Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bitcoincharts.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 262 posts

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

#71

Post by skrebbel »

gst wrote: post #58
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…

> 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.

Just like it's not the fault of the dollar if someone mugs you at gunpoint. Except robbing someone typically requires you to take physical risks and (threaten to) use violence. I'll be very curious to see any effective way of tracking down bitcoin thieves.

If you have to be a security expert to own more than a few dollars worth of bitcoins, the project has effectively failed already.

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

#72

Post by swishercutter »

saulrh wrote: post #62
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..

If I'm doing my math right, $500k is something like 2% of the bitcoin economy. Imagine what would happen to wall street if someone cashed out a few trillion dollars' worth of stock at once.

and honestly it only dropped for a minute...then it went right back over $14...so even if this had really been legit it would have sorta recovered.

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

#73

Post by bxc »

gst wrote: post #58
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…

> Someone sold a huge amount of Bitcoins. The market acted accordingly.

It doesn't seem very free market to rollback the market and cancel all the free market trades that happened.

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

#74

Post by lubos »

weavejester wrote: post #57
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.

which makes me think mtgox got very lucky. I mean the hacker could overcome $1000 limit a day (roughly 80 bitcoins) by creating thousands of bogus accounts, putting on the market bid orders at $0.01 in all accounts, drive the market to the bottom like he did to fill his orders and quickly transfer 80 bitcoins from each account out of the exchange. he could get away with bitcoins worth of millions irreversibly and completely anonymously.

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

#75

Post by lubos »

wmf wrote: post #56
lubos wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there is daily limit though. you can only withdraw up to 80 BTC a day.

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

#76

Post by joeyh »

tlrobinson wrote: post #61
weavejester wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that people with large amounts of bitcoin don't have better security measures. For that amount of money, I'd consider securing the private key in a safety deposit box. Probably several safety deposit boxes, actually.

They apparently had 500k BTC in their MtGox account, which is insane. Unless they were actively trading all of that they should have withdrawn from MtGox to the BitCoin network.

If they were Satoshi, they could be sitting on enough early-adopter bitcoins that 500k is relatively not insane.

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

#77

Post by econgeeker »

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.

You're right about the anarchy, but I don't see the burning world. I don't see hackers and cheaters "taking over" bitcoin.

An account was compromised, and despite there being no government regulation, the exchange stepped in, protected their customer, rolled back the trades and protected the market.

That is anarchy exactly! But no burning world. And it is yet another realworld test that has been successfully met by the bitcoin idea.

I'm not sold on bitcoins viability, due to questions about the larger marketability and having not done an audit of the software. But from an economic perspective, bitcoin is a viable currency, or as close to meeting all the requirements that any non-physical currency can.

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

#80

Post by weavejester »

lubos wrote: post #74
weavejester wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

which makes me think mtgox got very lucky. I mean the hacker could overcome $1000 limit a day (roughly 80 bitcoins) by creating thousands of bogus accounts, putting on the market bid orders at $0.01 in all accounts, drive the market to the bottom like he did to fill his orders and quickly transfer 80 bitcoins from each account out of the exchange. he could get away with bitcoins worth of millions irreversibly and com…

I think they were very lucky. Quite frankly I hope people take note of these near-misses and think a lot more about security.
Post reply on HN