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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

#181

Post by william42 »

danboarder wrote: post #163
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.

It's not a BitCoin problem, this entire episode revolves around one exchange (MtGox) and its security problems. Mt Gox Exchange =/= BTC Currency Nasdaq Exchange =/= USD Currency

Out of curiosity, how big is Mt. Gox compared to the other bitcoin exchanges?

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

#182

Post by william42 »

rick888 wrote: post #170
jacques_chester wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property rights are establishable in a lot of things that are abstract with numerous physical representations. You can own commercial licences, shares, bonds, debts, legal rights to this and that and so on and so forth. Property law does not require physical property in order to be applicable. (IANAL, TINLA)

good, I'm glad. I hope when articles pop up about piracy, more people agree that it isn't just bits being transferred.

There's still a fundamental difference between stealing bitcoins by inducing a transfer and copying music or video games or etc. The latter is clearly a lesser crime.

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

#183

Post by kevinpet »

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…

So the same folks encrypting their grocery lists with 8192bit RSA so the NSA doesn't read them are relying on ideals to keep the currency exchange functioning?

A system robust against outright criminals still works when you have decent people. The converse is not true.

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

#184

Post by eridius »

jacques_chester wrote: post #36
gte910h wrote: 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…

I think it's safe to say that Kevin knew the bitcoins he purchased were not on the up-and-up.

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

#185

Post by jamie_ca »

dkokelley wrote: post #159
dangero wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really good point. Who says that there really was anyone with that many bitcoins in their account? Maybe someone just hacked the database, put 500,000 btc into an account, and then sold them on the market? We know the user database was dumped, so why shouldn't we think that someone edited the account balances too?

The way I understand bitcoin is that you can't simply sell coins made by adding them to a db record. Perhaps the MtGox system can artificially generate the appearance of those coins, but the actual validation of the transaction by the network would have failed.

I imagine that all BTC available for trade at MtGox are in a MtGox-owned wallet. All trades are just done in their database, and a transaction only hits the bitcoin network when a user wants to withdraw BTC out of the market.

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

#187

Post by aparadja »

BoppreH wrote: post #117
dangero wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a really good point. Who says that there really was anyone with that many bitcoins in their account? Maybe someone just hacked the database, put 500,000 btc into an account, and then sold them on the market? We know the user database was dumped, so why shouldn't we think that someone edited the account balances too?

It seems the hacker got access of a copy of the database by compromising the machine of an audit. If this is really the case, he couldn't possibly edit the main database with only that.

Unless an admin reused a password somewhere.

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

#190

Post by bskari »

william42 wrote: post #181
danboarder wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a BitCoin problem, this entire episode revolves around one exchange (MtGox) and its security problems. Mt Gox Exchange =/= BTC Currency Nasdaq Exchange =/= USD Currency

Out of curiosity, how big is Mt. Gox compared to the other bitcoin exchanges?

http://www.bitcoincharts.com lists the daily trading volume of various exchanges. I think the numbers for Mt. Gox represent the volume before things went sour, so based on that, Mt. Gox sees almost 30 times the volume of the next largest exchange.
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