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What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

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Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#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 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFEBAAEDCE6AF48A03BBFD25E8CD0364140 are valid private keys for Bitcoin.

You'd have to be stupid unlucky to randomly generate an invalid private key, but it can possibly happen.

> If one must pick a cryptocurrency, the lowly dogecoin, of all things, is doing everything right.

Yeah, an ancient fork of Litecoin with a meme name is going to save us. Has absolutely no relevancy to the issue at hand of course.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#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 cash-out without being observed. Even if they don't try to do that there are likely to be indictments and prosecutions that they will have to live through.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#7
Author put a lot of thought and work in to telling a great story, but...

Would be better if it weren't built on speculation, and limited by the things the author clearly doesn't understand about crypto.

Articles like this hurt the Crypto Currency movement because the things they get wrong about what did or didn't happen are speculation that just fuels fires of mistrust for what could happen. And the thing touted as solutions to it happening in the future aren't well researched so they give false security and opportunity for things to happen again.

I appreciate the authors effort to drive up the price of Dogecoin, and prevent further fall of BTC prices, but that's all this is.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#8
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.

Re: What Did Not Happen At Mt. Gox

#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 Gox had an automatic system, which reissued Bitcoin transfers if they failed. So you didn't need to phone them or convince in any way - Mt.Gox would send you a new transfer (and exhausting inputs has nothing to do here 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) after it detected the old one failed (TXID not found on the network).

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