3 ms·

I think you are using a very technical definition of "final". Both the purpose and the real-world effect of the fork was to make an apparently final transaction

I think you are using a very technical definition of "final". Both the purpose and the real-world effect of the fork was to make an apparently final transaction no longer final. That it is still "final" in at best a distraction to the general-audience meaning of "final". I estimate the probability of a similar Bitcoin action to be small, but much larger than the "miner gets really, really, really lucky" scenario you propose. Do you disagree?

olalonde 5y ago
I wouldn't say it's just technical. The Ethereum Classic chain, where the transaction lives on, still exists and is now worth ~3x more than it was at the time of the hack. If the hacker kept their ETC (not sure if they did) they would still have 118M$ USD today. And regardless, the probability that any one transaction will be reversed by a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain are vastly smaller. There have been tons of hacks in Bitcoin's history already and no transactions were reversed. Bitcoin doesn't have a clear head. > I estimate the probability of a similar Bitcoin action to be small, but much larger than the "miner gets really, really, really lucky" scenario you propose. Do you disagree? Of course, I agree. That being said, I'd still put the probability in the vanishingly small category, especially for any individual transaction that isn't an exploit, and not worth considering in the context of "finality", as the term is commonly used (and not as patio11 defines it).