There are many interesting points made and dealt with in this article but what's weird/wrong/suspicious about a CEO using IRC?
Did he say something specifically stupid there? Or is the very medium tainted?
What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox
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Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox
#62There are many interesting points made and dealt with in this article but what's weird/wrong/suspicious about a CEO using IRC? Did he say something specifically stupid there? Or is the very medium tainted?
> There are many interesting points made and dealt with in this article but what's weird/wrong/suspicious about a CEO using IRC?
It contradicts the image of a corporate heavyweight, who by definition would want to avoid making informal remarks that might be misinterpreted by stockholders or the public. In some contexts, informal remarks by a corporate insider could be taken to suggest an intent to manipulate the public's perception of the company and therefore its market valuation.
> Did he say something specifically stupid there? Or is the very medium tainted?
Answers: Not necessarily, and yes, definitely.
Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox
#63> 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.
As he explained, it was a joke.
Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox
#64Far 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 knowledg…
This. The author likes to fill the space between his unexplored technical points with this tasteless, dismissive tone that makes me question the value of his argument even before I scroll down to look for an appropriately brief TL;DR. Unfortunately all I find is some strange reverence for the most irreverent cryptocurrency, Dogecoin. I'm sure the billions of unbanked and poor in need of affordable remittances would prefer a currency that takes neither itself nor its users seriously, and which lacks even the economic principles to deflect its alt-coin implausibility, over an increasingly established and appropriately ambitious alternative to the current financial system.
Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It isn't. I'm Dutch, and had to learn Dutch (obviously), English, French and German. And so did all the other people I know. People who attended gymnasium also had to learn ancient Greek and Latin.
Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's only looking at one kind of malleability. Notably, I've been told that MtGox for years issued its own transactions in a non-standard format... so one potential 'attack' would be to mutate those to canonical form and race them into the blockchain. There'd be no evidence of such an attack in the blockchain: only someone who'd been long-archiving losing, non-canonical transactions from multiple places in the netw…
That sounds a bit speculative. If someone has a link that shows one of these "non-canonical transactions," that might lend some credence to the idea. Furthermore, if Gox was always issuing weird transaction formats, then looking for addresses that show a statistic prevalence of these would be trivial. Showing that the attack took place would simply require showing addresses that occasionally issued a proper tx, but s…
Their history of oddly-composed transactions could help identify more of their likely addresses, if noone else did the same thing, but that would still be of limited use in funds-tracing depending on whether such addresses were ever reused.
That they've long been issuing valid but unusual signatures was mentioned among other places at: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x93tf/some_irc_cha...
I'm not sure if this was just a tiny sliver of their transactions, or a large proportion... but it complicates easy analysis of what the malleability losses could be.
Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox
#67Question:
If the bitcoins were stolen, and the thieves later try to trade them, will that be obvious from the blockchain? Or can they successfully spend them without anyone realizing they are stolen?
Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox
#68I 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…
> since they had no reason to use raw transactions API which lets you to use specific inputs, and instead they probably just used the more common sendto API
There's a very good reason to use specific inputs - the only correct way to re-issue transactions is with the same inputs from the failed transaction, ensuring that its impossible for both the old failed transaction and the new one to both exists on the same blockchain.
Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox
#69Of course this is wildly speculative but perhaps a simple answer is that someone internally at Mt Gox cleaned out the accounts and is blaming hackers and/or bugs. 100's of millions of dollars is easily enough of a temptation for someone to commit major fraud.