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Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?

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Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?

#171

Post by dogecoinbase »

chevreuil wrote: post #48
deweller wrote: post #28

In November of 2011 Mt. Gox demonstrated control of 500k BTC. I followed the 500,000 BTC for a bit beginning at https://blockchain.info/tx/b269bf1b82dae8a61f7f91dbf7a9d807e... . The coins move around and small amounts are sent away, but the majority ends up back in Mt. Gox's main (hot) wallet. This repeats a few times until the majority is paid back to the main Mt.Gox address. Here is the transaction where it starts…

I'm a bit new to bitcoins, but is it technically possible for the bitcoins community as a whole to make a blacklist of bitcoins addresses and "ban" the stolen bitcoins ? Such blacklist would daunt robbers and enforce public trust in bitcoins.

The main issue here is that once a Bitcoin enters a wallet, it's indistinguishable from the other BTC in that wallet. So you'd have to blacklist whole wallets, and since you can't deny payments, people possessing stolen BTC would simply tip anyone trying to enforce this scheme.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?

#172

Post by joeld42 »

kordless wrote: post #56
deweller wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is an example of something you might find: Say you traced these coins to 50 different addresses. And then, for example, say that those addresses lay dormant for 3 months. And then 45 of those addresses send bitcoins somewhere on the same day. That would imply that the coins are under the control of a single owner. I agree it is difficult and beyond the scope of just writing a simple script.

I was thinking about dumping the Blockchain into Splunk. Investigating the best way to do that today.

I don't know much about btc, but John Radcliffe has a nice command line blockchain parser/query tool: http://codesuppository.blogspot.com/2014/01/a-command-line-i...

Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?

#173

Post by gizmo686 »

deweller wrote: post #28

In November of 2011 Mt. Gox demonstrated control of 500k BTC. I followed the 500,000 BTC for a bit beginning at https://blockchain.info/tx/b269bf1b82dae8a61f7f91dbf7a9d807e... . The coins move around and small amounts are sent away, but the majority ends up back in Mt. Gox's main (hot) wallet. This repeats a few times until the majority is paid back to the main Mt.Gox address. Here is the transaction where it starts…

Thanks.

Is there an API available for doing this type of analysis of the blockchain (or a program already built for this)?

Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?

#174

Post by gizmo686 »

d0ugie wrote: post #49
loceng wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the issue. It can become a never-ending wild-goose chase. The thieves can continue to move the funds around until they're no longer tracked, or far enough ahead that from the trackers (assuming there's any enforcement or penalties or laws relating to accepting stolen Bitcoin - which there aren't currently) or just spend them if they're not being tracked or if there's no enforcement in place. The thieves will…

Wouldn't, in this high profile clustereff, somehow tracking down those bitcoins cause bitcoin in general more harm than good? Would it not highlight that one way or another, either by fault of bitcoin or human error, that like Tor it is not bulletproof in terms of anonymity and susceptibility to being taken back from someone, whether that someone is a good or bad guy?

To be clear, Bitcoin is not supposed to be anonymous. The centerpiece of its design is a publicly view-able log of every transaction ever made.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?

#175

Post by btcfn »

vladd wrote: post #141
btcfn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impossible. You'd have to somehow convince ALL miners to not process them. Fungibility prevents you from simply blacklisting these coins. http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.it/2013/12/why-bitcoin-fun...

Actually you just need to update the code and push it via the update mechanism.

Code of what? Bitcoin is not one central code base with a global update system.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?

#176

Post by [deleted] »

erichurkman wrote: post #121
enraged_camel wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Ever heard the adage "Don't put all your eggs in one basket"? I'm pretty sure the opposite is also true though, as in "don't split all your eggs among thousands of little baskets." I mean, at some point the overhead of managing all of those wallets must outweigh the risk of having everything in one wallet, right?

They should have written a check that runs periodically to check that the sum of all wallets equals their total BTC according to their ledgers. You have to write that process anyway, it shouldn't matter too much if it has to examine 100 wallets or 10,000 wallets.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?

#177

Post by gremlinsinc »

deweller wrote: post #28

In November of 2011 Mt. Gox demonstrated control of 500k BTC. I followed the 500,000 BTC for a bit beginning at https://blockchain.info/tx/b269bf1b82dae8a61f7f91dbf7a9d807e... . The coins move around and small amounts are sent away, but the majority ends up back in Mt. Gox's main (hot) wallet. This repeats a few times until the majority is paid back to the main Mt.Gox address. Here is the transaction where it starts…

Yeah, and I'm sure this line of thinking, will eventually route out the person who stole all those bitcoins -- and I won't be surprised it it's The top execs of Mt. Gox - - who better to take the money and run? They KNEW that they couldn't possibly sell bitcoins at higher than market prices, and make a profit UNLESS they were running a Ponzi scheme.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?

#179

Post by jsmeaton »

Torn wrote: post #104
freefrancisco wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to put these transactions, or the whole blockchain, in a graph database like Neo4J. Dealing with it as a graph would make it easier to find the sinks for all the transactions that started from that wallet. It would also be interesting to look at deviations from the historical statistical distribution in the aggregate of these transactions as a function of time, that would show when a single ac…

Visualising it in something like KeyLines ( http://keylines.com/ ) would be awesome.

Couldn't find a single download link or pricing/buy link.

Re: Ask HN: Where are the 750k Bitcoins lost by Mt. Gox?

#180

Post by mtlolx »

kordless wrote: post #89
mtlolx wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unusually silly conspiracy theory. I find it extremely unlikely that MtGox would falsely claim that they suffered a theft due to transaction malleability (a real point of possible error) if the actual issue was a US Government seizure. It just strikes me as utterly unbelievable that they would actively cover up (rather than simply failing to disclose) a government seizure. It's far, far more likely that Ka…

You can't disclose if you are under a gag order. If Mark was running a fractional reserve because the coins were seized, and they got hit with the transaction mailability issue, that could set the stage for what we're seeing today. I agree Occam's Razor applies here. That said, we still don't know a lot about what happened.

You can't disclose if you are under a gag order.

Exactly. They'd say something like nothing, rather than making up some false story about malleability-based thefts.

The government theft theory is nonsense.

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