The biggest news around is about Bitfinex been hacked.
If you access www.bitfinex.com you will be greeted by the following message :
" Security breach on Bitfinex
Today we discovered a security breach that requires us to halt all trading on Bitfinex, as well as halt all digital token deposits to and withdrawals from Bitfinex."
It is still unknown how much BTC has been stolen in this hack but it is estimated well over 40Million $ worth of BTC.
This news has triggered very high volatility in the crypto markets , and an obvious question : Will BTC hard fork to erase the hackers ownership on the blockchain ?
The answer is simple : NO
At lest not because of this hack.
Bitcoin will hard fork for a lot of reasons , you can read the news here , but in no way should you think it is because of the Bitfinex hack.
It is not so long ago a very similar event happened , but this time , in the Ethereum world :
A DAO vulnerability made possible for a hacker to successfully drain 120million $ worth of ETH into his control , but he/she had to wait for 30 days to be able to withdraw.
Ethereum's Dev team came up with a plan to hard fork the ethereum chain effectively erasing the ownership of the hacker over all drained ETH just before the 30 days deadline. My post on this here
There is a difference between the ETH hack and the BTC hack :
The hacker who successfully hacked Bitfinex most likely already dumped all of the BTC to erase all traces , it was over 5 minutes after he took control of the hacked BTC.
There was no deadline like in the ETH hack , the hacker assumed immediate control of those alleged 125k Bitcoins.
The only similarity is that both hacks could have been prevented !
The vulnerabilities were exposed weeks before in both cases before ever happening... but that's a story for another post.
I upvoted You
I think we need go all to decentralized exchanges now
good post @cryptoninja
Nice article. Do you think the Bitcoin fork could create a similar controversy to Etherium where a certain faction wants to avoid the fork and stay with the original BTC chain?
The BTC community is much older and way better organized than the much younger ETH community.
I do not think they will let a faction operate a non forked chain.
Remember about a week ago when a guy from the Ethereum community announced he will put all his hash power into a 51% attack against the ETC chain ? It backfired heavily because of lack of support from the rest of the community.
I suspect such a scenario would never happen in the Bitcoin community , thus eradicating any attempt of a faction chain.
Yep, I expect no good news from Bitfinex - no emails from the so far - figure there is no reason to bother them at the moment. Sux for the users and the people who are likely out of a good job. Who is the guy here on Steemit that handles support - nice guy just can't think of his username of the top of my head.
Seams like you had some coins in Bitfinex...
If so , I can feel your pain :/ ... maybe they will re-open shop shortly.
Sorry but I do not know the nice support guy's name :)
Yep, lost 70% of my account a few hours prior anyway so all in all a rough 24 hours!
Sooo sorry to hear that man...
Cryptocurrency world is a different kind of animal and cryptocurrency trading is that animal on steroids , anything can happen unfortunately.
Never never keep your coins on an exchange...ever.
...this gotta make btc and eth owners very nervous. hackernews!!!
Thank you appreciated !
You in the ETH game too ?