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Comment by mckirk | Hacker News Reader

The major blockchains are basically billion-dollar bug bounty programs. If they were hackable that easily, we'd probably know already.

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That depends on the hack. If the hack is something that is traceable to you then the hack becomes fraud and the police will be at your door. This assumes that the likes of Russia and North Korea have decided that there is more value in bitcoin remaining operational than the one time haul of money they can get from the fraud (which to be fair seems unlikely since it is prisoners dilemma where the defector chooses the final round)

North Korea recently executed what I believe is the largest known theft in history, $1.5 billion in ETH stolen from the ByBit exchange. It was easily traceable to a state-run North Korean hacking group. No police at the door, and ETH only had a temporary dip.

I'd think that if NK was sitting on a $1-10 billion Bitcoin bug, they'd execute it too before it got fixed or exploited by someone else.

> If the hack is something that is traceable to you then the hack becomes fraud and the police will be at your door.

That would be somewhat ironic, given the "code is law" mentality of many blockchain proponents.

I don't doubt that many people would file police reports and lawsuits if any fundamental paradigm of blockchain cryptography were to suddenly be revealed as insecure, but I'd be following the lawsuits with a big bowl of popcorn.

I dislike bitcoin, but you gotta admit that that's a rather clever aspect of it: Anybody with the power to destroy it is better off participating in it instead.

We'll need to find our way out of that logic eventually. Scarcity in general and proof of work in particular are terrible bases for an economy. But it is a respectable foe.

it is a prisoner dilemma where the defector controls when the final round is. If you know of a flaw you can win more long term by not exploiting it - but if someone else exploits it bitcoin becomes worthless. Thus if you know of a flaw there is pressure to exploit it first before someone else gets the benifits of defecting and ends the game

It depends on the flaw, for most of the attack surface that bitcoin has, your "flaw" is just an unfair advantage against the other miners, which you'll likely keep secret and keep on mining. That's not exactly a "bitcoin becomes worthless" scenario, it's not really that different from a halving, which are block-height-scheduled events built into the protocol.

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