A skinnable wallet one way gullible suckers will be enticed into downloading bitcoin-stealing malware.

That's hilarious on several levels.

Mt Gox is unable or unwilling to act proactively since 2011.

They don't fix issues before they turn into real problems - they only take action after those issues have escalated into a catastrophe. Then, to add insult to injury, they barely talk to their customers at all and what little information they do release is incomplete and typically raises more questions than answers.

What do we know about Mt Gox's wallet problems?

1. It doesn't know the difference between newly-minted coins which can not be spent for 100 blocks and old coins which can be immediately withdrawn, so sometimes is credits customers for deposits which can not actually be withdrawn and it sometimes also attempts to include unmatured inputs into outgoing transactions.

2. It has a habit of producing invalid signatures, which it did not correct last year after the network started rejecting transactions with invalid signatures.

3. 1 and 2 combined to create a situation where a certain percentage of all withdrawals would end up "stuck" and never confirm. Instead of fixing the two root causes of this situation, they instead created a permanent workaround in the form of reissuing withdrawals. Maybe this was intended to be temporary, but it turned into just a normal part of doing business.

4. Their method for reissuing stuck transactions was sloppy in that the new did not invalidate the old one therefore it was theoretically possible for both transactions to be included in a block (customer gets paid twice).

5. Their wallet did not continually reconcile the blockchain against their internal accounting. If one of the inputs they believed was unspent got consumed by a transaction that was included in a block other than a transaction they were expecting, their wallet would not notice this. Presumably this happened because it only checked the blockchain for what it was expecting to see.

6. Because of the previous 5 mistakes, transaction malleability made it possible for malicious customers to trick Mt Gox's internal accounting system and pay them twice (or more).

So naturally they blame the Bitcoin protocol.

Almost.

He obviously knows the value of good because he's trying to convince you that he's good. He must know what good is, because otherwise he could even attempt to convince you. That means he also knows that he is not good.

You're upset because he is a bad person who knows the different between good and evil, and is using his knowledge to deceive you instead of changing his behavior.

Don't you have some Nigerian princes to help or something?

1. Trolls exist on IRC.
2. Never trust your BTC to a business davout is involved with.

Your proposed solution creates the exact problem you claim to want to solve.

Is it possible to turn a bicycle in to a hair dryer? Maybe, but afterwards you won't be able to use it as a bicycle any more.

You might think you're asking for a simple feature, but what you're really asking for is an entirely different system with opposite properties from what Bitcoin has now in nearly every way.

Bitcoin doesn't work like that. Recipients have nothing to do whatsoever with whether transactions are processed or not.

Shouldn't this thread be in Service Discussion?

Because of the way transactions are constructed, the data that is signed is a subset of the data that is hashed. It's possible to change the transaction in ways that do not invalidate the signatures, but do change the hash.

For some types of transactions this is a useful and necessary property. For other types of transactions (most of what happens on the blockchain today), it is a nuisance that wallet software must be careful to account for.

If you're running an exchange whose wallet does not handle mutability correctly, and also makes several other errors at the same time, you can end up losing a lot of bitcoins.

Sounds like a job for a payment processor.

...and nobody starts a traditional Bitcoin business in the US ever again.

That's another way of saying that only the blockchain is canonical.

Bitcoin would be stronger for it in the long term.

The more permanent fix is to identify transactions by inputs and outputs, and (correctly) treat the relationship between transactions and txids as one-to-many.

That way a client could do the right thing if multiple txids appear for the same transactions: display the duplicates seen on the network at least until the transaction is unconfirmed, and optionally discard the ones that don't make it into the blockchain.

More fundamentally, all wallets need to assume a one-to-many relationship between txids and transactions and update their UIs accordingly.

I remember seeing somebody post yesterday saying that malleability should be the default instead of something that's fixed, maybe search for that post and ask the poster about it?

It was either in this forum, or on Reddit, or on the bitcoin-development list.

Cheap bitcoins. Same as always.