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What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

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Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#21

Post by smtddr »

efuquen wrote: post #8
nwh wrote: post #4

> But elliptic curve crypto is not one of these topics. If the code can generate a handful of Bitcoin account numbers and corresponding keys correctly, there is hardly any reason why it cannot do so for all account numbers and corresponding keys. Not totally true, not every input can yield a valid private key. The very upper ranges of the private key space are limited, as only integers 0x0 through 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF…

It's funny how you took that last line completely out of context, the author was clearly tongue-in-cheek with that statement, here is the what comes immediately after that sentence: > The community does not take itself seriously. Most importantly, no one pretends that Doge is an investment vehicle, a slayer of Wall Street, or the next Segway. No one would be stupid enough to store their life savings in Dogecoins.

>>No one would be stupid enough to store their life savings in Dogecoins.

Author must have missed that Reddit thread on Gox horror stories. There were some really awful decisions people made with their savings. I bet someone is going to make a similar mistake with Doge. We already have folks like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7166318

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#22

Post by axanoeychron »

drakaal wrote: post #19
axanoeychron wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is weak and your tone is dismissive. I think you're ascribing too much intent based on your own biases. You can't just say 'someone doesn't understand' crypto and not explain why. It reeks of an appeal to an authority and is not conducive to discussion. The Dogecoin mentioned at the end was a joke. It's also disingenuous to accuse someone of trying to inflate the price (without evidence) and to say that…

Enough other people pointed to flaws in the explanations that I didn't feel the need to beat a dead horse about those things. The whole article was a joke. The stuff about Dogecoin seems less a joke than the rest of the article. It is clear the author owns Bitcoins or Dogecoins or both. I can't prove this, but I'll bet 1 cryptocoin of my choosing on it. I don't currently own any Cryptocoins. I sold just shy of $950 a…

I was personally tempted to buy BTC from Mt Gox when they were worth around 90 dollars but decided against it. Shortly thereafter, they were breached and now this.

When the currency stabilizes, I'll consider getting some.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#23

Post by corresation »

Far too sarcastic for something that is almost entirely raw, unsupported speculation. Further, it is conflicted -- it disbelieves some statements by Gox, while fully believing others (e.g. "they were in cold storage").

The one element that seems believable are questions about the malleability attack. I do not understand how Gox or any exchange or service wouldn't have an up to the minute, blockchain verified knowledge of exactly what their positions are. Maybe they only did such accounting weekly, or even monthly...but at some point over the supposed multi-year exploit they would have seen that account balances > address holdings.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#24

Post by emin-gun-sirer »

M4v3R wrote: post #9

I think that his points against transaction malleability are invalid: - technical one - Bitcoin clients have a 100 ms delay before they relay messages. An attacker can compile a modified client that doesn't have these limitations and successfully outrun the rest. It was shown once that an attacker managed to successfully modify most of Bitcoin transactions on the network for some time in February - social one - IIRC…

Author here. I think there is some subtlety around the technical point that may be getting lost.

Ittay Eyal and I were the ones who discovered an attack against Bitcoin called selfish mining, where we showed how a miner could earn more than his fair share. This attack did not require, but could benefit from, the attacker racing against honest participants on the peer-to-peer network. Some members of the Bitcoin community claimed that the attacker would reliably lose these races because they start behind.

In the article, I point out that there is indeed a transaction race in this case, that people have demonstrated an ability to outrun transactions, and that this has ramifications for selfish mining. I do not claim that there is a technical impossibility -- quite the contrary! The tricks used to make that succeed are identical to what an aggressive selfish miner would use.

To be fair, malleability attacks require a modified client and some network positioning, so there is nevertheless a technical obstacle. Not one that is impossible to surmount, but one that requires some effort.

I did not know that Mt. Gox performed automatic reissues -- thank you for bringing that up. Would you happen to have a pointer that establishes this?

On the whole, I do not believe that malleability accounts for Gox's collapse at all. Even automatic reissues would put at most the hot wallet at risk. Studies of malleable transactions do not show anywhere near the volume required to account for Gox's collapse. And something I did not mention in the post is that the timing of the observed malleable transactions doesn't match the story from Mt. Gox at all. There is undoubtedly more to this story.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#26

Post by Jd »

>

If I'm not mistaken the Nobel leaurate [sic] in question wrote an article entitled "Bitcoin is evil." That seems to be slightly more than asking questions.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#27

Post by rsanders »

emin-gun-sirer wrote: post #24
M4v3R wrote: post #9

I think that his points against transaction malleability are invalid: - technical one - Bitcoin clients have a 100 ms delay before they relay messages. An attacker can compile a modified client that doesn't have these limitations and successfully outrun the rest. It was shown once that an attacker managed to successfully modify most of Bitcoin transactions on the network for some time in February - social one - IIRC…

Author here. I think there is some subtlety around the technical point that may be getting lost. Ittay Eyal and I were the ones who discovered an attack against Bitcoin called selfish mining, where we showed how a miner could earn more than his fair share. This attack did not require, but could benefit from, the attacker racing against honest participants on the peer-to-peer network. Some members of the Bitcoin commu…

Why do you assume that any coins were in cold storage? That's just another unverifiable assertion.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#28

Post by rsanders »

tomphoolery wrote: post #11
efuquen wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how you took that last line completely out of context, the author was clearly tongue-in-cheek with that statement, here is the what comes immediately after that sentence: > The community does not take itself seriously. Most importantly, no one pretends that Doge is an investment vehicle, a slayer of Wall Street, or the next Segway. No one would be stupid enough to store their life savings in Dogecoins.

Bitcoin is an experiment, it's not meant to be a new investment product. It should be very clear to anyone involved that this is a volatile atmosphere and anything can happen. After all, it's really just a bunch of geeks with a website. There is no liability here. That said, I do think the author was a bit naive about the Dogecoin reference. Weren't they implicated in some kind of fraud as well? Seems as though that…

What good is the experiment if nobody uses it as though it were "real"?

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#30

Post by coldtea »

nwh wrote: post #4

> But elliptic curve crypto is not one of these topics. If the code can generate a handful of Bitcoin account numbers and corresponding keys correctly, there is hardly any reason why it cannot do so for all account numbers and corresponding keys. Not totally true, not every input can yield a valid private key. The very upper ranges of the private key space are limited, as only integers 0x0 through 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF…

>Yeah, an ancient fork of Litecoin with a meme name is going to save us.

Read the rest of what he says. Plus, how is "Dogecoin" any worse than "MagicalTux"?

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