Nothing, core devs can't do rollback/reorg on the blockchain, only miners can, rollbacks are super expensive (usually cost more than whatever benefit you get from it) and miners who invest their hard-earned money in the space won't even risk going that route, Binance lost 7000 BTC (worth 40M $ at that time) and they didn't get away with a tweet that mentioned the word rollback, let alone trying to actually push that.



That won't be possible, the majority of BTC is already in the hands of the people, what's left of it or what those large corps can buy will likely never make a majority, if that happens it means they must spend unrealistic amount of money to acquire them, and if they do -- they would be very careful when attempting anything that might hurt bitcoin and thus hurt their pockets.

IMO, we should not fear those who have skin in the game, people are always worried about miners doing some nasty shit to BTC which is a stupid assumption given that miners have the most skin in the game, others are worried about core devs (many people already claim core devs are controlled by Blockstream "or is it someone else today"?, to me, all of these entities have skin in the game and have more to lose than to gain if they decide to do anything stupid, if there is anyone we should fear would be those old farts in the government.

Unless those developer willing to lose their reputation on Bitcoin community, they won't participate on such campaign.


I expect we'll see another community split where new forked coin is created. Although looking at ETH and ETC split, we can't be fully sure Bitcoin which doesn't implement rollback or other major change could remain most popular coin.

I should have said miners and developers. Of course you need the hashrate too, but that can be bought. If ETF-BTC can promise higher valuations, miners may follow, since they are economic actors that seek profit. If the majority of economic activity is happening on ETF-BTC, they may get more from the fees in there. As far as developers, we have developers fucking with our money in the form of Ordinals already. They could also buy people like Elon Musk type PR to pump their hardfork. They could also buy lobbysts to pass laws that outlaw non ETF-BTC for enabling money laundering or whatever. Im sure that's their long term goal with all of this actually. Does anyone seriously think they have approved ETF's if they don't think they can use it to control BTC? Their motto has been "We'll tame Bitcoin" for years now. This is all part of the plan. The question is, if community of actual BTC holders will fall for it. At the end of the day, in any hardfork both sides get shares of each token, so we'll see who dumps on who.

There is one big difference here. Nobody thinks Ethereum is decentralized to begin with. Sure, when they hardforked, Ethereum Classic was born, but who gives a damn about Ethereum Classic?

Ethereum is a premined, centrally controlled cryptocurrency, which is now even worse with their Proof-of-Stake model, operated by Vitalik and his rich friends. Apples and oranges with bitcoin.

The big problem is as the mainstream (voters) get into BTC through ETF and other user friendly products, that means potential voters losing money that turn into pissed off costumers at BTC, which start demanding changes on the code. Politicians will do whatever it takes to collect ballots, so if there is a big movement of angry people that want to change the BTC protocol for whatever reasons, that's something to consider.

There may also be a big chunk of the population mad to see others getting rich from BTC, and start demanding that mining is banned and whatnot. Consider that people like AOC could become presidents in the future. If they get a real chance to ban mining, they will try.

BTC should wake up from this ETF euphoria one day and realize it is an adversarial asset in nature, and must be ready for that.

They will not be able to force the "world" to change the protocol just because people in some country got angry after missing out and some politicians in that country wanted to do some crap. Bitcoin is too global for that.

You are right for being worried about ETF, but I'd be more worried about market manipulation and how centralization is slowly infesting the Bitcoin world. ETF is just one of the small signs of it. Not to mention that I'm more worried about some form of fractional banking starting in this world (ie. when the centralized authority that holds the funds only has a small fraction of what they are giving people). They could easily end up selling 42 million bitcoin to idiots who buy their centralized IOUs (in case it isn't obvious bitcoin supply cap is 21 million).

Actually I think the scenario described in the OP is perfectly possible if enough custodial Bitcoin services (ETF companies, exchanges etc.) collude and the community is so indifferent towards Bitcoin's original "values" that it accepts it.

Developers on a payroll can be an element in such an "attack". Not because of the needed skills for the code changes, e.g. to roll back a transaction (I think that even I could do that, even with VERY limited C++ knowledge), but because of the influence of renowned devs like the current Core group on public opinion in the community. We've seen that already in the block size debate. I think if most Core developers hadn't taken such a strong stance for Segwit and a restrictive block size policy, then the current "Bitcoin" could actually be BCash or even BSV (which in my opinion would have been a much worse outcome).

Miners will follow the chain where they believe the value "is at" - if there are several options, they'd chose the one they think the community as a whole would pay more money (or other values) for a coin. Here, colluding services providers could be a big problem, not only because they directly demand Bitcoins, but also because they have also influence over the community's "collective opinion", above all over the more indifferent part of the Bitcoin users - those who only want to invest in Bitcoin and don't care that much about the deeper qualities like immutability.

However, if there are enough influencial voices in the community insisting exactly on these "deeper" qualities, then I believe the "attack" would fail, like BCash failed.

Care to elaborate how an ETF helps on adoption? To me it rather seems as a tool for investors to not care about custody and regulation. It's just a little better than Binance's BTC IOU.

You make it sound worse than it should. If corporations manage to persuade Bitcoin Core developers to adopt a specific roadmap, they would likely succeed in convincing the broader community of its merit. In the event that Core developers receive compensation for a hardfork, they would need to persuade others to embrace the fork, not just themselves.

Some Bitcoin Core devs are already on payrolls of Bitcoin service providers (Blockstream being probably the most well-known example). When we talk about developer influence on the public opinion in the community, then quality -- i.e. that these devs are "respected voices" -- is also more important than quantity. I believe from the current Bitcoin Core team nobody would agree to a rollback. But it's perfectly possible that a group of new developers in the coming years gain influence who don't consider immutability as that important anymore. If some of these devs are perceived as "the voice of Bitcoin", like people like Greg Maxwell today, then a handful of them could be actually quite dangerous.

Just to be clear: I don't consider such an attack likely, only possible. I think there's a high likelihood that we'll never see such an attack. But the community should be aware of the danger (see also my answer to HeRetiK below).

There isn't such a "number" or "limit". All decentralized systems can eventually degenerate. Bitcoin has however fortunately a quite good balance between powers, so the probability of a successful attack is much lower than it was in Ethereum where the rollback finally occured quite fastly.

I agree, fortunately in the present and probably in the coming years such an attack seems highly unlikely.

I think however that this may change in the future if certain developments materialize, like a growing dependance on centralized providers (be it ETF operators or our good ol' exchanges, doesn't matter) and possibly if the connection to the cypherpunk movement and other groups which were essential for highlighting and defending Bitcoin's qualities like censorship resistance is lost. Thus the community should be aware of these dangers.

There's an (imo erroneous) belief that Bitcoin due to its current qualities, or software-related characteristics, is completely immune to such attacks. Bitcoin is a social system, and thus can be deeply changed and harmed if changes in the social composition of the community and its "values" change the way people perceive what Bitcoin should be. The Overton window thus could change in the future. I honestly was myself a bit shocked as a highly respected member of the German subforum once wrote here that he considers a rollback scenario quite likely (I hope he was wrong there).

In general I'm optimistic though.

Agree. For this reason, in my posts before I clarified that there has something more to happen for this attack to succeed: the community becoming indifferent about the "values" of Bitcoin. And then, if the "top influencer club" moves slowly away from Bitcoin's original values it could become an attack vector.

Isn't really what I wrote about. I believe the Blockstream-Bitcoin model (paying devs to maintain an open-source software project essential to the company's business model) is similar to the Google-Linux model for example and thus completely legit. I only mentioned it because it shows that a company can definitely afford to pay high-profile Bitcoin devs - the "top influencer club". And I wanted to emphasize that if something similar happens with a company with values not entirely compatible with Bitcoin's, and additionally the community not caring about these values anymore (because all they want is BTC going to moon ...) then it could become dangerous.

With your last sentence I agree though.