I am a senior member in this bitcointalk forum, but I want to remain anonymous.
I noticed Vericoin discussion when go to Altcoin ANN, and here is some of my insight:
First, a few questions:
1. Did mintpal really lost Vericoin, because of being hacked?
After reading their official announcement, the information is rather vague. Is there a possibility that coins are withdrawn by some big bagholders? Is there possibility that coins are sold by Mintpal (or its personnel) to other people and then they want to reverse the transaction while not paying the money back?
2. Vericoin was hacked, while other coins, including Bitcoin, was intact. Is it because the problem of Vericoin blockchain, or because of the safety hazard in Mintpal?
3. Vericoin group decided to roll-back the blockchain, is this a result after a deliberate consideration, or not?
4. If a small Altcoin-Bitcoin exchange site get compromised, will the Vericoin team do the same thing to roll back?
Then a few insights:
Cryptocurrency is created to be de-centralized. By reversing some transactions through the intervention of development team, it goes against its initial objective.
Cryptocurrency is created to be not regulated by authorities, such as countries. What happened to Vericoin today goes against this objective, because it is controlled by an exchange site. Suppose someday a country authority send request to the Vericoin development team about some Vericoin is held by some bad guys and the authority request a hard fork to remove those Vericoins, or send those coins to the country authority, based on what happened, I doubt the team will say no.
my two satoshi
As stated before, there are 3 choices here.
1. Do nothing and let it play out as it plays out.
Vericoin could die. Price could crash if hacker sells and then rebound. Hacker could keep the coin and stake or attempt a majority attack.
Mintpal could die. Customers will expect to be reimbursed.
If either survives it will be because they deserve to.
2. Fork the blockchain to block the stolen coins and effectively destroy them.
Vericoin will survive. Hacker has no coins. No threat to system. Coin amount reduced, value goes up.
Mintpal customers lose, this is Mintpal and the hackers fault. Mintpal needs to reimburse.
Mintpal could die.
3. Roll back the blockchain to before the theft.
This seems to be the plan at the moment.
Mintpal bailed out. Customers happy in the short term.
Long term consequences? This is effectively a charge back and a bailout of a central authority that messed up.
It is not their fault they got hacked but just like it is never your fault if you get robbed. It is the criminals fault.
But if you are an exchange that advertises security and deals with other peoples money then you are accountable.
nvminer: I don't think there is much rational discussion going on in this thread at the moment.
There are a few who are posting their concern for what this means in the light of what cryptos mean to them.
There are a few who are concerned about their private investments and trying to keep the hype and spin up by silencing what they think is FUD.
The problem is they don't see that it could also be investors who see this from a different angle in longer term game and are actually trying to protect the infrastructure.
We have not had a discussion from the dev team, just and update on their plans.
I have a lot of sympathy for them and I'm glad I'm not in their shoes.
If you were dev, how do you think you would handle this?
Personally I think I would probably capitulate and make a blockchain change but go with option 2 as mentioned above.
