ANYONE LOSING 500,000 BTC (more or less worth $8,500,000 USD) WOULD BE GOING APESHIT INSANE.
Why do you assume that it is someone that knows they lost a bunch of bitcoins? Why can't it be some dude that gathered up a shitload of coins when they were worth less than belly button lint, and has long since forgotten about the whole project? |
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IIRC intentionally selling a stock you can't deliver on is unlawful in the US (because it can be used to glut the market and crash the price of things pretty much at will).
No, not really. Well, it might actually be illegal. But as far as I know, no one has been punished meaningfully for doing it, at least not lately, and the FTD data suggests that no broker seriously believes that there is any real risk in it. The sad thing is that the brokerages have constructed a giant recursive borrowing machine to make it nearly impossible for a broker to be actually unable to locate a stock to borrow for a (technically) covered short, but there are still loads and loads of FTDs. |
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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....
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. |
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If mt gox only uses representations of actual bitcoins couldnt someone just add 500 000 fake bitcoins to the database and sell them thereby crashing the market ?
Yes, but again, this would be fairly easy to roll back. A better attack would be to bleed them out slowly, and hope that no one notices. And if the claims from gox are true, the whole point of the audit that started this fiasco was to demonstrate that the account balances in their system matched the account balances in their bitcoin wallets. |
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Wouldn't the correct approach to handling exchanges (ie FIFO orders) be to LOCK the table while an active order was being fulfilled?
If the hardware upon which the architecture was being run was sufficient enough, there wouldn't have been a chance for opportunistic bidders to buy @0.01 unless they had done so prior to the sell off. In lieu of that, a db level lock would honor the desired FIFO result. I would assume Mt Gox is set up this way and as such all attempts to place bids during the sell off would result in ~ "Another transaction is taking place." Again, assuming this is the case, this would invalidate Kevin (toasty)'s claim that he made a "lucky" bid in the midst of the sell off.
This is a bad idea, but it isn't obvious to people that haven't written or worked with large exchange markets. |
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Let me show you the login logs for our hacker guy on his account full of bitcoins, and Kevin: [2011/06/19 05:00:02] Hacker login
[2011/06/19 05:12:10] Kevin login
[2011/06/19 05:15:10] Hacker login
[2011/06/19 05:22:35] Hacker login
[2011/06/19 05:45:39] Hacker login
[2011/06/19 06:08:18] Hacker login I don't understand. Which account? Kevin and the hacker used the same account? Yeah Please Explain this Jargon, And what is it that you're implying by it? He is saying that Kevin logged in 12 minutes after the attacker logged in to start the attack. Not damning by itself, and almost certainly a coincidence, but still a connection that needs to be followed up, particularly in light of how it all played out. |
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Let me show you the login logs for our hacker guy on his account full of bitcoins, and Kevin: [2011/06/19 05:00:02] Hacker login
[2011/06/19 05:12:10] Kevin login
[2011/06/19 05:15:10] Hacker login
[2011/06/19 05:22:35] Hacker login
[2011/06/19 05:45:39] Hacker login
[2011/06/19 06:08:18] Hacker login Kevin had only one chance that day to place his 0.01 buy order. So either he had a lot of luck, and somehow knew it was the right time to place a 0.01 buy order, or something smells fishy in there. It's not up to me to decide, but I will report this as it has become a public matter. Therefore I choose option 4: Option 4: Mt Gox signals this to the competent authorities + We are safe + We may even have a chance of catching our hacker if Kevin knows him + We can rollback without having to worry - Having to deal with FBI, provide logs and proof I really want to believe that Kevin is telling the truth, and that he is just an innocent bystander in all of this. But under the circumstances, and considering that we are talking about (maybe) millions of dollars, I can understand why you would be suspicious and want it properly investigated. Here's hoping that they catch the guy, and also that Kevin isn't involved. |
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I think they can cover 643 coins out of pocket.
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No.
I don't need standards of evidence to ask a question*, now do I?
*The question is based on what we are currently told about the melt-down.
Why would any real person keep over 250,000 coins in an account unless they were setting up to intentionally crash the market?
How about because they stopped caring about bitcoin many months ago, and are totally unaware that their account is now worth some serious cash? |
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This is really great stuff kjj, thanks so much for saving me the time. On wednesday night I should be able to implement this. Can you explain to me the last code? the crontab -e
the restart script just kills the terminal and restarts it if the cpu load falls a certain amount?
have you found a way to monitor them remotely?
crontab -e is the command to edit the user crontab. You need to run that command, which starts an editor, so you can add that line. Must be done while logged in as user not as root, as in use LXTerminal from the Accessories menu, not Root Terminal. The restart script checks for two possible error conditions. First, if the script named miner1.sh (or miner2.sh, or minerX.sh) is no longer running. Second, if the load on the appropriate GPU is too low, which usually means that the script is hung and no longer asking for work, but still running. If either condition is true, it attempts to kill the script if still running, and then starts it in a way that it pops up on the display and has access to X. For remote monitoring, I'm using some custom mods to cdhowie's flexible mining proxy. My proxy box has a cron script that pulls the database every few minutes, and if any miner hasn't requested work in a certain amount of time, a command is sent to a networked power strip to cut power for a few seconds, rebooting the box regardless of how badly crashed it is. These scripts are still pretty crude, but they work great for me. Hopefully you and others will find them useful as well. I'm planning two improvements, but I probably won't get around to them until late in the week. First, I want to create config files to simplify setup, particularly for people that don't already know how to customize these bash scripts. And once that is done, I want to set it up to download the config files from a webserver so that I can just clone the USB stick to plug into a new box and have automatic provisioning. |
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I am being respectful and trying to keep a civil tone, I would very much appreciate if you did the same.
You are indeed, and I usually don't default to that mode. Don't take it personally. You quote anti-counterfeiting laws, when you should instead have dusted off your copy of Black's and looked into money, currency and current money. Bitcoin is neither a banknote, nor a currency, as so defined, and makes no claims to be either. Black's? Really? You do know that Black's is simply used for basic definitions, right? It is mostly used in law school. I don't even know where my copy is! If I remember my days from law school correctly, he may even have used Bouvier's own outdated definition of currency as "The money which passes, at a fixed value, from hand to hand; money which is authorized by law." Nowadays currency is recognised as a generally accepted exchange of value, this arises from Friedman and Schwartz famous paper, "The Definition of Money: Net Wealth and Neutrality as Criteria Journal of Money", Credit and Banking, Vol. 1, No. 1, Feb., 1969. I would also refer you to this definition in Ellinger, Lomicka and Hooley's "Modern Banking Law", Oxford Univeristy Press, 2002, p.362. The legal definitions of currency keep coming back to "authorized by law", which makes the law you quoted against issuing currency a law against counterfeiting. To be sure, we talk informally on these forums, and toss around the terms "money" and "currency" with wild abandon. Our informal words don't change the reality of the situation, nor their legal status. They can be used legally as proof of intent. Bitcoin calls itself a P2P currency, it fulfils the actions of money, namely, it is value exchanged by parties other than the issuer for goods and services. Bitcoin calls itself nothing. It has no voice, and it has no inscription. Promoters of bitcoin make various claims, but so far I haven't seen anyone make any claims that would get them into trouble with counterfeiting laws. Please observe that if you think bitcoin is illegal because it is "value exchanged by parties other than the issuer for goods and services", then barter is illegal in your world, which is simply not true in any part of this world, so far as I'm aware. Bitcoin is even better, since there is no such thing that anyone can point to, not even an abstract concept, and say "This is a bitcoin". What we are really doing when we "send bitcoins" to others is transferring an interest, another word you have forgotten since law school. Please, could you leave the snarky ad homs? You really want to use the intangible explanation? Really? By that argument, there is no such thing as an EFTPOS because you cannot point to a thing being transferred. There are no funds transfers from bank accounts because no physical bills and coins are being exchanged. And I can assure you that the courts have been dealing with intangible interests for hundreds of years, and have no problem with the idea.
Interest? Legally interest is nothing more than a payment on balances maintained in an account. Can you please explain how the entire system of interest works on Bitcoin? Who holds the balance? Who pays out the interest? How is it calculated? You sound more like a banker than a lawyer, and I don't mean any offense by that. When I say interest, I'm not talking about consideration paid for a debt. I mean that a person can have an interest in something that they do not own, and that this interest can be defended in court. An easement is a typical example. In the bitcoin system, there is no such "a bitcoin". Not even as an intangible good. It is an abstraction of an abstraction. When I say that my wallet has 10 bitcoins in it, I am speaking very informally, and very incorrectly. What I really have is a set of cryptographic keys that I can use to prove that someone has given me control of a number by giving control of a number to someone else. Those control relationships, and the value that I can get by using them, are my interest in the system, and at least in the US, the courts will have no problem hearing a case regarding that interest. |
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kjj, you are freaking me out. We are both typing the same thing at the same time. I posted my post about Blacks in synchro with you, once again.  Ha! I saw that. I'm almost done for the day, and I couldn't resist the temptation to waste a few minutes feeding the trolls. I was showing some of the alleged lawyer's posts to the local circuit judge, and he was howling with laughter. |
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Once again, I reiterate, YOU ARE ASSUMING BITCOINS FIT THE DEFINITION OF A CURRENCY.
They are not necessarily a "currency" legally. I do not believe they are.
You will have to show me that you have a legal definition of currency that is different from what Bitcoin does. It acts like a currency, it advertises itself as a currency, ergo it is a currency. How about the definition in Black's? Currency: Coined money and such bank notes or other paper money as are authorized by law and do in fact circulate from hand to hand as the medium of exchange. Also, I find it humorous that you think that bitcoins, which don't exist even in the abstract, advertise themselves. |
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You stupid
Dumbfuck.
From the FAQ:
"Bitcoins are the unit of currency of the Bitcoin system."
Are you going somewhere with this? Did you miss the part about informal speech using common words not changing the legal reality? |
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By convention in western jurisprudence, all is legal unless specifically illegal. Agreed. There are more than enough laws that declare all currencies not issued by the authorised issuer as illegal. To give an example of the law where I am: "Only the Central Bank will have the exclusive right to issue banknotes and currencies in the country. Neither the state nor any other person or entity, may issue notes, coins or other documents or certificates that can circulate as money." The law then imposes civil and criminal sanctions for breaking the law. The same applies to the creation of new currencies everywhere in the world. There are laws against possession of drugs, so a court will not be interested in hearing a case to remedy a loss of them.
There are no similar laws against bitcoin, so a court would have to hear the case.
Not specifically against Bitcoin, but against all unofficial currencies. I thought lawyers were supposed to do research before running their mouths. You quote anti-counterfeiting laws, when you should instead have dusted off your copy of Black's and looked into money, currency and current money. Bitcoin is neither a banknote, nor a currency, as so defined, and makes no claims to be either. To be sure, we talk informally on these forums, and toss around the terms "money" and "currency" with wild abandon. Our informal words don't change the reality of the situation, nor their legal status. Bitcoin is even better, since there is no such thing that anyone can point to, not even an abstract concept, and say "This is a bitcoin". What we are really doing when we "send bitcoins" to others is transferring an interest, another word you have forgotten since law school. And I can assure you that the courts have been dealing with intangible interests for hundreds of years, and have no problem with the idea. |
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It has been mentioned before in this thread, but if you are using unetbootin to write the ISO to the flash drive, you need to edit the syslinux.cfg file in the root directory and add "persistent" to the first append line. Unetbootin overrules the boot configuration in the ISO and uses its own.
The step by step sequence that I've been using is:
1) plug new flash drive into a linux box (an existing one, or write the linuxcoin ISO to a CD and boot that for this step)
2) find the device name, and unmount it if it automounted.
3) use fdisk to create 2 partitions. Partition 1 is 1GB, type "b" or "c", active. Partition 2 is all remaining space, type 83, not active.
4) use mkfs.ext4 to create a filesystem on partition 2 (probably /dev/sda2 or /dev/sdb2)
5) plug the drive into a windows box
6) go to disk management, format partition 1.
7) use unetbootin to write the ISO
8 ) edit syslinux.cfg
9) remove the flash drive from windows, boot the new box with the drive.
Optional steps if you are doing a lot of boxes:
10) accept the AMD license
11) install ntp
12) copy over my startup and restart scripts (generic versions with CHANGEME as the worker name)
13) shut down, boot from the CD again, and use dd to clone this prepared drive onto other drives
Why do you need to format from windows? Why not use unetbootin from linux also? The ISO was sitting on a SMB share that was easier for me to get to from my workstation, and I find just about everything about Ubuntu to be obnoxious, particularly the GUI, so I try not to spend any more time with it than necessary. So, it was just easier for me to do everything on the Linux command line and in Windows. The format was done in Windows because back in the 90s bootable FAT filesystems made under Linux were unreliable in Windows, and I was using unetbootin from Windows. Presumably mkfs has been fixed, but old habits die hard. My steps worked for me the six times that I did it. I'm sure there are many other ways to get this working, but I can't offer to help with any of them. |
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Criminal law doesn't work like that, vlaue is not the only way to determine criminality. People pay for drugs all the time, they have value, but you cannot go to court to have your busted drug deal enforced. Bitcoins could be illegal, so you could not even argue this in court.
Yes. Bitcoins could be illegal. And if they were illegal, no court would bother hearing your case. But they aren't. Yeah but are they Legal? By what law? You're usually right, please inform us. By convention in western jurisprudence, all is legal unless specifically illegal. There are laws against possession of drugs, so a court will not be interested in hearing a case to remedy a loss of them. There are no similar laws against bitcoin, so a court would have to hear the case. |
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Don't worry. The blackhats have known about password weakness for like 30 years now. |
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Criminal law doesn't work like that, vlaue is not the only way to determine criminality. People pay for drugs all the time, they have value, but you cannot go to court to have your busted drug deal enforced. Bitcoins could be illegal, so you could not even argue this in court.
Yes. Bitcoins could be illegal. And if they were illegal, no court would bother hearing your case. But they aren't. |
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Solving the blocks that way may had been a way to use an eventual surplus on computing power from the bitcoin network.
If you notice the two to the left, they look like at the normal block solving heartbeat.
During the attack you've 2 blocks being generated simultaneously, than 3 (at least, the amount of trades cover it up) and in the end 5.
At the same time it looks like party time in the transactions entering the blockchain. This denotes a co-relationship between demand and supply.
May things happened in that time frame worthing a look at, being obviously the most urgent MtGox's issue.
I salute you. Most people can't pack this many errors into such a small post. |
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