I disagree. Your statement is similar to saying, "Polls tell us nothing because everyone who participates could be lying and there's no way to verify their answers on an individual basis."

I agree that the list is not perfectly accurate, but I do think it's a decent indicator of the truth. When large amounts of people willingly volunteer information about themselves (especially if they think there's potential for personal gain) I'd estimate the margin of error to be closer to 0% than 100%.

A better title might be, "The most tip-worthy users on the bitcoin forum". And even that would be inaccurate, because it assumes that everyone who puts an address in their signature has not re-used the address for other transactions. Kinda interesting to see which forum users are having the most success with their tip jars, though!

Seems like this thread is a better fit for the Politics & Society forum. Perhaps I'm missing something. Does anyone have a good reason for why this should be in the Economics forum?

There is a forum for buying and selling services. I think this thread would be more appropriate there than in the general discussion thread.

What about orders that were in place before that certain timestamp? That's the whole point of this thread.

Yes. The order book will fill up during the hour before trading resumes, but will the order book be empty at 03:00 GMT?

OK, sure. Influencing Mt Gox is not the point of this thread. 

As of this posting, there are six instances of "order" on the page you linked. Here is the first one from Mark:

Unfortunately, this does not answer the question, "Will limit orders that existed before the massive sell-off be restored or cancelled?"

The other 5 instances of the word "order" come in the comments section from users who seem to be just as unclear about the answer to the question. TraderTimm, thanks for providing the link, but I don't see any information on that page that clearly spells out what will happen to the order book when Mt Gox re-opens before trading resumes.

At best, I can infer that the order book will be restored by this statement:
In order for the bitcoin to return the exchanged rate of ~17.5, he would have to restore the bid and ask orders (or at least the ones near that price). At least, that's my interpretation.

You seem really confident that a decision has been made and clearly communicated. I wish I was as confident!

Good advice, GeniuSxBoY. Except for maybe this last part:

I think we already have a lot of people who have used the internet to learn about life. We need more people to learn about life from turning off the computer and going outside once in awhile! 

I'm (slightly) kidding, Internet. You know I love you!

I asked this question in another thread. Unfortunately I received two contradicting responses that referenced the same source! The source was the The Bitcoin Show interview with Mt Gox. Skip to minute 38:00 where Mt Gox is asked if the order book would be cleared out. I've listened a few times, but Mark's accent is difficult for me to process. It sounds like he says:

• Yes, your orders will still be there (if they are close(?) to Bitcoin -- not sure what that means), and
• you will have an option to clear your orders when your account reclamation is approved

Edit: Here's my attempt at transcribing the dialogue:

OOTV: When you reopen, will the order book be empty? Will all the orders be cancelled?
Adam (repeating the question for Mark): If you had an open order before the attack will you still have an open order?
Mark: Yeah, if you had an open order you will still have an open order if its still close enough to Bitcoin. Unless when you claim you will have an option to cancel all the open orders, too.

It sounds like Mark is saying that limit orders close to the last price of Bitcoin (17.51) will be restored -- which would explain how the price would be restored. But how close is close? Is my $12 buy order close enough?

Thanks for elaborating! I didn't watch the Bitcoin Show, so I missed that piece of info.

Have you ever played Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time? I have been imagining the Rollback as "rewinding" time to a previous state. Meaning that all the trades get undone and all the limit orders that were in place get restored just like they were at that specific moment in time. I had a buy order around $12, so I would be happy with that getting restored.

I understand why they would clear the order book, though. It's just really gonna suck trying to put in buy orders between 3:00 GMT and 4:00 GMT tomorrow when everyone else is trying to do the same thing!

Can you confirm this with a link? I don't remember reading anything in MagicalTux's updates about whether or not limit orders would be restored or wiped out.

The moment you assume a system can't be compromised is the moment you lose. Every system has weaknesses whether you know it or not. Anyone who needs to protect valuable information should have a healthy sense of paranoia. You can never assume any one system is perfect, so don't put all your eggs in one basket. Research different methods of keeping your bitcoins, spread your risk around, and never, ever trust your entire balance of bitcoins to a single point of failure.

The ridicule and/or hatred of thousands of jerks on the internet!

I also think that it is unlikely that one user had 500,000 BTC in one Mt Gox account. However, if it was true, I don't think that user would necessarily come forward. Think about allinvain who claims he lost 25,000 BTC to a hacker. Some sympathize with him as a victim, but a lot of the internet see him as a laughing stock for not taking proper security measures.

I think a lot of people would come forward if they lost 500,000 BTC, but I think that there are a lot more than Buddhist monks who might decide to keep their mouths shut out of embarrassment.

You argue that Mt Gox has a motive to cover up his mistakes to save face. Couldn't the same be true for the alleged user who put 500,000 BTC into one Mt Gox account?

The faucet will be abused, but it won't be just abused. Scammers will manage to get their hands on BTC via the faucet, but it will also continue putting BTC into the hands of new users. I think the faucet is a great first step into the bitcoin economy and I'm happy to hear that it will be getting some more funding.

Or anyone who's fed up with Mt Gox could simply take their business elsewhere. We don't need to scream for a bloody revolution every week. Mt Gox messed up and customers got burned. If enough customers leave, Mt Gox will either die out, or improve itself to win customers back. No need to incite a mob.

I think you're misusing the phrase "security by obscurity". Security by obscurity means that the technical details of your system are guarded closely from potential attackers. As long as you can keep the outside world from understanding how your system works, they will be unable to exploit flaws in your system. This was a large part of Sony's strategy to keep homebrewers from getting root on the PS3 (which ultimately failed).

The phrase "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" applies to linux because bugs (and security flaws) are not hidden, they are openly shared so that they can be recognized and fixed. Linux is the complete opposite of "security by obscurity"!

I agree! I was also unaware of the 432077.76654321 BTC transaction. Kinda strange that if you read the digits backwards you get a '12345667' sequence. Could that just be a fluke?

mrb: I'm curious about this:
Emphasis yours. Can you elaborate on why you think georgeclooney is the attacker? Is that based solely on the fact that he posted some of the hashes before they were publicly leaked?

I think this is the post I was talking about. Unfortunately, it's not directly from MagicalTux:


There also seems to be a mention of iceberg orders coming to Mt Gox on This Week in Bitcoin (look under 23 May) -- which is really just a reference to the bitcoinmoney blog:


So two indirect sources, but nothing straight from MagicalTux regarding iceberg orders coming to Mt Gox. Seems like hanging out on IRC is the best way to get info on upcoming Mt Gox developments!  

Glad I could help! I find the search function on simple machines forums to be clunky and ineffective. Whenever someone mentions a discussion thread I don't know about, I think there's like a 5% chance I'll find the information they're talking about if they don't provide a link.

Fortunately, I had made a post in that thread, so it was really easy for me to trace back through my history and find it.

Here's one of them, it has a poll and everything. Specifically, I'd recommend reading nanotube's post regarding iceberg style orders. The poll option to keep the dark pool but replace dark + normal orders with iceberg orders received the most votes. Of course, Mt Gox is not a democracy, but MagicalTux was obviously interested in what people thought about dark pools. I remember reading that MagicalTux was planning to implement iceberg style orders, but I can't remember in which thread(s) I might have read that.

Also, if you're going to start a new discussion about this, please don't make up your own terminology. Currently there are three types of orders on Mt Gox:

• Normal
• Dark
• Dark + Normal