Source: TEDAO

Bybit encountered a $1.5 billion ETH theft case, and some have called for Ethereum to roll back the blockchain to undo this hacker attack. This event has become an excellent educational case, demonstrating why public blockchains are immutable ledgers. The essence of this event is not a vulnerability in Ethereum, but its core feature - even if one of the largest thefts in human history occurs, it will not be manually reversed.

Why?

Because the irreversibility of blockchain transactions is one of the most powerful trust mechanisms in the world today. This feature ensures the scarcity of native assets (such as ETH) issued on Ethereum, and the predictability of the smart contracts that underpin critical financial activities like DeFi.

Scarcity and predictability are the foundation for building a more resilient, globalized digital economy. We understand their importance because they have also been the foundation of the physical economy for millennia. Without scarcity, there would be no "naturally valuable assets" like gold, only "value carriers dependent on human trust" like fiat currency. Fiat currency certainly has its advantages, but almost all fiat currencies that have ever existed have ultimately become worthless, while gold has repeatedly set new highs. Gold follows natural laws, while fiat follows man-made rules. Natural laws are more constant and reliable.

Natural laws are also more predictable. This may sound a bit exaggerated, but one of the greatest features of nature is that the laws of physics and chemistry do not change. Hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water, the gravitational acceleration on the Earth's surface is 9.8 m/s². Without this predictability, there would be no skyscrapers, airplanes or iPhones, nor would there be a highly developed civilization and economy.

Today, the economy is rapidly digitalizing. But the digital world faces issues of scarcity and predictability. Data is not inherently scarce, it can be easily copied, tampered with, deleted or manipulated. This mutability does bring conveniences - credit card payments are more convenient than cash, Google Docs are more user-friendly than typewriters. But from the perspective of building trust, this is a huge problem. Credit card payments can be arbitrarily frozen or reversed, and digital documents (such as important news headlines) can be edited, forged or deleted.

So, how to solve this problem?

One way is to entrust the digital economy to large companies and governments, and hope they will do the right thing - hope the government won't over-print money, even though in the digital age this has almost no cost; hope companies won't
discriminate against specific users, censor payments (or news) that don't align with their interests, or charge exorbitant fees, even though these behaviors are both simple and profitable.

Another way is to invent a technology that gives digital assets (whether currency units or information) the properties of the physical world, such as scarcity, censorship resistance and predictability. This is what Bitcoin (BTC) has achieved. Bitcoin has now become a $2 trillion asset and is increasingly accepted at the geopolitical level, fully demonstrating the value of these properties.

Other blockchains, such as Ethereum (ETH), have extended this capability to a wider range of asset classes and use cases. Native cryptocurrencies like ETH, and smart contracts like Aave, provide an unprecedented level of predictability - something that is not available elsewhere in the global economy.

The more predictable the financial infrastructure, the more economic activities it can support. You wouldn't choose a reversible payment method to complete a multi-billion dollar transaction, just as you wouldn't build a skyscraper on a planet with unstable gravity.

Key point: Scarcity and predictability do have downsides

They may lead to bad things happening to good people, with no recourse. Gold can be lost or stolen - in fact, some of the gold mined throughout human history lies at the bottom of the sea, and people are now experiencing the loss of stolen jewelry. The same applies to other recognized stores of value, such as art. But no one says:

"The stolen gold cannot be retrieved with a phone call, this is a fatal flaw."

"We should not consider Michelangelo's works valuable, because they are so easily damaged."

No one would say these things, because they are completely absurd. Gold is irreplaceable, art is fragile, and this is precisely why they have value. We accept their imperfections because those flaws are the premise of their value.

However, now some clever people, including experts in the crypto industry, are making similar statements about the stolen ETH. They believe that Ethereum should roll back the blockchain and undo the losses from this hacker attack, because the victims are innocent, and the hackers (likely North Korean) are profiting from it. They also argue:

"If public blockchains don't have a 'undo' button, they can never be widely adopted."

The fundamental problem with these views is that: they still see blockchains as an evolved version of credit card networks.

Theyshould change their mindset, no longer treating Bit as anupgraded version of credit card networks, but seeing it asan evolution of the physical world—— it combinesthe advantages of the natural world (scarcity, predictability)andthe advantages of human intelligence (programmability, innovation).

Ethereum should not roll back the Bit chain.

On the contrary, the occurrence of this hacker attack, and the fact that the underlying infrastructure layerwill not make any modifications to it, is the most powerful propaganda for the value of Bit chain—— it shows that in the future, there should bemore human activities migrated to the chain.

Irreversibility ≠ Lack of Flexibility

Although Ethereum itself should maintainthe highest degree of irreversibility, theother assets (such as stablecoins) running on itas well asrelated infrastructure (such as Layer-2 networks), can have a certain degree of reversibility.
Skyscrapers still have elevators, and L2 networks can provide "undo" functionality for certain specific scenarios.

Butthis "undo button" only has value when the underlying network is as predictable as gravity.