Hackers eventually found a way to downgrade but you would not be able to connect to Xbox live. It did allow you to hack the Xbox and play pirated games and homebrew.
You could connect, you would just instantly be banned because the challenge/response pair didn't match, starting with the bright-white dashboard in Feb of '11.
the discovery of the RGH, reset glitch hack, aided in the reversing the early stages of the bootloader, allowing a small, incredibly talented, incredibly missed individuals to reverse the firmware/NAND challenges and correctly respond to the challenge.
Of course these stories are better off told. It's very interesting from a historical and technological standpoint to document these things before they're lost/forgotten
The internet is a small place, and the "it's just a game" defense didn't prevent 17 year olds from catching federal felony charges then, and it sure wouldn't now, barely out of the 10-year statute of limitations.
Between the statute of limitations now being a farce, and the young gentleman who made it out unscathed legally are now battling employment, credit, and security check issues... maybe the stories of SIM swapping, SWATing, social engineering, doxing, DDoS, bribery, conspiracy, nation-state actors, treason, and other miscellany that plagued our late childhood with paranoid fever dreams....be better off untold, at least until more of us are confirmed retired or safe from petty retribution.
Jack Rhysider (Darknet Diaries guy) has done a bunch of interviews with people in your circumstance- they use pseudonyms and keep certain things vague.
You mention wanting to "correct the record" in an earlier comment- why not DM this guy and tell him what you're telling us? https://twitter.com/JackRhysider
Accounts and online services have added a new dimension to hardware hacking, and it's been interesting to see automation similar to what you're mentioning be heavy handed with little recourse. For example automated anti-cheat systems sending out false-positives and banning people based on their hardware IDs, removing access to digital libraries potentially worth hundreds of dollars, yet support rarely has the tools to help. Guilty according to the code, and no-one to hear your counter-argument.
For now that's an issue for games and online services, but everything is getting digitized. Imagine getting banned from your EV's online services and losing authentication to start your car.
You could connect to Xbox live if you had one of the undetectable modchips with a switch that allowed you to flop between regular and modded firmware. Even with modded firmware you could go on live for a while, even cheat at multiplayer games flying around and stuff until you got banned.
ironically, the modchips were only "undetectable" because MS never thought a KV (the keyvault containing the RSA keypair tied to that mobo serial) would not match the motherboard it ran on.
The first players to use a xenon keyvault on a jasper mobo got away with it for years just because MS overlooked a decent assumption.
