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Comment by zaphirplane | Hacker News Reader

At today’s price that’s … like … err more zeros than I’ve got fingers

I think it's US$21.7 trillion? That's now about 15% of the total global money supply.

So, it's good that the transaction was undone, or 15% of our planet would now be owned by some hacker.

(To be real: if they had not undone the transaction immediately, then the price of Bitcoin would have collapsed, and probably that would have been the end of Bitcoin)

(And maybe that wouldn't have been so bad)

Thanks, for adding the joke that I thought was too boring and obvious to say

>15% of our planet would now be owned by some hacker

why? It's not like btc has anywhere near the trade volume for 15% of global money supply.

>(To be real: if they had not undone the transaction immediately, then the price of Bitcoin would have collapsed, and probably that would have been the end of Bitcoin)

Yes, Bitcoin does not have sufficient trade volume, and it was a joke anyway. Bitcoin would probably not have survived even one more month in 2010, if there were 184 billion new "fake" bitcoins added in the mix.

Even ignoring all the problems about the Bitcoin software being proven to be seriously broken, those 184 billion extra bitcoins meant that every other Bitcoin was suddenly worth about $0.0000000000000001

apologies, the joke went over my head

But I should be more careful when making jokes on this site. Thanks for your comments.

At a certain scale, face value is meaningless and all that matters is liquidity.

$21tn in bitcoin isn't going to get you any more money than $1tn would.

Yup, good point. Another flaw along with software and compute that no one seems to pay attention to. When the Bitcoin bubble pops everyone trying to squeeze through a few transactions is going to identify the actual worth of Bitcoin.

If code is the law, hackers will rule the world

I've never come across this quote. It is useful, thank you!

The price of Bitcoin would be way different if that much of it existed

Quadrillion, not trillion. ~200 billion * ~100 thousand = ~20 quadrillion. So, about 15,000% of the global money supply. (I had to look it up in case BTC actually lost 99.9% of its value and I just missed the news.)

Hackers could have redistributed their coins to the existing wallets in the same ratio their balances were at the time of attack, keeping some coins (say, 1/21) to themselves as a reward. The outcome would've been: the hackers become owners of 1/21 of all bitcoins ever; Satoshi either keeps his 1/21 or is left with 1/184000 (depends on the implementation); everyone else sees their balance increase 20k times overnight. bitcoin/fiat exchange rate drops the same 20k times, so noone has lost any fiat value. Block rewards immediately become essentially worthless; mining becomes 100% fee powered.

Imo not great, not terrible.

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