them. Have I got this right?

What puts me off is the inability to use it for real things but seeing the debit card post a few before am now wondering if I was wrong to ignore it.

I wouldn't sell my kids to buy some but if had a few dollars spare then speculation might be an option especially if it can be traded for coffee.

Futures trading was supposed to work as a force to reduce volatility and to facilitate reduced risk exposure/hedging.

Of course much of it turned into a casino, even when something that had some intrinsic value was being traded.  Because,  Human nature.

But creating a casino that's going to be used to gamble on the future of a virtual casino's tokens.  Good luck.

A much better article. As I said, the IRD did not say companies can pay in cryptocoins. What they said is that there are tax implications, regardless of how people are paid.