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Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider

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Re: Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider

#151

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> occasionally I multiply my Mt Gox holdings by the current price of Bitcoin and imagine how life could be I often have flashbacks to that one tweet I saw many many years ago saying „Bitcoin reaches USD parity“. I was considering investing a thousand bucks at that time, just for fun. I would be 37 million dollars rich today! Who am I kidding. What would have actually happened is I would have sold everything once my m…

Cryptopia was hacked a year or two ago. I had a diversified portfolio if shitcoins, but no idea which. They starting the legal process soon so I might be millionaire soon

Dogecoin is fucking killing it...don't ask me or my discarded hard drive during a health crisis how I know.

Re: Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider

#152
post #147

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect I was reminded of this recently by a fursuit company issuing a C&D over an accusation most people had forgotten about, for a tweet that was almost half a year old at that point. 24 hours later, the tweet from the target of the C&D has over 7000 retweets and the response from the company has almost 1400 quote retweets yelling at them. Many of the angry responses have as m…

Link?

I forgot to link it.

https://twitter.com/qutens_/status/1357496129659707392

Re: Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider

#153

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I didn't initially, but if you're reading that far in the comments I guess it can't be avoided. People need to know what CoinLab is trying to do.

> I didn't initially, but if you're reading that far in the comments I guess it can't be avoided. People need to know what CoinLab is trying to do. Mark, for all the controversy surrounding your case and the obscene level of malice in the Japanese court system, reflected in its conviction rate, do you think there will ever be a way for you to tell your side of the story at length? Like a series of long format podcast…

> The crazy thing is how much deeper it all goes and certainly has all the elements of a series of movies (at least a trilogy) if someone wanted to make it a script: DPR/Ross Silk Road case, those 2 Feds who stole the BTC, BTC-e seizure, Alexander Vinnik arrest in Greece alleging to be behind the MTGOX hack(s), variety Jones's arrest in Thailand. Not to mention guys like Gonzog, or Ver...

As someone who is only loosely aware of the story, is there a good place to learn more (I'm pretty sure I could spend countless nights researching this, I'm hoping for something like a detailed article or a particularly insightful forum post)? And I realize part of the issue is the story hasn't been told yet, but you still know a lot more than I do.

Re: Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider

#154
post #23

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That's a very different subject, I don't see any overlap

Mt Gox was responsible for the first bitcoin bubble. Tether has been responsible for multiple bitcoin bubbles now, using their crypto that was supposedly backed by the USD 1 to 1. The rationale for pumping bitcoin is the same: to recoup stolen money. Look at the money inflow graph. Tether surpasses everything else https://coinlib.io/coin/BTC/Bitcoin

There have been many bubbles before Mt Gox and there have been many after.

> Tether has been responsible for multiple bitcoin bubbles now

No one in the space actually believes this.

Re: Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider

#155
post #84

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There are decentralized cryptocurrencies that have achieved low volatility, such as DAI. I don't think it's ever gotten more than a couple percent from its $1 target price since being created. (I assume it almost never gets talked about because there's no profit from investing in it and hyping it to others.)

DAI is tied directly to the dollar. In what way is it better than a simple bank account for storing value? The idea behind gold, silver, property, etc as value stores is that they remain valuable regardless of what the currency does. If your value store is the currency itself you might as well just hold the currency.

You get the other benefits of cryptocurrencies: direct control and the ability to store or send it online with no middlemen or custodial risk.

Re: Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider

#156
post #56
post #37

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It may be a matter of demographics. Slashdot had the same effect with other new technology (ipod. Less space than a nomad). And Usenet or irc forums were full of people discounting myspace, FB, and other newer technologies. Hacker news has changed a lot since the time I joined. I came from /. And osnews . And initially it was strongly pro business . Now it has became more "liberal " and pro open source.

Curious if you've found a place that feels the way that HN did back then.

Not really but mainly because I haven't looked. I personally lean more towards left/socialist views. So the current HN groupthink is more aligned with my views. Maybe I am part of the problem: a group of people that joined HN and affected the discourse.

Re: Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider

#157

It's always amazed me how anti-crypto and behind the times (about bitcoin) this forum has been. Remember your imagination for the possibilities of the early web and computers.

Yeah it’s a collective “just use Rsync” blindness. I think Defi is pretty exciting and once it’s mainstream with more regulated options with KYC and tokens backed by fully audited companies it has some amazing potential. Also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26041057 - HN wants it’s mp3s, so why doesn’t it want it’s money?

Exactly! I find it so surprising how on one side stories like the one you linked are heavily upvoted, and many here complain about Google, Facebook, monopolies, etc. But when it comes to z technology that is disruptive enough to solve many of the underlying problems , people are fast to discount it because a certain implementation is slow, inefficient, misused, etc.

The discourse that I would LOVE to see here is HOW to make it better. Is BCH really better? Is XlM? even XRP.

Like when databases are discussed, we get interesting points for Postgres or MySQL or even Mongo. That's the constructive view.

Re: Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider

#158
post #76

Being directly involved in this I'm not going to comment as of the veracity of the article myself, but rather point to a response of when this was posted on twitter (look at the extra responses for some fact checking): https://twitter.com/wizsecurity/status/1355973512012292096

Mark, the security errors in Mt Gox cost me sums of money that would have completely changed the life of myself and my family. Mostly I have moved on from this, but occasionally I multiply my Mt Gox holdings by the current price of Bitcoin and imagine how life could be. I have never heard you express sorrow for the individuals whose lives you so negatively impacted. I have no idea if you have plans to make amends for…

It’s not Marks foul. You have the money transferred to an exchange to mage a transaction not to hold it and wait for >40k. You would sold at 200,1000,10000.....

Re: Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider

#159
post #61
post #43

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> As a computer science concept it's rather mundane. We know what merkle trees are. a practical, robust solution to a long-standing computer science problem (byzantine generals) that directly results in an entire new branch of computer science and economic sector is hardly mundane. bitcoin solves previously intractable trustless coordination problems. we are only at the early stages of discovering what it makes possi…

This is spaghetti language. What problem does Bitcoin solve? Economic inflation, deflation, hard money, computer science theoreticals. I'm talking about all proofs btw. So I'd have the same questions about ethereum. This is very flawed computer science.

You ignored the answer to your own question in the comment you were responding to. The problem is byzantine generals problem. In application to finance it is about trusting your bank and central bank.

Re: Mt. Gox demise as told by a Bitcoin insider

#160
post #110

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Agreed. Those who fell at the beginning are those who paved the way. Mark is a hero. Nothing less.

Is this coordinated image rehabilitation or something? You authoritatively confirmed that the account is who it says it is as your first involvement in this thread. Was that based on firsthand knowledge? I’m really suspicious about your involvement here and I’m starting to suspect someone figured out just how easily HN can be leveraged if the commentary remains civil and lionizes the right people late on a Friday nig…

Rasengan is Andrew Lee, cofounder of London Trust Media, parent company of Private Internet Access. He has been personal friends with Mark Karpeles since well before Mark's fraud was discovered. Here's a PR piece he put out when he hired Mark as CTO after he was let out of prison. Yes you read that right, an infamous fraudster who couldn't even be bothered to use version control on MtGox who lied day after day for years and who ran his business into the ground and was imprisoned for it was hired as a CTO for a major VPN company.

https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/why-i-hired-mt-go...

Rasengan has an obvious bias here, you can call that whatever you want but whatever you call it, he's not a neutral third party. I'm not either, Mark Karpeles stole a great deal of money from me and many others on this site. Rasengan has in the past given this same spiel on HN trying to make Mark out to be some kind of victim of circumstance.

>People who make amends for significant errors, after aggressively trying to obfuscate them for many years, have some measure of retroactive integrity.

At no point has Mark Karpeles done anything at all that could objectively be described as making amends for anything. Jed McCaleb previously indicated that Mark Karpeles was aware from when he originally made the deal for buying most of MtGox that the exchange was already insolvent. He lied to users for years and claimed that MtGox had a cold storage system comprised of 3 geographically disparate locations, of which access to 2 were required to move funds out of cold storage and 95% of customer funds were kept out of the hot wallets. In reality that never existed, and Mark just continually kept emptying the cold wallets that were just stored in their office into the hot wallet. The hot wallet was compromised in a hack, Mark knew the hot wallet was wiped out in the hack, he didn't rotate keys, he just kept dumping our money into a known compromised address and never once bothered to check just how much money was missing until it was gone. The only saving grace was that Mark was so incompetent and blaise with managing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of other peoples money that he quite literally forgot about 200,000 BTC. If he had remembered it, there's no reason to believe that he wouldn't have just kept dumping it in and push the collapse back by another 6 months.

Since the collapse everything's been in the hands of the trustee for MtGox and Tibanne. If Mark Karpeles told me the sky was blue I'd have to go outside and check.

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