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

forum.bitcoin.org

211–220 of 319 posts

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

#211
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Jesus, since when has uncouth thoughts been grounds for conviction? If it was, I'd be guilty of a trillion crimes.

Are you seriously putting these words in my mouth? I didn't say anything like that. The gist of my post was that from a casual reader's perspective, bitcoin was a hobby for cryptographic nerds, and that this demonstrated that it's "lost its innocence", so to speak.

Am I "upset" by this? Sure. In the same way that I would be upset if I was competing on something like allrgb, but nvidia decided to come in and destroy me and my friends by building custom glass. Is nvidia be "immoral" there? No. Are they being, to be blunt, assholes?

Thoughtcrime? Convicted?

I want this to be clear to anybody reading this that doesn't understand the context of what I'm saying: (I'm trying to say this in the most polite way possible) your response here is completely incorrect, and without merit.

You're accusing me of something that I consider morally abhorrent (accusing somebody of "thoughtcrime"), and it's ridiculous.

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

#212

There are two sides to this story. Here is Mt Gox's response: https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20250.0

After Kevin's detailed and eloquent explanation of events, the best they can do is show that he was logged in at the same time as the hacker, or whoever it was?

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

#213

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.

From the message board: "Folks, in the grown-up world, trades are unwound when the market malfunctions. --Jeff Garzik, bitcoin core dev team" In the grown-up world, currency is controlled by governments, the financial industry is regulated, and money cannot be transferred large distances anonymously. The whole sales pitch of BitCoin is that it is free of all this control. Invoking "the grown-up world" to describe Bit…

> Invoking "the grown-up world" to describe BitCoin is absurd.

So true.

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

#214

Interesting, MagicalTux said earlier they would not rollback transactions of this type: https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=18858.msg237804#ms...

I bet this was his personal account and he used an easily breakable password there. He has all interest to do a rollback there ;).

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

#215
Canceling trades disincentivizes traders to fill the dry side of the order book during a liquidity crisis.

That alone makes cancellations bad policy. If you're worried about so-called erroneous trades, you should disallow market orders; make all traders provide an explicit buy or sell price and there is no such thing as a bad trade except in the event of systems failures.

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

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it as he was watching a market free fall and was looking to capitalize on it. He had no way of knowing if the sell order was fraudulent. It could have been someone trying to drastically crash the value of BTC, but still a legitimate owner. Buying them through MtGox wasn't the same as buying bitcoins out of the back of some guy's car. What about people who had standing buy orders? They could never had known abo…

Exactly. If I see the price of Apple drop precipitously, I might think that somebody is manipulating the market, but I'd be a fool not to buy it at $5/share. Also, what if it wasn't an attack? What if someone with a lot of bitcoins was running a malconfigured script? We've seen flash crashes in the real world caused by automated trading; why would btc be any different?

Or, what if it wasn't an attack, and someone was really trying to sell his bitcoins, either because he needed the money/thought that was a rational thing to do, or because he wanted to drop the market price for whatever reason.

I think that the OP considered the above possibilities and acted rationally. However, he also considered the possibilitiy of this being an attack/theft/hack and acted NOT like a dick.

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

#218
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…

I whole heartedly agree. I wasn't actually expecting reactions like that from the forum users so that surprising too. It seems to me that the OP on that forum saw a pattern, proved it was true and then proceeded to tell the appropriate persons. The appropriate persons then realised they'd made a big mess of things and then twisted the truth to create a scapegoat, which is exactly how it's playing out on that forum.

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

#219
You should have moved the coins out. Now they're reverting the trades because the alternative is accepting liability for their awful security (which is probably, well, still awful). Bitcoin trading is the wild west, if you behave like Jesus Christ you're just going to get nothing out of it. What I mean is that in such a risky business you shouldn't feel guilty ripping people off, they had it coming after all, it was their choice.

UNLESS, of course, you're having second thoughts because you're related to the hacking and backed off when you got nervous, seeing how far the prices went down and how the massive buy order did manage to go through... just a possibility, no offense. The fact that you gave them your id and didn't behave like a shady guy is irrelevant as long as it's impossible that you be proven guilty, in fact that's exactly how the clever shady guy should be behaving... like "not guilty", because money is usually traced in the end, and you want to look like a saint when that happens. So, their position about contacting you is perfectly reasonable and natural; to them you might be related to the hackers anyway and anything they say to you (nothing they could say would be good- a conversation with them would be full of unanswered questions) is likely to end up in a public forum. Not good pr.

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

#220

Sounds to me like the admins at MtGox are, at the very least, amateurish, and shouldn't be trusted with millions of dollars in escrowed funds.

Millions of fantasy dollars.

Which are (subject to Mt Gox's rules) convertible to real dollars.
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