Bitcoin Forum

Is this the real culprit here for our never ending malaise? Do we have a few of russians that hacked gox slowly selling their stash of coins to fund their vodka addiction?

Nobody ever found any signs that gox had that coins. Consensus is that Mark was just retarded. They did owe users 650k coins, that is correct. But that could have occured after their dumbass bot lost that money to users, so to say. Selling imaginary bitcoins.

It's also hard to believe gox didn't have 650k of coins, cause even bitstamp has around 150k at much higher prices, and gox had much more whales - I doubt users were able to profit so much coins against the bot. So, to me it is reasonable that 5% of coins were on main exchange someday.

there's 200k coins they salvaged, I suspect that's all there was left.

Hopefully next year we will find out the truth behind the missing coins, the only point in staying silent is to either hide something or because their is a serious chance of recouping lost coins.

I know, what I was saying is that at one point it is very possible at gox were 650k coins or at least regularly should be (if not stolen before): deposits - regular (not stolen) withdrawals.

Not sure why you think there should be, but maybe. At one point, when gox USD withdrawals stopped working, they started leaking BTC and I suppose that balance quickly shifted to them having close to no coins.

PS I frankly have no idea who keeps 150k coins at bitstamp after gox, I guess people never learn. But thanks to them, without these brave souls the price would be manipulated to zero already :)

You think they were running a fractional banking game the entire time?

Here's the theory about it that states gox was running a fractional banking game since 2011...

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1zdnop/peter_rs_theory_on_the_collapse_of_mt_gox/

I think that is the only logical explanation of the fact that Mark had no idea where the rest of the coins could be. Hard to show something that never existed.

Bitcoin days destroyed do not indicate a massive movement of coins recently.
Hence the theory of goxcoins being sold now would only work if they have been at an exchange for quite some time already.

Gox running a fractional reserve for some time or the coins being inaccessible due to bad coding would be more likely.
Alternatively the coins are actually there and accessible but it is claimed otherwise.

It brings up an interesting point. If even one of the bigger exchanges was also running a fractional reserve and allows for naked shorting it would be interesting to know how that were to play out for the entire market

If this is true.. I have no mercy for the man and he should visit the gulliten.

Didn't gox move 400k+ coins in 2011 as proof that these coins belong to them and that they still have control over them?

2011 was quite a long ago.

Many things happened meanwhile.

And they having 400k+ coins in 2011 different from they control 400k in 2013 or now

I think the point I take from this is that certainly gox has had a lot of coins and a lot more than 200k in the past. I think the missing coins are real, maybe not 650k in missing coins but 200k in missing coins would not surprise me at all.

Yes, however they have claimed that several hundred thousand bitcoin was lost due to malleability, and this would have happened over several years

That's what never clicked with me. Even you are a stoner monkey running a business, you would still notice cold wallet balance decreasing by several hundred thousand coins, especially over several years. Even dumb php sites can add "money in minus money out" to check where they stand at. So Mark definitely knew that he owed way more than he had. 100% certain.

If I recall correctly Karpeles/Gox claimed that they lost the coins recently due to malleability.
Anything else would have implied that they were conducting gross mismanagement as the missing coins would have had to show in their bookkeeping.

I don't know if there exists a log of all broadcast transactions rather than just those that are in the blockchain.
If anyone has such a log it might be possible to determine if and how many transactions were affected by malleability.

I am almost certain it was not the reason that the coins are "gone".

One very strong indicator that something fishy is going on is that the public information provided by Gox does not properly add up.
You cannot lose that amount of coinage over a long time with proper procedures without noticing.
Over a shorter period we would see other tell-tale signs like a noticeable change in bitcoin days destroyed.

The sheer amount of coins makes them very hard to hide if they were indeed stolen. It is easy to conceal a few dollar bills you stole but try to hide truckloads of money without it being noticed.

Can't find the link now but it was pretty much proven that the most that was lost to malleability was like 100 btc. total, over all of the blockchain transactions. so that myth was debunked

Ok, I read up on it more and basically the blockchain would have to contain many malformed transactions (where the padding is non-standard but not invalid) if tx-malleablity happened on a large scale.
Shame on me for not looking into it more before posting. I had always assumed malleability was caused through a variable field for which there is no single "correct" encoding. The difference being that one is easy to check for while the other would require you to know of both transactions as you would not be able to tell which one is "wrong"