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Comment by niahmiah | Hacker News Reader

Let me guess... another hard fork to undo this.

I know this is a joke, but what would prevent the thief from attaching high transaction costs to the withdrawal of ETH from the target wallets? Say they place 50% of the value into the transaction costs - miners would assume a healthy profit off of the theft and it wouldn't be beneficial for them to rollback the chain.

Takes longer for such a change to propagate than for the miner to just move his coins. Unless you implement it as some kind of history tracking for wallets, but then the hacker can just send a tiny transaction to literlaly every wallet around, and everone's paying the 50% cost.

A hypothetical hacker could robin hood easily then.. only steal coins from wallets with massive amounts, and "give them away" to miners via transaction costs

> Let me guess... another hard fork to undo this.

Nah, Vitalik is not affected by the bug this time. You only hard fork, when your money are stolen.

The same old tired snark, in every single Ethereum-related story.

But it's true. If "code is law" is your key feature you don't simply undo a "code is law" decision and gain investors trust.

You prefer a hard spoon? ...it'll hurt more

Hard fork can't even undo this, from my understanding.

I'm pretty sure a hard fork can undo anything on the block chain. You can start over from the block before the hack. There's probably a cleaner solution than that though.

The problem is, how do you reassign the funds after the hardfork? The funds are attached to addresses and not persons.

You can revert the funds to the address that paid into the contract in the first place, since transactions are public.

That wouldn't move the money to their rightful owner but to the previous owner.

I don't think that's correct. If you only revert the stolen money transactions and all the branches of them since, almost nobody loses. The few stolen ETH that got sold will be a loss, but it's nothing compared to $35M.

And you'll revert them to what? the buggy contract?

It's a hard fork. The contract would be fixed. But you could also send the victim's money anywhere, just ask the victim where they want it, there are only 3 major ones.

Start at block n-1, disable the buggy contract, leave the "stolen" funds where they were.

They were in the contract (or the contract addresses).

Why wouldn't hard fork be able to undo this transaction?

Piecing together the comments up thread: there was apparently a unique twist to the infamous DAO hard-fork which allowed someone to steal the funds but not withdraw them (ie, transfer them to an exchange and get dollars out), so they were able to undo the transaction.

There was no such twist this time around which means the funds could already have been transferred to an exchange and withdrawn as dollars or BTC. You can only undo the ETH part of the transaction, which would take money away from the exchange (or from people who have since bought the stolen coins from the exchange unknowningly) and give it back to the victim. That's a lot less palatable than taking the money from the thief, so it's unlikely to happen.

> Hard fork can't even undo this, from my understanding.

This is completely incorrect.

A hard fork can undo anything, it's just backing up before this happened and continuing down another path as if it didn't.

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