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180 days in most cases except some CC in some instances allow a chargeback up to a year later.
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There were a lot of money in USD balances and it is unclear how this will be handled. It seems that USD balances are protected under current law, but the problem is that there was a lot of trading going on after the theft when Gox said nothing was wrong (this is criminal by the way). This is one reason why the price of BTC fell so low after the theft compared to the other exchanges-- people in the know rushed to turn their BTC into USD for this very reason. This is also criminal. They will have to roll back all trades to the time of the theft and separate the bitcoin balances from the USD balances. All of this will be debated and dragged on in court for many years. What a mess!
Well there is also the issue that MtGox somehow doesn't have enough USD to cover the USD owed to users. Exactly how that happened who knows? Maybe their bank network also suffered from "check malleability". |
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There is no way to know for sure. Some sites just pick one but that is very poorly designed and that assumption is not always valid.
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My guess is the OP hasn't looked into securities law. That would be a good place to start.
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What kind of hashing power is required to recover keys? :-)
It depends. If it was "frapachino123" not much. If it was a truly random 256 bit encryption key we are talking heat death of the universe before that happens. Then again maybe the cipher will be broken sometime in the next century. I mean the private key that the cold storage is encrypted with... Maybe Bitcoin 2.0 is going to be trying to "remine" those coins somehow. If the keys really are lost, what kind of computing power is required? Actually, that's a good point. I'd be in favor of a system that could somehow re-absorb inactive coins into the mining process for redistribution. I'm not a technical expert so I don't know if this is possible, perhaps every time the mining process reaches a block reward halving event any addresses with coins that remained inactive longer than say the previous two halving events for example will have their coin balances cleared. The total amount of cleared coins would then be divided equally between each block being mined up to the next halving as a "subsidy". So for example at the next halving down to 12.5 BTC the actual per block reward would become 12.5 + [subsidy] allowing all "lost" coins to eventually be reintegrated gradually and fairly via the mining process. It's just a thought, I don't even know if it's possible but it could be one way to get these coins back in the long term. So summarized you favor the confiscation of wealth which belongs to others and ex post facto changes to the core rules of the network agreed upon by everyone? Inactive doesn't mean lost. |
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By pennies I mean the trillions of dollars used IN pennies. There are more currency units used in Bitcoin then the entire fiat money supply expressed in pennies.
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I would be inclined to agree with everything you said, but I simply can't knowing full well that Bitcoin is unfortunately used primarily as a speculative asset rather than a currency. And when you truly think about it, it makes sense. Bitcoin just isn't designed to really be a universal electronic currency. To me it seems as though it's designed to be an experiment into the possibility of have a truly universal electronic currency. 21 million coins even at 8 decimal points just isn't enough for every man, woman and child on this planet (roughly 7 billion people). If it were fairly distributed globally everyone would have just 333.33333333 Bitcoins; which just doesn't seem practical to the layman.
It's even worse when you consider the fact that Bitcoin is actually deflationary as coins can be irreversibly be lost and never used again.
It is 300,000 satoshis per human. More than enough. There are more satoshi's in the Bitcoin system then there are US pennies in the world. |
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In the bankruptcy process he said the funds "may have been stolen".
MtGox says a lot of things. Taking all of them on face value would lead to a pretty impossible conclusion.
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Why would you assume the thief is still holding. I think there are a lot of holes to MtGox's story but they claim they were losing coins for YEARS. It wasn't like all coins accounted for, single 800,000+ BTC tx and all coins are lost. Thief may have exchanged, or spent some or all of those coins months ago.
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but now its upto date if i recover dat file thru datarecovery and put it in bitcoin folder will i get funds?
yes. Stop client, replace existing wallet.dat with the one from backup. Start client. |
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However if you convinced everyone on the planet that 2+2 does equal 5 then the calculator wouldn't be broken all the old incompatible ones would. No, it would just mean that humanity had somehow simuntaneously lost the capability to do arithmetic. "four" and "five" are simply agreed upon language constructs. Language can be changed by consensus. GoxNumbering System One Two Three Five Four Six Seven ... |
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Yes and no. The basic idea is, if MtGox really just lost the keys to a 750K BTC wallet (which is a rumor), it would be technically possible to create a fork of Bitcoin where the original MtGox wallet is made unspendable by code and at the same time 750K new BTC are created in an address where MtGox has control. No need to inflate the total Bitcoin supply. It's technically possible to build a calculator that concludes "2+2=5" any time it would be convenient for that to be true. That wouldn't make the calculator any less broken. However if you convinced everyone on the planet that 2+2 does equal 5 then the calculator wouldn't be broken all the old incompatible ones would. That is the point. Bitcoin works on a consensus, if you want to change it you need the support of a consensus. This isn't a technical problem, it is a very difficulty social/human barrier (for good reason). |
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If you deleted the wallet.dat and you don't have a backup you deleted the private keys which give you access to the coins.
wallet.dat = contains only copy of your private keys = "your Bitcoins".
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I have heard there are other countries on this planet of ours. |
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I totally agree with the reservations here, but my question was if it could be done technicaly, and the answer was No.
Technically it can be done. It would be a half a dozen lines of code max. It could probably be done in an hour. Anyone can fork Bitcoin to make any change. The trick is can you convince people to use the fork? To date all existing forks have been non-controversial with near universal support. It isn't a technical problem, it is a consensus problem. Aha, then I misunderstood the first answer. Consensus is also about being afraid to be left out, So if there is a sentiment by most, to restore the coins to a recoverable wallet for everybody’s greater good, then the minority would feel a lot of peer pressure to update their wallet? Or you end up with two totally incompatible "Bitcoin"s each supported by a group of users but where tx are not compatible between each other. Both claim they are the real Bitcoin and the resulting confusion kills off the project. Most people are pragmatic and aren't going to support a fork unless it has near universal support. The only forks to the network which have succeeded have been pretty mundane non-controversial fixes or enhancements (additional features like P2SH). |
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So the real question could be: why not now? After all, we're still in beta.
If you start 'rolling back' the ledger (even if just specfic addresses) my confidence in the system would then be zero. Zero trust = zero price. Which doesn't change the fact that it "could" technically be done. One can point out the correct answer while not advocating its use. It is like asking if you shoot someone in the head is there a good chance they will die. The answer is yes but the yes doesn't imply support for that action. |
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Technically what could be done? How difficult it would be to do would depend a lot on what problem you think you are trying to fix. The problem proposed in the OP would be to give MtGox "lost" bitcoins back. That would be trivially simple to do in code. MtGox creates a new address, a "super user trusted" exception to the coinbase rules coded in the client which allows a single future block to contains a coinbase of 750,000 newly minted coins to that address. MtGox pays a miner to create a block with that coinbase tx and TADA you just fork the network. Now the question is would anyone use that fork over the existing one? I wouldn't for the moral hazard and other reasons. I seriously doubt it would gain a consensus or even a super majority but those are "people problems" not technical ones. Any change can be made to the protocol at any time through the use of a fork, the "hard part" is just convincing people to use it. |
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I totally agree with the reservations here, but my question was if it could be done technicaly, and the answer was No.
Technically it can be done. It would be a half a dozen lines of code max. It could probably be done in an hour. Anyone can fork Bitcoin to make any change. The trick is can you convince people to use the fork? To date all existing forks have been non-controversial with near universal support. It isn't a technical problem, it is a consensus problem. |
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So my question,: Is it possible to delete a known wallet and make it's balance appear in a new one with not lost keys (under the pretence that coins locked out in Gox are proper identified)?
Well MtGox hasn't even admitted to losing a private key. The bankruptcy procedure reported bitcoins being stolen not lost. You can't change Bitcoin, you can only fork it. A fork that is controversial has no chance of consensus (being accepted by all users, merchants, developers, etc). As Danny points out, people often attribute magical powers to miners. Miners set the consensus on transaction order, nothing else. An invalid block is still invalid even if 51%+ of miners build off of it. You can fork the Bitcoin network to do anything you want, you could fork it so the block reward is 1 billion bitcoins per block. The question is how many people will use your work. Also you can't stop the existing fork as long as at least one copy of that blockchain exists. The idea brings up a lot of moral hazards. If it was done (and I don't think it has a chance in hell) then MtGox is "too big to fail" and you have essentially just recreated the existing broken financial system. There will always be someone who wants just one more "one time exception". |
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Perhaps in retrospect he found that attempted pose as an innocent playful geek, the sitting on a blue ball photo, was seriously embarrassing. His inner Walter Mitty then took him to dark places at which point he started imagining himself as engaging in a theft that would rank among history's greatest.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by [gross] incompetence. |
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