Crypto's biggest hack just turned into crypto's biggest ideological brawl, reigniting old battle lines.

$1.4 billion in ETH vanished from Bybit's cold wallet on February 21st, and now everyone's playing the blame game.

The maximalists and the ETH heads are going for each other's throats, and nobody's holding back over whose technology is at fault.

Adam Back Goes Nuclear

Blockstream's Adam Back wasted no time throwing Ethereum under the bus.

"EVM can go to zero, no one cares," he fired off, blaming the "EVM dumpster fire" for hurting the entire crypto ecosystem's credibility.

He's pushing the narrative that EVM's complexity makes it fundamentally unsecurable at a hardware level.

According to Back, the sheer size and complexity of Ethereum's state make proper transaction verification on hardware wallets practically impossible.

The Clap Back

Ethereum defenders aren't taking this lying down.

Hacken's CEO Dyma Budorin pointed out that multisig vulnerabilities aren't exclusive to Ethereum – Bitcoin faces the exact same operational challenges.

Even the most sacred Bitcoin multisig setups remain vulnerable to human error, phishing attacks, and compromise of signing devices.

Global Ledger's Lex Fisun raised an obvious question: if EVM is so flawed, why were Bybit's other ETH wallets completely untouched?

The Facts Of The Matter

To get a better idea of why this is flaring up, let's take another look at what went down at Bybit.

This wasn't a random smart contract exploit but a sophisticated social engineering attack targeting humans.

The hackers pulled off an insane phishing operation, gaining access to internal credentials and bypassing security protocols like they weren't even there.

The malicious transaction was hidden inside what looked like a routine wallet transfer, displaying legitimate addresses and Safe URLs to the multisig signers.

Once approved, the hidden code transferred control to the attackers, who transferred all the assets to a wallet they directly controlled. 

Battle of the Narratives

This hack has become a Rorschach test for everyone's preexisting beliefs about blockchain security.

Bitcoin maxis see it as a vindication of their minimal, conservative approach to blockchain design.

Ethereum supporters view it as an operational security failure that could have happened on any chain.

Meanwhile, Vitalik has maintained radio silence on the accusations, probably knowing that anything he says will just pour gasoline on this dumpster fire.

The Never Ending War

The largest hack in crypto history just proved that technical security is only as strong as human judgment.

No blockchain is immune to social engineering and operational failures – not Bitcoin, not Ethereum, not anything else.

But, as exploitable as humans are, they’re also observant… let’s see these hackers try to figure out how to launder $1.4 billion in marked ETH without winding up in a jail cell