Nick Szabo  🔑

I was assuming that already, but he can't replay coinbase transactions. These coins and their ancestors will definitely be destroyed, causing havoc in the network.

those can only be spend 100 blocks after mined. So for a 200 block reorg we are talking about 100*12.5 = 1250 BTC ~$12.500.000 I am aware that IN THEORY those missing UTXOs can block an unlimited amount of total tx. In practice this seems unlikely.

So you think Bitcoin nodes would accept a reorg more than a couple days deep? The recent Binance incident implies otherwise. There was immediate support, incl. from core devs, to reject that reorg which wasn't even a day deep and not coming from a hostile entity.

At this point one is relying on trusted third parties rather than the protocol. A dangerous thing to do, it cuts into Bitcoin's value prop. Frequent de-reorgs provide another, even easier vector of attack.

Nick, I know you've been away from Twitter for a few months but did you hear about the Binance hack and their idea to bribe miners to take these funds instead (a "scorched earth policy" to reject future theft)? What are your thoughts on that?

It wasn’t “their idea” and it was knocked down because it was irresponsible to encourage a stressed out CEO to run a $100B experiment with no research

I agree that it was bad advice, but that's beside the point. You can either think that Bitcoin can (and should) manually reject reorgs of a certain depth, or you can think that reorgs shouldn't be rejected, in which case the good guys can also use them - but probably not both.

In case it's not clear I support rejecting deep reorgs and allowing more shallow reorgs (and re-reorgs). What's allowed and what isn't is for the social layer to decide (because *technically*, all reorgs of all colors are allowed.)