My understanding of the DAO hack is that Ethereum was hard forked so that those who lost funds could have them retrieved. If the hacked funds were immediately converted to bitcoin, would this still have been possible?
2 Answers
Even if the attacker managed to "withdraw" the funds, the DAO had very special conditions as the money was locked for 35 days. This allowed plenty of time for the Ethereum community to make an educated decision and hard fork the chain before the deadline.
If there was no such lock-up, the attacker wouldn't probably have converted the funds to Bitcoin because it's one of the most public currencies in the world. They would've chosen Zcash, Monero or anything alike.
It's really hypothetical, but it's likely that the hard fork wouldn't have taken place, had the attacker gained access to all the money instantly. The rationale is that this is not a question of "if this would've been possible", but whether the merchants that (possibly unawarely) exchanged ETH to BTC/ ZEC/ XMR etc for the attacker would've accepted a loss - which, due to the political and social nature of the issue, would've created a lot of contentious discussions.
answered Dec 14, 2018 at 16:24
that probably can't happen, since the funds were blocked for 30 days due to Dao ways. Converting to bitcoin is not supported by the ethereum network, so you will have to sell them the old fashion way by exchanging them on a dedicated platform.
Trying to do so will surely spark some manifestation and may get the user to be retaliated against ( even thought that is quite unlikely ). Selling Ethereum in that quantity for bitcoin would be a massive deal and it may not be possible instantly, since no platform would be able to convert all of that ether in an instant( Because it is based on sell and demand and that is not the same as your neighborhood grocery store )
answered Dec 14, 2018 at 16:17
