Do you know those times that Amazon is wrong about the price of a product and people go to buy it en masse, even though they are aware that it is a mistake and that they will not receive it and they only do it to try their luck? The same thing happened at a Bitcoin exchange house last week.

For 20 intense minutes, Bitcoin was priced at zero dollars on the Zaif exchange website, a Japanese exchange company that advertises itself in this way:

According to Reuters, it was all due to a mistake that was quickly rectified, but the technicians' speed did not prevent seven savvy customers from trying to buy bitcoins at such an attractive price during the 20-minute window.

Of course, Zaif ended up annulling all transactions, although it had to resolve separately the case of a client who had tried to transfer his cryptocurrencies to a personal address. And it didn't end there.

According to Asahi Shimbun, one of the clients has opened a dispute with the exchange house to recover the bitcoins that had changed. How many did it change? 2200 billion yen, the equivalent of more than 20 billion dollars ($20 billion). An extraordinary but impossible purchase, bearing in mind that Bitcoin's capitalization does not exceed $183 billion.

Thanks to this gentleman, the company behind Zaif exchange, Tech Bureau Corp., is awaiting "an investigation into system security and business practices" from the Japanese Financial Services Agency.

The problem couldn't have come at a worse time for the local cryptoexchange business. The recent attack on the Japanese exchange house Coincheck (which resulted in the loss of more than $400 million in NEM) led two independent industrial groups to form a self-regulatory body to protect investors.

The Japanese yen is by far the most traded national currency in the Bitcoin world, so regulating the business would have a global impact.