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

What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

hackingdistributed.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 97 posts

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#41

Post by lvs »

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…

Another point is that evidence of significant tx-mal can't be found on the block chain prior to Feb 9 [1]. Now, it's possible that the search wasn't thorough enough, but I find that unlikely. Any reissued transactions must have occurred within a very short period -- a couple of weeks in February -- that could have been attributed to malleability.

[1] http://www.righto.com/2014/02/the-bitcoin-malleability-attac...

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#42

Post by afterburner »

ck2 wrote: post #29

By the way have you seen Mark Karpeles public apology in Tokyo? (20 seconds in) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15IZtzWOzRU So he is French, educated in Paris and living in Japan since 2009? Speaks French, English and Japanese. Sounds interesting, he's no dummy.

Born in France, so he speaks French.

Involved with the internet, so he speaks English.

Lives in Japan, so he speaks Japanese.

This is not impressive.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#44

Post by jonknee »

nwh wrote: post #32
rsanders wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Gox mentions this on a number of occasions, not the least in 2011 when they detailed how their cold storage system worked with split keys.

Gox also mentioned a lot of stuff before it went dark with everyone's coins. Something obviously went horribly different than planned.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#45

Post by jonknee »

ck2 wrote: post #40
isaacb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking three languages doesn't qualify him as a competent developer.

Cannot comment on his code. Or how he operates a business. Just that he seems rather smart in general, or rather not stupid. I wonder what the motivation to move to Japan was.

I suppose it's all relative, but it should be pretty easy to judge his code and how he operates a business--MtGox was by all measures poorly coded and that directly resulted in hundreds of thousands of people being damaged financially.

He may have a high IQ, but he is not fit to run a giant financial exchange. I'm not sure any single person is, this is why large financial organizations have tons of people with different areas of expertise (development, security, law, finance, risk, etc etc). He rode "internet freedom" all the way to being way over his head and took everyone else down with him.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#46

Post by nols »

smtddr wrote: post #37
adrianwaj wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are all these horror stories?

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv26o/gox_horror_s... Here are some of my "favorite"(anger inducing) comments: ▻ Poor student, all he had... http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv26o/gox_horror_s... ▻ Son's college fund wiped out... http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv26o/gox_horror_s... ▻ Used many credit cards... http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1yv26o/gox_horror_s... ▻ Holding coins…

I think that's exactly the counterpoint he was going for, people would be stupid enough to put their life savings into BTC but not dogecoin.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#47

Post by dsrguru »

jonknee wrote: post #44
nwh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gox mentions this on a number of occasions, not the least in 2011 when they detailed how their cold storage system worked with split keys.

Gox also mentioned a lot of stuff before it went dark with everyone's coins. Something obviously went horribly different than planned.

In fairness, it's somewhat likely that everything went exactly as planned, at least for some of the people behind MtGox.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#48

Post by pmorici »

jeremyjh wrote: post #6

I think that there are only two real possibilities here: either Gox lost the money but doesn't know how they lost it, or they stole it. Theft is a much simpler hypothesis than many that are being proposed, but this doesn't really fit the pattern of the previous major thefts by wallets trusted by the community. The main difference is we that we know who these people are. It doesn't seem likely they could ever really c…

There were reports that they laid off a number of employees in late January before this all went down. Maybe one of those disgruntled employees took a copy of the cold storage private keys with them.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1wc2mg/things_just_...

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#49

Post by ryanobjc »

The article is ok, and unsurprisingly did well on hn, but it's still the easy first level technical analysis. I learned nothing here.

I'd love to see a deeper analysis, but it probably can't come from a computer scientist.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#50

Post by jmduke »

afterburner wrote: post #42
ck2 wrote: post #29

By the way have you seen Mark Karpeles public apology in Tokyo? (20 seconds in) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15IZtzWOzRU So he is French, educated in Paris and living in Japan since 2009? Speaks French, English and Japanese. Sounds interesting, he's no dummy.

Born in France, so he speaks French. Involved with the internet, so he speaks English. Lives in Japan, so he speaks Japanese. This is not impressive.

Speaking as someone who is anti-Karpeles and unilingual: I think speaking three languages, regardless of context, is incredibly impressive.
Post reply on HN