Nice talking to you there. I also do (mostly) weekly spaces on X, everyone is welcome to join.

It depends on a lot of things, but if this is done properly the main negative impact it would have is for thieves. Of course the question is not to move coins without proper thought, and the main reason I'm trying to bring this into a discussion is to see what everyone thinks about it. It's been 12 years since the start of the bankruptcy and this is probably the last sore point on this whole case. This 1Feex address has been there, always, with ~80kBTC sitting on it that should have been part of the distribution to customers.

What do the majority of Bitcoin holders want? How do you compute the majority? If it's majority in amount, those are likely large companies that have little to no interest into Bitcoin's ideals and just care about making money. If you count as people it might be different, but I doubt a majority would support theft.

These would be going through the Japanese courts and trustee having jurisdiction over the MtGox bankruptcy case. It's not a perfect solution but considering the number of creditors it's probably the best.

As to criminal addresses (scams, etc), most exchanges are already blocking these from being redeemed, and some miners will not accept said txs. This is not yet a bitcoin-whole rule but will likely evolve over time.

I do not know that people will distrust Bitcoin for allowing people to recover a bit of their loss. If anything this could be fairly positive overall.

Even recovering those 80k BTC wouldn't make people whole as over 550k were stolen and laundered in Russia. I'm bringing this up as these have been sitting unmoving for nearly 15 years, clearly stolen.

I'd like to underscore that the "small group of individuals" would be nearly all people involved with Bitcoin in 2014. This is also a very unique case as I do not know any other theft where coins have been clearly tagged and sitting for so long.

So if the threshold for action is "nearly 100% of bitcoin users at the time affected, bitcoins track clear, bitcoins not moving for multiple years" there are no chances for this to happen again.

I should have added this theft is also widely confirmed in community, and as far as I know it is public and shared knowledge that bitcoins on 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF were stolen from MtGox.

I'm not trying to bring this as a law enforcement issue, but as a community discussion. Those bitcoins are obviously stolen, sitting on an address labelled "MtGox Hacker" for some 15 years. This is a unique case where something can be done. I'm not asking to clawing back funds from people who are not involved in crime (that can happen in real life if you buy stolen property, even if you didn't know about it) but a very specific and unique case.

Some people (faketoshi) have tried to get courts to give them those bitcoins, based on forged documentation. I am trying to appeal to the community.

If we have another really clear cut case then why not, but I doubt we'll see future case similarly impacting all of bitcoin users at the time.

We know this address belongs to the hacker thanks to the blockchain. Stolen coins have landed on this address. No intermediary.

Can you point to any unambiguous theft proceeds still on chain on a single easily recovered address?

I beg to differ. Yes I have been found guilty of hiding the massively lacking bitcoins. That is under Japan's legal regime where 99% of charges pressed lead to a guilty verdict. The Bitcoin Foundation didn't need help to go down (and I wasn't involved there anyway).

I deeply regret what went on and trying to do everything I can to make creditors whole. This is one of the things I can do. Will it yield to something? Only way to know is to do it. Hate me all you want.


Recovered BTC would be under supervision of the court and the trustee until distributed to creditors. I would get exactly wero of these.

This case is quite unique for multiple reasons.

The bitcoins haven't moved, can be directly linked to the theft (those do not belong to Satoshi but to the mtgox hack itself). The coins have been tagged, and the hacker clearly knows moving these would trigger news worldwide instantly.

There aren't many events that affected so many Bitcoin users as MtGox (arguably most bitcoin users had an account on MTGox in 2014), where we both know which bitcoins are the stolen bitcoins and have a legal process that would allow distribution of said coins back to creditors.

What would be your strongest argument against? Those bitcoins have been sitting these for 15 years now, everyone knows these are from the MtGox hack, yet some people have tried to use underhanded methods to claim these using courts/etc. Allowing these to be returned to the MtGox customers would make a lot more sense, have a minimum cost and, I believe, would be the right thing to do.

Just trying to open a discussion here. We've seen something similar with ethereum before (with the DAO thing) which caused a fork, but in the end consensus regrouped around the "right thing" which is letting people who were hurt be saved.

I know this is not going to be an easy proposal, but I do believe there is strong arguments toward doing it. There are arguments against too, so I'm hoping to see what everyone thinks and weigh the pro/cons.

I've opened a pull request on Bitcoin Core to discuss a one-time consensus rule that would allow the ~79,956 BTC stolen in the 2011 MtGox hack to be recovered and returned to creditors.

Pull request: bitcoin/bitcoin#34695

Context

For those who weren't around or need a refresher: in June 2011, a compromise of MtGox systems resulted in ~79,956 BTC being sent to 1FeexV6bAHb8ybZjqQMjJrcCrHGW9sb6uF. These coins have not moved in over 15 years. The UTXO is still sitting there, along with thousands of dust outputs people have sent to it over the years.

MtGox is currently in civil rehabilitation under Japanese courts. Trustee Nobuaki Kobayashi has been distributing recovered funds to creditors, but these 79,956 BTC are out of reach -- nobody on the creditor side has the private key, and the attacker has shown no sign of moving them in a decade and a half.

What the proposal does

The patch adds a new script verification flag that, when active, allows outputs paying to the theft address to be spent using a signature from a designated recovery address. It is gated behind an activation height that is currently set to INT_MAX (i.e. it does nothing until the community agrees on a real activation height).

The change is ~50 lines of code. It affects one specific P2PKH address and no other consensus rules.

Why I think this is worth discussing

I know the first reaction for many will be "this violates immutability" or "where does it end." Those are legitimate concerns, and I'm not dismissing them. But I think this case has a combination of factors that make it genuinely unique:

• Unambiguous theft. This isn't a dispute about ownership. Law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions confirmed the hack. There is no question these coins were stolen.
• 15+ years dormant. The coins haven't moved since 2011. The keys may well be lost entirely, making these coins effectively burned. Recovery would return dead coins to productive economic use.
• Existing distribution framework. A Japanese court-supervised rehabilitation process is already actively paying creditors. The legal infrastructure to handle these coins is in place and has been running for years. This isn't a situation where we'd be recovering coins with no clear destination.
• Narrowly scoped. This targets exactly one address. It cannot be extended to other cases without a separate, independent consensus change that would need its own community agreement.
• UTXO cleanup. As a side benefit, the address has accumulated a lot of dust. Sweeping it cleans up the UTXO set for every node operator.

Why now

The MtGox trustee has declined to pursue on-chain recovery because there's no certainty it would be adopted. But the community can't evaluate the idea without a concrete proposal. This creates a deadlock. I'm breaking that deadlock by putting actual code on the table so there's something concrete to discuss rather than hypotheticals.

I'm under no illusion that this would be merged quickly or without extensive debate. That debate is the entire point.

The strongest argument against

I want to be honest about this: the strongest argument against is precedent. If Bitcoin makes an exception once, it becomes harder to refuse the next request, and the next. The line between "unique, justified exception" and "political override of property rules" is subjective and hard to maintain.

I believe this specific case is different enough -- in its documentation, its age, its legal framework, and its scope -- that it can stand on its own without opening floodgates. But I understand if others disagree, and I respect that position.

This is a hard fork

I want to be upfront: this is a hard fork. It makes a previously invalid transaction valid. All nodes would need to upgrade before the activation height. I'm not trying to disguise that fact or sneak it through as something else.

Open questions

Even if the community is open to the idea, there are design questions:

• What activation mechanism? Fixed height, BIP9 miner signaling, or something else?
• Should there be a time-limited recovery window (e.g. 1 year) after which the rule expires?

I'm here to discuss all of this. Fire away.

-- Mark Karpeles

Just for info, automatic update of these data is scheduled to start this week or next week

Actually, MtGox is more than just Japan.

Our head office is located in Tokyo (in Shibuya), and we have branches all around the world. For example for European deposits, we have a bank account in Poland held by MtGox Poland.

We comply as much as possible with local regulations in countries where we are present, and always look for opportunities to make our activity more compliant. In Japan we discussed with the FSA ( http://www.fsa.go.jp/ ) and were told that our activity is fine as it is now. We are also working with authorities in Europe and US to ensure our activity is in line with local regulations.

Hi,

The v0 getTrades is cached ~120 seconds, even with ?since=. The v1/v2 api is cached 15 seconds only if ?since= is passed.

However if you're looking for realtime activity, you should be using the realtime feeds.

As many of you may have noticed, price of Bitcoin increased.

The main impact we had here at MtGox before the price increased is an increase in number of accounts, which means more new accounts to verify everyday, and more support requests.

We are currently doubling the support staff at MtGox and should have new staff hired somewhere in April (hopefully), but I though it was worth sharing some numbers.



The satisfaction rate is usually with 90%~95%. See below graph.



I cannot give graphs for AML requests right now, but I can tell you that the rate of new requests increased in the same way, with around 1000 new requests on Friday. Three new staff will be starting Monday on the AML.

No change on the socketio url, however we are testing a new system that'll be much better to handle the load. Tests are currently being done.

Thank you for your message.

We are currently experiencing delays on EUR transfers of up to two weeks for larger transfers because of the daily limits imposed by our bank in Europe. We are currently negotiating larger limits with this bank and hope to be able to finally be back to regular delays by April.

In the meantime, you can track the status of your transfer from your wallet history. Status "confirmed" or "todo" means that the transfer is pending on our side. Status "pending" means the transfer has been submitted to the bank, and status "processed" means that we saw your transfer going out of our bank account.

Please contact info@mtgox.com should you have any question.

In the last 24 hours, data.mtgox.com has served 143513 requests for a total of 25.9 GB bandwidth.

That's just a fraction of what's being served on mtgox.com, but that helps already quite a lot.


If that's for uses such as development, then it's fine. Some websites actually hit our ticker backend once for every page load on their side.



None, but your suggestions are welcome on info@mtgox.com. I've read what you posted here and will use it. I'm not sure about user-defined order ids, as it's going to be using a lot of storage on our side, and all data is already gzipped if supported by the user agent. We'll be checking your other suggestions.