Live data from Hacker News

I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

forum.bitcoin.org

51–60 of 319 posts

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#52

Didn't MtGox say they'll rollback all transactions from that time period, including the legit ones?

Yes. He's complaining about that decision.

He also mentions that no stolen user has reported, and that its hard to believe a single user held that much money.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#53
post #27

A thief can't pass good title on stolen goods: If you buy a stolen item, it is not yours, it is still the original owner's. Doesn't matter if it's a bitcoin, a car, or a quarter. The sale was not legit, it should not stand. The rest of the rollback is fuzzier, but on this gentlemans coins, a seizure should occur. http://www.lexisnexis.com/community/corpsec/blogs/bus-law-an...

The exception to this rule is a "bona fide purchaser for value without notice". If someone has no reason to believe that property is stolen and buys it, then it's their property now. So sorry. I'm still confused about whether or not bitcoin transactions are traceable. If they have deniability, it might be impossible to prove/disprove that you knew the goods were stolen. Of course, I am neither a lawyer nor a crypto s…

Uh, is that really so? So I can steal whatever I want, as long as I can sell it off fast enough?

Say I am 99 years old and have only one week left to live. What if I go on a car stealing spree and steal Porsche cars for my extended family. Then I sell it to them for a symbolic 1 cent each, claiming that I have collected them over my lifetime and now want my family to benefit.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#54
post #47
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2676336 ) is why it happened. > Then trying to withdraw $5 million USD from Mt. Gox? He was stating that he could have withdrawn the entire amount, but didn't want to appear shady (especially since doing so would have made him seem even more like a hacker that initiated the sell order).

Yeah, reading the story that is what he says, but the fact that the also doesn't want to give back the 600BTC or so that he ended up getting out to me suggests that he isn't quite that honest. If the limit had been $10,000 -- I'm sure he would have gone for that.

Are you using "honest" to mean "good intentions"? Because I think he's told the truth about everything, and I'm not surprised that someone who made money in a market wants to keep that money.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#55
post #47
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2676336 ) is why it happened. > Then trying to withdraw $5 million USD from Mt. Gox? He was stating that he could have withdrawn the entire amount, but didn't want to appear shady (especially since doing so would have made him seem even more like a hacker that initiated the sell order).

Yeah, reading the story that is what he says, but the fact that the also doesn't want to give back the 600BTC or so that he ended up getting out to me suggests that he isn't quite that honest. If the limit had been $10,000 -- I'm sure he would have gone for that.

Why? There is a perfectly legitimate argument for letting him keep the funds. They were put up for sale, and he bought them. It was MtGox's systems that executed the trade. If the sell order was invalid, it was MtGox's fault, or the seller account holder's, not the buyer's.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#57
post #29

The stolen user hasn't reported until now, it seems. From one of the comments: "It was definitely all our bitcoins that mtgox had in one account! I remember a few days before, people saying that some big bitcoin movements on bitcoin monitor were from mtgox, and the quantity being moved was around 400 000 to 500 000 bitcoins. No single user lost that quantity, it was our coins, from all of us!"

This is absolutely not how the Mt. Gox database works.

I know because I have access to the source code of the site.

You can't post a trade from 'all' accounts; if a large trade pushed the price down, then a large trade pushed the price down, and that trade was executed from a single account.

Given Mark's statement that the logins which had been dormant for more than a few months were the easily rainbow-table attacked ones, it seems that someone had sent in a lot of bitcoins and then stopped using the system for a while; they apparently had a weak / rainbow-table vulnerable password.

If that's the situation, I'd call this a medium-sophisticated attack; better would have been to drive prices down slowly over a day or so, then use other hacked accounts to buy them up cheaply and withdraw over BTC. That might have taken some time to notice and unravel.

As it is, it looks like someone tried to flash-crash the market, then send out $1,000 worth of BTC at very low market rates, so a lot of BTC. Someone who would do this intrinsically believes in the resilience of bitcoin by the way, which is interesting. I'm not sure how they would plan on dealing with the taint on their coins, though. They'd have needed some sort of high-volume laundering service; none of the ones I know have enough volume to deal with this.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#59
The problems here with Bitcoin come across as the same problems with piracy:

Bitcoin are just bits on a computer.

Just like piracy, when we copy bits from one place to another, is it really "stealing"?

Anyone that says "yes", better double-check their stance on software piracy as well.

Re: I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday

#60
post #27

A thief can't pass good title on stolen goods: If you buy a stolen item, it is not yours, it is still the original owner's. Doesn't matter if it's a bitcoin, a car, or a quarter. The sale was not legit, it should not stand. The rest of the rollback is fuzzier, but on this gentlemans coins, a seizure should occur. http://www.lexisnexis.com/community/corpsec/blogs/bus-law-an...

Bitcoins are just bits on a computer and aren't physically taken away like a car or a quarter...so I don't think you can call it "stealing"
Post reply on HN