Hold onto your hats, folks! Crypto exchange Bybit reportedly got hit by a hefty hack on Friday. Rumor has it that the notorious North Korean Lazarus group is to blame, and they allegedly made off with a staggering $1.4 billion in ether (ETH).

In the aftermath of this massive theft, Arthur Hayes, you know, the co-founder of BitMEX and self-proclaimed ETH whale, jumped onto X (formerly Twitter). He fired off a tweet directly at Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder. Hayes essentially asked if Vitalik would consider “rolling back the chain” to bail out Bybit. Meanwhile, Bybit’s own CEO, Ben Zhou, chimed in during an X Spaces chat. He mentioned his team had also contacted the Ethereum Foundation to explore this rollback idea, but stressed that any such move would hinge on what the Ethereum community actually wants.

Hayes’s tweetstorm immediately ignited a firestorm of reactions from the Ethereum crowd. Let’s just say they were not thrilled about the rollback suggestion. The overwhelming consensus? Absolutely not happening. Some even wondered if Hayes was just pulling everyone’s leg! CoinDesk, ever on the case, reached out to Hayes via X to get some clarity on his comments.

The Ethereum community, especially the core developers, are staunchly against this “rollback” idea. Why? Because it would violate the very core principles of decentralization. Imagine Buterin single-handedly deciding to rewind the blockchain – that would be seen as a major blow to Ethereum’s whole philosophy. Ethereum prides itself on being a collaborative effort, with numerous developer teams and community members involved in maintaining the health and direction of the blockchain.

As user @the_weso put it succinctly in an X post, “Rolling back the chain would give ETH no purpose. What’s the point if you can just change rules?” It’s a pretty fundamental question.

Stepping outside the immediate Ethereum echo chamber, some observers pointed back to the infamous 2016 DAO hack. Remember that one? Around $60 million in ETH was stolen back then. Ethereum’s response wasn’t a rollback, but a hard fork. They essentially split the original network in two, and the new branch continued as the Ethereum we know today.

It’s crucial to understand that the DAO hard fork wasn’t a “rollback.” It was a more complex maneuver known as an “irregular state transition.” Technically, Ethereum can’t just “roll back” in the traditional sense because of how its account model works – individual accounts hold users’ ETH.

Back during the DAO incident, developers tackled the crisis by upgrading their nodes with new software. Those who didn’t upgrade remained on the original, pre-fork chain, which eventually became known as Ethereum Classic.

When the majority upgraded to the new software, it allowed for the movement of the stolen ETH out of the original problematic smart contract address.

To break it down simply, Laura Shin from Unchained clarified it in an X post this way: “The ‘irregular state change’ implemented during the DAO hard fork was like this: they essentially airdropped all the ETH stuck in the DAO smart contracts into a refund contract. Users could then redeem 1 ETH for every 100 DAO tokens they sent in.”