81–90 of 97 posts
Question: 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?
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?
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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.
I'm only fluent in 3 languages.
I guess I don't see why the simplest explanation isn't that the US Feds seized the contents of the safe deposit boxes where their cold wallet was kept last year along with the $5m in bank deposits.
I guess I don't see why the simplest explanation isn't that the US Feds seized the contents of the safe deposit boxes where their cold wallet was kept last year along with the $5m in bank deposits.
Then why isn't anyone saying that? Why could they admit $5M was seized but not admit that BTC was also taken at the same time?
Could explain a lot of their behavior, actually.
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.
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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…
It'd be most accurate to say you rigorously described a kind of mining-cartel attack that had been discussed years earlier, but I know I won't convince you of that, because you only count published academic papers, and the earlier discussions of the same attack all happened in less-formal bitcoin forums. Regarding MtGox scenarios: Reliable evidence on what MtGox truly did is scarce, but people have widely speculated…
Is that actually the case, or can most/all forms of malleability be detected by looking abnormal transactions that wouldn't have been generated by any known client?
Looking at the known sources of malleability, most of them would never be done intentionally: https://gist.github.com/sipa/8907691
Has anyone done a comprehensive analysis like this yet?
We are talking about a half a billion dollar heist here. That's a lot of money - probably in the top 10 of biggest robberies ever committed. You wouldn't have be a super hacker to pull it off. Some hidden cameras, USB key loggers and some microphones in the office could probably have gotten you a lot closer to that money. And if you then could lure MtGox into emptying their hot wallet with the tx mal problem, then ev…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It'd be most accurate to say you rigorously described a kind of mining-cartel attack that had been discussed years earlier, but I know I won't convince you of that, because you only count published academic papers, and the earlier discussions of the same attack all happened in less-formal bitcoin forums. Regarding MtGox scenarios: Reliable evidence on what MtGox truly did is scarce, but people have widely speculated…
"only outsiders with a giant archive of long-ago race-losing transactions (that never reached blocks) would be able to estimate the magnitude of the losses. (I don't know any public source for such an archive.)" Is that actually the case, or can most/all forms of malleability be detected by looking abnormal transactions that wouldn't have been generated by any known client? Looking at the known sources of malleabilit…
The issue with using it to estimate an upper bound on potential MtGox losses is that since some portion of MtGox's historic transactions were non-canonical, a third-party mutation could result in a 'normal' transaction entering the blockchain... but MtGox still confused, perhaps to the point of loss. Any survey would miss such transactions.
Maybe there's a private archive of never-confirmed transactions. Since it seems MtGox at times provided a public feed of (some of?) its own intended transactions, someone who'd been scraping/saving that for long enough might have a useful estimator dataset.