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Experts Find Mt.Gox Only Lost 386 Bitcoins Due To Transaction Malleability
- sciguy77 13y agoHow can I get in on the class action lawsuit?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- 1ris 13y agoI'm not even sure if there is such a thing in japan. In my perception class action lawsuits always have been a us-anomaly.
- JonFish85 13y agoEven in a best-case scenario, you'll be lucky to get anything at all. Even assuming there is a successful lawsuit, and after all of the assets have been divided up, and after the lawyers have taken their fees, in 10 years maybe you'll end up with $20. Maybe.
- daniel-cussen 13y agoI doubt it. IANAL, but it must depend on how much money you lost.
- gress 13y agoHave you ever been part of a class action?
- daniel-cussen 13y agoI was invited to one last week, actually, but don't know if I'll get involved.
- roel_v 13y agoAgainst whom? From the little I know about this case, it seems MtGox, Inc. (or whatever it's called) will be liquidated once the mess is sorted out.
- anonbanker 13y agoIf you file against MtGox (class-action or otherwise) right now, you could be listed as a creditor in their bankruptcy, and would benefit greatly from said liquidation.
- roel_v 13y agoNot all jurisdictions allow filing against a bankrupt entity, and considering that Japanese law is heavily influenced by German law, I doubt it's possible in Japan. I can't find any easily accessible English language literature on it, though.
- userbinator 13y ago386 - not a round number but a pretty recognisable one nonetheless.
- broolstoryco 13y agoIt is a very rough estimate that mainly serves to give us an idea of the magnitude of possible theft due to TM.
- gizmo686 13y agoI prefer 686 myself. Just as easy to remember, and easier to type when logging in.
- einhverfr 13y agoAnd if they had included floating point processing built-in they could have lost 486 bitcoins..... Now I feel old.
- broolstoryco 13y agoWhile very interesting, the scope of this study is limited by the fact that their data collection only goes back to January 2013, so anything that happened before that was not considered. I don't want to defend Gox, but it is conceivable that they lost significant amounts of BTC prior to this via TM and were just doing business with a deficit of BTC.
- duaneb 13y ago> I don't want to defend Gox, but it is conceivable that they lost significant amounts of BTC prior to this via TM and were just doing business with a deficit of BTC Sure, but it's unlikely given the rate of ~1btc/day and the fact that it wasn't resolved until well after 2013.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- tlrobinson 13y agoHas anyone tried analyzing the actual blockchain for likely malleated (malled?) transactions? Depending on which form of malleability was exploited (see: https://gist.github.com/sipa/8907691 https://gist.github.com/sipa/8907691) it should be fairly easy to separate "normal" transactions generated by "normal" clients and intentionally malleated transactions.
- cpncrunch 13y agoThis seems to suggest that if someone did a thorough audit of MtGox's mess they might be able to figure out where these bitcoins went.
- sillysaurus3 13y agoUnfortunately, Mt. Gox's accounting appears to be nonexistent. For example, they recently revealed that they found 200,000 of the missing bitcoin. I could be wrong, but I don't think anyone analyzing the blockchain had a clue that those particular 200,000 bitcoin were still under Mt. Gox control, let alone traced where any other bitcoin went.
- gnaritas 13y agoI think you're wrong, reddit was tracking those coins and said Gox still controlled them over a week before he announced he'd found them. However I think you're right about accounting being non-existent.
- sillysaurus3 13y agoReally? Hmm, do you have any links I could look at? I thought they'd found some other large quantity of coins, but not the ones that have remained inactive since 2011 (the ones Mt. Gox said they recently found). Thanks for the info!
- gnaritas 13y agoI recall this http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/210s3t/keep_digging_into_gox_we_may_have_prompted_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/210s3t/keep_digging...
- sillysaurus3 13y agoIndeed, I remember similar threads. But the 200,000 BTC that Mt. Gox found has remained inactive and unmoved since 2011. I can't find any Reddit thread that discovered those inactive coins before Mt. Gox did.
- TaylorAlexander 13y agoI don't know much about this, but is it possible that Mt Gox simply stole the bitcoin themselves and blamed it on hackers? I imagine the coin is supposed to be cryptographically protected, but I don't know where users stored their keys. Bitcoin is so new that we all seem to have bought the malleability loss claim, but it could have been a red herring. Disclaimer: That is all speculation, I know nothing about this.
- einrealist 13y agoBefore the 'loss', their bank tried to cancel all contracts. It's more likely that Gox' accounts were frozen along with the deposit boxes (cold storage), due to an investigation. Maybe Gox is under a gag order. So they tried to find an explaination that would not violate that gag order.
- TaylorAlexander 13y agoAh, interesting. Well I look forward to seeing how it pans out. I feel for the people who lost coin. Hopefully we have learned how better to handle cryptocurrency in the future, even if it's learning how little to trust others with it. I'm rooting for decentralized electronic currency, so I hope the lessons learned make it stronger!
- einrealist 13y agoWell, people should treat market places as what they are and not as banks or deposits. It's always the lazies who get bitten. Move coins to your own secure wallet, back it up and be suspicious about everything (your and other's hardware and software, market places). Unfortunately, there is no easy way and never will be. Everything comes with trade-offs. Just pick those with the least risk. I like to see open devices that are built just for managing coins. Bitcoins on your smartphone? Forget it! Maybe, if all the bis players stick their heads together, they can build something, that is certifiable and has nothing more than required on-board, so that it is easier to be kept secure.
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- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lvs 13y agoThat's just a strange logical leap based on essentially no public evidence of any kind.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- SideshowBobb 13y agoOccam's Razor here is that Karpeles stole the money himself. There is a _very_ rich tradition of Bitcoin service operators absconding with customer funds and blaiming "hackers". Inputs.io, Sheep Marketplace, MyBitcoin, Bitcoin Savings & Trust, and that's just off the top of my head. Most of these services were run by sketchy people who had been into Bitcoin from the earliest days when its only use was buying drugs and gambling on Satoshi Dice. There's a clear financial incentive to abscond with customer funds, and the obfuscated and irreversible nature of Bitcoin makes stealing BTC the perfect crime. Mark clearly had the opportunity, motivation, and means to steal. This would also be fully consistent with Bitcoin history. In my view, 90%+ chance Mark stole everything himself. Incompetence or legitimately was stolen from? 8% chance at best. Gag orders? I'll put it at 1%. It just didn't happen.
- aianus 13y agoWhat would have been the point? There's nothing he can buy with $400m in stolen bitcoins that he couldn't have bought with his couple million dollars in legitimate money. A mansion? A plane? 100 cars? How would he get away with it? It seems much much more likely he lost the coins due to incompetence, panicked, and tried to recover them by running a fractional reserve. Then transaction malleability happened, too many people tried to withdraw, and the jig was up.
- gnaritas 13y agoNo evidence of this, fraudsters routinely go quite after being caught; this isn't unusual behavior. There's simply no cause for speculating a gag order.
- RV86 13y agoIt may be inconvenient to keep as much of your holdings in cold storage as possible, but it's much more convenient than assuming the third party service you're using is secure/not a bad actor.
- pistle 13y agoExperts? Conspiracy. Inside job... sigh Popcorn. Bored. Ambivalent. Shadenfreude. Apathy.
- devindotcom 13y agoHow easy/difficult would it be to assemble and analyze the full set of transactions going back to mt gox's start, assuming we know what we're looking for and can just sift through looking for those, as the researchers did?
- olalonde 13y agoThe title is not accurate. Mt.Gox could have lost at most 386 BTC to transaction malleability. From the report's conclusion: " As such, barely 386 bitcoins could have been stolen using malleability attacks from MtGox or from other businesses." In other words, the set of "successful" transaction malleability attacks totalled a sum of 386 BTC among which some may or may not have been targeted at Mt.Gox (impossible to know without knowing Mt.Gox addresses).
- sillysaurus3 13y agoInterestingly, that would also mean Silk Road stole its users' coins. They couldn't have lost 4,400 coins to malleability, which is what they blamed the theft on. http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/02/13/silk-road-2-0-hacked-using-bitcoin-bug-all-its-funds-stolen/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2014/02/13/silk-ro...
- sillysaurus3 13y agoNevermind, I'm mistaken. After reading the paper more carefully, it's saying only 384 coins were involved in successful malleability attacks before Feb 7th (when Mt. Gox stopped withdraws). But between the 7th and the 13th (when Silk Road announced they'd lost their coins), the number of coins involved in malleability attacks increased to almost 300,000 BTC: http://i.imgur.com/H8YVLXO.png http://i.imgur.com/H8YVLXO.png As such, it's entirely possible that SR lost 4,400 coins due to malleability.
- Zarathust 13y agoWhile this doesn't explain MtGox losses, this is still around 200k$ at today's worth, enough to interest a lot of criminals
- jgalt212 13y agoI know this sounds trollish, but why is the tech community so bullish on Bitcoin when theft seems so rampant/easy?