41–50 of 53 posts
“Cold storage” does not “leak”. The idea that the funds were stolen,
unnoticed, from cold storage, due to Transaction Malleability,
strains the credulity of even the most gullible observers.
One possible explanation that I haven't seen anywhere else is that MtGox lost control of the private keys to their cold storage.
How else could 744,000 BTC disappear, without anyone noticing, from cold storage?
A little regulation and over sight might have prevented all this. And with out it going forward all anyone can do is advise best practices, and then watch as some ignore them and also have their money stolen. Very wild west. Totally something I'll be staying well back from
Just like a little regulation and oversight stopped the housing bubble, tech bubble, etc. I'm not saying this is comparable directly to those situations, but we shouldn't forget that regulated markets have crooks and cheats too.
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> we have the first evidence (ever) that there is no need for a central authority to conduct oversight and ensure a robust currency. No one has ever doubted that this was possible. 'Robust' currency has existed without a central monetary authority in the past (for millenia!). The reason the Fed exists is because its believe that it takes an existing 'robust' currency and makes it better.
""The Federal Reserve System (also known as the Federal Reserve, and informally as the Fed) is the central banking system of the United States. It was created on December 23, 1913, with the enactment of the Federal Reserve Act, largely in response to a series of financial panics, particularly a severe panic in 1907"" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System The common argument is that the modern, global…
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>Yes, but that is completely contrary to the whole reason Bitcoin exists in the first place. Not really. Satoichi has shied away from the political motivations of a lot of the community.
Satoshi's motivations were political, his first message in the blockchain makes that clear. He hasn't shied away, he's disappeared for obvious reasons.
He/she/they talk about a need for finical transaction capability without the need of a trusted third party, but I'm not seeing how that was in any way overtly political.
Under the presumption that it is true that ~750k BTC has been stolen, has anyone considered the possibility of orchestrating a 51% attack on the attacker(s)? Gox probably has logs of withdrawal requests. It might be daunting but feasible to sift the tx-MAL withdrawals from legitimate ones, then work with major pools and exchanges to double-spend stolen coins back to Gox. Gox could then be forced (by the same 51% majo…
That really undermines Bitcoin overall. Also, that makes it more attractive to act maliciously, as an exchange. Either you make off with your stolen BTC (win), or the community fixes things for you (not really a loss). What would help is some equivalent of FDIC. A group of Bitcoin "banks" that handle your deposits, with some pro-BTC group guaranteeing your deposit up to 100 BTC or something. Getting the insurance wou…
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Satoshi's motivations were political, his first message in the blockchain makes that clear. He hasn't shied away, he's disappeared for obvious reasons.
Speaking about this: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf ? He/she/they talk about a need for finical transaction capability without the need of a trusted third party, but I'm not seeing how that was in any way overtly political.
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That a bug in one implementation does not imply a bug in the protocol.
I didn't say there was a bug in the protocol. There is a bug in the REFERENCE implementation, which is used by almost every exchange. And one criticism of MtGox was that they used a custom version of the reference implementation, and should have used the standard one. You can't have it both ways.
By your standards then SSH is broken, which is false. I don't want to have it both ways. I think if you are running a money service that you should not rely on variables that were known to be malleable since 2011. There's even a wiki page about it, on a site the guy owned, since Jan 2013. Either they run someone elses code and made sure it worked, or run their own code and made sure it worked - and by worked I meant worked the way they needed it to, not the way they expected it to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say there was a bug in the protocol. There is a bug in the REFERENCE implementation, which is used by almost every exchange. And one criticism of MtGox was that they used a custom version of the reference implementation, and should have used the standard one. You can't have it both ways.
Is there a reference implementation for SSH? I don't think so. By your standards then SSH is broken, which is false. I don't want to have it both ways. I think if you are running a money service that you should not rely on variables that were known to be malleable since 2011. There's even a wiki page about it, on a site the guy owned, since Jan 2013. Either they run someone elses code and made sure it worked, or run…
However, it's quite clear that this is a bug, and it could have affected them, and they could be telling the truth, contrary to what the original article says.
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This would require you to discard all the blocks since the transactions started happening and re-mine them with those transactions excluded. This would be completely impossible unless you dedicated most of the mining equipment to this for months and asked those miners to part with their earned mining rewards until this rewritten chain caught up with the official one. Hardly likely.
I don't think this is what I'm suggesting at all. If a popular majority of miners agreed to accept transactions double spending the original coins, this would be tantamount to generating 750k new Bitcoin, not initially invalidating any blocks or other transactions. With forensics on the initial theft, miners could then tree-traverse back up to blacklist future transactions on stolen coins. There are probably lots of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think this is what I'm suggesting at all. If a popular majority of miners agreed to accept transactions double spending the original coins, this would be tantamount to generating 750k new Bitcoin, not initially invalidating any blocks or other transactions. With forensics on the initial theft, miners could then tree-traverse back up to blacklist future transactions on stolen coins. There are probably lots of…
You can't double-spend the outputs unless you get rid of the blocks they were originally spent in, i.e. rewinding and re-mining all of them.
My understanding of the way the network operates is that a group with 51% of hashing power can essentially arbitrarily manipulate the blockchain going forward. Nothing could stop them from confirming otherwise invalid transactions (re-spending the original outputs) and mining those new transactions. After which, clients, only looking backwards to the first block a transaction resides in, wouldn't notice that the funds were originally double-spent.