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.