Someone cashed out on mtgox - price from $17 to $0.01 in minutes!

[elements]

Furthermore - If someone was intelligent and informed enough to hack into an account with 500k BTC - why would someone sell them if that someone knows he can only get out a 1000 USD?
Anyone with the slightest portion of intelligence would have withdrawn the coins and "laundered" them in smaller prortions to different adresses.

(If someone now answers that you can only withdraw a 1.000 USD worth of bitcoin per day - that is only the case if not registered for bigger transactions with mt gox AND the guy with 500k would have been registered obviously!)

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[zerokwel]

yea when i saw the price start crashing I booted up mtgox tradehill etc to buy buy buy pity I got nothing booo. thought it was just a panic sell at first

[S3052]

So everyone who got cheap bitcoins is basically screwed now!

Lol

Instead they should secure their site already and let it be - I mean what idiot keeps 500.000 BTC in their account at mount gox ? I doubt this was a hack - it obviously was a huge sell-off and everyone who profited from that gets punished now. Thank you!!! (For weeks I had an order buying at 0.01 BTC for a dollar - should a crash happen...now that finally I got a few coins cheap Mt Gox takes it away!)

This is a nightmare for bitcoins as a whole, since it destroys trust.

I would not be surprised to see people litigating the exchange because of this issue and I can understand both sides. Those who lost a potential gain with their low buy orders and those owning BTCs who are happy that prices could go back up. What a mess.

Again, we need SECURE and PROPERLY MANAGED exchanges as number 1 priority.

[imperi]

Furthermore - If someone was intelligent and informed enough to hack into an account with 500k BTC - why would someone sell them if that someone knows he can only get out a 1000 USD?
Anyone with the slightest portion of intelligence would have withdrawn the coins and "laundered" them in smaller prortions to different adresses.

(If someone now answers that you can only withdraw a 1.000 USD worth of bitcoin per day - that is only the case if not registered for bigger transactions with mt gox AND the guy with 500k would have been registered obviously!)

They could sell half of the coins so that the price drops to 0.01, and then withdraw 100,000 other coins.

[Houdini]

I am becoming more and more convinced this was a deliberate attack on the bitcoin currency (by some competitor like PayPal or a hostile government) and not a theft or sellout. Both of those theories (theft and sellout) are ridiculous because it would be so stupid to sell like that and get pocket change in comparison to real BTC value.
And if this was an attack on bitcoin's reputation, it was completely succesfull (even if that's not obvious to you) ! It doesn't matter the value came back up, the point is with all the bad press bitcoin has gotten lately (the first big value fall, then the first big theft, and now a 200 times value fall and rise in minutes !) no one serious (I mean real Wallstreet investors, not teen Satoshi-cultists) is going to invest in this for many years...
Bitcoin is looking more and more fishy and uncertain to the general population and that is very bad for the market...

[elggawf]

You guys clearly haven't seen this:

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=19543.0

It looks legit - my information is in there, though I can't be bothered trying to figure out the salt/hash format and verifying if my password is in there.

The claim that no other account was compromised is most likely bullshit - they just picked the account with the most BTC in it because they knew they'd only have time to get away with it once.

[S3052]

I am becoming more and more convinced this was a deliberate attack on the bitcoin currency (by some competitor like PayPal or a hostile government) and not a theft or sellout. Both of those theories (theft and sellout) are ridiculous because it would be so stupid to sell like that and get pocket change in comparison to real BTC value.
And if this was an attack on bitcoin's reputation, it was completely succesfull (even if that's not obvious to you) ! It doesn't matter the value came back up, the point is with all the bad press bitcoin has gotten lately (the first big value fall, then the first big theft, and now a 200 times value fall and rise in minutes !) no one serious (I mean real Wallstreet investors, not teen Satoshi-cultists) is going to invest in this for many years...
Bitcoin is looking more and more fishy and uncertain to the general population and that is very bad for the market...

Exactly, this nightmare is just starting.


What can people with MtGox accounts do in the next hours before it is reoponed while the exchange rate sinks in the other exchanges (i.e. tradehill is at 10 $). I feel with all people owning bitcoins. This is a disaster.

[S3052]

Mark Karpeles
posted this on Jun-20 04:07
The bitcoin will be back to around 17.5$/BTC after we rollback all trades that have happened after the huge Bitcoin sale that happened on June 20th near 3:00am (JST).

And by the way, MtGox can and should not control the exchange rate. If it is legitimate to rollback the trades (legal guys where are you?), the exchange rate will be determined by the bid and ask orders at the time of the reopen. Noone can predict where this will be.

Those who are affected need to be asked first, whether they want to place again their bid orders where they have had it.

[Houdini]

Actually Tradehill is at ~14 $, Bitcoin Market too, BitMarket.eu hasn't even noticed the drop yet (they're always a bit late).
I must add I've always (well actually in the 5-6 days since I found out about bitcoins) thought that Mt. Gox is a semi-amateurish website and operation and not suited to be the biggest exchange for a market of 100 million dollars... I guess it's just the pains of growing up for the bitcoin... Mt. Gox is like those mediaeval bankars with a bench on the city plaza and bags of gold coins changing hands on the bench and being written down on paper compared to today's ultra-high-tech and secure banks...

P.S.
I say we need more exchanges, MUCH more secure exchanges, and that each big exchange should have an automatic trading halt mechanism in case of a major decrease or increase (like 5x in one day), just like real stock exchanges.
And we should have BTC banks, SECURE servers to create and keep e-wallets on securely for a small fee, so people don't get their money stolen from their hard drive or have to perform all kinds of tricks (encryption, separate BTC  machines, USB memories...) to prevent that.

[StopLossLOL]

[...] you can only withdraw a 1.000 USD worth of bitcoin per day [...]

so if the price was 0.1 usd/btc, the hacker could have withdrawn 10.000 bitcoins? (10000*0.1=1000)

[JTaBitCoinKing]

Psychopathic hacker! Is a Psychopath!

Will the White Hat Hackers save the day?

[StopLossLOL]

best hacking-line would have been:

*taking over controll of mt.gox account with lots of coins
*creating 100 accounts
*creating 100 new bitcoin-adresses
*creating buy-orders for 0.01 usd/btc in all 100 accounts
*making the price crash to 0.01 with the hacked account
*intantly cashing out all 100 accounts to different bitcoin-adresses at a price of <1 usd/btc.

=> so even with the 1000usd per day limit, he would have gotten at least 100.000 bitcoins out of the system. with no rollback possible.