Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Peter R’s Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox

bitcointalk.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 125 posts

Re: Peter R’s Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox

#11

Post by rheide »

mkonecny wrote: post #9
rheide wrote: post #8

Assuming that MtGox (let's say MtGox, not Mark) did indeed introduce transaction malleability as a feature, that should be very easy to prove with source control commit logs. But if the malleability vulnerability was already there to begin with, it would be very hard to prove indeed that MtGox was taking advantage of it. Edit: I should also add that Mark in particular has not proven himself smart enough in my eyes to…

MtGox didn't use source code control.

Another great reason to assume ignorance rather than malice.

Re: Peter R’s Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox

#12

Post by talas9 »

mkonecny wrote: post #9
rheide wrote: post #8

Assuming that MtGox (let's say MtGox, not Mark) did indeed introduce transaction malleability as a feature, that should be very easy to prove with source control commit logs. But if the malleability vulnerability was already there to begin with, it would be very hard to prove indeed that MtGox was taking advantage of it. Edit: I should also add that Mark in particular has not proven himself smart enough in my eyes to…

MtGox didn't use source code control.

How.. convenient.

Re: Peter R’s Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox

#13

Post by bdcravens »

mkonecny wrote: post #9
rheide wrote: post #8

Assuming that MtGox (let's say MtGox, not Mark) did indeed introduce transaction malleability as a feature, that should be very easy to prove with source control commit logs. But if the malleability vulnerability was already there to begin with, it would be very hard to prove indeed that MtGox was taking advantage of it. Edit: I should also add that Mark in particular has not proven himself smart enough in my eyes to…

MtGox didn't use source code control.

rheide was talking about the Bitcoin source control.

Re: Peter R’s Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox

#14

Post by gpcz »

joe_the_user wrote: post #7

Well, Regardless of how exactly it happened, I think the big thing is that anything that operates as "just an exchange" has the potential to operate as a fractional reserve bank instead (IE, just operate with enough money to cover day-to-day transactions and not-have/use-for-something the remaining funds people think you have in your vault). So basically, trusting any unregulated entity that claims to have stuff in i…

It also shows what happens in an environment without insurance. If Mt.Gox was insured, this catastrophe would have been avoided for the customer by either the insurance company paying out or by Mt.Gox never getting hacked due to the security controls that the insurance company would have demanded.

This, of course, raises the questions of "who insures the Bitcoin insurance company" and "how do the insurance companies protect their Bitcoin now that they are a target?"

Re: Peter R’s Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox

#16

Post by tlrobinson »

tl;dr: Mt Gox had a lot of coins stolen in 2011 and has been running a fractional reserve ever since. Mark tried to delay the inevitable insolvency by creating a bot to manipulate the price, and eventually tried to cover it all up by blaming "transaction malleability" attacks.

One of many plausible explanations. It's going to be really interesting seeing how this actually plays out.

Re: Peter R’s Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox

#17

Post by wizardry90210 »

I did notice that the owner of a large mining pool was receiving error notifications from Mt. Gox. This mining pool has tampered with mined blocks to include religious messages, so they'd definitely be in a position to do transaction malleability attacks to provide Gox with plausible deniability.

/r/bitcoin thread with sources: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zifxf/why_is_the_a...

Re: Peter R’s Theory on the Collapse of Mt. Gox

#18

Post by rheide »

bdcravens wrote: post #13
mkonecny wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MtGox didn't use source code control.

rheide was talking about the Bitcoin source control.

No actually, I meant the MtGox source code that deals with transactions. The malleability issue was known long before MtGox announced the exploit. It's possible that MtGox initially handled transactions correctly, but later introduced the malleability issue so they can blame their problems on that. Like I said before, I don't believe that's the case though.
Post reply on HN