Source: TEDAO

Bybit has suffered a $1.5 billion ETH theft, and some people have called on Ethereum to roll back the blockchain to cancel the hack. This incident has become an excellent educational case, explaining why public chains are untampered with ledgers. The essence of this event is not an Ethereum vulnerability, but its core feature - even if one of the largest thefts in human history occurs, it will not be artificially revoked.

Because the irreversibility of blockchain transactions is one of the most powerful trust mechanisms in the world today. This feature ensures the scarcity of native assets issued on Ethereum, such as ETH, and the predictability of smart contracts that underpin key financial activities such as DeFi.

Scarcity and predictability are the cornerstones for building a more resilient, global digital economy. We understand their importance because they are also the basis of the real economy for thousands of years. Without scarcity, there will be no "naturally valuable assets" like gold, but only "value carriers that rely on artificial trust" like fiat currency. Fiatco certainly has its advantages, but almost all fiatcoins that have existed have ended up being worthless, while gold has repeatedly set new highs. Gold follows the laws of nature, while fiat currency follows the rules of man-made. The laws of nature are more constant and reliable.

The laws of nature are also more predictable. This may sound a bit exaggerated, but one of the greatest features of nature is that the laws of physics and chemistry will not change. Hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water, and the gravity acceleration on the earth's surface is 9.8 m/s². Without this predictability, there would be no skyscrapers, planes or iPhones, nor would there be a highly developed civilization and economy.

Now, the economy is accelerating its digitalization. But the digital world faces problems of scarcity and predictability. Data is not scarce by nature, it can be easily copied, tampered, deleted or manipulated. This variability does bring convenience – credit card payments are more convenient than cash, and Google Docs are more friendly than typewriters. But from the perspective of trust building, this is a huge problem. Credit card payments can be freezed or revoked at will, while digital documents (such as important news headlines) can be modified, forged or deleted.

One way is to hand over the digital economy to big companies and hope that they can do the right thing—hope to not overprint money, although there is little cost to do so in the digital age; hope that companies will not discriminate against specific ones Users, review payments (or news) that are not in their interest, or charge high fees, although these actions are both simple and profitable.

Another way is to invent a technology that allows digital assets (whether they are monetary units or information) to possess the characteristics of the physical world, such as scarcity, censorship resistance and predictability. This is exactly what BitcoinAchieved. Bitcoin has become an asset with a market capitalization of $2 trillion and is increasingly accepted at a geographic level, which fully illustrates the value of these characteristics.

Other blockchains, such as Ethereum, extend this capability to a wider range of asset classes and application scenarios. Native cryptocurrencies like ETH, and smart contracts like Aave, offer unprecedented predictability—that is something that nowhere else in the global economy can offer.

The more predictable the financial infrastructure is, the more types of economic activities it can carry. You won't choose a payment method that can be revoked at will to complete a multi-billion dollar deal, just like you won't build skyscrapers on a gravity-abrupt planet.

They can cause bad things to happen to good people and they can't do anything. Gold can be lost or stolen – In fact, some of the gold mined in human history sinks to the bottom of the sea, and now someone is experiencing the loss of jewelry being stolen. The same situation applies to other recognized means of storage of value, such as artworks. But no one has ever said: "The stolen gold cannot be retrieved by calling, which is a fatal flaw." "We shouldn't think of Michelangel's stolen gold." Luo's works are valuable because they are easily damaged. ”

No one will say these words, because it is totally nonsense. Gold is irreplaceable and artworks are vulnerable to damage, which is why they are valuable. We accept their imperfections because those flaws are the premise of value.

However, some smart people, including experts in the crypto industry, are saying similar things to the stolen ETH. They believe Ethereum should roll back the blockchain and revoke the losses caused by this hacker attack because the victims are innocent and the hackers (most likely North Korea) are profiting from it. They also argued that: "If public chains do not have 'revocation' buttons, they will never be adopted on a large scale." The fundamental problem with these views is that they still put blocks The link is regarded as an evolutionary version of the credit card network.

They should change their mindset and no longer regard blockchain as an upgraded version of the credit card network, but as an evolution of the physical world - it combines the advantages of the natural world (scarcity) , predictability) and the advantages of human intelligence (programmability, innovation ability).

Ethereum should not roll back the blockchain.

On the contrary, the occurrence of this hacker attack and the underlying infrastructure will not make any changes to this, which is the most powerful publicity of the value of blockchain - it shows that there should be more in the future Multiple human activities migrate to the chain.

Although Ethereum itself should maintain maximum irreversibility, other assets running on it (such as stablecoins)And related infrastructure (such as Layer-2 network), can have certain reversibility. Skyscrapers still have elevators, and the L2 network can provide "undo" functionality for certain specific scenarios.

But this "undo button" is valuable only if the underlying network is as predictable as gravity.