In theory nothing prevents that but it would be so contentious that the backlash (e.g. 90% drawdown) may be even worse than just letting the hacks stand.

▲

pants2 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The Bitcoin “value overflow incident” on August 15, 2010 is probably the closest thing and that didn't affect the price much (though one BTC was around 8c at the time)

▲

weakened_malloc 8 hours ago | parent [-]

This time you'll have hundreds of billions of BTC that will be hacked by someone who will probably instantly unload it. In that scenario it's hard to see the price of it not dropping >90%, so you'd have to think people would prefer a roll back.

That said, I don't know how you could even do a roll back, you're not rolling back to a 'safe' state since the keys aren't safe at that point.

▲

pants2 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Very good point on the roll-back.

However in terms of the hack, Bitcoin is slow - most exchanges require a few confirmations so it's 30+ minutes to land a deposit in Coinbase/Binance at minimum, and a transfer that huge would instantly set off alarms. Seems unlikely that they would be able to unload that much.

	▲	wmf 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Coinbase would definitely go into buy-only mode during a major crash but that just means people would scream while they watch futures/perps go to zero. "If you're first out the door, that's not called panicking."

▲

glerk 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Letting the hack stand means the chain comes to a halt and all value is destroyed? Even if you’re a staunch bitcoin purist, I don’t think that’s the path you want to go on.

	▲	wmf 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The chain wouldn't halt because mining won't be affected by quantum. If you see hacks happening you could race to move your coins into a PQ wallet before the hackers do. I'm assuming that PQ software will be available before the hacks. I agree that this is a very bad scenario.