The CEO of Binance, Changpeng Zhao has thought that it will be a good idea to suggest rolling back the bitcoin blockchain in order to retrieve the 7000 bitcoins that were stolen from binance recently.
What is Rolling Back the Bitcoin Blockchain:
Rolling back the bitcoin blockchain would basically mean that had a majority of miners actually agreed to this plan, which they have not, but had they, the bitcoin blockchain could be rolled back erasing all transactions between now and the time of the hack and returning the bitcoin back to binance. To be more specific, just those specific transactions which would actually shake the whole cryptocurrency economy to the core if this were to happen.
Conspiracy Theories running in the market:
Conspiracy theories are running wild online about what happened over at Binance with everything starting from This was an inside job, Binance trying to upgrade to Segwit and they made a mistake or a Tether conspiracy connection thing. However, there has not been any confirmation to any of these conspiracy theories yet and the only thing that is suggested yet is to keep calm and relax. Also, the theory regarding Binance trying to upgrade to Segwit has proven to be untrue as in this case the bitcoin would be unspendable and currently the hacker is splitting that 7000 bitcoin into smaller bits.
Binance cannot roll back the bitcoin blockchain:
The Binance CEO really quickly retracted his comments and the idea has been relegated to the dustbin of bad ideas. So it is not going to happen as Binance does not have the power to make this happen. The miners wouldn’t support it and the community is opposed to this idea. However, it did bring up a very interesting point that surprised many people that anything is kind of possible in bitcoin. A block realization in bitcoin is possible and this has come as a surprise to many people who thought that such a thing could actually happen.
Two Roll Backs have happened before!
Back in 2013, when the bitcoin network was upgraded from version 0.7 to version 0.8, a flaw appeared and the miners had rolled it back to the version 0.7 including a few blocks.
Also in 2010, an inflation flaw allowed someone to create 92 billion bitcoin and a rollback was used to fix this problem.
But a big difference here in what the Binance CEO proposed is that these rollbacks were done to fix a dangerous software flaw and not to bail-out a private business that didn’t take care of its security adequately. The community was actually behind these previous decisions and they were actually relatively uncontroversial.
Can Bitcoin Blockchain be Rolled Back Ever?
Yes, it is possible to roll back the bitcoin blockchain if the miners were to collude. Assuming that 51% or more miners were to agree to such a plan. Yet currently, no single mining pool, not even all of the Bitmain affiliated mining pools together can command that kind of power. It would actually take enticing a much wider group of miners to get on board with this, most of who would likely disagree.
If for example, Ant Pool would come out and announce that yes we are going to support a rollback to save the money of Binance, then regular miners who pool mine with them would jump ship to different pools that do not support the rollback. All of the pools would stand to lose huge amounts of money in this situation, from the home miners to the small operation miners who might be more ideologically driven in their bitcoin, leaving their service and going to a service which supports their ideology.
Game theory is holding the network together on a daily basis as miners are supposed to be greedy. They are supposed to be competing for the most bitcoins with all pools acting in their own self-interest i.e. the interest of keeping the chain together and mining more bitcoin. And if such action of rolling back the bitcoin blockchain is done to support the profits of a private company or any other user for that matter, would actually be against their own self-interest as it would erode the faith of the public into bitcoin and would probably drop the price dramatically as well as causing a chain split.
Miners right now are collectively making around $10 million a day or around $8.65 billion a year. So why would they risk all that profit to help Binance recover their $40 million loss? What do you think above the idea of Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance in terms of rolling back the bitcoin blockchain? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below.
