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What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

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Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#91

Post by bennyg »

jonknee wrote: post #45
ck2 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differ…

He built an MVP and then kept going by iterating on the same codebase. This is literally the mentality HN tries to collectively push forward. If he had gotten the security/crypto right the tables would be turned and we'd be reading an article about how a guy bootstrapped the largest crypto currency exchange and how many people thought they could do it too and lost everybody's money collectively trying.

I'm beginning to think that the only constant in security/crypto is that people fuck it up.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#92

Post by thesimpsons1022 »

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.

where do people get the idea that speaking multiple languages makes you intelligent. In a lot of third world countries almost everyone speaks 4 or 5 languages.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#93

Post by gnerd »

DrStalker wrote: post #88
mads wrote: post #80

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…

Third biggest robbery ever if this list is accurate: http://listverse.com/2009/12/01/10-largest-robberies-in-hist...

I'm not sure it would count as a robbery as usually in English jurisdictions the term robbery implies force (through violence or threat of violence).

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#94

Post by lloeki »

gojomo wrote: post #54
emin-gun-sirer wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Karpeles wrote his own SSH server in PHP.

I never heard of that one, although I know Mark Karpeles is the author of a few tools in PHP. I met him around 2003 when he developed, hosted and managed a Ragnarok Online (not so) private server (fRO) on Linux (hence his surname, MagicalTux). The whole time he paid the hosting himself. Contrary to more known servers such as eAthena, this server had a unique feature is that it was written in PHP and developed mostly by himself. The server was stable, allowed for quick iteration and took the load quite fine. The whole time he paid the hosting himself. He also wrote an inetd daemon in PHP. Another PHP game project that never took of was 'Inochi', but I can't remember what it was about. He started a few other projects such as a homegrown OS and a VoIP system/company.

Still I can't tell much about the quality of his code since I never read it, and all traces of his code have vanished, and that's been more than 10 years ago. What I can remember though is that he was smart and friendly, but very sloppy at communicating.

For a side story, fRO grew sufficiently big that it caught attention of Gravity and Mark received a cease and desist letter, which he obeyed short of facing a trial. He rebuilt the server soon after though, authorising only a select few members (of which I was one) resulting in something more like a permanent, albeit remote, LAN party, and finally abandoned the project, stepping down and transitioning the management to the player community. The community stayed strong enough even without access to the server that Gravity offered an exit in a form of an officially sanctioned, monthly-paid server. That server was eventually integrated into the official Gravity managed euRO.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#95

Post by mcv »

catshirt wrote: post #78
smtddr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

the real horrifying part is not that they lost their money but that they invested it.

Particularly, that they picked a very risky investment for money they couldn't afford to lose. There's nothing wrong with investing money you need, but you should invest it in a safe, low-risk way, like a savings account or bonds or something (though those have turned out not to be entirely risk-free either).

High risk investment, like, oh, some totally unproven payment technology, is only for money you can afford to lose.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#96

Post by jonknee »

bennyg wrote: post #91
jonknee wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differ…

He built an MVP and then kept going by iterating on the same codebase. This is literally the mentality HN tries to collectively push forward. If he had gotten the security/crypto right the tables would be turned and we'd be reading an article about how a guy bootstrapped the largest crypto currency exchange and how many people thought they could do it too and lost everybody's money collectively trying. I'm beginning…

That's one way to look at it, another is that it wasn't minimally viable at all because it did the worst thing that an exchange can possibly do--lost everyone's money.

Coding aside, I don't think anyone at HN tries to push the mentality that you should try a financial startup without any accountants or a compliance department.

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