Ultimately, stolen cryptocurrency doesn't cause real world damage for real people, it just causes a bad day for people who gamble on questionable speculative investments.

The damage from this hack could have been far worse if it was stealing real money people rely on to feed their kids.

You have the context sort of wrong. To do a comparable “real money” heist en masse, you would be stealing from the banks or from the customers of one, or via debit or credit cards. It’s real enough money, but those fraudulent transactions would be covered by existing protections, like FDIC insurance or chargebacks. I don’t think anyone could steal much cash from a single heist from a bank or other hard target, so your analogy is confusing. There is no analogous situation in which “real money” could be stolen from customers or financial institutions or the interchange system that would impinge end users. That’s the whole reason people use them. Even in friendly fraud situations, the money isn’t gone, it’s just frozen, so you might have to wait a month or so to get it unfrozen after the FBI et al clear the source of funds.

Sure, if someone takes my grocery money, that’s a real loss, and that’s why I don’t carry large sums of cash. But that isn’t what happened here.

Can you explain what you meant so I can understand? I think you had a point, I just don’t think that the risk of the kind of attack in TFA is comparable to someone getting their grocery money stolen, because the financial situation for that individual in-person theft can’t really occur on the same scale as the attack in TFA, and even if it could, that’s kind of on the end user for carrying more cash than they can defend.