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500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

bitcoincharts.com

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Re: 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

#51

Post by knowtheory »

Tichy wrote: post #22

Does anybody have a link to instructions for reading that kind of chart (or the name of the chart type)? I used to know, but it has been many years. I suppose green bars means the price went up and red down, and the bar extends between the high and low price. But what does the chunk in the middle mean? And where can I see that 500k were traded?

There are two charts here.

Along the bottom of the chart is the volume of trades, i.e. how many shares/coins are being sold or bought (and whether they're being sold or bought).

The chart in the middle is the price and variability of the trades (i think).

Not a stock person or a BTC trader. Just gawking at the spectacle.

Re: 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

#52

Post by wmf »

seats wrote: post #28
mikemoka wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you mean that if the market would be bigger such things won't be done? they could do more of the same unfortunately..

When the market is really big, then only the really rich people can manipulate it. Comforting thought ;)

It's already a little disturbing to realize that a single account held 261K BTC out of 6.5M BTC in circulation.

Re: 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

#53

Post by yesimahuman »

Macha wrote: post #35
Tichy wrote: post #22

Does anybody have a link to instructions for reading that kind of chart (or the name of the chart type)? I used to know, but it has been many years. I suppose green bars means the price went up and red down, and the bar extends between the high and low price. But what does the chunk in the middle mean? And where can I see that 500k were traded?

EDIT: The below is wrong, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlestick_chart The chunk in the middle is the price for the majority of trades, and the lighter bar is all trades, if I remember right.

The small bar indicates the range of prices during the time frame (for example, each bar could represent 15 minutes of trading on a 15 minute chart). The big bar shows the closing and opening prices for that time range. If the closing price is below the opening price the bar is red, and vice versa.

The red bar that shoots up from the bottom is the trading volume, and usually isn't covering up the bars so it looks strange. It just says a ton of BTC was sold in that time frame.

Re: 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

#54

Post by mcantelon »

skrebbel wrote: post #9

i must admit i'm somewhat impressed how fast the hackers and cheaters managed to take over bitcoin trading. i think it's kind of cute. people hoped for an economy no government could control, and got exactly that: anarchy and a burning world.

Sounds like it has been dealt with pretty well:

https://support.mtgox.com/entries/20208066-huge-bitcoin-sell...

Re: 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

#55

Post by kristofferR »

kaffeinecoma wrote: post #21
enki wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

according to the guy running the exchange: user with 500k bitcoins was hacked (probably password bruteforce or csrf). they'll probably reverse all transactions since then

How do you "reverse" transactions that live in a peer-to-peer network? Or are you saying that MtGox has some kind of buffer of transactions that haven't been "executed" onto the network yet?

MTGox runs its own private system. They display the value of BitCoins you can withdraw, but they're not really BitCoins until you withdraw them.

Re: 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

#56

Post by wmf »

lubos wrote: post #47
buro9 wrote: post #39

From the mt.gox site: Huge Bitcoin sell off due to a compromised account - rollback The bitcoin will be back to around 17.5$/BTC after we rollback all trades that have happened after the huge Bitcoin sale that happened on June 20th near 3:00am (JST). Service should be back by June 20th 10:00am (JST, 01:00am GMT) with all the trades reversed and accounts available. One account with a lot of coins was compromised and w…

mtgox acts like a central authority. basically all these trades were happening in mysql database within the exchange between internal accounts, there were no actual bitcoin transactions.

But if you bought a bunch of BTC at $0.01 and then withdrew them, Mt.Gox should have irreversibly sent that over the real Bitcoin network.

Re: 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

#57

Post by weavejester »

buro9 wrote: post #39

From the mt.gox site: Huge Bitcoin sell off due to a compromised account - rollback The bitcoin will be back to around 17.5$/BTC after we rollback all trades that have happened after the huge Bitcoin sale that happened on June 20th near 3:00am (JST). Service should be back by June 20th 10:00am (JST, 01:00am GMT) with all the trades reversed and accounts available. One account with a lot of coins was compromised and w…

Trades are internal to Mt. Gox until you withdraw your money either as bitcoins or as USD. The compromised account had a $1000 per day withdraw limit, so the thief could only withdraw $1000 after selling all those coins. The rest of the cash is still within Mt. Gox, and therefore the state of the Mt. Gox DB can be rolled back to before all the coins were sold.

Re: 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

#58

Post by gst »

skrebbel wrote: post #9

i must admit i'm somewhat impressed how fast the hackers and cheaters managed to take over bitcoin trading. i think it's kind of cute. people hoped for an economy no government could control, and got exactly that: anarchy and a burning world.

Where is anarchy? What's burning?

Someone sold a huge amount of Bitcoins. The market acted accordingly. Expect a bounce back to the old exchange rate as soon as Mt. Gox is available again.

Of course it might be possible that the computer of the person who sold the Bitcoin was cracked. But that's not the fault of Bitcoin - if someone is not capable of taking care of the security of his local computer, it's better not to use a distributed currency where your money is basically stored inside a single file.

Re: 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

#59

Post by rmc »

citricsquid wrote: post #2

So for someone who doesn't understand economics that much, what does this mean? Have bitcoins finally failed?

Not as such. As an example, Steve Jobs ownes 7% the shared of Disney. If tomorrow, he were to sell them all, no matter what the price, there might not be enough people to buy them all, so people who, for the laugh, said they'd buy Disney stock at $0.01 a share would eventually get the shares. Thus the stock price for Disney would drop to $0.01. A similar thing just happened to BitCoin, but rather than shares of Disney being traded, it was bitcoins.

Re: 500k Bitcoins traded in 1h, Mt.Gox market hacked + crash

#60

Post by eis »

Newest update:

Apparently someone got the whole user account database of Mt.Gox

I wont publish the link to it though for obvious reasons.

Quick analysis: the database is legit, it contains user id, username, email if set, and a bcrypt hash. The hashes seem salted with a global salt.

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