Bitcoin Forum

I’m Kevin and I'm the guy who bought 259684 BTC for under $3000 yesterday. I really wanted to keep this as quiet as possible, but I don't feel I can anymore. Here's my side of what happened.

On an exchange like MtGox, there are typically hundreds of standing "buy orders" where people are offering to buy bitcoins at various amounts and prices. When a large sell order comes in, an exchange will start with the highest priced buy order, match up the buyer and seller, then move down to the next lowest buy order. This repeats until the entire quantity of bitcoins being sold have found buyers, or there are no more buyers at the minimum price the seller was willing to accept.

I was watching, like many of you, a gigantic sell order burning through the bids. Mt Gox doesn't execute trades very quickly, so we were watching this huge order slowly eat up every buy order on the books. The price started at around $17.50, and within minutes was below $10. At this point, I realized this wasn't merely a large seller willing to accept some losses. This was someone attempting to crash the market by selling a huge percentage of the market's total bitcoins at once.

I had around $3000 USD in my Mt Gox account, from earlier sales I'd made. I looked at the market stats, and realized that there were tons of orders to buy BTC at $0.01 that would likely eat up any remaining bitcoins this seller had on the order. I figured if I put a buy order in for $0.0101, my order would execute first and I could buy a huge amount of bitcoins from this seller before it hit the bottom. The only problem was that Mt Gox was running slower than molasses at the time, and everyone was saying that it wasn't accepting trades. I had to try several times, but eventually I got a buy order in, offering to buy as many bitcoins as I could for $0.0101.

The site stopped responding completely for a while, probably from so many people hitting refresh to see what was going on. When I got back in, I saw in my account:

06/19/11 17:51  Bought BTC  259684.77 for 0.0101

I had just purchased over 250,000 bitcoins for $2613. At the trading price immediately before this large sell order happened, that number would have been worth nearly $5 million. After I regained my breath, I tried to figure out what to do. I wasn't sure what was really going on. Over the past few days there had been a lot of talk and complaints about Mt Gox's security. Lists of Mt Gox usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords were being traded around, which was an obvious sign that security at Mt Gox had been breached in some way. If there was an attacker in the system, perhaps he was able to log into my account now and force my account to execute some other crazy trade.

I attempted to withdraw the bitcoin balance into my own wallet, and hit the limit that Mt Gox has, preventing you from withdrawing more than $1000 USD worth of bitcoins (at the current market value) in a day. This transferred 643.27 bitcoins to my personal bitcoin account before hitting that limit. It was pretty well known that the limit for transferring bitcoins was actually broken in Mt Gox. It stopped you from moving more than that in one withdrawal, but you could immediately ask for more and get another $1000 USD worth, over and over. I decided against this, since it was exploiting a bug, and I definitely didn't want to do anything suspicious looking or improper.

The thought also occurred to me that there were only about 100 bitcoins worth of buy orders back on the market in the minutes immediately following all of this. I could place a reasonably sized sell order for $0.001, crash the market again, and withdraw probably all of the bitcoins, since they'd be valued at $0.001 each and would fit under the $1000 USD limit. I also decided against this, when I realized that whoever placed the gigantic sell order was probably doing so for the exact same reasons and I knew how that would make me look.

I then sent an private message on IRC to MagicalTux (Mark Karpeles, the founder of Mt Gox) to explain that I was the one who won the giant buy order, and that I wasn't the same person as whoever placed the huge sell order. We'd talked previously, including a private talk a couple of days ago about Mt Gox's "change my password" system not working. He didn't respond to me at all, but I figured he was busy. A few minutes later he was saying in public that he'd decided to reverse all the recent trades, effectively undoing the final 3602 trades that were executed before he shut the site down.

We talked a bit, and I started to become increasingly concerned with what Mt Gox was saying in public which was totally contradicting what I knew to have happened. The Mt Gox status page said:


There are three very misleading elements in that line alone.

First, this makes it sound like the "hacker" is the one who was buying back all the bitcoins at a penny. We all were watching the trades execute in real time, there was only one buy order of anywhere near the size of the huge sell order that went through, and I was the buyer not the hacker. Other people in IRC were saying which other buy orders they were able to get. The hacker couldn't have been able to buy back even 10% of the bitcoins that were sold during the sell-off. Did this mean Mark thought *I* was the hacker? I have repeatedly asked him this question, which he's managed to ignore each time.

Recently I've been getting into the bitcoin trading market. Over the last couple of weeks, I was hitting the $1000 USD Dwolla cash withdrawal limit from Mt Gox, so I requested that it be increased. I sent Mt Gox a copy of my driver's license and two utility bills in my name/address to prove my identity, which Mark accepted and increased my limit. Could that have been faked? Sure. But, if I was the hacker I was going about this whole thing stupidly. I had several ways I could have drained the Mt Gox account, and deliberately didn't. I immediately contacted Mark to identify myself as the buyer and offer assistance. If I were up to something shady, I was doing a really bad job at it.

The second thing wrong with Mt Gox's statement is that it makes it sound like only the hacker managed to withdraw any money, and even then only $1000 worth. I alone withdrew 643 bitcoins (worth more than $10,000 USD easily). The withdrawal limit feature was so broken, it was hard to imagine the hacker didn't know how to exploit it.

On top of how misleading I felt they were being about what I knew occurred, I felt it was far worse that they were using this argument for why they wanted to undo the trades. From reading their public statements, they're making it sound like they're reverting the trades because they want to prevent a hacker from profiting from it. This is simply not true, the vast majority, if not all of the buy orders that picked up coins at a low price were regular users like myself. Any profit this hacker was going to make, he's already done so. The majority of the buy orders that got executed were standing orders from legit users that had been in the system for quite some time, and those are the orders he's threatening to revert.

And this is where I, like others here, have a problem. Of course I am greatly biased here, but look at what's going on:


1) Rolling back/Breaking trades is something Mt Gox said they wouldn't do.

Many exchanges will break trades if something truly unusual happened, but there's a policy listed in advance so everyone knows how, when and why it will kick in. Mt Gox never claimed they felt they had the authority to undo trades, in fact the Mt Gox website states:


Claiming that Mt Gox isn't a "counter party" to trades has a specific legal meaning. Typically market participants, stock brokers and other associated people are "counter parties" or "central counter parties" to trades, taking on the burden of insuring trades were executed properly. Put simply, Mt Gox was saying in legal terms they were only acting as a match maker between buyers and sellers, not involving themselves in any issues that may come up from the trades themselves.

If they're claiming they have no responsibility for what occurs, that means they don't get to flex any control over it. You're either merely introducing buyers and sellers to each other and have no liability or power over what happens after that point, or you are a central counter party to the trade and do get to make those decisions. Mt Gox is trying to have it both ways, after telling us that they didn't want the responsibility. No rollback policy was ever published or even discussed anywhere I could find.



2) Mt Gox had been repeatedly warned about password security issues recently, and continued to reassure us everything was safe.

An exchange cannot be allowed to reassure customers of their security and fail to accept responsibility when it is proven to be insecure. As customers of Mt Gox, we cannot have the same visibility into their systems that they do and must rely on their word that the exchange is trustworthy. If exchanges are allowed to repeatedly tell us we can rely on their trading platform, fail at securing it, then be given a blank check to remove funds from anyone they desire to make themselves whole again, no exchange has any incentive to secure themselves.


3) The precedent they're setting here cannot be maintained.

Exactly what happened here may never be fully known, but according to Mt Gox an unauthorized user accessed someone's account and placed a sell order. Passwords get guessed/leaked all the time, and any exchange that attempts to undo that in every case will undoubtably fail.

If I'm careless with my password and someone places orders on my behalf in my account without my permission, will Mt Gox revert an hour's worth of trading to fix it? What if I only had 2 bitcoins? Or 20? or 200? There is no way rolling back trades to handle a compromised password in any way that will scale to the size of bitcoin's current economy. Unless Mt Gox is wiling to explicitly say they'll give this same treatment to any user who has their account compromised, it's blatantly unfair to everyone else.

This also opens the door to allowing anyone to request equal treatment if they made some trades they later regret. Log in through a proxy to make it seem like someone from a distant country was using your account, make your trades, then later scream about how your account was compromised and you want a do-over.


4) The whole situation seems fishy once you know everything that’s been made public.

Mt Gox's story is requiring extreme leaps of faith to believe. They have insisted that only one account was accessed. This means they expect us to believe:

 * A Mt Gox user had more than 500,000 bitcoins stored in their Mt Gox account (more than $8 million by Sunday's prices).
 * This user chose a password that was able to be guessed by a password cracker from the encrypted hash of their pass. (This means their password was likely quite simple)
 * This user managed to amass this many bitcoins without being involved in the community enough to hear everyone screaming about the password file being leaked to the world.
 * Mark claimed to me that police reports were filed in less than an hour after Mt Gox's trading was halted.
 * The decision to roll back trades was announced within minutes of them investigating.
 * Mt Gox's public statements have been, at best, misleading.

All of this is so implausible that I can't help but believe we are not being told the whole story. I am not implying that I believe Mt Gox is acting dishonorably, but that if they don't respond to this sort of thing, people will start jumping to worse conclusions.

If I had $8 million worth of easily convertible currency, there is absolutely no way I would store it on a public website like Mt Gox, no matter how secure I believed it was. If I had to store that much there, even temporarily, I would use a password so long it would make War and Peace look like a Twitter message.

Is the account owner a friend or investor in Mt Gox?  The account owner managed to get decisions made and a police report filed faster than I was able to get a response out of Mark. If there is some kind of connection between the account owner at Mt Gox, this needs to be fully disclosed and explained before any actions are taken, or any trust in what Mt Gox does is going to be shattered.

I am not actually accusing Mt Gox of scamming us or anything, but asking their users to accept over 500,000 BTC in orders to be reversed due to a story that has some serious holes in it, greatly benefits an anonymous account holder, and has some elements that are provably false is simply unacceptable.


5) Claims that they want to revert to protect the market are false.

Again, unless there are major pieces of the story missing, the hacker has already gotten away with whatever they were going to. Secure the compromised account with a better password and that matter is closed.

Mt Gox's website was severely affected by the large sell order, very very few new sell orders made it into the system. A few people did get some panic sells in during the freefall, but they were tiny in comparison to the volume of the big sell that started the mess.

The majority of the "buy" orders that got executed were long standing buy orders that were already in the system. Those people, before any crash started, told the system of their intent to buy at specific prices, and those agreements were honored. At worst, buyers got exactly what they already agreed to purchase, at best got a good deal.

The market made a 70% recovery within minutes, and was continuing to trend upwards before Mt Gox halted trading and shut their web server down.

The only parties that need to be involved in this are Mt Gox and the original account owner to determine if any unauthorized trades were actually made from their account, and how Mt Gox is going to make it up to them.


6) Mt Gox has several options before them, and are choosing to screw over the community to protect their profit.

I've seen people throwing around three options:

Option 1: Rollback all trades.

+ The guy who chose to store $8m in bitcoins on a public website gets the majority of his money back
+ Mt Gox is out very little
? Sellers who placed a panic sell during the freefall get a free undo.
- This sets a precedent that trades can be reversed, which increases risk and will likely result in some players want to wait for their trades to "clear" before taking further action making us no better than using PayPal.
- This gives strong incentive for traders to immediately withdraw funds after a trade, which will greatly reduce liquidity.
- Buyers who had both new and long time orders that were executed are getting them revoked by a policy that didn't exist yesterday.
- Had I not decided to "do the right thing" and leave the funds in Mt Gox, this wouldn't even be an option.

Option 2: Mt Gox tells the account owner "tough luck" and does nothing.

+ Everyone else who placed orders will be unaffected
- The account owner that got hacked is facing massive losses from something that may have not been completely their fault.
- This gives strong incentive for traders to immediately withdraw funds after a trade, which will greatly reduce liquidity.
- Mt Gox ends up earning their trading fees off someone's loss that they were likely partially or fully responsible for.

Option 3: Mt Gox takes responsibility, and reimburses the original account owner's account to the best of their ability.

+ The exchange is forced to deal with the consequences of their negligent lapse in security
+ Faith in the trading market would be largely restored if not increased
+ Buyers who placed orders that were executed get what they paid for
+ Mt Gox has clearly made several times more revenue (through trading fees) than this incident would cost them to completely absorb.
+ If this became an expected feature of an exchange, only exchanges that actually protected our accounts would survive.
+ Mt Gox is the only party that can go after the auditor that they are claiming was responsible for this incident
- It is uncertain if Mt Gox actually has that much liquid reserve to do this fully.

I am publicly asking Mt Gox to explain why they are unwilling to go for Option 3. They're choosing the option that costs them the least, protecting this mystery user at the expense of the entire bitcoin community. Their decision will result it everyone refusing to keep balances in the exchange for fear that profitable trades will be lost at the whim of the exchange owner. You've heard my story, if you make a sudden windfall trade that nets you a good profit, how long are you going to let Mt Gox hold onto it, out of fear they're going to claim it was invalid? If everyone is doing this, where is the money going to come from to make trades?


I realize a lot of this is going to fall on deaf ears who think I’m only doing this for my own profit. I’d believe this no matter what, but I probably wouldn’t be fighting so passionately if I didn’t have some stake in it.

I made a bunch of attempts to try to come up with some kind of mutually agreed on plan with the Mt Gox people, only to get stalled (they won't even talk to me until I sent them notarized copies of my photo ID on a Sunday?). I'd like to end as much uncertainty as I can, so this is my side. We all have opportunities to totally disrupt the market. I could threaten legal action which would cause an even bigger run on their reserves. Mt Gox could close their doors and take everyone's cash. I could have drained the money from Mt Gox but didn't. I really just want a fair solution that doesn't leave anyone hanging and doesn't disrupt the whole economy any more than it already has been.

*flame suit on*

Someone wants to keep their fat "booty"...

You stole 643 btc. Congrats.

Every major exchange breaks trades. Too bad for you, consider yourself lucky if you don't get sued for the 643 btc.

Every major exchange has written policies saying when breaks will happen. MtGox specifically said they weren't a party to the trades, and had no policy for doing so.

I also haven't said what I would do with that 643.

ITT:

Zealots zealoting zealotry.

I have no idea if you are who you so you are. I also agree that it is highly improbably that a single user was storing so many bitcoins on mt gox. However, this statement is not true. You are claiming that Mt Gox has already made millions of dollars and could absorb this loss without going under and taking the entire bitcoin economy with them. I fail to see how Mt Gox being made insolvent and lots of people ending up with no cash is a better outcome than rolling back trades (which again, happens all the time). I agree that Mt Gox and all exchanges need to be more explicit about this in the future but I don't think they have a legal or ethical obligation to honor the trades.

The rollback is inevitable. I feel bad for you because I would have felt like I one that lottery and then it was taken away. But, it simply has to happen.

It is possible that mt gox lost more than they have reported yet, but I don't think they lost enough to not be able to function. We'll see soon enough. I was never under the impression that the hacker was buying at a penny. It seems like the hacker was just acting crazy.

Most exchanges have a general rule about 'clearly erroneous trades' - this is usually defined as 20%+ away from recent activity. Trades at .011 clearly fall under this globally accepted guideline.

Mtgox is charged with running a fair and orderly exchange. That obv did not happen here and he has no choice but to correct it. Again, you have balls asking for the rest after taking 643 btc.

Executive summary:

1.) "I took advantage of an extraordinary event that turned out to be initiated by a rogue sell order, not legitimate trading."

2.) "Can I keep it? Look, here's why."

No, sorry. To allow the trade to stand would legitimize the attack, is that what you really want? (Besides bitcoins and dollars, I mean.)

I was assuming that your 0.01 trades were longstanding, and thus were the first 1 cent trades that were made(due to FIFO.) Now that I see that you did this while the price was crashing....well, I don't know what to think.  ???

No, I'm not claiming that they could have millions of dollars. But I am claiming that they've made many hundreds of bitcoins per day. Take the public volume, times their fee. If they don't have enough in BTC to cover the entirety of this, they're doing something very very wrong.

(edit to change incorrect comment about dark pool trade)

Although an alternative view would be that this redistribution of bitcoins into more people's hands would be good for the economy. Both because people tend to spend "windfalls" more freely than other money and because it would get coins in circulation that were just sitting there. Still, assuming that there is a person out there that would go after Mt Gox for the loss, I'm not sure they could be made whole withot Mt Gox going under and a lot of people losing a lot of money.

He is. I've verified it.

So the only minus of option three is... it might be impossible. Well, a back of the envelope calculation tell me that it is impossible. Of all the options, I prefer the rollback.

Tl;dr and no-one cares.

interesting can of worms.

i can't think i'd want to take the position of either party.

You are correct Kevin to take this approach. I believe Mt Gox tried to fuck everyone, especially you.  I believe they may have stolen bitcoins from accounts, then tried to sell them to buy them back up, thus laundering them into their own hands.

That's just my opinion, based on everything I have read and heard so far.

I agree that rollback was wrong INITIALLY. However, once the database was leaked, it was clear that none of the trades could actually be trusted. I'm almost suprised that they aren't reverting back further, but I suppose those are losses they can cover on their own. They don't have the millions of dollars it'd take to fix this mess.

Note that I phrased it as "to the best of their ability".  Nobody wants to see them go under or get screwed.

I actually agree with OP 100%. This is Mt. Gox's responsibility to make right. Especially in light of numerous complains regarding security well before the plummet. The fact is they were in over their heads and they dont know what to do now. Who are they to roll back a market?

THEY allowed their system to be compromised. They alone. I dont care if it was an auditor. That auditor had authorization to access their files and was acting on authority of the owner. No difference. I have zero pity for Mt. Gox. The only right thing to do is to reimburse the original owner for everything that he lost (since there arent enough bitcoins available, they need to BUY them for him. Period.) and the OP be allowed to retain the bitcoins fairly purchased. If I had money in Mt. Gox at the time, I would have been furiously trying to buy, too. There were plenty of posts here that thought it was a legitimate selloff. The OP did nothing wrong. Period.

They aren't making "hundreds or thousands of bitcoins a day". The volume is usually around $300,000 USD. Times .013 is 3900 dollars. Or about 260 bitcoins a day. That isn't enough.

Why couldn't it be a valid trade?

Because you and all your dumbasshole friends here think that BTC could NEVER be crashed by someone who just didn't give a fuck?

You all take your little play money market WAY too seriously...

#1) Volume includes dark pool trading
#2) You are not claiming they have millions of dollars available, but you think they could cover the loss of over 300k bitcoins without being made insolvent?

Agreed

no exchange is party to the trades (except maybe the clearing house of futures exchanges).
this doesn't mean they can't break trades.

the ONLY thing he could claim is that they're not allowed to break trades because there was no policy/agreement. but even that I doubt.


you basically admitted that you knew at the time you withdrew the 643 that it was the loot of a hacker.

Bitcoin is hardly a professional currency yet. It's an amateur one.

More of these things can be expected until the pros step in and start running things.


It's like comparing a street full of globalised company owned stores to a kid's fair at a school.

Honestly, I think you should just keep the coins. I personally was sleeping when the crash happened, but as a matter of principle I don't think actual BTC transactions should be reversed once finalized in the chain. Reversing the trades on MtGox's servers, though, is up to the owners, as there aren't actual BTC transactions being added to the chain.

MtGox screwed up though, and they should take the loss.

+ 1,000

When I signed up at Mt.Gox first thing I noticed was lack of user identity security. Definitely left themselves open to abuse.

I almost wish you would have cashed out and would now have much more leverage against MtGox. I wish you luck OP, and think you're in the right

What would be honest about that?

No, I had no way of knowing what was going on then, and still don't know. At first I thought it'd be safer trying to get a pile of bitcoins off a site if it possibly was hacked, but had absolutely no way of knowing.

I feel for you, Kevin, I really do. Problem is, this isn't someone making a stupid trade, or even someone trying intentionally to crash the market. In either of those instances, I would support you in keeping not only the 643, but the full 259684. It wasn't though. It was a Hack. Which means that the poor guy whose BTC you got had nothing to do with the trade, which means that he was stolen from.

MtGox allowed the theft, so its their responsibility to fix it, which means returning things to the way they were before the hack.

This means you're out those BTC you didn't get out, And I would return the 643, as well. On the bright side, you get your cash back.

Talk to a lawyer, preferably one specialising in securities. Who knows you might get a settlement from mtgox and rest of the community terms and conditions.

You will not find any justice even if you deserve it on the forum.

I think you are smart Kevin. That should be rewarded. Not with stolen bitcoins, but first we need proof they were actually "stolen". Otherwise, they are and should be rightfully, yours.

Kevin, this isn't something that can be decided with forum posts. Get a lawyer and keep your mouth shut in public.

We have no idea they were hacked, absolutely. We do not know they did not hack themselves.

I am astounded at the outpouring of support for MtGox here. Wow. MtGox allowed itself to be compromised, THEY are the ones responsible for settling things financially here. If they werent ready for this possibility, they shouldnt have been in the business.

If I lawyer up, it's game over. The lawyers I talked to said the first thing I'd have to do would be to get an injunction, which would effectively start a run on MtGox's reserves, which I won't do.

If nothing more, I'd like to be a cautionary tale to everyone else and stop the misunderstandings that resulted from Mt Gox's poorly written statement.

this ^

you can't seriously thing that you'll get the 250k or parts of it by making a forum post, do you?
there is nothing to gain, but there is 643 BTC to loose in case MtGox demands those back and you are making public statements here.

I honestly can't say if I was in your position, I wouldn't be say the same thing.  And it probably hurts real bad.  I don't even know what solution is the right one - because almost every option is bad for somebody or the concept of btc itself.

Must have been one hell of a few minutes!

A self-hack is still a hack. What I would like to see is a post from the guy whose account got drained. (verified, 'course.)

And if he refuses to give them back??? What are they going to do, sue him? How did any of us know it was a hack. As I stated, there were many forum posts right HERE talking about the "major selloff". People thought Satoshi was getting out and dumping. 90 percent of you would have bought at .01 if you could have. SO Mt Gox should get their coins back bcause they allowed themselves to be compromised?

Someone gets their wallet stolen and the prevailing attitude here is "oh well, should have been more careful", but a site trusted with our financial resources allows themselves to be hacked, and everyone feels bad for them?

If either of us tried that, it would be like scorching the earth behind us. There are very few actions any of us can take that won't cause huge disruptions.

This keeps getting stated.  Who is this "poor guy" - zero evidence for said "poor guy" having actually ever existed has been posted/made available as far as I'm aware.

If it were this simple, it's an open and shut case.  Kevin's post shows it quite obviously is NOT this simple, unless you believe that a simple password compromised user account held 500,000 bitcoins in it.  I personally do not.  My opinion may change based on more evidence.

No one (well, I'm sure some do) wants to see MtGox fail - but I personally want to know wtf the actual truth is so I can make informed decisions.  Why is this so unreasonable all of a sudden?

best post of the thread.

can you imagine?

Robber steals from a bank.



Robber loses his loot on a chase.



You pick up loot.



You're tracked down.



Loot is not yours to keep.



Simple fucking logic.

False comparison.

toasty, you, and many others, underestimate resilience of Bitcoin and overestimate it's dependence on mtgox. I mean medium and long term.

Yeh... really false.

Coming from a bitter eddy like yourself, I think that synopsis is spot on.

This comes down to theft, and the right thing to do is returning the stolen goods. As much as it pains anyone who scored from it.

If the goods isnt returned, this would tarnish the bitcoin community even more having it out and about that its fine to steal coins since there is no means to return stolen funds.

An exchange, specificly this situation, just proves that in some cases there is atleast some recourse for stolen funds.

This is all a bunch of bullshit.

Kevin stepped up. Now it's time for the bitcoin loser to step up, and if no bitcoin loser shows to claim the loss, then it was Mt Gox all this time. Who owned the 500,000 bitcoins?

I think it was Mt Gox!

They either owned them first, or stole them and then tried to sell off, and buy back, but Kevin got half of them. Who else got the others, exactly in their orders? Could it have been Mt Gox that got many of them?

Toasty the simple reality is if you choose to keep the bitcoins you will probably use all of them to pay for legal fees in a civil case, not to mention posibbly defending yourself in a criminal case.  This could very easily be in excess of $200,000 and there is no guarantee you would win and you would most likely loose one of the cases.  What is your risk tolerance?

Gosh, you inspire me Vladimir.

I don't agree with you, I think you're utterly banal, but damn is your tenacity inspiring.

I would also like the bitcoin "loser" to step up before you swallow kevins cock.

Its impossible for me to understand the logic here that because its such a huge amount of potential booty the arguments being made is attempting to justify keeping the funds.

I will stand in the corner for a second and say this, if it is some elaborate scheme by mtgox then it should be outted however if someone steps up and explains just like kevin did in this thread, that he is the bitcoin "loser" who will believe him? None of you who stand behind kevin and the stolen booty would believe it to be the bitcoin "loser" and conspiracies will fly about that mtgox is posing as the loser.

How do you think this could be proven? It cant.

I think it was many accounts and Mt Gox doesnt want to admin that.
wouldnt be the first time of the last few days.

can you explain their motive? I see no profits in a market crash besides commission and volume, and that isnt very much.

I probably have way more faith than you believe. But I couldn't live with myself if my own legal actions resulted in funds getting frozen which would affect even more innocent third parties.

+∞

I hear you. I smell herring, myself. Remember that HUGE consolidation last week? I want some facts, but I support reversing this whole fiasco for one simple reason: It was a fiasco. Kevin will be out his 'Profits', MtGox will take a loss, And it sets everything back to the way it was before it went nuts.

And isn't it odd that no-one has stepped up to comment about this theft of their assets?

I guess that's the power of bitcoin, all anonymous and shit.

Could have been Al Quaida, or some REALLY prolific child pornography collector...

Who knows?

Could have been an abandoned account from when bitcoins were worth $0.01c that was just forgotten about...

BUT TAKE IT TO COURT, BEST ADVICE.

The problem is, that's the story they're trying to tell, but have offered no proof of any "theft" happening, want to play police and fix it themselves, and their story has holes in it. Their solution screws over many, and the problem was one they allowed to happen.

Also, nobody tracked me down. I identified myself immediately to MagicalTux the moment he was active on IRC.

Shit, it could have been you. Considering how anti-bitcoin you have been, I think you are the hacker.

Prove me wrong, conspiracies activate.

If Kevin does not go after Mt Gox, even if it disrupts trading, who gives a shit? If he does not go after them, and they are guilty of anything, then what's to stop them from doing this again? EVEN BIGGER!

Does anyone remember this?  - STOCKGENERATION.COM

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.09/stock.html

My guess is that the selling account that was hacked was the mtgox owner's account itself.  If you're thinking along those lines that should answer a few questions.

Who has that much money?  The exchange that profits from every trade.

Why would they roll back the trades?  It was their account that was selling at $0.01.  

How did they decide to break their own rules so quickly and make it public?  Their own money was at stake.

Good luck getting them to not reverse the trades.  That would probably put them out of business and negatively effect the bitcoin itself.  I had a standing order at $0.01 and managed to pick up $14 worth of coins at that price.  But even I realize that these trades must be rolled back in order to prevent a loss of confidence by the investor group.  Anyone who deals with real trading will tell you that.  I also lost out big when they reversed trades on the NYSE after the flash crash 15 months ago... But I understand why these things happen.  Get over it and be glad that you got the BTC you did out of the market.  I wish I had been as smart, but I got greedy and withdrew nothing.  People like you who did get $ out of the system will probably cause mtgox to have some losses, but that is probably what they deserve for allowing this to happen.  At the end of the day, you made a little easy money and mtgox will restore confidence and keep the bitcoin economy alive.  It's a win-win.  

My $0.02.

You got me.

Come claim your prize, 10 billion Linden Do...I mean Floo...I mean Tuli...I mean Bitcoins.

I just wanna say: Everyone who is saying he stole that 643 btc... Shut up, youre just jelly.

WTF??? why does everyone keep thinking that it was one users bitcoins that were stolen?

It was definitely all our bitcoins that mtgox had in one account!

I remember a few days before, people saying that some big bitcoin movements on bitcoin monitor were from mtgox, and the quantity being moved was around 400 000 to 500 000 bitcoins.

No single user lost that quantity, it was our coins, from all of us!

1. MtGox will do whatever they want.
2. Numbers displayed on their website are not trades.
3. Nobody will sue MtGox, because who here can write a lawsuit in hiragana.
4. Bitcoins are not currency and formally have no value. Your wallet with bitcoins is just a file filled with some bits on your computer. Mr policeman, someone stole by bits! They really were here i swear. They were worth $20 each.
Okay everything is gonna be all right. Here put on the jacket we have for you.


https://i.imgur.com/PiHgw.jpg

Have no doubt...   MtGox will use the full weight of civil and criminal law to retrieve what it believes it is owed.  Cutting off communication with you is the first legal step.

Edit: Never mind I got the decimal place wrong I thought you withdrew 64,300 not 643 BTC.  643 BTC is not enough money to get lawyers involved.
Edit:  Ops MagicalTux thinks you are involved w/ the hacking.....   GET A LAWYER!!!!!!!

+1

Lol, I love you people like brothers.  You are the light of my life until I get bored here.

I just, can;t express what joy you bring to my life with your innocence.

It's like a pack of fucking kittens up in here.

They haven't even asked me to return those coins. You are generally required to pursue things out of the legal system first, and only use it as a last resort.

Lol, the 643 the dude "stole" aren't his.



If you buy a TV from a thief, the TV is still not yours and you don't get your money back, if the TV is found.


Similarly, If someone steals YOUR TV and sells it to your neighbor, you're not going to throw your hands up in the air and say "ohhhh! you're right. you own it now!! how stupid of me"

I wouldn't rule out that you'll get sued for the 643.
it's just a matter of their "professionalism", if they have the means to pull off a lawsuit in another country or just 3 people in a basement.

if I was in your shoes I'd just shut up.

My 2 cents. I say that Kevin keep the trade. I then say press charges on Kevin for reciept of stolen property. Its clear that he knows its stolen, now.

If I sell you a stolen gun so you may protect your home and you use it to shoot an intruder, do you think that you wont be charged with mere possession of stolen property? Of course you would. If you bought a stolen car and didnt know it was stolen and you got stop by the police do you think you would be going to jail? Of course you would. Even if your only the passenger. The law (in the USA) doesnt care if you knew the item in question was stolen. It only cares that it is merely in the possession.

So Kevin, I have some questions for you.

1) If your car was stolen and resold 10 times, would you still want your car back?
2) How long of a jail term is worth the btc you bought?

With that said, MtGox does have some culpability. You might look into getting a layer, but most layers will want payment upfront.

If it were me, I would have little issue returning the btc, tho it might be painful, I know I would want my stolen items back.

Kevin, are you going to join the chat on OnlyOneTV tonight?  That will be more enlightening than last night's show.  (Where all we learned was that the auditor was a "she")

I had around $3000 USD in the account before this started. They valued the bitcoins I received at $1000 when they were sent. I still had a positive cash balance when trading was halted, too. Both of us could be making demands of each other right now, and I don't think that's in our best interests.

It's quite possible that the person who was hacked still has no idea that it was them. For all we know, they were asleep when this happened and didn't have email notifications enabled. There's no way for them to login to MtGox to check.

Also: If you had this kind of money on MtGox, would you admit it? Although the user database was leaked, the balance sheet WASN'T. They'd quickly become a target on other sites if people knew what account's password they specifically had to crack to make big bucks.

You people making the stolen property analogies are leaving out one critical factor. The middleman.

Let's say you go to a used car dealer, and you purchase a vehicle. Later it comes to light that the car was stolen. Would you then give the vehicle back? No. You wouldnt. The dealer would be responsible. Simple as that. The dealer would have to re-imburse either the original victim, or give the car back and re-coup the buyer. It doesnt matter what price the car was, if I bought it for 5 dollars, it was an agreement made with a professional organization who decided to get into the business of selling these things.

toasty, just take the money and run I bet mt.gox would do the same if given half the chance.

I don't wanna argue the case with you.
all I'm saying: public statements when you MIGHT get sued are never a good idea, especially when you have nothing to gain.

No, you'd lose the car, You'd be lucky to get your money back, and the dealer would go to jail for receiving and selling stolen property.

I'd say Kevin is getting off easy here, he's getting all his money back, and may end up +643 BTC.

If the dealer could prove he didnt know the car was stolen, he likely wouldnt go to jail.

I'll tell you what causes a loss of confidence: an exchange that takes arbitrary actions which it never specified in its user agreement to protect itself.

I got all of my dollars and bitcoins of of mtgox a few weeks ago. I've been generally unimpressed by the standard of mtgox software ever since it was first released, and this whole hacking fandango came as no surprise to me unfortunately.


What's with so many people loving mtgox? they have "some responsibility" for writing crappy software, getting hacked via a dodgy auditor and getting the entire contents of the exchange sold off in 5 minutes? You're right, they do have the tiniest smidgeon of responsibility there...

I also have very little to lose. If it really did come down to it, and I was forced to give up the 643 BTC, it would suck, but I would move on. I can't think of anything they could possibly sue over beyond this, and if they tried it they'd definitely look like the bad guys here.

Oh Wow.

The police would seize your vehicle if they were aware of the situation. If you didn't know it was stolen, you wouldn't be charged with any crime.

Very good post OP, I completely agree.
As I said here (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=19581.0) the rollback punishes the people who stood up and did the right (heroic) thing.

Next time the market drops there will be less incentive to step up and buy:
1) They could lose if the market keeps going down for a long time.
2) They could lose if it was a short term selloff which then would be undone by a rollback.

I know the rollback is a rare occasion, but so was this crash, what if the next crash less people will stand up? Just roll it back again? Where do you draw the line.

No where did I hear Kevin say "I should get to keep them all!"

In fact he is speaking out primarily because he personal account contradicts MtGox side of things.

This is not going to be solved on an internet forum. I personally can't claim to know anything about the truth.

However MtGox has established itself as a reputable business within our community. They do have records of all the trades, where the transfers came, and their own transfers. Much of this can be corroborated by independent sources and even within the bitcoin blocks themselves.

I do think that the only way MtGox will repair the trust lost from their investors and this community as well as quell any stupid conspiracies is to bring in an independent financial auditor or forensic investigator. Yes I know this is what caused the problem in the first place, THAT auditor deserves to be sued nine ways till sunday. However instead of a general audit this particular incident needs to be investigated and explained in detail.

There are just too many questions everyone has and it at this point is just too early to have all the information.

Let MtGox do a thorough investigation, let an independent investigator in (with tighter security controls in place), and lets all reserve judgement until the verifiable facts come out.

So if suddenly bitcoin clients broke and everyone gained 99999btc you'd be fine with keeping those bitcoins then right?

All this talk of theft and zero evidence an actual theft took place.

The system should be rolled back (imo).  But the actual story needs to come out, someone already said it better than I could have - my belief based on all the evidence is this was MtGox's actual account, not a users.  It is really the only plausible scenario that makes logical sense, based on the evidence available to us.

Does this mean a rollback should not happen?  IMO no!  But it means we're being lied to.  Why?

And seriously, people actually care about the 700 coins taken out that are likely to be given back when this is all resolved?  Man you guys focus on the wrong stuff.

What you non-trading goofballs keep missing is the trade was fraudulent to begin with.

The rest is just bickering over who keeps a pot of gold that fell out of the sky.

Doesn't matter either way, the trades get rolled back and this thread will disappear under the newest wave of trollbait and ranting like usual. Just the way it is.

Does anyone still remember how MtGox handled the last situation where there was a large amount at stake for MtGox?

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=3712.0 (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=3712.0)

That guy explained himself, was hounded by the community, MtGox barely bothered to respond, made some outlandish claims, froze funds and rapidly moved the whole operation to a different jurisdiction (Japan) after the guy finaly decided to get lawyers involved.

MtGox promised to inform the community! No news yet, and it´s been 6 months!

QFT.

Kevin, cry me a river and troll elsewhere.

Amen!

Wow, my trust for mtgox just went a little lower, didn't know that was even possible any more.

Any news from Baron on if he ever got his money back?

Fine.  In that case the trade should be rolled back and the BTC returned.  But I'd insist on seeing the evidence.

When you talk about fat finger trades and so on, that is missing the fact that there are no T&Cs that anybody signed up to, the market is unregulated and the rules that apply on Wall Street do not apply to mt. gox.

Your wrong. I know someone how bought a stolen vehicle and they lost all their money and the vehicle. The dealer closed it doors. What do you do now? Sue the person whos vehicle was stole to get your money back? You mean in a theft you would want your items back?

I'm Spartacus!  I mean, "the bitcoin loser".

:P

The dealer could be sued in civil court. Yes, not existing anymore presents a problem, however in this case Mt Gox is still around and should be reimbursing the original account.

Alright.. so amdist all the wailing and gnashing of teeth I've yet to see anyone propose an actual solution to this problem, that is not outlandish and ridiculous (e.g. laywering up - no one wins here.)

So, I propose the following.  Full disclosure:  I personally know Kevin through mutual colleagues, and occassionally (2-3 times a year?) speak with him via AIM about various nerdy projects we're working on.  This is the extent of my personal relationship with him.  Oh, we at one point (5 years or so ago?) repaired a broken solenoid in a pinball machine together.


Kevin,

You say in your post that you are more concerned about the community and future growth of Bitcoin rather than your own pocketbook.  Many here obviously dispute this claim, and for good reason are unlikely to believe you.

Given this, would you agree to a panel of senior community members (chosen at large by the community as a whole) to become a panel for arbitration between yourself and MtGox?  Lets call it 5 senior well-respected members, who both MtGox, yourself, and the community can all trust.

Kevin will submit his story, which he pretty much already did it seems.  MtGox will tell their side, and provide confidential information needed to verify it to these 5 panel members.

These 5 members will decide the best course of action in relation to your specific situation with the following guidelines given to them:
* The primary consideration is what is best for the community as a whole
* Any solution will not bankrupt or otherwise substantially impact MtGox's operational capabilities

This would accomplish the following, based on your +/- system:
+ Gives the community some semblance of transparency for a MAJOR issue with the bitcoin market as a whole (as it exists today, at least)
+ Allows both sides to tell their story in relative confidence, thus protecting any major run on markets or mtgox due to new info being released that may be damaging.
+ Keeps this situation out of the court system, where it really has no business belonging and everyone is a loser
+ Quick resolution if MtGox agrees to this, I can't imagine it taking more than a few hours?
- Random panel of 5 "Internet Dudes" are deciding your fate
- You have a very substantial chance of being ordered to give back the BTC you withdrew, should the community members deem it appropriate

I believe this solution, with of course some tweaks to make both parties feel comfortable can accomplish everyone's *stated* goals here.  It will allow Kevin to know what happened, so he knows he's not being completely taken advantage of, it will allow the community to gain transparency and show to outsiders we can resolve problems in an expediant and reasonable manner.  Additionally MtGox will be able to end the rampant speculation as to their activities, and at least for me personally I'd regain a lot of confidence in their exchange.

Does someone have anything better?  Kevin, do you agree in principle to this?  MtGox?  Community feedback?

My personal goal is the longevity of Bitcoin.  Discussions with Kevin lead me to believe this is also his goal as well.  Is it MtGox's goal?  They have stated it is!  If so, step up!  If they do not, then I will have lost faith in their motives myself.  Others will make their own decisions.

Nobody here knows that's what happened though.

And there are many ways this could be interpreted in wholly different ways. One way could be, depending on what actually happened, is that MtGox's system sold me bitcoins that they didn't have a seller for, so they sold them to me themselves.

That's a bit of a stretch, but saying what happened here is positively "theft" when there's no evidence of any "theft" happening, and it's hard to say that even if what they say happened did happen, that it's actually theft or not.

If Kevin wanted, and as I'm sure a few other people have done, he could have purchased those coins, withdrawn every single one of them by exploiting the bug he identified, and then stayed quiet. Kevin, who is doing the right thing, will have 250k coins taken off him in the rollback, and would probably return those 600 coins if asked, other shadier people will have got away with some money, will stay quiet about it, and will get to keep it.

I think we're rewarding the wrong people here!

they "allowed" it to happen...?

okay, so if someone goes to 7-11, runs in for a second to buy something and leaves their car running it's no longer a theft if someone else takes it...? obviously the car is now theirs to sell, right...? they "allowed" their car to get stolen due to their own stupidity, so that's where the situation ends, right...?

The original victim didnt leave his car running. He left it in a garage that is supposed to be secure.

And the owner of the car was told that the garage wasn't secure but he didn't care, until this happened.

People who are making comparisons need to review the actual situation instead of making a straw man argument.

Analogies are wonderful because there are so many of them!

Me: "Hey, Ford... This new car I got from you... People are telling me that if they go to a ford dealer they can get new keys to my car made without any proof they actually own my car! I keep a lot of valuable stuff in there, I don't want it to get stolen."

Ford: "There is nothing to worry about, nobody can have new keys to your car made. If you want to have your locks changed, you can do so whenever you want. Your car is safe if it's locked."

Now my car gets stolen because someone did convince Ford to make a new key to my car. Aren't they partially to blame, especially because they were notified that this very thing was happening and reassured me it was safe?

Haha, completely off topic here.  But for a winter here in Minneapolis, this was essentially the case.  For whatever reason, there was a huge rash of idiots leaving their cars running (while warming up, running in to get groceries, etc.).  It got to the point that the police refused to investigate any reports of stolen cars that were left running - they'd just take a report over the phone and that's that.

Why would you call that stealing.

I go to art baazaar.
See some painting for just 1 USD and I buy it. This sort of paintings where between 1 usd and 1000 usd in last year I suppose, but I don't even have to know that or be art market expert.

If later it turns out that the painting was brought to the trading place not by lawful owner, but by someone that stolen it from next room, or stolen it weeks ago, or got this painting in exchange for some work that was not done well so it was sort of "stolen" .... then why do I care about this all, exactly?

The garage owner assured everyone that their cars were secure, even when people borught concerns to his attention. His business operation was dependent on keeping said cars secure, and he ridiculed people who said they werent.

This.

Even if the bitcoins were MtGox's to begin with, the trades should be reversed. Kevin did a pretty smart thing in jumping in there to grab those BTC, But the release of the DB shows that it was a hack, whether from an insider or from someone in it for the lulz, and the person (or persons) whose BTC those were should get them back.

@toasty:
So, you are Kevin, the guy who bought 259684 of stolen BTC for under $3000. And with your essay you are here to complain that MtGox says you can't keep the stolen value but will get your money back? Tell that face to face to person who got robbed.

And btw, how do we know you are not related to the hacker? Maybe you just wanted to launder the stolen BTC that he(or yourself) sold on MtGox.

As long as I didn't feel it was filled with people who had already made up their minds before starting, or if we could use a mutually agreed on professional arbitrator, I'd be up for something like that.

I don't want to feel like I'm participating in some kind of "tragedy of the commons" scenario. If the community consensus says doing X is overall the best option for EVERYONE, I'd be willing to go along with it. I'm far less concerned with my own outcome than I am of the effect all of this will have on everyone.

Do you know how I can tell you didn't read the original post? :)

Sorry Kevin, but Mt Gox is making this right, it's just not right for your financial gains.

Although your transaction went through, it happened during a time when the exchange was not under legitimate terms, so of course the only recourse is to roll back any transactions up to the breaking point of legitimacy.   To not do so would destroy the economy to the point of making all those bitcoins you "earned" effectively worthless.

It is wildly obvious that there was no single guy with a cool half million coins in his account.

It wasn't long ago that everyone was gawping at some 425k coins being moved, presumably offline by the MtGox lot. Then there are 50,000 users they have picked up in the last month. (I was about 11,000 and I signed up on June 1st, there are 60,000 odd on the list now!). They offline most of their funds and just keep a float, hence the maximum withdrawal limit.

All the coins that people see trading are all just numbers in a database. The hacker clearly had much more control than is being let on, I would imagine he ran a SQL script of some sort to dump all of the dbCoins into one account and then put in a sell for next to nothing.

MtGox cannot afford to honour all of the coins. That is all of the coins they have, and everyone else who is daft enough to leave their coins on a public exchange run by beginners. If they honour your claim, there is no more MtGox and everyone and their mother will be up in arms, litigating, leering and generally ousting them from the community they have helped to build.

The bottom line is that you are losing the coins no matter how much you complain. You say you should keep them for the good of the community but if you've got half of the freely traded bitcoins then the market really is gone. Tough luck.

They were the best option available for a mass of humanity rushing to pay big $$$'s for BTC. When they re-open they will still be the best current option, IMO.

I don't think I actually said that, though.

I said a forced rollback of the whole thing was bad for the community, and without a lot more transparency what the right solution is is very hard to determine.

So you feel you have enough information at-hand to reasonably know what happened?  The rollback is a foregone conclusion to me.  It's everything else that matters.  Kevin obviously knows he's not a newly minted millionaire, and has made that clear in multiple posts.  Mtgox rolling back and covering up the extent of their apparent negligence is not "making it right" by my definition.

The problem begins where MtGox's story is fabricated, at least a portion of it which can be independently verified as a fact.  Perhaps this was due to the rush of getting information out ASAP while still uncovering things, etc.  I'd like to believe that vs. them lying directly to our faces?

It is very clear this was not a simple account password breach.  It goes deeper.  I want to know how deep, and I'd have thought the community as a whole would want to know as well.

Ah well, I tried :)

Not going to make an ethical judgment here on the course of action for MtGox, so right to the point:


We were discussing your story in #bitcoin, but weren't able to track down said transfer in the block chain. Could you point it out?

This.

It is clear now that MtGox has not been trading bitcoins but a representation of bitcoin, storing the real bitcoin off-line from the trading accounts (the one big centralised 500k account).

More centralisation, more fail. It is like the fiat credit crises freeze all over again, the bitcoins weren't really there and when the hackers showed up there was nothing to go around and fill the gaps, even if they took nothing, just shuffled things around and messed it all up.

Lesson learned, move on, decentralise. Get bitcoins in your hand or you got nothing but promises.

EDIT: By storing the MtGox float in one account then they have become a counterparty to all trades by proxy, i.e. a market maker. Not what is claimed up front.

You don't know very much about this, do you?

Fair enough old chap, and you sound perfectly reasonable if not wildly optimistic!

The blunt truth of it though is that there are nowhere near enough T&C's to stop MtGox from saving it's arse. If all those coins are gone, not only will they be bankrupt but an awful lot of other people will be out of pocket.

This is the key right here.

Make no mistake, if they do a roll back and if my account gets hacked in the future I will be demanding a roll back no matter how many BTC are traded.  And I rather like the proxy idea you stated.  I might just have to go for a super risky trade and demand a rollback if it doesn't work and claim hacking.

http://blockexplorer.com/t/cu8GyUmqj

If only one question is answered by MtGox, I hope it is whether the 500,000 BTC was really all in one account (the only one compromised).

Regardless of MtGox responsibility in this matter, I don't think anyone should hold on to stolen goods they bought at 1500 times below the market price.

Wisest seems to me to give those 643 BTC back to MtGox. If you choose not to, your lawyer fees will likely far surpass the value of those bitcoins and you may end up with a criminal record as someone who knowingly kept stolen goods (which most likely is a criminal offense in your jurisdiction).

If someone accidentally transfers a million dollars to your bank account, you'd have to give it back too, even if you moved some of that to another account at an other bank in another country shortly after seeing your statement. I seriously doubt a judge will see your case any differently. If you hide the money a judge can order you held until you reveal the whereabouts.

The fact that you got money (or bitcoins) as a result of someone else's error (or crime) does not make them legally yours. That it's the other party's fault for not securing their passwords properly still does not entitle you to that money.

That said, I am no lawyer but I do remember a case of a woman being held for several months because she had hidden money accidentally wired to her account. She had also claimed it wasn't her fault that she got the money and was thus entitled to keep it. The judge clearly did not agree.

What you think and what would happen in a court of law are two entirely different things.  Your opinion on the matter is void.

If I'm the OP I file the injunction and subpoena every bit of server info from them because:

1.  It's obvious this account was Mt. Gox, not some users.

2.  How do we know there was a theft?  Maybe someone at Mt. Gox fat fingered the trade or there was a bug in their code.  Do fat fingered trades get reversed?

I think there's a decent chance this was never even theft.  I think someone at Mt. Gox screwed the pooch BIG time.  And if it wasn't theft, then the trade should absolutely NOT be rolled back.  How many others here put in a buy order for 20 bitcoins at 111 instead of 111 bitcoins at 20?  I know I have!  Maybe someone at Mt. Gox did something similar with their account or their was a bug in their automated software that converts BTC from their .65% fee to USD and crashed the market.

As the OP said, the likelihood that an account with 500,000 BTC could be easily brute forced is minute.  We'd all have HUGE passwords.  Something is VERY fishy here.

Kevin, lawyer up.  Make them PROVE this was a hack.

Kevin,

Someone hacking another persons account isn't right, and it also shouldn't allow for you to become a millionaire on wrong doing. It's pure greed plain and simple, and it's sad that you would want to "accept" what is basically stolen goods. Congrats....I guess?

Kevin you're a douchebag, you ruined the whole shower. :(

As with any interaction with any company there is a level of trust needed by both parties.  Many feel that level of trust is forever broken with Mt Gox and will no longer use it as a exchange, that is perfectly fine by me.  Mt Gox could easily go out of business from this fiasco and other exchanges will have to learn from the mistakes made to avoid a similar fate.  That in no way means Mt. Gox has any responsibility to allow transactions made during the duration of the hack and subsequent flash crash, which is unfortunate for people like Kevin here.

Really hate quoting myself, but I do believe this is important!

I´ve seen this kind of thing before (see the forum link), Kevin has put himself out there, has posted his side has explained in detail and has been answering questions, MtGox, not so much.

Hell Kevin has even been on http://onlyonetv.com/ (http://onlyonetv.com/) , answering questions for about 2 hours. Mark(MagicalTux) not so much, he was supposed to be on but weaseled out, explaining that his English wasn´t good enough(http://onlyonetv.com/?p=203) and sending an employee(no video mind you).

That´s not my idea of transparency.

So how about this as an idea: Let the two of them find a solution to the whole mess on http://onlyonetv.com/ (http://onlyonetv.com/) in a live discussion. And if Mark Kerpel´s command of the English language really is all that bad, let him bring a translator(easily covered by about an hour of MtGox fees).
I don´t get why the guy that has shown transparency up to now is villified whilst the one who has been sorely lacking in transparency is being celebrated. (Especially given the track record [see forum link above])

If i was in position of snatching the booty out of a thieves hand i would, and would hold onto it until i was sure the safe where it was taken from was secured again (or the police instructed me to hand it back to the original owner even though he was likely to loose it again). But i admit the temptation of charging a "finder's fee" to compensate myself for the trouble would be significant, not sure how i would decide on that...

Kevin, after what Mt Gox did in the "their side" thread to try and CONNECT YOU with the hacker, I sure as hell hope you file that injunction.

I sure hope too, will make it easier for us.

OH SNAP! IT'S ON NOW SON!

Agreed. It's ON!

There is and will be, and should be a full on WAR!
I would fight for that $5 Million dollars, Kevin, because you might get it, if Mt Gox is found to have tried to breach themselves and then blame you or some shadowy nobody. Especially if that 500,000 bitcoin account belonged to them to begin with. Fuck them, until they prove something useful.

If I were in the right, and this was happening to me, i'd sue for the current value of the 250,000 bitcoins, simple and final.

now wait just a damn minute...

mods - has the OP been edited?

see post #10.  i seem to recall that originally, the OP declared that he had a standing order at 0.01, but was worried it would get eaten up by other orders at the same level - so he changed it to 0.0101.

is that not the case?

Wow.  You really are a dbag.  You have specific personal knowledge given to you that Kevin is NOT involved with this, and you post this.  Very interesting.

You did business with MTGox. It's such an extraordinary event, that MTGox themselves are the ones who get to make any decisions in this matter. The market will reward or punish their choice. Personally I think MtGox is in the right in this instance.

+1

wtf is this supposed to mean?  kevin has been nothing but up front about everything.   this response is gross as hell.

L
O
L

This is the team holding millions of dollars worth of our capital?

God I love Bitcoin.  We should have our own reality show.

Reverting might be the lesser evil for some, of course ideally the exchanger would eat the bullet, revert and let the low-price-sellers profit - repay them from own pocket.

Getting FBI/CIA involved by giving them logs is not something that users of free, libertarian, bettern-then-government "money" system would love too much I guess.

Hey, I was doing something social or playing outside when the shit hit the fan.  Who can I sue to get hooked up with some phat 0.001 bitcoin action?

If, as you believe, this 500,000 coin selloff, was a legitimate selloff, and was NOT due to theft (the only reason you may be legally entitled to keep your bitcoin), then it's likely that after the rollback, this seller will just sell their money again. So, put in a few more orders at 0.0101, and wait for another windfall. If the money WAS stolen, well then...

Really? To me it is more like watching group of man running from one side of market to another, and later buying some cheap used cellphones nearby seeing how there are tons of sell-offs.
You may be surprised about the prices, but actually this place is known for incredible price swings and unbelievable occasions.

Sure this looks sort of suspicious, but do we have independent "people's currency" to:
- make verdicts based on total speculation (at time of writing this post: coincidental close login times of hackers and the person that was able to made the cheap buy
- leak logs to hackers and Internet
- hand over logs to CIA/FBI

I may like mtgox (more until inexcusable horrible security was revealed), but above is really bad imo.


 

I just wished someone on the other side of the table would say something. This actually points to a single account getting compromised, or the wallet itself. How can there be so many crying "ahhh, but I thought I was going to get rich. I didn't know it was stolen, honest..." and no one stating the reverse side of the coin?

Maybe noone noticed yet, and with the reversed transactions never will, but just imaging all your coins had been sold for $0.01 a piece... you could argue that it was mtgox fault, sure, but how would you feel about the guy that knowing something fishy was going on still bought them (I would) and then, when shit hits the fan, throws a public fit because he might have to give the stolen coins back? I know, it sucks to not be freakin' rich anymore, but just imagine your however many k's of coins got sold as a result of a security breach, the site owner had the option to revert these abusive transactions but instead throws in the towel and says "tough luck, I'm out" ?

This may (or may not) be my last reply on this matter.  It is now a legal issue, unfortunately.  I'd like to point out Kevin made every attempt to avoid this and set things right.

I'd imagine Kevin may be scarce either now, or very soon as well.  Remember directly publicly accusing someone of a felony, generally causes them to lawyer up if they have any intelligence whatsoever.

MT - I used to think you were simply an amateur operating out of his depth.  Now I fear something far worse is afoot.

Hopefully the truth comes out soon.

Otherwise, good luck to everyone who has money riding on this - I hope you can afford to lose it :(  I know I'm likely out a thousand or so myself.

-Phil

Don't be surprised. Mt.Gox is the bitcoin equivalent of a liked social institution -everyone has a stake in it and they are going to protect it. But when something like this happens to an individual they're going to say "tough luck.." Double standards are everywhere. It's human nature.

No, just the phones had really low sticker prices on them, and the selling system is fully automated.

As I customer I don't give a fuck who's fault is it that some phones where allowed to be moved into other part of the shop, or between shops or something - especially that the same System/Person is responsible for allowing the initial steal and later trading of it.


EDITED (appended):

Btw. nice example with the mindcontroll chip.
But here the obviously fraudulent operation of taking over accounts was connected to unknown operations - buy and sell orders, some of them legit, some not, we will never know for sure.

I guess I would also rollback in place of mtgox, but what is the right thing to do is to eat the bullet and repay everyone. But that is nor possible probably since mtgox would need to have around 400,000 USD or so liquidity.

Or perhaps settle with the buyer, and slowly repay him over next 10 years using 5% monthly profit or something, and be known as the most trusted exchange ever that will always eat the bullet and never let down any customers about transactions :)  (yea but its unrealistic..)

b

I don't know about who have the right on these bitcoins, however,

No one cares about the innocent users affected by this situation?

Hellllooooo... This is about MONEY; the measure of work of many people.

Thank GOD my account was empty.

Kevin,

I think your just motivated by the greed, so to make it easier for everyone (especially yourself), take your 654 or whatever BTC and just walk away.
Call it a day and Go enjoy your 7000$ profit, and let BTC continue fixing its bugs and getting better.
Youre holding up the parade.  Wouldnt you like to be known as the giant hearted guy that did the right thing?  The Karma is gonna be enormous brah!
Think of the ladies. They love that kind of hero stuff.

good on ya in advance for heeding this advice,  ;)

I think you better file suit, Kevin, or you are going to look like the hacker in everyone's eyes, maybe even my own.

Kevin,
  MagicalTux says you logged in and placed the .01 cent order 3 minutes before the selloff began.

  Is this true?

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20250.msg253491

Thoes are not "phones", thoes are art paintings. One day worth 1 usd another 1,000,000 USD. You are not required to know.

Also, what with traders @12, trades @10, trades @5, trades @14 ... all deales are supposed to be reverted.

Okay this is just getting silly. The behavior of Mt Gox here is completely unprofessional. If you suspect that Kevin is the hacker/worked with the hacker then you go the legal route. Trying to slander him on a forum isn't the right way to go.

The sad part here is that you already know this and the reason you slander Kevin on the boards is that you hope that if people get someone to blame for this they'll forget that this is all Mt Gox fault. You're making Kevin a scapegoat and hope that people will keep trading on Mt Gox when this thing is over and you can open up trading again. I really hope people aren't falling for it.

Mt Gox weren't ready to go from trading cards to actually currencies and the whole clusterfuck that has been their handling of this case has proven that beyond reasonable doubt. For the record I think the lack of security measures was enough to leave mt gox, the rest is just icing on the cake.

I don't see how anyone can read the OP and think KD has a case for keeping his money. Based on his owns words, I think he should be going to prison.  Compare what he did to what Martha Stewart did. Do we know where he lives? American DA's freakin' love to take on cases that will be big in the news.

Kevin 170 x MtGox 131
Who will make the "epic-est" thread?

what exactly did martha stewart do?  it sure as shit wasn't commit any actual crimes.

Regarding the 500k BTC account:
 Bitcoin transfers aren't free, remember? So, if you trade between USD and BTC a lot, if it was actually done Bitcoin to Bitcoin, the transaction fees would be eating up a lot of people's trades, and would be costly for MtGox as well. I suspect the actual buying and selling is all done on a SQL database, and the only time actual Bitcoin comes into play is when someone requests a withdrawal. I think this method is a good idea, since it saves everyone money. Due to this, though, the 500K Bitcoin that was "stolen" could very likely be just an arbitrary number in an account, which doesn't mean anything more than an IOU from MtGox. So, not reverting this would amount to actually filling everyone's account with actual bitcoin. Like others pointed out, these stolen IOU's could very well be money from EVERYONE'S accounts, not just one rich guys.

Except, in this case the thief walked into a Ferrari dealer pretended to be a legitimate salesman and sold it for $5...the buyer should have known better and now he is pissed because the dealership wants their car back.

I was in the forums while this was all happening and I myself thought it was either:
1) An early adopter selling off without care for crashing the market.
2) A mistake...someone entered .02 instead of 20 (I am aware how stupid that sounds...people can be stupid).
3) A hack.

I cannot say that if I had money in my account I would not have bought what I could...that is the smart thing to do...just I wouldn't cry when they tell me "Sorry, that was clearly an illegal trade" because I knew from the start there was a chance of that.  

  

She knowing profited from the illegal gained information and then lied about it. No way in hell she should have gone to jail though. Her real crime was in being a promotion worthy prosecution.

I just noticed that Kevin lives in Chicago. So the attorney would be the very ambitious Anita Alvarez.

I am reminded of the previous mention (in another thread) of the utility of BTC for anonymous bribes...

What was she convicted of then? Trafficking in bad cooking advice?

To defend MagicalTux here. He is french, and the miscommunications are incredible. I used to work with many French,  and they all come off like.. well like MtGox.  Its a combo of language and culture, that make the French seems incredibly obnoxious to Americans when communicating in English.

.02

This is fucking hilarious. I've just read through nine pages of fucking hilarity. "Bitcoin.... the future is now" evangelists, people claiming the OP should be in prison, Mt. Gox making accusations (despite the fact that Mark refused to get on the phone directly in Bruce Wagner's Bitcoin show. How far does this have to go before you people realize that you guys are way in over your head on this? Its like kids in a sandbox. Most of you no understanding of economics and are all playing Michael Milken in your pajamas next to overclocked video cards.

Just look at yourselves.

There's NO WAY to rectify this mess you've gotten into without screwing someone. And despite the decentralized, anarcho-capitalist philosophy underlying this experiment that you all jerk off to at night, you are all scream for litigation.

Just look at yourselves!

It's a matter of Latin language structure (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian) versus Anglo-Saxon (not "Americans" specifically) and you could add Germanic language branch versus those 2... and why not Slav.
Confusions of an old Continent such as Europe.

At one point, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were just kids in a sandbox, playing business tycoons from their garages, screaming and threatening litigation at each other too.

If the government was taking bitcoins seriously you'd be going to prison man.  You attempted to acquire 5 million dollars of stolen bitcoins, even if you didn't cause the crash.  You only made off with about 10 grand worth. imho you should return those bitcoins to their rightful owner.  MtGox is going to have to foot the bill for the bitcoins you withdrew!

Excuse me, but me and my Rothbard pin-up poster want the government out of this.

Hey Kevin Day....

Are you the same Kevin Day that wrote the Book, "Inside the Security Mind" - Making the Tough Decisions ???
http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Security-Mind-Making-Decisions/dp/0131118293

Product Description
Inside the Security Mind: Making the Tough Decisions, by security expert Kevin Day, teaches information officers how to think like a top security guru. Using real-world examples, Day explains how to reduce any security problem to a set of essential principles, making it easy to arrive at optimal solutions. Includes practical material on enterprise security issues and measures.
From the Back Cover

    "This is a really good book ... it spells out the motherhood and apple pie of information security in a highly readable way."

—Warwick Ford, CTO, VeriSign, Inc.

    "An excellent security read! Breaks down a complex concept into a simple and easy-to-understand concept."

—Vivek Shivananda, President

    Redefine your organization's information security
    Learn to think and act like a top security guru!
    Understand the founding principles of security itself and make better decisions
    Make your security solutions more effective, easily manageable, and less costly!

Make smarter, more informed security decisions for your companyOrganizations today commit ever-increasing resources to information security, but are scarcely more secure than they were four or five years ago! By treating information security like an ordinary technological practice—that is, by throwing money, a handful of the latest technologies, and a lineup of gurus at the problem—they invariably wind up with expensive, but deeply flawed, solutions. The only way out of this trap is to change one's way of thinking about security: to grasp the reasoning, philosophy, and logic that underlie all successful security efforts.

In Inside the Security Mind: Making the Tough Decisions, security expert Kevin Day teaches you how to approach information security the way the top gurus do—as an art, rather than a collection of technologies. By applying this discipline, your solutions will be more secure and less burdensome in time, expense, and effort. The first part of the book explains the practice of breaking security decisions down into a set of simple rules. These rules may then be applied to make solid security decisions in almost any environment. In the second part, Day uses a series of practical examples to illustrate exactly how the discipline works in practice. Additional material covers:

    Designing an enterprise security plan, including perimeter/firewall and Internal defenses, application, system, and hardware security
    Ongoing security measures—recurring audits, vulnerability maintenance, logging and monitoring, and incident response, plus risk assessment
    Choosing between open source and proprietary solutions; and wired, wireless, and virtual private networks

This book is essential reading for anyone working to keep information secure. Technical and non-technical IT professionals alike can apply Day's concepts and strategies to become security gurus, while seasoned practitioners will benefit from the unique and effective presentation of the essential security practices.

Are you sure MagicalTux is FR, not just their European SEPA transactions partner company?  (Not that this is too important, just curious)

Is this you, Kevin?

http://www.freshports.org/mail/elm/
I'm looking for a bit of assistance from a undernet IRC node operator please. I would like a cloaked hostname. Seems I'm attracting a bit of attention.
Elm is an interactive screen-oriented mailer program  that
supersedes mail and mailx.  This is the 2.5.x distribution.

http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/75
Re: Unusual entry in Apache logs 2008-05-30
Kevin Day (toasty dragondata com) 

??? ??? ???

Got anything to say for yourself?

This MUST be YOU, correct?

DragonData.com - Welcome to Your.org
Domain Name: DRAGONDATA.COM Registrant: N/A Kevin Day ( ) P.O. Box 326. Round Lake Beach Illinois,60073. US Tel. +1.3126281200. Creation Date: 03-Apr-1997 ...
whois.domaintools.com/dragondata.com
►

So you are a 100% confirmed Security IT and Hacker.

I knew you were smart, but apparently not smart enough to outsmart everyone else.

We'll be awaiting your response and explanation. And it had better be good!

The response to this whole affair is outrageous. Involvement by a group of thugs who are presently considering legislation to ban the use of a peaceful and volunteer form of exchange? Desecration of individual rights and contractual terms for the sake of the public bitcoin community? The public be damned! Kevin has every right to every single bitcoin he earned in a legitimate trade, under contract terms that stipulated Mt. Gox in NO WAY a central authority with the power to reverse trades. Mt. Gox has provided no remotely convincing evidence to connect Kevin with the hacker, a hacker who could very well be affiliated with Mt. Gox. On top of that, the evidence and arguments put forth by Mt. Gox are extremely implausible. Who the hell would leave 500,000 bitcoins ON MT. GOX, and keep it so poorly secured? Or perhaps...and far more plausibly, it was well secured --- but Mt. Gox had secret affiliation and access.

There are dozens of avenues by which Mt. Gox could plausibly engage in fraudulent behavior to the ends we've seen in these recent revelations. There are zero thus far proposed that could at all plausibly connect Kevin with the perpetrator.

Kevin has every right to his coins, and Mt. Gox must release all necessary information to shed as much light on this situation as possible, if it hopes to ever connect Kevin with anything malicious, or if it hopes to regain any legitimacy in the eyes of the bitcoin community. Involvement by thugs with guns is not a solution. It merely provides illusory legitimacy to Mt. Gox's desired action --- grand theft of Kevin's property.

The outrageous response witnessed here on these forums is tangible evidence as to the inseparability of bitcoin and anarchocapitalism. I propose that all those who adhere to the principles of voluntary interaction identify themselves on the forum, and engage only with those who share these principles. All statists spell disaster for Bitcoin.

In light of this - I must take a step back and declare myself an idiot for posting everything I have regarding this whole mess. I dont know what to think at this point. Except that is some great detective work, and if it's one and the same Kevin, well, shit. Both him and mtgox need to rot in the same pit.

I am not the author of that book.

toasty@dragondata.com is me though.

For a bunch of smart people everyone here really jumps to conclusions based on what? 6 lines mtgox could have typed? As far as I am concerned until someone actually produces legitimate evidence, all toasty is guilty of is being in the right place at the right time....

Did you imagine that decentralization of power leads to an vacuum of legality, or perhaps a crime-free utopia?

Silly boy.  :D

Meh.  Looks like a roughly equal number have jumped to the conclusion that mtgox is stealing their bodily fluids, and they have just as little evidence ( = none at all).

The truth will come out eventually, maybe.  Until then, the forum circlejerk will likely continue at a gradually declining pace.

So, judging by the posts on chat, Kevin is not going to return the stolen Bitcoin... Guess that answers that question.

Here's an idea. Let's not turn into a creepy mob and try to look up the address of Kevin and post it on these boards because magicaltux want someone to blame for all of this.

That's just an idea though. Being the personal army of the guy too lazy/incompetent to get decent security in place for a site that handled millions of dollars sounds fun too.

From all the posts in this thread and all the info gathered by other users not to mention your own words, it is pretty obvious you are the hacker that had caused all this and tried to profit from it. Now that you have been caught and your name is out there you are making up this pitty party story to try and keep your stolen profits. Trying to con all the users of this message board into beleiving you are the victim and big bad mtgox is the bad guy. I think you should be locked up and hope the authorities are looking into this as we speak. I got to hand it to you though, hacking into MtGox, emptying out someones account and buying them back up for .01, then coming on the forum and telling everyone you are the one who tried to buy them, and then asking for pity!? That takes some pretty big balls man.. Two ton balls.... Or just plain stupidity.. Its hard to tell.. Should of just kept your mouth shut, hung low, and hoped you wouldnt get caught. You know the authorities already have your name and address... FBI is probably monitoring your bank accounts, and sitting in a windowless van down the road as we speak... If i were you i would cut up your credit cards, grow a beard, shave your head, buy a false id with your stolen BTC, and rent a boat to the Cayman Islands...

Yep. he be going to jail!

Let Kevin keep the few btc he managed to get out (i.e. steal) and rollback the trades, with MtGox taking the loss on the lost BTC. That's the only solution that will work.

So let me get this right. An account was hacked, some guy put in a bunch of orders at basically a penny and was able to make out with 600 plus bitcoins valued at well over $7000 and he's bitching about it because he didn't illegally become a millionaire at the expense of someone else that perpetrated a crime? Wow...............take your free $7000 and run, I mean seriously?

lol I think both sides attacking are wrong. I haven't seen sufficient evidence that says either side is right. Just a bunch of conjecture and speculation... ;o)

I'm not sure how that would help. I don't see how you can launch a "securities" investigation into a trade platform that trades something technically, no different then baseball cards as far as giving monetary value. Their are places you can buy/bid on baseball cards (like MtGox) and companies that give up to date monetary values on baseball cards but if a theft of baseball cards happened, how would you investigate by means of securities law?

If a guy steals a truck full of goods, and decides to dump them for cheap, whoever buys those shoes is still committing a crime. I say fuck Kevin and take the coins off him (he seems pretty seedy anyway).

Maybe convincing up until there. I had more than one chance to take the money and didn't. I have gone out of my way to prove who I am to the Mt Gox guys. I went on OnlyOneTV with my real name and showing my face. If I did anything illegal, this has to be the worst possible strategy I can imagine for how to proceed. The only evidence that Mt Gox has shown at all is that I logged in around the same time as the bad guy, which... is exactly what I said happened.

I sat down, started checking the markets, then saw the crash start happening moments later. Of course I was logged in when this happened, I have no idea what else anyone expected?

If "OMG THEY LOGGED IN WITHIN 15 MINUTES OF EACH OTHER" is considered proof, every person reading this thread right now is obviously the same person, right?

No, not remotely. As far as the purchaser is concerned, the goods were legitimate. The only criminal is the seller of said shoes due to his fraud and theft.

Kevin's story is backed up by MtGox's own feed; and that showed that he could not have made the order before the crash. In fact, 6 people got in before him when the large order finally finished executing - which took 35ish minutes.

This.

Which of course begs the question of why magicaltux would try to pin this whole thing on someone he knows most likely had nothing to do with the hack. The obvious answer here is that he needed a scapegoat and he needed one fast. The sooner people start blaming Kevin the less heat magicaltux and thus mt gox will have to take. He must know that legally he can't put over any responsibility for this on kevin so I assume he's doing this because he hopes that he can get mt gox back to its former glory after this is over with. I for one am not going to make a single trade there.

The current evidence stacked up again Kevin is that he was logged in when the crash happened and that he's apparently good with computer security. While this is apparently enough to convince some of the lesser minds on these boards I somehow doubt it's something that would hold up in court.

This is how it usually works with BTC, buying low and selling high.

It was lower then usual for some traders indeed, but it's not his fault so crazy low offers where placed.

This.

To say "I got extraordinarily lucky and was able to use my wits to help someone perpetrate a crime at the right moment but 'dems da rules' so I should get to keep my ill gotten gains and the system I exploited to get them should be destroyed in the process." is not only incredibly selfish but an untenable position for someone who claims to want to *help* the bitcoin community.

Assuming the sale came from a compromised account, which at this point seems very likely,  "Kevin" either knowingly profited from theft or he was too ignorant to realize the figures he was seeing could only be a bug in the system or the result of something uncouth.

Honestly if someone was claiming they put in a sell order at $100 "just in case" and a bug caused it to go through mt. gox at $0.01 and it caused this event would anybody argue *not* to roll back translations? I can't imagine the "it's important that if our exchanges are bugged we allow the market to collapse" argument holding water.

Kevin, regardless of whether you were the original hacker (I don't think you were), a large part of the consensus here is that you did pretty much admit to possessing stolen property. Considering your real name and info is out now (thanks to you yourself), it would probably be in your best interest to wait until things calm down a bit, get in touch with MtGox people, and then PUBLICLY return the funds. Otherwise you'll likely get blacklisted and trolled for years to come. Not saying MtGox people are right, either, but at present only two entities are getting attacked. If I were you, I'd do everything I can to not be one of those any more.
Unless, of course, $12,000 is worth it to have your name remembered and dragged through the mud for the next few years.

OK, Not the hacker.

Still a dick for wanting to keep the BTC.

Kevin. Listen to me: The rollback is happening for one simple reason: It is the easiest way to make as many people as whole as possible. You will get your money back, and may end up ahead by over 600 bitcoins. I am sorry you're not a millionaire. You acted in good faith, as most of us would, to snap up as many of the coins as possible. As it turns out, those coins didn't belong to the person selling them. This means that they go back to the people or person to whom they do belong. It is very likely that MtGox is going to go under from this. I see no reason to ride down with them.

With the amount of money involved here I cannot understand how this cannot go to court.  Kevin if what you say is true call up the most expensive law firm in NY and get the ball rolling, maybe the law is on the side of the rollback, maybe not.  With 5M at stake you bet your ass I would be finding out.  With the nature of bitcoin and international laws and something so unprecedented it needs further examination.

I am attempting to arrange that the bitcoins that I am in possession of right now, due to this trade, be held by a neutral third party until everyone can cool down about this.

[DELETED cause I was starting to be douchy too]

Not in my country, here the purchaser has to make sure the gods aren't stolen or they would be breaking the law if they end up holding stolen gods/property.

AWESOME! You should mention this in your Post #1 in BIG BOLD LETTERS!

What about THESE possibilities since I still don't believe someone with 500k coins had them in a single, stolen account on Mt Gox.

1.  The person who had 500k bitcoin had those in a personal wallet on his own machine at home.  That machine was compromised.  All the BTC were sent to Mt Gox for sale by the hacker and was a REAL TRADE but of stolen goods.  Do we roll back every trade of someone's coins who had their PERSONAL computer hacked?  Because there are a shitload out there.  Or only the rich people? 

2.  The 500k bitcoin was from the person who released the virus that steals the bitcoin wallet of hundreds of traders such as Allinvain (the guy who got $500k of BTC stolen).  Those 500k bitcoin are from hundreds of people the hacker stole from.  He dumps them on Mt Gox when he smells the authorities starting to track him down and decides to crash the market and run.  A LEGIT trade again, just of stolen goods of hundreds of people.

If THOSE were legit trades but of stolen coins, should the market be rolled back?  If so, it sets a precedent that ALL SUCH FUTURE stolen trades cause a rollback no matter the size.

Where did you read this?

I can't believe anyone could honestly think they would be entitled to property that the seller could not legally transfer. If I dock my boat at my marina slip, go on vacation for a month, and during that time some jerkoff finds a spare key, puts up a craigslist ad, shows my boat to someone, and "sells" it, does that mean I lose my boat? Get real man.

I missed part of the live broadcast, but I think MtGox said that the 500k coins was actually form the MtGox account. All the user's coins are actually stored in a single large wallet, and the BTC you see in your account is just an accounting entry. They're no actually yours until you withdraw your amount from the main wallet. So the theft wasn't from some poor schmuck with a bad password, it was from everyone at the same time.

You seem to like money regulated by some community, lets call it a government since it's governing.
Why at all use bitcoin then.

People are being too emotional. He was just lucky, he's done nothing wrong. If you want someone to blame, blame MtGox security and immature rule of the market. He's earned his pie fair and square.

Because a government that regulates ALL activity is fundamentally different than an exchange that only regulates the people that choose to engage with it. This is simple buddy.

maybe Kevin should run the security for mt.gox

Congrats Kevin, you pulled a fast one. I'll only hold it a little bit against you

I watched the live broadcast, but missed this if it was said.  I don't believe so though.  The only response to the question of "who owned the account that was hacked" I recall was "I can't answer that".   I don't expect them to reveal the name of the person's account, but I did expect a "no it was not mtgox itself, but we cannot reveal our customer's information" or similiar.  Easy answer if what they have been saying (hacked user account) is true.

You've likely simply been reading speculation on the boards that this is the case (perhaps my own speculation, as I believe it to be true).

This is an extremely important detail, and sidestepping the question seems rather shady to me.

I thought I heard it on the broadcast, but I guess I was mistake. Though it would make sense for MtGox to keep all BTC in a single account, and execute trades using just accounting accounts. Actually transferring Bitcoin costs transaction fees, and filling multiple orders will quickly eat up people's trades with tx fees if it was done with actual coins. It may also be that the trade that sold 500k coins wasn't actually selling real coins, just fake IOUs, in which case the rollback is even easier and more justified.

Notice how flippantly the detractors of Kevin come to their conclusions. "Sounds like a jerk. Let's steal his bitcoins. Oh...that doesn't sound so good....how about...for the good of the the bitcoin community!"

It's so easy to just tell someone else to steal his coins. Why don't you personally go to his address, put a gun to his head, and demand his laptop? It's not quite the same when you think about it that way, huh? Do you guys sneer at lottery winners too? Jealous bastards.

Exactly. If he had bought bitcoins at the same time from, say, Tradehill, I wouldn't be going after those. Only the ones purchased (in good faith!) from a fraudulent trade. No different than buying stolen goods, except, hey presto, he gets his money back. All of this really just seems like him being butthurt about not being a millionaire (which I totally understand.)

Lol. This isnt awesome. All he is saying is he is giving them to a friend to hold onto until the cops stop snooping so they are not in his possesion. then after people forget aobut this and move onto the next thing that happens he will be home free and cash in the illegal coins.

No one can take these bitcoins from him, and he knows this.  If kevin is unwilling to return the coins, there is very little that any of us can do about it.

Considering he exposed himself completely, including his IRL info (though not intentionally), I tend to believe him. At least in the "innocent until proven guilty" sort of way.

You sure can weed out the honest people from the greedy and entitled people just from reading this thread! FYI in my state if you knowingly buy stolen property at a cheap price, even if you are not positive it is stolen but know something is not right, you are just as guilty as the person who sold it and will be charged accordingly. It is a criminal offense no and's if's or but's about it. Your only chance of not having charges brought up against you is the fact that it is bitcoins and not an acknowledged currency as of yet. May be the only way you will stay out of jail. but after reading your very first post i have to say i do not know if i have ever read anything more greedy or self centered in all my life... Funny thing is i cant tell if you are trying to convince everyone else or trying to convince yourself?

This thread is quickly following the path of the other one.  Calm down or I'll lock this one next.

Kevin i feel for you. you made a fair trade and took advantage of the situation i would have done the same damn thing to be honest it's not your fault and it's not mtgox users fault either it is mtgox fault and i would personally sue mtgox if they tried to take my money from me ..

i really hope you guys can come to some form of settlement as no matter what happens due to mtgox's negligence in this situation could ultimatly fuck the entire bitcoin outlook

I will participate fully in a class action lawsuit against mt. gox

Kevin, when will camwhores.com accept bitcoin?

I AM COMPLETLY ON KEVIN'S SIDE AND OPTION 3 IS THE WAY TO GO.

As I already stated anyone who had standing orders bought bitcoins fair and square at the rate they were going for in that moment.
No one of these users said "cool - stolen bitcoins let's have some for small money" NO!!! People entered these standing orders in hope the rate would once go down again and they would be able to buy some more bitcoins (like the early adopters did). Buy this also exporessing their trust that the rate would eventually go up again and thus declaring their commitment to bitcoin. Of course at the time that was more hope than anticipation. Now, as it really did happen, they get their bitcoins taken away from Mt Gox at a whim?? And in addition Mt Gox wants to give anyone how withdrew coins during the crash a NEGATIVE BALANCE??? ARE THEY NUTS?

IF they were smart (which two people handling more than a 100.000.00 USD OPM should be) they would do/have done one of these things:

A1) As soon as the they shut down the servers put an emergency site up saying that everyting is under control or something like that und that within 48 hrs Mt Gox would reopen.

Then they should have cleared their accounts, grabbed their stuff and take the next plane to Brasil (where they can't be expedited).

=> This wouldn't have been a nice move but a smart one.

OR

A2) The should stick to their policy "we do not act as a counter party" - then all they would have to do is to fight with the orginal 500K holder wether Mt Gox is liable for hos loss or not - and if so, how much (percentage).

This would result in a single lawsuit for about 5-8 Million. The court would have to decide about partial liability of the account holder (500K BTC in one account, unsecure password, etc). Then most likely they would settle somehow - maybe at 2.5-4 Million USD

That's it.  Mt Gox would have lost part of the fortune they already gained and could go on. For the persons involved this would also be the least amount of stress.


BUT THEY DECIDED TO ROLLBACK (worst idea ever - not only for the community but for themselves personally)

WHY: Now they have - as they stated about 3.000 traders who profited from the flash crash and whose winnings will be taken away by the rollback. Kevin Day - of course - loodes the most - about 5.000.000 USD.
DO YOU HONESTLY BELIEVE NONE OF THESE 3.000 PEOPLE WILL HOLD MT GOX ACCOUNTABLE???

Mark will have to face law suits for the rest of his life!
And the funny thing is, that the amount of the law suit is approx. the same as in the option A2 BUT with much less chance to settlement (since you have now about 3.000 parties involved).

This ist the biggest mistake those guys made in their live and they will regret it forever.
Short term the rollback costs them less, but in the end they'll loose everything.


BTW Any one who is investing really money into anything - may it be gold, silver, stocks or bitcoin has NOW to leave Mt Gox since rollbacks are an option (without being announced that this chance exits and in what cases they might occur). You simply cannot invest in market when no fixed rules are abided by. (All the people who bought during the crash did so because they were sure a rollback was not an option - otherwise they would have just enjoyed the spectacle and lay back waiting for the rollbacks to kick in).

In mid- and longterm this will be the worst thing ever for bitcoin. Anyone who is not yet involved in bitcoin and hears about this story and Mt Gox's handling will come to the conclusion: "The whole thing is a scam - a ponzi scheme - You (meaning us) should've known better".

Well, thank you Mt Gox for your hippie attitude - this is not a hobby exchange of playing cards anymore!!! Grow up and act responsibly (or at least turn out to be smart and run as fast as you can!!!)


Well and now I am awaiting the many guys telling me that I am the asshole for being honest. Bring it on!

 ::)

Folks, in the grown-up world, trades are unwound when the market malfunctions.

Thank You! Grow up kids. This happens all the time. I understand your emotional rollercoaster, but these rationalizations are getting absurd. And MTGOX fulfilling those trades will make it insolvent much faster than a rollback and having to deal with any dumb lawyer that actually thinks he has standing.

This.

Hi Kevin,

Your side of the story makes perfect sense to me. How anyone could side with MagicalTux on this, given the "information" he's given is utterly beyond me. I hope everything works out for you.

Hey Kevin, thanks for mk IV

Sincerely,

Pitchforkmedia smackdown

who the F*** is mtgox, does he has a license to gather people's IDs, process and store personal data >:(

No, this is being "butthurt" about MtGox lying about what happened.  It was an attempt for at least a little transparency where there was none, and the information being given to the public was demonstrably false.

Then, it was supposed to spark serious debate over how to fix the situation in the most community-responsible manner, once the actual facts of the matter were revealed.  This was met both by more lying, and accusing Kevin of being the hacker himself.  MT knows this to be untrue, so I find it to be absolutely despicable.

These facts are slowly being revealed, and I suspect in the coming days you may be astounded at some things.  If the "full disclosure" thread doesn't convince you, then I don't know what will?

Elements is talking a lot of common sense in his last post. Rollbacks will haunt mtgox owners forever. And now imagine that a year from now one BTC worth 1000$ and it is bitcoins people (and lawyers) will demand, not dollars.

Though I really doubt existence of this single account with 500k BTC. It seems that 500k BTC is all the money combined from 60k accounts. If true, this would make not rolling trades back an impossibility for mtgox. If true, than mtgox by rolling back simply choses death by a thousand paper cuts as opposite to a quick cyanide injection.

Haha, I don't know whether I agree with this, but it's a great post. Thanks for sharing.

Sorry Kevin but you coming here and 'coming clean' when so many people lost tons of money and shortly will lose tons more when MtGox let's it be known that they are insolvent is sorta like going to a den of lions dressed like this:

http://www.usmagazine.com/uploads/assets/articles/35686-lady-gaga-accepts-vma-award-covered-in-meat/1284349914_gaga-290.jpg


Yes.

That's raw meat.

And where are they going to get those bitcoins? MTGOX is done regardless, but these people are not getting the bitcoins that are not theirs.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/37764517/SEC_Offers_Trade_Break_Rules_for_Public_Comment

Er.. who are these "many people" that lost money?  MT has stated that only a single account was hacked and the contents sold off for cheap :)

Sounds like a lot of people possibly *made* money, and 1 person lost it.  If you go by MT's explanation of course.

Now, I don't believe MT's explanation to be anything resembling reality, so you may actually have a point!

This is actually a surprisingly useful post. Over here, the Kevin Day security researcher/book author (http://www.net-security.org/article.php?id=513) says:


In 1999, I was working for Midway Games. You can see my name in the credits under "Special Thanks" for the arcade version Mortal Kombat 4, as the above poster was mentioning. You can see my name in the credits for the arcade (and some home versions) of Cruisin' World, Crusin' Exotica, Maximum Hangtime, NBA Showtime, NFL Blitz, Touchmaster,  Touchmaster Infinity, and more I'm probably forgetting now.

See this ancient slashdot thread (http://games.slashdot.org/story/99/07/06/0228241/Perfect-score-in-Pac-Man) from 1999 where I'm posting under the name "toastyman" and saying I'm a Midway employee.

Now can we stop arguing if I have or have not written a book about IT security, and get back to "I think Mt Gox is acting on something big without telling anyone the full story"?

TBH, I think I missed that thread. I'm not saying MtGox is in the clear here. I am by no means on their side. From the facts that I have seen, It looks like the hacker, whoever (s)he is, got a hold of MtGox's master account, and tried to drop the market in an attempt to clean it out. Kevin lucked into a huge pile of that, Which must have felt like scratching off that third pot of gold, But since it was the result of a hack, he doesn't get to keep them. Sorry, Kevin. MtGox smells pretty fishy, and I'm likely not going to use them anymore, but first, let's get everyone made whole.

:o
A million thanks for MK 4!



/topic

Mt Gox can't tell the head from the tail.
Why would a hacker sell then buys what he hacked? I hope they are not thinking of this as laundry.

Awesome. You found a 10 year old picture of me with Mark Hamill, that someone photoshopped. Can we PLEASE get back to something serious? I'm honestly trying to help all of you.

I believe that actually Kevin doesn't have to give back any of it.
He purchased them in good faith. Even if the market was crashing, I would have purchased it if I saw the opportunity.

• Now, even if it is on his right to keep them, IF the money belonged to MTGOX (and not a user, but actually the main fund of MTGOX, which seems to be more plausible the more I think) then I guess that for the betterment of the economy and its stability, Kevin should give it back to MtGoX.
  In exchange of the devolution, MtGox should give a compensation for the act of good faith and allow Kevin to keep the withdrawn amount
• If the account was a personal one, Kevin has less obligation to give it back to the owner of it. When you make the wrong call playing poker you can't undo it, if you fucked it up, you fucked it up. Period.
  But still, it would be a nice gesture, and this would be totally from Kevin's generosity, if Kevin gives back partially or totally to the previous owner. A generous compensation for this gesture would be appropriate.
  

BUT, Kevin has all the rights to keep it and not giving it back to anyone. He would be a total asshole by behaving like that, but it is in his right.
Now, everything depends on his will.

MtGox shouldn't rollback shit.
The least thing that MtGox can do is to compensate to all users for this scandal and for they negligence/incompetence.
The leaked userbase is embarrassing enough, and that needs a fair compensation to all of us who entrusted this site with our money, and in some cases, our life savings (doesn't matter if trusting one's savings is a unsound judgement, the point here is that our trust has been broken).

It takes decades to build trust, and only one second to break it.

Usually, one never recovers full trust with a person, but doing good deeds can help to reestablish the relationship.
I hope MtGox understands here that more than profit, trust is actually the backbone of a business.
If you don't offer a deal to keep your users happy, expect a bank run.

Can we please move past the whole "KEVIN IS TRYING TO KEEP TEH MONIES!!!" posts?

No. Stop.  Kevin is saying that MTGOX IS LYING TO YOU.  Until the FACTS actually are revealed, why the hell should *any* action be taken yet?  Who the hell knows how far deep this goes, and how far back it goes.  I'd bet my life savings that someone has been quietly (likely more than one someone) exploiting these holes for months, and made off with a decent amount of loot undetected.  Does this fact not concern anyone?  What effect on trading prices has this historically had?  What is the scope of the problem in terms of bitcoins/dollars generated from this activity?  Did these coins even exist in the first place, or were they simply added via SQL injection to someone's balance?

This is NOT (only) a compromised password problem.  This has been as proven as it possibly can be without MtGox directly stating the facts as they happened themselves.  So why are they continuing to state this is the case? WHAT is the agenda?  Why the rush to rollback?  Why the rush to immediately after the hack call it a compromised password (the first clue this claim was BS - he had know realistic way of knowing at that time yet - post-mortems are excruciatingly both boring and generally take quite some time to really unravel anything, and usually then it's difficult to put all the pieces together sometimes if the attacker was careful)?

If you think a rollback is a good idea not knowing the entirety of the situation - that's fine, that's an opinion you can certainly hold and it may even hold some merit.  However, I want to really know if this is what you truly want?  To me, it seems like a completely bizarre stance I'm trying to understand :)

Wow this looks familiar.  Oh that's because you reposted it from another thread.  Are you looking for a kick back for brown nosing our new friend/pariah Kevin?

All I know is that the whole thing is rather confusing.  Between MT's side, Kevin's side and the myriad of responses coming down on all sides, it is impossible to keep up.  It certainly would be nice for someone to publish a timeline for those who cant stay by the computer all night.  A lot of people have a lot of money involved in this cluster fuck.

That's what the rollback is. Primarily, I think, because they don't have the funds to make the users whole any other way. (at a guess, because all of their funds are sitting in Kevin's account). They can still expect users to flee in droves.


I've yet to be responded to by Kevin on that, but Yes, I think we can get past that.


I think a rollback is the first step. Put things back to before the crash. In fact, I would suggest a transaction-by-transaction examination of (at least) the last week. We need a disinterested 3rd party to do this. NOT Kevin, and NOT MT. I have no idea who, but I do not envy their headaches.

I don't know how everyone bought that hacker story. The so called hacker should knew couple of things - like account name and the amount of BTC in it. And that information leak is not Mt. Gox fault.

I see two possible options:
Nothing is rolled back - except providing better account security, Mt. Gox should not cover losses or cut profits.
Mt. Gox fills the accounts who sold their coins again, and leaves anyone who profited from the "attack" richer than before. Mt. Gox gets poorer.

In both cases the 250k BTC account holder gets the money "the hacker" couldn't withdraw. Anything else is his fault - even the fact I can't sell my BTC right now. Kevin keeps his BTC.

And no, I was not there, I bought nothing, my account holds $0.01 and my password is strong by accident.

This should absolve you of my claims you are the other Kevin Day. But you could still be the hacker.

References
Site: http://www.relationalsecurity.com/company_team.htm
Kevin Day - Founder & CTOKevin is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Rsam.Kevin has over 10 years of experience in Information Security & Risk Assessment consulting and has worked directly with more than 100 large organizations in planning such efforts.Prior to Rsam, Kevin led Information Security, Risk Assessment, and Compliance Management efforts for fortune 500 clients in Healthcare, Entertainment, & Financial Services through Computer Horizons Corporation, (a $500m consulting company).Kevin is a CISSP and author of "Inside the Security Mind" , published by Prentice-hall 2003.Kevin holds a bachelor's degree in Music from University of Nevada, Reno.

Site: http://www.relsec.com/company_team.htm
Kevin Day - Founder & CTOKevin is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of RSAM.Kevin has over 10 years of experience in Information Security & Risk Assessment consulting and has worked directly with more than 100 large organizations in planning such efforts.Prior to RSAM, Kevin led Information Security, Risk Assessment, and Compliance Management efforts for fortune 500 clients in Healthcare, Entertainment, & Financial Services through Computer Horizons Corporation, (a $500m consulting company).Kevin is a CISSP and author of "Inside the Security Mind" , published by Prentice-hall 2003.Kevin holds a bachelor's degree in Music from University of Nevada, Reno.

Site: http://www.rsam.com/company_team.htm
Kevin Day - Founder & CTOKevin is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Rsam.Kevin has over 10 years of experience in Information Security & Risk Assessment consulting and has worked directly with more than 100 large organizations in planning such efforts.Prior to Rsam, Kevin led Information Security, Risk Assessment, and Compliance Management efforts for fortune 500 clients in Healthcare, Entertainment, & Financial Services through Computer Horizons Corporation, (a $500m consulting company).Kevin is a CISSP and author of "Inside the Security Mind" , published by Prentice-hall 2003.Kevin holds a bachelor's degree in Music from University of Nevada, Reno.

Site: http://www.relationalsecurity.com/Rsam_Releases_Latest_Version_of_GRC_Software.htm
"Rsam technology and innovation continues to evolve through our vast implementation experience and Rsam v7 is a product of the direct feedback received from our customers," said Kevin Day, CTO of Rsam.

Site: http://www.rsam.com/Rsam_Releases_Latest_Version_of_GRC_Software.htm
"Rsam technology and innovation continues to evolve through our vast implementation experience and Rsam v7 is a product of the direct feedback received from our customers," said Kevin Day, CTO of Rsam.

Site: http://www.rsam.com/pdf/RELSEC_RELEASE_08_FORRESTER_WAVE.pdf
Secaucus, NJ – July 2008: Relational Security Corporation, provider of the industry's most ... added Kevin Day, CTO of Relational Security. " RSAM™'s sound risk ...

Site: http://www.rsam.com/pdf/RSAM_6.0_Release_Notes.pdf
© Relational Security Corporation | www.relsec.com | page 1 of 1 ... automate the management of data and workflow," said Kevin Day, CTO of Relational Security. ...

Kevin,

No matter what the MT Gox website says, they are not going to volumtarily take a 5 million dollar hit, even if its 100% their own fault.

MT Gox will not bow to community pressure when 5 million bucks is on the line.

Not that there is significant pressure to begin with, since the majority of the public opinion is in support of the rollback do over.

We love our money. We work hard for it. We want our money protected and given back to us if its taken away. Thats where the opinion is.

My advice to you would be to consult with an attorney. If he sees feasibility in moving forward, you will probably need to hire one in japan as well to work with your US attorney. MT Gox may very well hold fiduciary responsibility in honoring your trades, barring any unknown laws regarding fraud, theft, unregulated trade and commidities speculation. The very least that could happend would be a judge refusing to hear the case or throw it out. The best that could happen is that the bitcons and/or financial assets are frozen until case disposition.

With their servers in the USA, their operations in Japan, and doing world-wide trading, its hard to tell what jurisdictional relief you may have.

When a company does not adhere to their own terms and policies, the only recourse is through the courts.

This is an amateur currency FFS. You should be thanking MtGox for pushing boundaries and getting this currency to where it would never be before.

BTC is essentially reliant on entrepreneurs and with this, there are always great risks.

Moral hazard, anyone?
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Moral_hazard

It's fairly easy to see who has a horse in this race and most likely bought coins for cheap during the selloff. Sorry guys, but big time exchanges break trades even when all the trades are executed according to the explicit instructions of the trader. And the SEC allows the exchanges to define these rules:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/06/17/business/main6592645.shtml

This MTGOX scenario has the added condition of criminality, including unauthorized access. It's beyond absurd that some of you think these trades should be honored. It's shows a shocking level of trading amateurism on the boards.

We absolutely agree on the 3rd party audit, this needs to happen.  I think we simply disagree on the time frames involved here.  I'd like, before we roll back, to actually know if we should roll back just this one 500,000 btc trade, or if there have been dozens, hundreds, or thousands of illegitimate trades for much smaller amounts of bitcoins that no one noticed?  Does the community just pretend these didn't happen and simply move on?  I honestly don't really have a good answer or solution here since no one knows the extent of the problem.  And this is why the rollback as a concept really concerns me.  MtGox is picking an arbitrary transaction to roll back from - granted an extraordinary transaction that had a large amount of publicity and upset users.  One thing I've learned from operating sites that are high profile targets for attack, is that if you do notice someone exploiting a hole - usually you can go back in forensics and see other people exploiting that hole in a much more quiet and smart manner.  Sometimes these attacks go back years, before being noticed.

I understand you're trying to get back to normalcy as quickly as possible, and that does make sense and I wish for it too.  I actually agree that a rollback is a good idea, if it can be relatively certain we know it will actually fix anything other than simply giving 500k btc back to mtgox, and then we go on merrily being robbed from unknowingly by some other (very likely to exist with the state this code is apparently in) exploit until someone comes along and fucks it up for the smart hackers again by drawing attention.  Rinse and repeat.

I stated this in IRC, so you don't think I'm making up hypothetical concerns here.  I trade bitcoins for cash, locally in person by executing a real-time trade on MtGox and letting them watch, to ensure I'm not charging them any more/less than up-to-the-minute market rate.  I get cash, they get bitcoins sent from MtGox to their wallet address.

If a rollback can happen now at any time, how am I to conduct this business any longer?  I could be buying "stolen" bitcoins unknowingly, and have them taken from my account at a later date (how long do I have to wait for the transaction to "clear"?).  I am now out real money, since I conduct an actual business that will make my customers whole in the event of one of my vendors making a mistake.  It's the right thing to do.

I simply want to know the extent of the problem, the fixes being implemented, and the policy/plan for such situations moving forward.  I personally believe MtGox has lost their "right" to claim privacy/business secrets on this one as they've already lost the benefit of the doubt by having their entire database stolen.  Considering none of these answers have been forthcoming, I think it's starting to become obvious this problem is quite a bit more complicated than a simple hacked account.  Once answered (and answered truthfully this time, if that's even a possibility any longer) I can then evaluate my risk exposure based on legitimate and truthful information, which I currently cannot do.

Look at the broader picture. If they allow $10,000 USD worth of BTC to slip out for less than it's worth they get SIGNIFICANTLY LESS fees. By rolling back, and protecting potentially $5M+ USD, they stand to make tens of thousands more in transaction fees when the BTC are sold for a higher price. Obvious troll chooses more all the time. While the customer relations aspect could keep (possibly earn) them customers (as any business management course would teach) if they did the right thing... We all know how greed works.

Think a little bit harder on that one, guy.

lol I edited the previous post, it was in the wrong thread.
And I wouldn't expect shit from him... I am just playing neutral here and find a fair result for everyone.

Summarizing: Kevin has all the rights to keep it, it would be really a nice gesture if he gave it all back to their owners.
In rewards for this gesture, both the hacked account owner (*cough*MtGox*cough*) and Mt.Gox should give him a compensation.
(like when you find a wallet and give it back to its owner)

On the other hand, MtGox has to take responsability for all of us who were directly impacted through the leak of the userbase.
MtGox must compensate ALL OF US for the leak of the personal emails, the passwords and for breaking our trust as customers.
Many people already got spammed because of this and many people became targets of phishing.
No transaction fees for a couple of months would be nice, for starters.

I think this would be fair for everyone.

PD: About the rollback I think this is a stupid move, and MtGox has no right to execute it.

let's suppose there is no loser, it were MtGox' btc all along.

still the trade was initiated by a hacker since why would MtGox sell their own btc and then roll back the trades?

so we're back at the hacker version and nothing changes...

or, if your version if true (some person who did not care about the money decided to throw away 500000 btc to crash the bitcoin economy) - then we should have the person who did want to sell those 500000 btc he OWNED but his trade was rolled back by MtGox and 500000 btc stolen from him by doing so.

Now, where is THAT victim?

The problem with that is that it could freeze a large portion of the Bitcoin economy for months, or even years! This is by far the most dangerous thing that could happen to Bitcoin.

I think we're (mostly) on the same side here. Yes, there were probably vulnerabilities before the huge obvious one, and MtGox will probably have to (and should, IMO) eat those. But it is the huge obvious one that necessitates the rollback, because of the sheer size of it. As I've said previously, it's the easiest way to get the most people the most whole, which will give MtGox a place to start from to get everyone made as whole as possible. I don't think there's a bad precedent being set here, though. If something like this happens again (And I hope it doesn't) it will be just as clear as it was this time. 'Little' thefts don't need a rollback, the exchange will end up eating those.

TLDR translation:

Hi, I'm Kevin. The other day I went to the gym and saw a guy get jumped and knocked unconscious in the locker room. The attacker rifled the pockets of the dude on the floor and took off. I smelled an opportunity but since there were others in the room I moved in closer to have the first go at him after the attacker. I quickly put the loot in my locker so noone else could get at it and immediately wanted to take as much as possible of it home, but found that my pockets could only hold a fraction. I knew there were loose bricks on the other side of the wall behind the lockers, but thought I might be committing something illegal if I went for it. Since my fingerprints were all over the place, I immediately went to the janitor and told him who I was and what happened, but he appeared to be on the phone. So I went to the library and put up a note explaining things, hoping for visitors there to gather on my side, and giving reasons why the dude who got jumped should let me keep the booty. I'm thinking some other looters may help me out a bit, and maybe some others who think the dude should have expected to be jumped, after all the gym locks were broken a couple of days ago and he didn't seem to care.

This isn't a legitimate opportunity, it's grave robbery.

I can't believe the greed dripping off my screen. You know it would be fair to roll back, but boy, being a millionaire does sound good. Whatever Mt. Gox' history, this is not right.




ROFL, so when and where does this fight between you and MyFarm take place? So far you were hanging over the precipice of the 'conspiracy researcher' ledge, hovering above the 'paranoid crackpot' abyss, but your FUD here (first attacking Mt. Gox, then turning on Kevin, as long as there is strife eh) makes me think you're a plant.

Strange choice of words. Are you by any chance Charles Taylor?

+1 Nescio.

Ok I just kick in this thread to make some things clear:
You surely know what's about "deal in stolen goods" (dunno if the word "concealment" is right, only know in french it's "recel"). Will you accept getting bitcoins if you suspect someone stole these from another account ? Maybe not, you want to stay safe legally said, since this is more punished than the stealing itself.

Short: lots of people not wanting to deal with "probably stolen" bitcoins, selling them, making the bitcoin's value drop, and so on. Then, 250 000 bitcoins robbed:
- will be worth nothing if nobody want to pay for them
- still is illegal

Mt.Gox did the right thing, Kevin is already tracked down for stealing and possible relation with system intrusion and cracking (if he really did it). It's now your turn: give the stolen bitcoins back where they belong (Mt.Gox) and be less charged, or keep them and face more charges and massive bitcoin crisis of interest and value loss.

You can't fuck around thinking you're safe because it's virtual and looked legit to you, Mt.Gox has to hand over all their logs to the authorities and they will easily go up to you. Legally, they have to hand over everything they know to the authorities, may the community like the FBI sniffing on it, or not. Mt.Gox being a registered society, they have to comply to any law of the countries involved, french because of french bank and admin, american because of technical infrastructure, and japanese because of society establishment and admin home. The point is how hard you will be hit in the end, and what impact this will have on the whole bitcoin economy. And how Bitcoin will be treated by the govs.

TL;DR: give the bitcoins back. For the community, for the future of Bitcoin and for yourself.
inb4 domain names "bitcoin.org", "mtgox.com", "tradehill.com", "sourceforge.net"... get seized by ICE (they can, TLDs managed by american societies)

TL;DR is a bane of society.  You obviously subscribe to this theory as well.

Kevin does not have possession of these bitcoins, so it is quite obvious you didn't even read the original post, much less the followup replies in this thread.  Yeah yeah, that'd be work and all.

Just to help out the reading-comprehension challenged...

~250k bitcoins = at MtGox.  They never left.
~650 bitcoins, the amount transferred by Kevin, are sitting in escrow waiting for this whole mess to be figured out.  He posted that he was working on doing this, and I'm certain he'll post the details in the AM for everyone to see.  Sorry this stuff isn't instant?  Lawyers don't tend to keep 24 hour law offices open.  I really don't think he expected everyone here to be up in arms about 650 BTC he said he'd give back, when there are 250k on the line...

Jesus get facts right before you go accusing people of shit.  It's starting to get pathetic here.

I was thinking about this overnight and if there was a serious database compormise, would you bother moving all of the coins into one account or would you just update a single field to say 500k?

I reckon the coins don't even exist, MtGox cannot afford to cover it and the rollback is therefore all but assured.

The bottom line Kevin (IMO) is that you were the fortunate recipeint of some one elses prank, but you cannot hold onto them because they do not exist. Do get over it, all this talk of running to the authorities to retain your gains is nonsence.

MtGox are going to take a panning over this and will probably go out of business, but the sad truth is that if you force MtGox to honour this trade, you will be taking the coins from the pockets of your peers and not from the security ignorant fools that let this all get so out of hand.

MtGox, you should be ashamed of yourselves.

Kevin you make good points, and I think everyone can put themselfs in your shoes, and understand that they would have acted very similar (since the whole situation was chaotic during the crash).

Since the whole problem is complex, I want to point out some key points:
1.) it has to be clarified what exactly has happed. That there were 500.000 BTC on one mtgox account is difficult to believe, but if it was, then the hacker obviously known that, and cracked exactly that password from the database.
2.) When it's clarified that Kevin bought "stolen" BTC i think he legally has to give them back, since the seller had no right to them.
3.) Even tough the rollback hurts a lot of people, I think it is the right way to go.


Who's fault?
f1) Well that lays definitely at the side of the hacker. mtgox gave the hacker the ability to steel BTC's. But mtgox didn't act (if everyone says the truth) criminally, just negligent.
f2) If the hacker would be found, he would be charged with the criminal intend to steel a few million $. Like a bank robber trying to get millions, and he got away with a few thousand (if it's true what mtgox says).
f3) mtgox acted negligent, but they don't must pay for the damage the robber has done.


All in all I think it's right to roll back everything.
But it will probably be impossible to get all the BTC and $ back, that where withdrawn (with no illegal intent (like Kevin)). This money "gone from mtgox" should be payed by mtgox , if they want people to trust in them again.  Otherwise mtgox will be known as the unsecure market responsible for nothing... (good luck finding traders...).

Phil21 -> well, guess I got some things not right then and the way it developed (nobody knows everything about all this mess anyway) _sorry_.
Still: I stated "if he really did it" in my post, since I've no proof of anything for or against :) -and there I am, waiting authority investigations make light on this. Meanwhile, my post applies to all massive bitcoin thieves.
//

Torminalis: be assured that MagicalTux is highly ashamed of himself for not forcing all users to update the password when he acquired Mt.Gox, making the passwords salted at the start. Not even mention the discredit on Mt.Gox and all the other services he's running, many people sure lost faith in his ability to secure websites. As a human, he can only do his best, not guarantee perfection: he may have more technical experience than the average, but he still has 24 hours time per day like everybody. Every expert knows that perfect security in computers is impossible, even the über-safe OpenBSD had 2 remote critical vulnerabilities at standard install in it's history. The internet in it's whole has been hacked and hacked again, making the network stronger everytime (would DNSSEC exist if there weren't any DNS poisoning vulnerabilities ? Buffer protection if there weren't "ping of death" attacks ? Antiviruses if there weren't viruses ?). Bitcoin economy is at experimental state, I prefer Mt.Gox exploited now and reinforce security massively (and anybody else taking lessons) than all markets hacked and coins sucked out while bitcoins are worth 4000 $ each. Preparing good times from the bad times, that's the philosophy.

btw: I'm directly concerned about all this, since I'm hosted on KalyHost and want to pay it with bitcoins - fed up about PayPal/MoneyBookers fees, plus bank tracing. So I really want Bitcoin to go back normal again and stay legal everywhere in the world.

And if the crash would be "just" to @5 then what? Is it some hacking or bubble bursting?
What if @3 ?

Here it happened, first it was drop to @10, then @5 then to @1 and so on.

There are more people involved then the @0.01 guy.

I would buy like hell if the price would drop to say @9, and most people on this forum would. With price @1 I doubt anyone would not buy (unless he started to think the entire bitcoin thing collapsed overall).

What if people in china would rob some farmers. The farmers would be forced to work at slave wage or just for food at local factory. It would make new abibas boots from there cost x100 lower then you pay in normal shop. Someone would import them to your country, and you would buy them at x5 lower price at local baazar and then open up a shop.

No wait, not baazar.

You would buy it at most respectable and biggest imported good distributor in your Bitcoinville country.

Later police comes in and takes all your goods. Happy?

Again - I am not saying here necessarily that say mtgox is bad for doing the rollback or anything; Just trying to look at legal-moral problems that arise with trades triggered initially by some wrong doing; How should they reverse, who should refund which trader.

Kids, in the grown-up world, centralized currencies are used for trades.

Totally agree with Kevin.

Let's say we let Kevin keep all of those 200K+ coins,
then mtgox "accidentally" gets hacked again,
and this time that single hacked account happen to be Kevin's
(the hack happened so fast before Kevin could withdraw anything)

What would Kevin say? Rollback or not?

he stated too many times that he would be against the rollback.
I think he should return the BTCs but the idea of MtGox rolling transactions back is very disturbing. They will get off too easy.

This is again, why reimbursing everyone (so doing a rollback while letting people profit as if there would be no-rollback) would be most just (and unrealistic since it requires liek 400,000 usd)

Man, I already explained this yesterday....
THE TRANSACTIONS WERENT REAL

The coins that got sold DIDN'T EXIST

The buy you did was a forge

So, stop whining, and accept the rollback.  ::)

This was a CODE-attack, not a real trade.

Sorry for the font sizes and bolds and stuff, but hey, nobody is listening.


For those interested in numbers:
A total of 51 million bitcoins got sold by 1 sell order this Sunday. If you know there are only 6,6 million coins in existment, you can do the math and see it was a fake sell order.

source?

WTF does 'existment' mean?!?

This sounds like the first real news all day!!!

http://pastebin.com/J0HXBjWu

That's from sunday, the price reached 0.01
In order to reach the price of 0.01, all these orders had to be cleared.
If you paste it in excel and do a count of the amount of bitcoins that people wanted to buy @ 0.01 or higher, then you can see that there needed to be sold a total of 51 million bitcoins in order to clear the whole bid-side of 0.01 or greater, which happened, but was impossible...

Obvious forge is obvious.

+2

Man, I would LOVE to see some of the people threatening lawsuits posting some proof or paperwork showing they're actually trying to do it. Regarding suing to stop the rollback, no lawyer would touch that with a 10 foot pole! Plus it's silly how many people yell "I'll sue!" without even realize that there's a few $100 you have to pay out of pocket just to file the paperwork.
Please, someone who is suing MtGox, show us that you're actually doing it.....
...
anyone?....

Fallacy.

It is really more of:
Owner of Art's dealing auction house gets drunk and forgets to lock up doors. Few times. (Or he gives they keys to his friend and he gets drunk). Either way he was warned for weeks to get the damn doors fixed.

Then someone brakes in, and rearranges price tags.

Then you come in and seeing paintings at affordable 13 USD instead usual 17 USD you bid for it and win.
Others do too, some even for 10 USD, 5 USD... and so on.
One dude buys all the paintings for a penny each - you think - what a crazy trade, wtf.

You come back to pickup your painting for 13 USD that you bought, but the owner woken up and closed the auction house.
Sign says it will reopen in few hours. Then in a day. Then "soon".

As buyer of picture at 13 USD I would expect some compensation if it was all a fuckup.

I, personally, would not demand to have the paintings are pries like 10 USD, or 5 USD, or 1 USD,  but some people might want to want to have compensation.

I glanced through the numbers (don't have excel on this PC) and I seriously doubt the total buy orders were even close to the number you claimed.
I don't think it's even close to 1 million...

Are you trying to add up all the numbers in that list? INCLUDING THE DATES PROBABLY.
gosh, get your facts straight before you post bullshit like this!

Used excel to sum it up and yes:

Total: 51,025,991 btc were "exchanged" there.

But this makes things WAY worse! Was MtGox a fractional reserve or the hacking went way further than a simple read-only users db dump?

EDIT: Actually MORE than that number, due to the number format used by my European excel it didn't sum the floats, treat them as strings.

Are we looking at the same data?  I've got 2967 rows (including the header) totalling 237457.099 BTC.

How about the obvious again...that there may have been other 'stop loss' sales in the system, and people were (although not many) committing buy and sell orders on the way down outside of the single large sale going on thereby greatly increasing the number of transactions happening as the same coins traded multiple times on the way down.

I'm sure there were losers and winners in this whole game...also, i don't even see remotely close to a million in that list, 237457.099 is the total.

Now shoo troll.

Obviously not, I used the data he provided and estimated no more than half a million, 237k sounds way more reasonable.

Which column are you summing? "Total" or "Amount"?

EDIT: You're right! Just made a small function to sum it up, using the "Amount" column, and the result it:

201,772.872 BTC

Wonder where the hell Excel got that sum [ SUM(C2:C2967) actually outputs 51 Million]. Result: -1 for Excel!

There are about 3000 lines or orders in that txt.

If there were really 51,000,000 BTC orders there,

each line should average about 17,000 BTCs

Show me an order or two which had that much amounts.

KTHXBYtrolls

amount sum is 237,457.099.  total sum is $1,321,904.20618504.

here's the same data, with the running total.

http://pastebin.com/jXqmLKuc

(pffff excel...Perl for the win)

So yes, one account with 500k BTC can fill every buy order on the market at the time,

and still have about 260K left waiting to be sold at 0.01 each.

Got a different result because cut the column using Excel which gave me double floats (1.000.123 for 1,000.123). WTG Bill! What a nice piece of sh... spreadsheet software Excel is...  :o

There's only stupid users ::)

About my 51 million bitcoins post, i found what went wrong  :P
My excel transformed European Format numbers into American ones and changed numbers like 21.652,252 into  21 million....  ::)
Sorry guys, but hey, it's not easy sometimes. Why can't we all just use the same formats throughout the entire world?

good thing you're not running mtgox.com...

or is it a bad thing?  :o

I opened that file, and I see nothing which indicates whether the lines are buy or sell orders, or a mixture of both.

fuck it... i think i might be on team kevin.  I've been pro roll back since I heard about what happened.  I still am, but after reading Kevin's long post he's obviously well educated (more than me at least :) )  My main issue is that the sell off was not legitimate.  It's akin to a bank robber stealing 1oz gold coins and then selling them all off at a flea market for $10 when people know they're worth $1500 each.  Sure, you're going to buy buy buy.  But at the end of the day, it's basically receiving stolen property which at least in the states is a crime.

I'm almost willing to think this option 3 as layed out by Kevin could be the best thing to do.  The rollback was obviously a hasty decision, as I'm sure in such a panic state it would be hard to think of what else to do.  Surely the idea of covering the losses didn't just come to mind.  A mainsteam type business would have insurance for things like this and it wouldn't be about coming out of pocket as the business operator.



I do however have my doubts about how option 3 would effect the bitcoin community.  How does that effect value to know that some guy just got nearly 300k bitcoins for a little more than the money you've insvested in mining equipment over the past month?  

If a bank is robbed and the robber simply transfers money to other peoples accounts, what do you think the bank would do?  They're not going to let people keep the ill-gotten monies.

I just know I would not want to be MTGox.  And if I were the guy w\ 500k bitcoins, I'd feel obligated to lessen the blow to Kevin for being a stand up guy.  Kevin as he said could have simply hit withdraw over and over again and taken out much more btc than he did, but he's obviously an honest guy w\ morals.

In a real debate, team Kevin would be winning right now,
but the hammer is in gox' hand, so...

@d.james
If the jury (us) reach a consensus, it is a great moment to see the impartiality of the judge.
If we all agree that it is plain ridiculous, and that actually Kevin should get compensated somehow, but MtGox takes an arbitrary position.

For me, that will be a ticker telling me to GTFO.
And I might do it if that happens.

You buy exotic fruits. Later you found out you got them for 1 cent but they cost 10 dollars a day before. Later it turns out it was becasuse the baazar owner left doors unlocked and some people rearranged price tags.

Now YOU are called the thief.
And the guys that bought apples for 3 or 10 USD are also - well perhaps not called thiefs - but they are not getting the apples they dealed and payed for (well they will have their money returned, but they would prefer the deal to be carried out and shop owner is not reimbursing this).

Unfortunately every poll shows overwhelmingly a preference for a rollback.

Every poll shows overwhelming support for wolves to eat the sheep. So what?

There are just few people that gamed the AUCTION system when the price was very attractive.

Heh, so could it be that Kevin actually saved Mt. Gox? If his buy order went in just as the hacker's sell was winding down and he was the first to buy in quantity, Kevin snapped up the balance and the hacker could not transfer out anything because he sold the complete balance (didn't see that coming). Unless Kevin was the hacker or associated with of course.

Still, rollback is the fair thing to do.

BUAHHAHA... you honestly can't write this stuff.

How sweet would that be that this hacker is going along and mr Kevin swoops in and buys all the btc lol

Which Kevin then got with his buy order. There's even apparently evidence in another thread (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20437.msg257339#msg257339) that he did actually place the order after the market started crashing. Looking good so far.

Nobody called Kevin, or any of the 5 or 6 other lucky traders who got a piece of that pie, a thief (Tux implied it, but nobody rational would steal that much money and then come forward like Kevin did). Option 3 would be a fine idea, If it were not such a large amount that got traded, and it weren't such a C-F as to the source of those funds. As it stands, a roll-back is the sanest way to get everyone as close to made whole as possible, and then they can proceed with paying back anyone who got shafted as a result.

It's rational if you realize you're going to be caught anyway. Did he come forward before he thought he'd be tracked down, or after? Seemed like after to me.

Why should he, bitcoin is rather wild west.  If you want a government regulated thing, try government bonds or something.

Well of course the polls favour a rollback. When a market moves this fast there is going to be a very slim proportion of traders that gain!!

Surely we should refer to examples in the traditional financial system. This kind of thing has happened and does happen from time to time.

He came forward within minutes (lets call it an hour or two so I'm not later called a liar) of this all going down, directly to the owner of MtGox via IRC.  At that time it was attempted to keep things a bit quiet on the public side for obvious reasons.

Chat logs will confirm this, should it ever come to that.

This was also mentioned in the OP.

Oh, hey, how about Solution #5:

Take a vote for rolling back versus letting transactions stay. Since it's fairly obvious that the 500kBTC sale was from the pooled account holding everyone's money,

+ Those who were against the roll back have a  fair (% weighted) portion of the stolen money withdrawn from their accounts to pay for the theft, letting them keep their sense of morality about it.
+ Those who are for the roll back are compensated partially from MtGox's own wallet and partially from the other people
+ MtGox takes a hit in the wallet, but that hit is somewhat mitigated
+ People who managed to get away with the ridiculously low buys get to keep their money.

This way everyone wins!

I appreciate the attempt at a solution, however the above statement is unfortunately not correct.  It's quite plausible it may be correct, but it's equally plausible the bitcoins didn't even exist in the first place (e.g. attacker adding +500,000 to the "BTCBalance" column or whatever for their account, via SQL injection).

Since it's been pretty much proven the story given by MtGox is incorrect, it's really wild speculation as to the real current situation.  Without all the information, my vote currently is to "sit and wait" until a third party can audit this mess.  I was previously in favor of a rollback, until it became painfully obvious that we were being misled about the situation.

I am of the opinion without truthful information about the situation, it's impossible to make an informed decision.  How many other fake balances exist in the system now, that will be re-activated when the site goes live?  I have about 500 questions like this, that are impossible to even begin to answer without getting some information in the light.

-Phil

are you crazy?  if there is one thing i have learned from this it's never trust a 3rd party 'auditor'.  actually wait just make that never trust a 3rd party

How about solution #6:
Roll-Back all accounts back to the very beginning!

+ Fixes my mistakes when I bought my coins at $28.
+ Fixes early adopter's mistakes when they sold at below $1.
+ Now everyone have a fresh & equal start.

Do you actually still believe that story?  With all the evidence pointing out otherwise? Wow.

There are *very* competent security teams on this planet.  They don't advertise.  I would feel very comfortable with one of these teams flying in and taking a look ASAP.

Some people fail to grasp the concept that the coins were stolen.

Alot of people actually seem to not really grasp that or don't care.  If all of the coins were indeed from EVERYBODIE's accounts, and a rollback is the only way to save most of them... I don't see how it can really be up for debate.

Obviously it's pointless to try using the honor system around here and just ask that people return the stolen coins.


This is for people in the US... idk about international law.  It's common knowledge that the coins were stolen.  Therefore if you bought them and have them in your wallet, you're in possession of stolen property.

To play devil's advocate here for a moment, Let's say Kevin did do it. (not that I am, mind.) He could have, after realizing his mistake that he could not withdraw all the funds and that the largest amount of it would still be in his account, Thinking on his feet, went to MT and said, 'Look! I stopped the hacker from getting all the bitcoins!'.

You can all take off your tin hats now. ;) There are inconsistencies in both stories, and I suspect the truth will only out once we get that third party auditor in there.

nah i really don't know what to believe.  it's a serious point about 3rd parties though. if you are taking part in a marketplace where you only need to trust your transaction partner, things can go wrong for you as an individual but if lots of people put their trust into a single 3rd party and he screws up that can turn into a major catastrophe.

i'm thinking the Open Transaction model i've read about could be a better path to go down.

That's the story from MtGox.  Backed up by what evidence?

If you accept that the coins were stolen, then fine -- a roll-back would seem most appropriate (to me, at least).  But without evidence to back up that story...

As I have said multiple times -- I don't need names, IP addresses, and all such details.  I would be satisfied with proof that 'criminal proceedings' have been initiated, as has been claimed.  Again -- if for no other reason than that filing false reports is felonious pretty much world-wide.

Option A) unauthorized access gained to mtgox.  btc belonging to other people sold for 0.01.
rollback needed

Option B) somebody with 500k btc just did it for the lulz. 
no rollback needed

Option C) government intention into the btc community.
no rollback needed

Which other possibilities am I missing?

Days before this crash, I forwarded to MtGox my photo ID and proof of address, then used the very same account to make this buy. I never attempted to hide who I was from him.

Since I explained this poorly before, I'm stating this again: I was requesting that my Dwolla daily limit be raised, not my bitcoin daily limit. That's why the $1000 BTC limit was still present on my account.

Option D) unauthorized access gained to mtgox.  btc belonging to nobody sold for 0.01.
rollback needed

Option B) they did it for the lulz, and after the rollback is done, they'll do it again for more lulz. If it happens again, THEN we'll have proof the money is not stolen, and people who bought for $10, $5, or $0.01 will be just able to buy it again. I.e. if it really wasn't theft, why object to the rollback if you'll just be able to do it again?

This is hilarious and quite possible based on my knowledge of real life....
O wonderous universe.

 

Kevin, I'm about 99.99% convinced you are the unfortunate victim of a con here (Which is what it amounts to when someone sells you something they didn't have to sell) and that you acted in complete good faith. You've been considerably more forthcoming than Tux has, and much calmer in your responses, as well. My faith in MtGox as an institution is severely shaken, and I won't be trusting them with my money until I have verified third party assurance that they're secure. I don't think you hacked the site, Just to be clear, the scenario above was a decidedly devil's advocate one.

That said, I won't be satisfied with either story until a third party goes through the logs and ferrets out the truth (Which I suspect will more closely match your story, but I doubt will exactly match either one). I sympathize with what must be one hell of a roller coaster of a weekend.

If Kevin is truly the savior of mtgox, then a roll-back should still happen,

But Kevin should be compensated by gox for saving their ass.

He was :)  MtGox blamed him for the hack, and said they forwarded his details on to the FBI (not like I believe that, but that's the official statement at least).  That is fair compensation right?

The best compensation would be all these threads dying in a fire, never to pop up from the primordial ooze that spawned them.

If you wait a while, the 643BTC you managed to withdraw are gonna be worth those $5million you thought you had in your pocket.

The true wild west solution to this would be: you get to keep that, tough luck for the rest.
However, 250k btc is just too much coin for one man alone to handle. You wouldn't have gotten far with that.


great story!

The term Zealot, in Hebrew kanai (קנאי, frequently used in plural form, קנאים (kana'im)), means one who is zealous on behalf of God.

So saying "religious zealot" is redundant?

Mind you, if at all, then in an inadvertent capacity. He was admittedly out to make a good deal, and the fact that he tried to transfer it out immediately only underscores his awareness that Mt. Gox would be quite opposed to that (because it would bankrupt them).

BTW, Kevin went to IRC after having failed to transfer out the whole balance. There is no reason not to assume he did that to salvage that failure. How much are you willing to bet he would have returned the balance if successful and not also 'given it to someone to hold in escrow until things are cleared up'? If things got nasty, that's a very large legal fund right there.

It would also be quite recursive if the lawyers accepted Bitcoin :)

The new york stock exchange had a rollback a couple years ago.   If you think it is fair that you were able to buy BTC for $1 and be allowed to keep them I think you are silly. 

No matter how this particular incident ends, Mtgox is super fishy and I'm sure next time hacker will do more harm.


OtDwStEotW

So how did this story end?

Check the Escrow, see where the money is.

Kevin joined a Tibetan monkery and gave away all his worldly goods, including his bitcoins ... the end.

Looking at the escrow, it seems Kevin dumped the money before MtGox even reopened. Can't tell if he took it out for himself, or sent it to the BTC Faucet...

I realize the escrow page (https://clearcoin.appspot.com/status/r_H5PyEWwb5wEa8RTbrMTY8k) is a little hard to read, but the money is still in the escrow account. If Gavin is reading this, it'd be awesome if he could confirm that publicly for me.

Oh. I was just wondering what the "Release request made on June 21, 2011" was about. When I was using the escrow, the "release date" was then the money was allowed to be transferred to the address listed.

I posted the link to the escrow page in public, which was really meant to only be shared with the other party in a private transaction. The moment I made the post here, someone clicked the "Request that the funds be released now" button, which is why it's saying that.

Oh. Well that's a weird system then :) I guess there's no real way around it though. But you are right, once done, I think it says something like "funds have been dispersed" or something.

One month later, what was big news on reddit, is now big news on reddit again.  Go /r/Offbeat/

"I’m Kevin and I'm the guy who bought 259684 BTC (Bit Coins) for under $3000 yesterday. I really wanted to keep this as quiet as possible, but I don't feel I can anymore. Here's my side of what happened."

-  http://www.reddit.com/r/offbeat/comments/ioy5d/im_kevin_and_im_the_guy_who_bought_259684_btc_bit/

I love outsiders views on these situations, keeps things in perspective :)

Yeah, kind of highlights the absurd clown-car Bitcoin appears to be to regular people...

EDIT: ...which it is.

Whatever happened with this? For an event that resulted in (presently) 2.5% of the bitcoin economy to end up in escrow limbo, I can't remember there being any resolution to this, either on this thread or elsewhere. Are the coins still there?

What's with all these old threads being revived? 

Does the current rise in price have something to do with it? 

People who left Bitcoin back in the fall of last year, thinking it was dead, starting to take notice again and realizing there just might be something to this Bitcoin stuff after all?    ;)

Haha, no, I stuck around. Just curious about the location of 250,000 bitcoin. Isn't anyone else?

This is third on my list and was surprised to see it bumped. Too bad I'm busy with two other investigations right now, but if anybody wants to further dwell into this, check my past handful of posts, for I've left many of hints (think Jergens®). Once you start connecting the dots, you'll be shocked as to where it leads.

BTW, I've been doing all this research pro bono, and am not seeking any donations (I'm good), but was there a reward or two for information leading to the arrest of anyone attached to any of the Bitcoin thieves?

I've have one of then I.C.E. tokens in my wallet, therefore I should be able to practice policemen in all 50 states, including 185 countries, including The Vatican, in case anybody's Catholic. (Note to self: Quit dropping hints and just do it!)

~Bruno~

BTW, Toasty is still active, albeit under the guise of a different avatar, and is still active today, as in today.

~Bruno~

Zhou Tong? ;)

So that's what a security cunsultant/game programmer does for fun, creates alternate identities of young asian boys?

To be honest, I've yet to make that connection, if there is one. As it stands now, it's a stand-alone investigation that I stumbled upon searching for something else. Basically a fluke find, but once found, I did a few quick searches and was amazed. Even amazed that it wasn't found earlier for it's an find.

The reason I've yet to state anything about this find is because I'm currently suffering repercussions for presenting the latest finds. Adding another reason from the naysayers to reject me outright would be futile.

I can't believe this community has banned together to kick a 52-year-old grandfather to the curb. (see what I did there?)  ;)


I'll await your posting of initials to help me figure out which person you're in reference to, C_S.

BTW, you all do know that this guy's name is Kevin Day, don't you? There's this thingy called Google...

~Bruno~

+1

I believe that actually Kevin doesn't have to give back any of it.
He purchased them in good faith. Even if the market was crashing, I would have purchased it if I saw the opportunity.

Now, even if it is on his right to keep them, IF the money belonged to MTGOX (and not a user, but actually the main fund of MTGOX, which seems to be more plausible the more I think) then I guess that for the betterment of the economy and its stability, Kevin should give it back to MtGoX.
In exchange of the devolution, MtGox should give a compensation for the act of good faith and allow Kevin to keep the withdrawn amount
If the account was a personal one, Kevin has less obligation to give it back to the owner of it. When you make the wrong call playing poker you can't undo it, if you fucked it up, you fucked it up. Period.
But still, it would be a nice gesture, and this would be totally from Kevin's generosity, if Kevin gives back partially or totally to the previous owner. A generous compensation for this gesture would be appropriate.

BUT, Kevin has all the rights to keep it and not giving it back to anyone. He would be a total asshole by behaving like that, but it is in his right.
Now, everything depends on his will.

MtGox shouldn't rollback shit.
The least thing that MtGox can do is to compensate to all users for this scandal and for they negligence/incompetence.
The leaked userbase is embarrassing enough, and that needs a fair compensation to all of us who entrusted this site with our money, and in some cases, our life savings (doesn't matter if trusting one's savings is a unsound judgement, the point here is that our trust has been broken).

It takes decades to build trust, and only one second to break it.

Usually, one never recovers full trust with a person, but doing good deeds can help to reestablish the relationship.
I hope MtGox understands here that more than profit, trust is actually the backbone of a business.
If you don't offer a deal to keep your users happy, expect a bank run.

the guy is 4 million dollars richer!  :o

How long does it take to offer a screenfull of opinion on how to handle a situation that happened two years ago?

I vote we do a rollback.  Everyone, get ready...

He's not. They took his money back, since he didn't get them legitimately.

how did they get his money back?

.... he never really "had" it ... like all those people with bitcoins in Mt. Gox, they only have an entry in a spreadsheet ... Mt. Gox holds the priv. keys itself.

"You can;t sell what you don't own", is made real by bitcoin, but so few chose to really use it.

interesting read anyway

So how's Kevin doing?

did he ever give the money back?

and what about the man who had so much bitcoins on just one mtgox account? maybe the second secret stash of nakamoto?
"Note that from the 1,814,400 BTC awarded, 1,148,800 BTC has never been spent (63%).   ;D As of October 2012.
I suppose (but have not checked it yet) that these are exactly the segments that belong to the mystery entity,"
I think its funny when it is like 20% of bitcoins were premined

The Verge reported earlier this year that Satoshi Nakamoto, the Bitcoin network’s mysterious founder, has an address with over one million bitcoins.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/6/4295028/report-satoshi-nakamoto

https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/

Nothing was premined.  Nakamoto might actually have 1 Million BTC, or that might be someone else.  But I know that there was no premining.  I was here well before the 1 millionth BTC was mined, and I did some of it myself.  Kindly stop spreading bullshit.

I can second that. I was here way before there were 1 million coins too and also mined some myself.

I was all like "well, you were using Gox."  Then I noticed the date.

This is way old news, remains of the hot Summer 2011 and the bitcoin bubble. $3 to $32 and back to $3.

There's no winner in this argument... You found a flaw, and took advantage of it. And Mt.Gox did what any normal business would do, and that is to try and keep ALL the customers happy. Doesn't matter anymore though since this forum post is so old.

There was no "pre-mine" but someone ended up with a wallet with 1 million coins. I'll draw my conclusions, thanks.

How much did Kevin make on transaction?

How would he have ever been able to withdraw these into fiat anyways?

I wonder what the reaction would be today in 2014 if the same situation happened with the same amount of BTC involved?

Basically pretty much the same I guess; a lot of Anger and a lot of rage by jealous people. :D

True, but you've got to remember that in the beginning of Bitcoin it didn't hold value beyond mathematical curiosity. There is an interesting read here into a cryptoforensic analysis of the early blockchain and the "ExtraNonce" data:

http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/ (http://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-fortune-of-satoshi-nakamoto/)

Long story short - when he kicked it off he had to set up something to do the mining as that is what drives the transaction processing until other people started doing it to share the load. It's kind of like when downloading torrents and you are the only seed - until other people join in and there are enough doing it to keep it running as people come and go online. There is speculation that Satoshi may have just set this early miner up as a background "dumb process" to keep the network going in those early days and didn't bother to even track or keep any of the coins. After all, it had no value at that time and who could have predicted it.

Very interesting read especially given recent developments.

This part isn't true.  It was his baby, he kept the coins.  In fact, I remember an event wherein someone on the forum offered Satoshi $50 per btc for as many of the genesis block coins as he was willing to sell.  The response was along the lines of, 'No thanks, those are for my son.'

Furthermore, there was some speculation as to whether or not Satoshi could actually spend the genesis block coins.  The view being that, since the genesis block is actually unique, some clients might choke on the attempt to deal with verification of such a transaction; and that it wasn't worth the risk of a blockchain fork.  Since those early blocks still have never moved, it's also possible that those early keys have been lost or that Satoshi is dead.

EDIT: at the time, the market price for a single bitcoin was about a nickel.

I believe that offer was specifically for coins in the Genesis block (Block 0) itself, not those that came after. If you check out the target wallet address for block 0 you can see they only ever held the genesis block mined coins. Coins mined after that went someplace else.

https://blockchain.info/address/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa (https://blockchain.info/address/1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa)

Satoshi certainly mined and kept a bunch of coins, the theory though is that there were a bunch of early coins out there that weren't kept or used beyond supporting the mining process.

gosh , ya've done a most right thing in your live!

You are just lucky. After the crash on Mt.Gox, you had the chance to buy Bitcoins for $100 each, but the chance you actualy would receive them, was very small. So consider yourself lucky.

Kevin, is this you again?

http://s28.postimg.org/g70cg45yl/Untitled.png
Source: Page 14 of the Criminal Complaint - http://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/30/criminal_complaint_force.pdf

Sorry but Who is Kevin ?

The OP?

the old mtgox story. wow so many money lost on that one.

Never came across this thread. Read the first two pages and I was shocked...

Pretty interesting to bump this today, as Mark was charged of embezzlement. I too wonder what would the reactions be today. I figure they'd be really different.

It's not so different today. During the brief August crash on Bitfinex down to $160 there were complaints that people's buy orders at $170 weren't filled. That's similar to Kevin's experience, although Bitfinex didn't let people have their lowball buy order coins then take them back. I'd be furious if I had $$170 buy orders on that didn't get filled. However, MtGox kept on trading afterwards, and likewise Bitfinex kept on trading afterwards.

I feel like OP should have been given that money,he didn't do anything wrong. the seller of the order wanted to crash prices and he did that. But the person buying the coins hasnt done anything wrong.

indeed you are right. but i wonder what really happen now to those bitcoins.
its a large amount of money. hm... and he doesnt do anything wrong since he's just a buyer.
did he withdrawal all of his bitcoin in time? or the only thing he withdrawal is the
600+btc? hmmm... im thinking what did he do wrong...:(

To start off my reply I'd like to say that our knowledge of Mt. Gox today is very different than what they had back then and that might influence each and every one of our posts in the forum.

Both situations are a bit different as far as I can understand. Someone (hacker or not) put up a huge sell wall (of what were supposedly legit Bitcoins and not Goxcoins as later in time) that crashed the market. People had buy orders low, because you know, just in case (who doesn't have them?) and the user managed to put a low order just in time to get cheap coins. Why not? Trades were rolled back under the reasoning that it was a hacker who did it... But people had already bought the coins. I know that coins on exchanges aren't really ours, but people had legitimately put buy orders and bought the coins at the price they wanted. It's not the buyers and sellers fault that their systems were not secure enough, as we've been having proof of in the last few weeks, and it isn't the fault of the people who bought the coins that other users (might have) had weak passwords.

As for Bitfinex's case, the orders weren't even filled to begin with, which was different (although also the exchange's fault: the system didn't correspond to what customers were expecting).

I know it's hard to ask for these services to be 100% able to correspond to users demands... But we can't (yet) resort solely to face-to-face trading and we need online trading systems that are stable and correspond to the user's desires, and don't simply rollback trades on bad reasoning.

The only legit rollback I recall (at least in near past) was that one where there was a 0.8 fork, and even that one might be questionable by some. That was an honest and serious bug related to incompatibility and was fixed quickly without a big harm to end users, as far as I recall.

i would of let the seller crash price again to 0.01 cents,  and withdraw all the 250k btc's, fuck mark.

You know, that this topic is from 2011 and OP hasn't been active since 2012?

I will not be able to see how people can read the OP and think that KD has a case for saving money, existing or non-existent.

Incredible story. Reminds me of that Goonies movie where the kids find a boat full of gold coins but ultimately once it sinks the fat kid retrieves a small bag of gold coins which would have made him rich.
Kind of the 600+ btc Kevin managed to transfer to his wallet.

Got a different result because cut the column using Excel which gave me double floats (1.000.123 for 1,000.123). WTG Bill! What a nice piece of sh... spreadsheet software Excel is...  Shocked

All the user's coins are actually stored in a single large wallet, and the BTC you see in your account is just an accounting entry. They're no actually yours until you withdraw your amount from the main wallet. So the theft wasn't from some poor schmuck with a bad password, it was from everyone at the same time.

What you think and what would happen in a court of law are two entirely different things. Someone hacking another persons account isn't right, and it also shouldn't allow for you to become a millionaire on wrong doing. It's pure greed plain and simple, and it's sad that you would want to "accept" what is basically stolen goods. Congrats....

Here is the first bitcoin novel. when i read this i couldn't hold my tears for days. reading and crying situation was very educational for me.

Regarding the lawsuit to stop the return, no lawyer can touch that with a 10-pin pole. I think he should return what he took at that moment.

Kevin's story is backed up by MtGox's own feed; and that showed that he could not have made the order before the crash. In fact, 6 people got in before him when the large order finally finished executing - which took 35ish minutes.

Thank you, I fully agree with your opinion, but I suspect the actual buying and selling is all done on a SQL database, and the only time the actual Bitcoin goes into play is when someone asks for a withdrawal. I think this method is a good idea, since it saves money for everyone. Consequently, though, 500k Bitcoin has been "stolen" may very possibly just be an arbitrary number in an account, which means nothing more than an IOU from MtGox.

It makes you tear and cry for a few days it seems like you really feel what has happened.

There's no winner in this argument... You found a flaw, and took advantage of it. And Mt.Gox did what any normal business would do, and that is to try and keep ALL the customers happy. Doesn't matter anymore though since this forum post is so old.

Really. This is crazy. A huge amount of money

The greatest novel  ;D

Kevin if what you say is true call up the most expensive law firm in NY and get the ball rolling, maybe the law is on the side of the rollback, maybe not.  With 5M at stake you bet your ass I would be finding out.  With the nature of bitcoin and international laws and something so unprecedented it needs further examination.

Kevin if what you say is true call up the most expensive law firm in NY and get the ball rolling, maybe the law is on the side of the rollback, maybe not.  With 5M at stake you bet your ass I would be finding out.

They're no actually yours until you withdraw your amount from the main wallet. Someone hacking another persons account isn't right, and it also shouldn't allow for you to become a millionaire on wrong doing.

Honestly, I think you should just keep coins. I personally slept when a failure occurred, but in principle I do not think that actual BTC transactions should be canceled after they are completed in the chain. However, the reversal of trading on MtGox servers depends on the owners, since the actual BTC transactions are not added to the chain.

You had 259,684 BTC and you round it off to 250,000 BTC  ::) ::) haahaa that is really funny. if even 10% of the left what you excluded from rounding off is given to anyone here then they will be happy.

This quote should go in every single history book.

This man made over 1 fucking BILLION $ (at today's price) out of 3000$, and had the integrity of giving it back.

Nowhere in history anyone ever made such an enormous profit overnight.. we are talking about 30000000% in a day.

So this was past with a historic amount of bitcoin. I'm curious if this even publish anywhere else aside from here, as this is sooo craaazzzyyy.

I'm thinking what Kevin has doing now with his life after he posted this.


I loved that. Well back in 2011 I was slave by a corporate world and living in dull.

Do not let me know that somehow Bitcoin hack happened. And who did it. Because no one could tell.

Did he HODL tho?

Or when did he sell?

why this old topic was pulled from the history of the forum? of course this is a very fascinating story, but it brings only envy and pity to the events of the past years :-\

Yeah, the story of you, Kevin is very fascinating. I hope that many people or bitcoin users will be inspired about your story and I think they can also be like you.