I'm the guy who bought 259684 Bitcoins for under $3000 yesterday • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by sethg » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 1:02 PM UTC

bradleyland wrote: post #88

sliverstorm wrote: post #28

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!!!

There's been a lot of talk about regulation, but I read something earlier today that I found rather surprising: "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 cred…

I suppose this makes sense... the US government doesn’t really care if you get fleeced buying or selling British pounds, and the British government doesn’t care if you get fleeced buying or selling US dollars.

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

#242

Post by rbanffy » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 1:03 PM UTC

politician wrote: post #125

rbanffy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bytecoins are worth 9 bitcoins each because they are parity-checked.

Whoa there. Your parity-checked bytecoins are only worth 7 bitcoins each ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8-bit_clean ).

Dammit. I was counting on the market not realizing this.

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

#243

Post by unreal37 » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 1:23 PM UTC

The law clearly is on the side of rolling back the transactions. Just like Amazon.com can refuse to fulfill an order for an 50 inch LCD TV that was accidentally priced for $1[1], and a bank can withdraw money from your account that was accidentally deposited there[2], and just like the NYSE can nullify mispriced orders[3], its clear Mt Gox can legally do the same. Transactions can be rolled back and are in the real world all the time. It has to be that way, to maintain fairness in the system.

Do you think this guy deserves $5 million worth of bitcoins because of the work of a hacker? Uh no.

His rationalizations for his behavior are astonishing. Assuming he is not the hacker, he got caught up in the excitement of buying cheap bitcoins (as we all would have), realized after the fact he probably did something wrong, and through contacting Mt Gox and coming out to the community he was hoping to get away with at least some profits. He shouldn't be able to keep any of it. Sorry Kevin.

[1] http://www.amazonsellercommunity.com/forums/thread.jspa?thre... [2] http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Banking/BetterBanking/B... [3] http://www.thestar.com/business/markets/article/806459--regu...

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

#244

Post by Gormo » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 1:40 PM UTC

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.

I think the problem here is the existence of Mt Gox itself. It seems like creating a centralized exchange for a currency that does not yet have a real economy associated with it - and which has been hyped by the internet meme machine - is just asking for the currency to become the victim of wild speculation.

Especially when the exchange is just a spot market - speculation in futures and options wouldn't undermine the viability of the currency as an actual means of exchange in the way that this situation will.

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

#245

Post by Gormo » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 1:46 PM UTC

dangero wrote: post #210

dkokelley wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The way I understand Mt. Gox is that they have a giant pool of real btc. They are the "owner" of these btc. So, for instance, if your account says you have 3000 btc, then your 3000 is just an entry in a database, and the only time that actually becomes a bitcoin is when you cash out the coins from Mt. Gox. At that point, they give you the amount of coins that you requested to be withdrawn from their giant btc pool. S…

Or, to analogize, your MtGox balance is a gold certificate, MtGox is the bank with the actual gold in its vault, and someone just robbed the bank.

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

#246

Post by danssig » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 1:54 PM UTC

Wow, Mt. Gox sound like a bunch of criminals. Did everyone see the link (posted 2 or 3 times) where something shady happened before and they just moved jurisdiction so they couldn't be sued? I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they did this whole thing themselves to steal some bit coins.

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

#247

Post by danssig » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 1:58 PM UTC

Tichy wrote: post #133

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…

As a proof of concept he could have withdrawn 0.01 BitCoin, no need to max out on MtGox limits. He writes he was aware that probably the hack is causing this and decided to take advantage of it. He should give the BitCoin back to MtGox, who would then proceed to roll back the transactions. Simple as that.

How can you fault a guy who does what traders try to do every single day? The fault is only with Mt Gox here and this isn't the first shady thing they've done (apparently even changing jurisdictions to avoid getting sued over previous abuses). Mt Gox are scum bags and deserve to be shut down at the very least.

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

#248

Post by danssig » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 2:00 PM UTC

enneff wrote: post #225

haberman wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an exchange issue, not a BitCoin issue. The exchange is entitled to behave however it wants. In fact, if it wants to remain profitable it should behave in a responsible, reliable way. In this case it means appeasing the majority of its users.

That's not how the market works. It's the few who win, not the many.

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

#249

Post by batterseapower » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 2:03 PM UTC

haakon wrote: post #221

romland wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> After all, if the trade is internal on MtGox, it's just a double in a database. Dude, don't use double to represent money.

There are 21 million bitcoins and they divide down to 8dp, so you need 16 decimal digits to represent them exactly. Coincidentally (?) double precision floating point is capable of precisely representing exactly 16 decimal digits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_precision

So using double is in fact perfectly OK in this case.

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

#250

Post by RockyMcNuts » Tue, Jun 21, 2011, 2:12 PM UTC

sure seems like the best of all possible worlds... a currency based on nothing of tangible value, no central bank to try to keep it stable and stem panics, no real economy or legal infrastructure behind it or army to protect them if they existed, transactions easily traceable (even reversible), prone to speculative fever and vulnerable to security issues.