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

forum.bitcoin.org

171–180 of 319 posts

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

#171
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then trying to withdraw $5 million USD from Mt. Gox? He didn't do that. He withdrew $1000, once, and some bitcoins. Then notified the administrators.

It sounded like he probably tried to remove the bitcoins, hit the limit, then contemplated hitting that $1000 limit a bunch of times. Honestly, this whole forum post reeks of "I know I did something wrong, hopefully posting here will make the pit in my stomach go away." Same goes for contacting magicaltux (the admin of mtgox) -- I bet he was absolutely losing his mind when the trade went through. I know I would have…

You're upset he contemplated doing something shady? Jesus, since when has uncouth thoughts been grounds for conviction? If it was, I'd be guilty of a trillion crimes.

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

#172

What on earth is all this talk about "attacks" and "rolling back the market"? This is how currency works; we've just been witness to one of the darker parts. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not legitimate. Even if it's illegal to manipulate the US Dollar, it is most certainly legal to manipulate the BitCoin, whose express purpose was to be wholly unregulated!!!

I guess the "attack" was done by the guy doing the mass sell off since he had acquired the coins by hacking into Mt Gox and stealing other people's coins. That is stealing, not manipulation. Had that not happened, and if it was just some speculator doing a mass sell off, they should have let him do it and not done the roll back. If you sell at 0.01 per btc, and the market goes back up, you lose money. Simple as that.

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

#173
post #165

What's with all the sudden HN coverage of these silly internet fun bucks?

It's been going on for a while. Since midapril, there's been a minimum of two stories about bitcoin each and every day[1]. There was, for a while, suspicion that it was an attempt to boost interest in bitcoin, and get more people using it - astroturfing, more or less - but I'm increasingly convinced that it's just because stories about bitcoin tend to be upvoted, and it's often an interesting topic. Well, ignoring the fact that there's very little left to say about it, anyways.

[1] Based on a search for "bitcoin" on HNTrends, http://www.hntrends.dotcloud.com/

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

#174
post #90

> Two months ago we migrated from MD5 hashing to freeBSD MD5 salted hashing. The unsalted user accounts in the wild are ones that haven't been accessed in over 2 months and are considered idle. Once we are back up we will have implemented SHA-512 multi-iteration salted hashing and all users will be required to update to a new strong password. I'm quite surprised that a service with accounts holding millions of dollar…

When Mt.Gox was created it was handling thousands, not millions. It's a hobby that grew out of control.

you make it sound like thousands in other people's money is trivial and doesn't deserve salting.

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is laggy, has security problems and the people running it are spreading deliberate falsehoods in order to cover their asses... ... it ain't credible. On the other hand, it sounds like they would have a great career path at the federal reserve...

"On the other hand, it sounds like they would have a great career path at the federal reserve..." I don't mean to be too harsh, but I can't see any value in this part of your comment. It will only possibly lead to derailment of this discussion.

Quick! Somebody invent software which will allow people to have discussions that branch! Otherwise the dreadful disaster of discussion derailment will doom us daily!

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

#177

> Two months ago we migrated from MD5 hashing to freeBSD MD5 salted hashing. The unsalted user accounts in the wild are ones that haven't been accessed in over 2 months and are considered idle. Once we are back up we will have implemented SHA-512 multi-iteration salted hashing and all users will be required to update to a new strong password. I'm quite surprised that a service with accounts holding millions of dollar…

FreeBSD MD5 is pretty strong— Its randomly salted and runs 1000 iterations of MD5. None of MD5's weaknesses are especially relevant in this context.

The most important thing is the how slow it is, and it's likely that if they'd taken defaults bcrypt would actually have been faster.

The saddest thing is that many of the people howling about MD5 are proposing weaker alternatives like straight SHA-512 with a static "salt" embedded in the source code.

In fact, MTGOX almost deployed such a replacement in their upgrade until they were cluesticked by people screaming to not invent you own cryptographic functions.

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

#178
post #176
post #56

If there is real money in bitcoins, then there should be a real engineering staff running a real, secure trading platform.

A non-profit and open-source exchange is necessary for the bitcoin economy.

I see a kickstarter project!

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

#179

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.

There appears to be a real market demand for a currency that is not controlled by a national government, especially one that has the features of cash-like transactions. That bitcoin is lacking as an implementation is immaterial, people want it for whatever reason.

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

#180
post #10

The poster makes some good points about the inconsistencies in Mt. Gox's handling of things, but it seems to me that he's ascribing to malice what is well explained by incompetence on the part of the person or people running the site. The security practices are appalling, and their lack of clarity on the counter-party issue is damning. If I were Kevin---or, indeed, any customer of that exchange---I'd take my money an…

>fault of the Mt Gox admins

Mt Gox is run in such amateurish way, it's appalling.

In real life, with many brokers you trade doesn't close in 3 days and as such you can't withdraw proceeds from the trade for 3 days (but you can use the proceeds to continue trading).

In this situation Mt Gox is effectively both exchange and the broker. Not to have rule in place to block funds from recent transactions is like people who designed it never traded real stock with real brokers.

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