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.

Thank you to our sponsor!

CipherTrace: http://ciphertrace.com/unconfirmed

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