Binance Hack: Should the Threat of Reorgs Be Used to Deter Hackers? - Ep.072

Tushar Jain of Multicoin Capital discusses how hackers likely obtained $40 million worth of Bitcoin in a hack on Binance, how the leading crypto exchange could have incentivized miners to reorganize the blocks, and what the possibility says about the game theory of Bitcoin. We talk about why Binance ultimately decided against trying to go this route, and whether or not exchanges should, in the future, try to use reorgs immediately after exchange hacks in order to both undo the hack as well as deter future hackers. Plus, we discuss how this idea would have differed from the Ethereum hard fork after the DAO and whether or not this suggests that fast finality is preferable to probabilistic finality.
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Episode links:
Tushar Jain: https://twitter.com/tusharjain_?lang=en
Multicoin Capital: https://multicoin.capital
Binance's announcement about the hack: https://binance.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/360028031711
Bitcoin core contributor Jeremy Rubin's suggestion to attempt the reorg: https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin/status/1125919526485254144
CZ's Periscope AMA after the hack: https://twitter.com/binance/status/1125959459782553600
CZ's decision not to do the reorg: https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1125996194734399488
CZ tweeting about the controversy that resulted: https://twitter.com/cz_binance/status/1126088279261007875?s=20
Jeremy's statement after the controversy over his suggestion of a reorg: https://twitter.com/JeremyRubin/status/1126391126619971585?s=20