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Comment by uncoder0 | Hacker News Reader

I was there. Someone would post the code for the hard fork and most miners would switch to the chain without the bug. A chain that has infinite bitcoins on it is worthless... Just as it happened back then. I switched over as soon as I read the thread about it and saw the chatter on irc.

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I understand that most people probably would switch. I’m actually looking it this from a different perspective: would Bitcoin be able to regain trust? A large hack might kill Bitcoin if everyone decides that they don’t trust Bitcoin’s security.

I think it depends how it goes. Some people might gain trust if the community could move swiftly to fix the problem

Yes. The trust is not in the code, it’s in the hash power.

From a normal investor’s standpoint, the hash power is an implementation detail. Trust has to be in the integrity of the blockchain.

Maybe that investor shouldn’t invest in bitcoin or Proof of Work based chains.

These systems are nothing like PayPal and Venmo and investing in ignorance is just asking for losses.

I agree; nobody should be considering cryptocurrencies an investment. That’s not the message coming from most Bitcoin enthusiasts, though.

The really huge problem would be if the digital signatures would have a weakness. I believe all the other parts of the protocol are simple enough to fix, but there's no mathematical guarantee that the discrete log problem in the Bitcoin elliptic curve is algorithmically hard, we just think it is, because it has the test of time.

It's an interesting question but I'm fairly sure that after ten years Bitcoin has matured enough that all possible exploitation vectors have been tested.

In theory though this would definitely cause some chaos if something like this happened today, I don't know if it's enough to kill bitcoin but it would certainly drop the price. Most people only interact with bitcoin in a very abstract way through exchanges and don't understand enough of the details to care. If the exchange switched to the proper chain and everything appeared to be fine to the end user I don't think you'd see too many long term problems.

But what if the transaction had gone unnoticed for a year? What would you have rolled back? The created bitcoins would have spread all over the ledger.

The hacker should also have distributed a fraction of the newly created BTC to all known wallets. Would incentivize BTC users strongly to stay on the existing blockchain.

Its abundance renders it completely worthless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation is what you get.

  […]
  In short, whoever you may be,
  To this conclusion you’ll agree,
  When everyone is somebodee,
  Then no one’s anybody!

– W. S. Gilbert

It isn't really possible for something like that to go unnoticed.

Any time anyone at all makes a big transaction, there are a bunch of posts about it on Reddit and Twitter, because everyone is watching all the time, and Bitcoin is easily auditable.

But! There are some coins that focus more on privacy, such as ZCash. And those coins are indeed vulnerable yo this situation. Maybe there is a secret transaction, that has already happened that massively increases supply. The coins can't be audited, so they are there.

This problem does not exist in auditable Blockchains though.

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