But forget about "my fix", just tell me please why anyone would use a currency when the current price is totally controlled by a thief?
Well that is an unproven assumption. MtGox has provided no clarity. We have no idea how many coins were stolen. MtGox has never explicitly articulated how many coins were stolen, by how many people and over how long of a time period. As for "controlling" the exchange rate. So they dump it, ok now they don't have the coins anymore and the exchange rate will recover. Bitcoin rewards the "smart" thing to do. If an attacker had 800K BTC they could sell it off slowly and be rich for the rest of their lives, or they could dump it all, very likely never be able to cash it out due to AML/KYC type requirements, and cause a short term drop in the exchange rate. Are you always afraid of every shadow? There is no evidence that a single attacker has all the coins, and if they do there is no evidence they would be downright idoitic with them. I mean do you really believe that Bitcoin can be completely annihilated by a single entity acquiring 800,000 BTC and selling them? If so why are you here? You do know that at current exchange rates buying that many coins would be trivial for a well financed bad actor. It would be a tiny fraction of the cost of a 51% attack and your claim is that short of a network killing fork there is nothing that can stop them from destroying Bitcoin by just clicking the sell button. Some of us believe Bitcoin will do just fine, and the biggest risk is implementing some dubious "fixes" based on little more than "we have to do something". In my first post I gave the source in which I based my thesis (Mt.Gox lawyer explicitly said that someone stole 850k from them). I thought this was not necessary but I just want to make it clear that I don't know if what Mt.Gox is saying is true, in fact Mt.Gox PR have a long history of bs so I don't trust them. I only created an hypothesis based on what they claim. The problem is that 850k is more than the whole demand of bitcoins in all the exchanges combined. Actually I think it's almost three times the current demand. We don't know the intentions of this bad actor, the only thing we know (in our universe of discourse...) is the amount stolen. The bad actor could manipulate the market for years, for example one could mix those coins and sell otc just small fractions (best case scenario), or send everything to one single address, write some scary message (like "in one hour I will drop 100k in BitStamp") and sign it, get profit from shorts, or talk with some external entity who hates Bitcoin and make some real deals with them. If I were a big bad bank I would try to find the hacker right now, create an alt-coin, destroy bitcoin's economy with occasional drops, let people speculate about future drops. I already said that I am not 100% serious with this thread because three weeks is too much. Then why make the thread to begin with? Don't bother I won't be able to see it. Life it too short. you should try to relax asap, otherwise your life is gonna be shorter.... |
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Let's say that now 40% of all coins are owned by one single hacker, would you fork?
NO. Absolutely not. What would happen if I legitimately bought £10,000 worth of coins 2500 blocks ago? According to you it would be okay for the transaction to be rolled back. Now I don't have my coins or the money! I said that Mt.Gox should pay for that. IIRC last year the Foundation rewarded those affected by the hard-fork. |
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It isn't a "fear" (your proposal was DOA before you wrote it) but you are talking about wilfully double spending wealth (let me use simpler words STEALING) from existing users in order to "undo" a mistake which has nothing to do with Bitcoin itself and everything to do with the actions of a private party and the people who mistakenly trusted them.
That is your solution? The solution is a thousand times worse than the problem and the problem has nothing to do with Bitcoin and everything to do with a private party that people voluntarily chose to use.
Saying the network has been forked before that is a strawman. Orphans are short lived and are known in advance to miners as a cost of mining. Patches to the network normally do not produce long running forks and have been used to CORRECT FLAWS IN THE NETWORK NOT COMPENSATE THE LOSS OF A NEGLIGENT OR CORRUPT PRIVATE PARTY (i.e. NOT A BAILOUT). The one notable exception was the berkeley db bug which caused a long run split in the network. Miners did decide to switch to the shorter fork however it is important to note that the abandoned fork was only 78 blocks long which means the coins were immature and couldn't be spent. No user could have received coins from miners and then had those coins erased by the miners as a result. Making the fork before block 100 was a big factor in the decision to move when quickly. If the major fork had gone longer than 100 blocks it is very likely the other (older) fork would have been abandoned instead.
You are talking about STEALING FUNDS from innocent third parties by undoing 3000+ blocks of transaction data. "Fixing" the losses from MtGox, by cluster fucking the entire network. Merchants, users, and exchanges who did nothing wrong and had no connection to MtGox would suddenly see coins vanish and you think that will be ok? You think that will make people trust Bitcoin? You think that anyone would use a currency where a user can do everything right, wait 3,000 confirmations and still have wealth erased by a third party through no fault of their own? Are you insane? Would you use that system? Would anyone who is informed of the risks?
chill out dude, you looks mad.. I already said that I am not 100% serious with this thread because three weeks is too much. But forget about "my fix", just tell me please why anyone would use a currency when the current price is totally controlled by a thief? |
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No fork and no Bitcoin Code Authority please !
Bitcoin is Bitcoin not Gox-coin !
Maybe you say that because you think that 850,000btc is not so relevant. What would you say if BitStamp, BTC-E, Coinbase, and Huobi get hacked or "gaged"? Let's say that now 40% of all coins are owned by one single hacker, would you fork? |
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All this talk of this destroying the Bitcoin market are absurd.
This isn't the first huge bitcoin hack and it probably won't be the last.
Nobody is going to try and dump that many coins in one go. They would drain them out slowly to ensure maximum long term profit.
If I were the hacker I would probably sit on them for a long time and probably only start selling OTC to stay under the exchanges radar for a while. Probably reach out to people who expressed an interest of buying a large chunk OTC under market price. It would take a while to get even a million out but given time that could be accelerated as the trading volume picks up and the number of exchanges increases.
Nobody with a large holding of bitcoin is stupid enough to crash the bitcoin market. It's that simple.
If what Mt.Gox claims is true this is biggest hack ever. The only thing comparable with the SR sized coins (150k). Do you think a person who have such economic power wouldn't use that to manipulate the market for years?? think again... |
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You are all missing that we ALREADY had hard-forks, do you know that right? And also if you think that a fork is an alt-coin you are ignorant: as I already said every day we have several small forks (ie orphan blocks). I understand your fear DeathAndTaxes, but the reality is that Bitcoin is already fucked: it's not distributed anymore, it's just decentralized. We have big mining pools with huge percentage of hashing power, we have few exchanges saving hundred of thousands of bitcoins, we have web services with virtual wallets getting hacked every month... But Bitcoin could still be used as a currency if we stop being so archaic. Sometimes you need to fork  core devs + mining pools already did that. I have a question for all you: would you use a pre-mined cryptocurrency? because right now we have practically the same shit. |
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Do we have any idea where 800,000 BTC are located on the blockchain?
We know at least one transaction from June 2011 (with 42424.24 BTC or something like that).
My thesis is that Mt.Gox lose 850,000btc three weeks ago. No. Gox lost those years ago. They've been in deficit since. How do you know that? I based my thesis on what they said in their last press conference. |
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What you are talking about is an altcoin. Please move to the altcoin forum
No, I am not talking about modifying the protocol, nor maintaining a parallel blockchain. Please read my posts again. I would very happily buy from that person at a near-zero price. I don't see a problem with that situation.
Furthermore, why would he sell off at low prices? He will not do that.
I think you don't understand the situation: the bad actor have a huge power over our economy, if only 1/3 of that amount is sold in the open market every exchange will go to near 0, and who will buy when there is another +500k awaiting? Actually, the bad actor don't even need to use those coins, but only buy shorts and sign terror messages in Twitter like "In one hour I will dump 50k in BitStamp". Even more, the bad actor could have financial incentives outside Bitcoin's economy. Mods: this topic goes much further than the latest events with Mt.Gox. Bitcoin's economy is based on centralized services that could get stolen from too. |
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Do we have any idea where 800,000 BTC are located on the blockchain?
We know at least one transaction from June 2011 (with 42424.24 BTC or something like that).
My thesis is that Mt.Gox lose 850,000btc three weeks ago. |
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I believe you are describing a different situation: my suggestion is to recreate the whole blockchain except for the thief tx's, but this could happen only if most of us agree that it would be really bad for our economy to have a single bad actor owning a huge fraction of the current market cap. but please go on  |
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So if a "cracker" really has 850K bitcoins (highly unlikely really), the question is "WHAT WILL HE SPEND IT ON"?
Manipulate the hell out of the market: just think about it, you don't even need to touch those coins, just buy shorts and sign some terror message!  |
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Ok, I'm not being a 100% serious with this thread, but only because 3 weeks may be too much for doing it... anyways: Explain why you think miners have this capability. Miners have the capability of creating new blocks that's how Bitcoin works. Actually something like what I described happens all time in a much smaller scale with orphan blocks, but it doesn't happen because someone is trying to double-spend but because mining is a competition. Thereby invalidating around BTC75,000 in block rewards. If you want to repay that, be my guest. It could be much more actually because rewards from the old chain will be lost, so they would want to be paid for the old chain and for the new one. We should track those new coins to know the impact, fortunately afaik the last BTC25,000 (from the last 1000 blocks) are not expendable yet. Mt.Gox, with some help, could pay for this. They could actually use part of their 850k and give bonds to their users, and most of them would accept (right now people have 0). Actually, if what they claim is true, I think that from those 850k they own 150k and the rest are from their cold storage, which is 75k * 2 but they should pay for those who may have bought the first 50,000 new coins from the old chain. Finally I have a question for you Foxpup. This 7% could be actually 20% of all the expendable bitcoins. Explain to me how people will trust in a currency that could go to 0 any time because there is a thief owning much more than the current demand in all the exchanges together? this person could destroy the economy not one time, but three times. I think the current situation is critical. If you believes that this thief is not going to use those coins to manipulate the market you are being naive. |
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Mt.Gox claims that someone gained illegal access to their systems and stole 850,000btc. They filed for bankruptcy protection. Three weeks ago Mt.Gox closed their withdrawals and reported that someone was using transaction malleability to steal their bitcoins. A couple of days before the public statement we had a new peak on days destroyed:  If, and only if, what Mt.Gox is claiming is true and those bitcoins were stolen three weeks ago, then we can assume that right now there is a single entity (could be one single person or a group) owning ~7% of all the btcs mined until now, and since many old wallets are lost forever this percentage could be much significant in relation to the current market cap. Which means that there is a new single entity with a lot of power over Bitcoin's economy. Please check out the depth chart of the biggest exchanges to understand how bad is the current situation: if this entity drop all those coins in the open market the price would go close to 0, literally. And even when an event like that could last maybe just a couple of hours, I believe that most people would lose all their confidence and Bitcoin could die as a currency. Actually, the 850k could be divided in 3 parts and just use the first part to send the price to single digits, and keep the rest to make everyone scare. You could even write and sign some message to terrorize the community. I know that all this was already discussed, but now the thing is real... Is there anything we can do? iff Mt.Gox still have their private keys then yes: Bitcoin is a consensus network and we can fork the blockchain whenever is necessary. We need Bitcoin to be useful as a currency, and sometimes we will need to take extreme measures. Specifically, what we can do is pay miners to double-spend the illegitimate transaction and recreate the last ~3000 blocks. There may be people affected by doing this (ie people who received coins from the thief), but if the amount is not something huge then Mt.Gox should be able to pay for their loses. The only thing we need is consensus, we must analyze what is worse: a fork or a shady entity owning too many bitcoins. tl;dr: to fork or not to fork, that is the question |
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now one person with no moral values could destroy the economy at any moment.
That's assuming a lot. For instance, I don't have morals applying to the harm of animals, but when people hurt plants I tell them to stop. Maybe this person just has no morals applying to the money in exchanges, but would see a moral problem with tanking an economy. I disagree, assuming that the thief is looking for more money is not "assuming a lot": he could mix those coins, sell a fraction just to be a new fiat millionaire, do shorts then drop, talk with some evil banks that wants to destroy bitcoin, etc. If MtGox was actually robbed as they claim then now we have one single actor that have the power to destroy the economy anytime. |
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The funniest thing about all this is that iff Mark still have the private keys for his stolen coins (ie the official explanation is true) since he owns a lot of btcs (at least 150k?) he could try to make a deal with the biggest mining pools / miners and hard-fork the blockchain removing the thief's transaction and making a new one to some address he owns. It would require a lot of mining power and consensus in the community, but it's possible (interesting poll results!) |
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hah well, unemployed, in foreign country, and today I understand that a lose almost $10000 dollars.. now drinking a heineken while reading tons of crazy theories about how mtgox could lose all those btcs.
damn x)
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Hoverer, the cracker still suffer from the same market mechanisms as your standard whale. If he floods the market with 850 k he will in effect kill the golden goose, making all his coins worth zero. Unless he wants to destroy bitcoin what would be the point of that?
Be creative: there is no enough demand in the world for 850,000btc, you wouldn't drop it all in the open market obviously (nor otc). But you could talk with JPMorgan or some other entity who hates Bitcoin and tell them that you would drop it all for X million. And also, you also get some powerful contacts for the rest of your life. |
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Satoshi would never try to destroy Bitcoin, nor "criminals" from the onionland, but a cracker?... The person who stole 850k don't give a shit about Bitcoin, this person don't have ideals, this person only cares about money. back to the "cold storage" thing, I am not sure if this is real but: gmaxwell: wumpus: yea, I understand they had timed automatic reissues...  this was also something I didn't know prior to monday before last and is one of the other reasons my "they couldn't have lost much!" position softened to "I have no freeking clue." gmaxwell: alpha125: from mtgox staff and magicaltux ... I had assumed previously that any reissues were manual via customer support but apparently it was just timed. http://pastebin.com/DaSph9uT |
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The thread title sounds a little racist   sorry I am not sure if you are trolling, why "racist"? (english is not my first language, obviously) Sorry! More of a joke than a troll... In 'murica, a cracker is a derogatory name for a white person. Carry on! oh i see, no worries |
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The thread title sounds a little racist sorry I am not sure if you are trolling, why "racist"? (english is not my first language, obviously) |
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