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

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

#141

Post by anigbrowl »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #128
anigbrowl wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No he didn't. He withdrew them as proof of concept. Right now it's not even clear who he should give them back to. Furthermore, unless he caused the selloff there was nothing wrong with putting in his $0.0101 order. I suspect the bitter people on the bitcoin forum are the ones who had $0.01 orders in and assumed that fractional values would be rounded down the the nearest cent. They were hoping to make some easy mone…

The 643 he has are 'worth' $10K at the $17/btc rate. That would be triple the $3000 he 'had in his account' so either way that would be not a bad return on $3K. Raises other questions about whether clients can 'conspire' to hold records of sales (vs rolling back the transactions). In real 'cash' situations you have to give back the actual currency, in a bitcoin world its a rollback of the sell record, but now you've…

I'm thinking of doing some bitcoin trading myself. It's like finding a free herd of sheep; eating them would be naughty and possibly illegal, but I'm seeing good opportunities in fleecing them and selling woolly sweaters to keep out the chill.

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

#143

Post by jerf »

Tichy wrote: post #106
jacques_chester wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've misread me. You, the thief, are still on the hook for your crime. The buyer, if they really are a bona fide purchaser for value without notice, is not. Your family would probably not meet the test, as this would be the first time they've heard of the Porsches. (IANAL, TINLA)

Yes, what I mean is that if I was 99, I wouldn't care much about being punished for being a thief. I could therefore make a lot of people happy. If not my family, then maybe I could go Robin Hood, steal from the rich and sell cheaply to the poor. I can't imagine that it works that way. I can believe that as a buyer of stolen good without knowing they were stolen, you won't be punished. But you will still have to retu…

In addition to what jacques_chester has said, never forget the law is adjudicated by humans, not computers. If a judge thinks you've found a "loophole" there's no guarantee he's going to take that too kindly to that line of argument. Yes, we've all heard stories about loopholes that worked, but for every one that did there were a great deal more that did not.

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

#144

Post by tptacek »

illumin8 wrote: post #113

This guy doesn't really have a leg to stand on. Just like when the flash crash happened on the real stock market, transactions are going to be rolled back. One thing that has become abundantly clear from reading all of the comments on the Bitcoin forums is that the investing knowledge of most BTC traders is much less than your average equities, fixed income, or ForEx trader. MtGox is a pretty low budget operation, bu…

A regional bank in New England recently prevailed with exactly that argument in court.

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

#145

Post by christoph »

blhack wrote: post #16

This reminds me of a conversation I was having with a friend a couple of days ago about network affects. Once a system gets too big, the nice people that started it start getting screwed by the people who don't understand (or care about) the founding ideals. The problem with a trading house like Mt. Gox is that some people assume that all of the players are altruistic (these "some people" being "me", somebody with a…

What happened here is just natural selfishness: the person that executed this buy order knew that the market was crashing, and that something was going wrong, but decided to exploit it regardless.

All others moaning about what he did who bid at 0.1 weren't?

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

#146

Post by jacques_chester »

nkassis wrote: post #137
Tichy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, what I mean is that if I was 99, I wouldn't care much about being punished for being a thief. I could therefore make a lot of people happy. If not my family, then maybe I could go Robin Hood, steal from the rich and sell cheaply to the poor. I can't imagine that it works that way. I can believe that as a buyer of stolen good without knowing they were stolen, you won't be punished. But you will still have to retu…

SO if I understand this correctly, by buying the coins at ridiculously low prices and the fact that in the post he said it was weird and he tried to take advantage of it. Would he not completely fail the test?

I don't know. I imagine there is a body of caselaw dealing with these rules in the context of financial instruments and currency trading that would give more detailed tests.

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

#147

Post by gojomo »

politician wrote: post #110
saalweachter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the defender could have a rainbow file of his own and purposefully choose a password which didn't hash-collide with a password of < N characters.

That's a fantastic idea for a web service. Google, are you listening?

Doubt that'd be worth the effort/storage, even in the case of a weak, unsalted hash like MD5.

Take N to be 10, assume 7 bits per character. Then all 10-character passwords fill no more than 2^70 of the 2^128 MD5 space. Any 11-or-larger character password then has a less than 1-in-2^58 chance of colliding with any shorter password. (That's how much larger the full space is, from which each longer-password hash will be drawn.) That's 1-in-288-quadrillion for us decimal apes.

The service would probably never deliver a useful warning before MD5 falls completely to a preimage attack.

The analysis for such a service only gets harsher for 160/256/512 bit hashes.

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

#148

Post by robryan »

haberman wrote: post #131

The community that for months has been preaching the virtues of the currency nobody can control is suddenly arguing that a middleman should roll back a bunch of free-market transactions. I decided a while ago that arguing against the "bitcoin has no problems" crowd was futile: people are too enamored with the idea to see problems like this until they happen.

The exchange does seem to go against the primary purpose of the currency.

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

#149

Post by bradleyland »

kees wrote: post #78

A bitcoin exchange is a shady business, no regulation exists. So it is a freespace for criminals and hackers. You hustle or you will be hustled. This guy should have made a withdrawal by any means. In the bitcoin business only your wallet file counts, the rest is just a big hustle. And please forgot that you're able to sue somebody over a bitcoin dispute.

Would you be surprised to hear that ForEx (the method of exchanging currencies like the USD, EURO, and YEN) are also unregulated?

"Unlike stocks, futures or options, currency trading does not take place on a regulated exchange. It is not controlled by any central governing body, there are no clearing houses to guarantee the trades and there is no arbitration panel to adjudicate disputes. All members trade with each other based on credit agreements. Essentially, business in the largest, most liquid market in the world depends on nothing more than a metaphorical handshake."

- http://www.investopedia.com/articles/forex/06/SevenFXFAQs.as...

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

#150

Post by rapind »

romland wrote: post #42
wiredfool wrote: post #3

So, There's something like 21 million bitcoin possible, and 6 million 'in circulation' now. A sell order comes in for 1/12 of total amount of outstanding bitcoin. And the system processes it, flashcrashes, and. 3) Profit, I guess. or 4) rollback. That's something like what would happen if someone dumped 1 trillion USD onto a bond exchange. There are only a couple entities who could do this. So how did 1/12 of the val…

Or it could, again, be stupidity by MtGox: This was a "test account" that had no real user attached to it. After all, if the trade is internal on MtGox, it's just a double in a database. If that is the case, then hell yes, I can see why MtGox would want this rollback.

If this was the case though, don't you see a really big issue? They're running test data through a financial production system? That wouldn't just be retarded, it would be illegal anywhere else. If you're *SX and creating fake money in a real system you're going to get into a lot of trouble.
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