I'm Kevin, here's my side.

[Bit_Happy]

I am astounded at the outpouring of support for MtGox here. Wow. MtGox allowed itself to be compromised, THEY are the ones responsible for settling things financially here. If they werent ready for this possibility, they shouldnt have been in the business.

They were the best option available for a mass of humanity rushing to pay big $$$'s for BTC. When they re-open they will still be the best current option, IMO.

[toasty]

You say you should keep them for the good of the community but if you've got half of the freely traded bitcoins then the market really is gone. Tough luck.

I don't think I actually said that, though.

I said a forced rollback of the whole thing was bad for the community, and without a lot more transparency what the right solution is is very hard to determine.

[Phil21]

Sorry Kevin, but Mt Gox is making this right, it's just not right for your financial gains.

So you feel you have enough information at-hand to reasonably know what happened?  The rollback is a foregone conclusion to me.  It's everything else that matters.  Kevin obviously knows he's not a newly minted millionaire, and has made that clear in multiple posts.  Mtgox rolling back and covering up the extent of their apparent negligence is not "making it right" by my definition.

The problem begins where MtGox's story is fabricated, at least a portion of it which can be independently verified as a fact.  Perhaps this was due to the rush of getting information out ASAP while still uncovering things, etc.  I'd like to believe that vs. them lying directly to our faces?

It is very clear this was not a simple account password breach.  It goes deeper.  I want to know how deep, and I'd have thought the community as a whole would want to know as well.

Ah well, I tried

[ius]

Not going to make an ethical judgment here on the course of action for MtGox, so right to the point:

This transferred 643.27 bitcoins to my personal bitcoin account before hitting that limit.

We were discussing your story in #bitcoin, but weren't able to track down said transfer in the block chain. Could you point it out?

[marcus_of_augustus]

It is wildly obvious that there was no single guy with a cool half million coins in his account.

It wasn't long ago that everyone was gawping at some 425k coins being moved, presumably offline by the MtGox lot. Then there are 50,000 users they have picked up in the last month. (I was about 11,000 and I signed up on June 1st, there are 60,000 odd on the list now!). They offline most of their funds and just keep a float, hence the maximum withdrawal limit.

All the coins that people see trading are all just numbers in a database. The hacker clearly had much more control than is being let on, I would imagine he ran a SQL script of some sort to dump all of the dbCoins into one account and then put in a sell for next to nothing.

MtGox cannot afford to honour all of the coins. That is all of the coins they have, and everyone else who is daft enough to leave their coins on a public exchange run by beginners. If they honour your claim, there is no more MtGox and everyone and their mother will be up in arms, litigating, leering and generally ousting them from the community they have helped to build.

The bottom line is that you are losing the coins no matter how much you complain. You say you should keep them for the good of the community but if you've got half of the freely traded bitcoins then the market really is gone. Tough luck.

This.

It is clear now that MtGox has not been trading bitcoins but a representation of bitcoin, storing the real bitcoin off-line from the trading accounts (the one big centralised 500k account).

More centralisation, more fail. It is like the fiat credit crises freeze all over again, the bitcoins weren't really there and when the hackers showed up there was nothing to go around and fill the gaps, even if they took nothing, just shuffled things around and messed it all up.

Lesson learned, move on, decentralise. Get bitcoins in your hand or you got nothing but promises.

EDIT: By storing the MtGox float in one account then they have become a counterparty to all trades by proxy, i.e. a market maker. Not what is claimed up front.

[bitrebel]

@toasty:
So, you are Kevin, the guy who bought 259684 of stolen BTC for under $3000. And with your essay you are here to complain that MtGox says you can't keep the stolen value but will get your money back? Tell that face to face to person who got robbed.

And btw, how do we know you are not related to the hacker? Maybe you just wanted to launder the stolen BTC that he(or yourself) sold on MtGox.

You don't know very much about this, do you?

[Torminalis]

Fair enough old chap, and you sound perfectly reasonable if not wildly optimistic!

The blunt truth of it though is that there are nowhere near enough T&C's to stop MtGox from saving it's arse. If all those coins are gone, not only will they be bankrupt but an awful lot of other people will be out of pocket.

[MyFarm]

3) The precedent they're setting here cannot be maintained.

Exactly what happened here may never be fully known, but according to Mt Gox an unauthorized user accessed someone's account and placed a sell order. Passwords get guessed/leaked all the time, and any exchange that attempts to undo that in every case will undoubtably fail.

If I'm careless with my password and someone places orders on my behalf in my account without my permission, will Mt Gox revert an hour's worth of trading to fix it? What if I only had 2 bitcoins? Or 20? or 200? There is no way rolling back trades to handle a compromised password in any way that will scale to the size of bitcoin's current economy. Unless Mt Gox is wiling to explicitly say they'll give this same treatment to any user who has their account compromised, it's blatantly unfair to everyone else.

This also opens the door to allowing anyone to request equal treatment if they made some trades they later regret. Log in through a proxy to make it seem like someone from a distant country was using your account, make your trades, then later scream about how your account was compromised and you want a do-over.

This is the key right here.

Make no mistake, if they do a roll back and if my account gets hacked in the future I will be demanding a roll back no matter how many BTC are traded.  And I rather like the proxy idea you stated.  I might just have to go for a super risky trade and demand a rollback if it doesn't work and claim hacking.

[toasty]

Not going to make an ethical judgment here on the course of action for MtGox, so right to the point:

This transferred 643.27 bitcoins to my personal bitcoin account before hitting that limit.

We were discussing your story in #bitcoin, but weren't able to track down said transfer in the block chain. Could you point it out?

http://blockexplorer.com/t/cu8GyUmqj

[Klestin]

If only one question is answered by MtGox, I hope it is whether the 500,000 BTC was really all in one account (the only one compromised).

[ottodv]

Regardless of MtGox responsibility in this matter, I don't think anyone should hold on to stolen goods they bought at 1500 times below the market price.

Wisest seems to me to give those 643 BTC back to MtGox. If you choose not to, your lawyer fees will likely far surpass the value of those bitcoins and you may end up with a criminal record as someone who knowingly kept stolen goods (which most likely is a criminal offense in your jurisdiction).

If someone accidentally transfers a million dollars to your bank account, you'd have to give it back too, even if you moved some of that to another account at an other bank in another country shortly after seeing your statement. I seriously doubt a judge will see your case any differently. If you hide the money a judge can order you held until you reveal the whereabouts.

The fact that you got money (or bitcoins) as a result of someone else's error (or crime) does not make them legally yours. That it's the other party's fault for not securing their passwords properly still does not entitle you to that money.

That said, I am no lawyer but I do remember a case of a woman being held for several months because she had hidden money accidentally wired to her account. She had also claimed it wasn't her fault that she got the money and was thus entitled to keep it. The judge clearly did not agree.

[aral]

What you think and what would happen in a court of law are two entirely different things.  Your opinion on the matter is void.

[MyFarm]

If I'm the OP I file the injunction and subpoena every bit of server info from them because:

1.  It's obvious this account was Mt. Gox, not some users.

2.  How do we know there was a theft?  Maybe someone at Mt. Gox fat fingered the trade or there was a bug in their code.  Do fat fingered trades get reversed?

I think there's a decent chance this was never even theft.  I think someone at Mt. Gox screwed the pooch BIG time.  And if it wasn't theft, then the trade should absolutely NOT be rolled back.  How many others here put in a buy order for 20 bitcoins at 111 instead of 111 bitcoins at 20?  I know I have!  Maybe someone at Mt. Gox did something similar with their account or their was a bug in their automated software that converts BTC from their .65% fee to USD and crashed the market.

As the OP said, the likelihood that an account with 500,000 BTC could be easily brute forced is minute.  We'd all have HUGE passwords.  Something is VERY fishy here.

Kevin, lawyer up.  Make them PROVE this was a hack.

[chuckypalumbo]

Kevin,

Someone hacking another persons account isn't right, and it also shouldn't allow for you to become a millionaire on wrong doing. It's pure greed plain and simple, and it's sad that you would want to "accept" what is basically stolen goods. Congrats....I guess?

[RandyMarsh]

Kevin you're a douchebag, you ruined the whole shower.

[bitbitcoincoin]

Sorry Kevin, but Mt Gox is making this right, it's just not right for your financial gains.

So you feel you have enough information at-hand to reasonably know what happened?  The rollback is a foregone conclusion to me.  It's everything else that matters.  Kevin obviously knows he's not a newly minted millionaire, and has made that clear in multiple posts.  Mtgox rolling back and covering up the extent of their apparent negligence is not "making it right" by my definition.

The problem begins where MtGox's story is fabricated, at least a portion of it which can be independently verified as a fact.  Perhaps this was due to the rush of getting information out ASAP while still uncovering things, etc.  I'd like to believe that vs. them lying directly to our faces?

It is very clear this was not a simple account password breach.  It goes deeper.  I want to know how deep, and I'd have thought the community as a whole would want to know as well.

Ah well, I tried

As with any interaction with any company there is a level of trust needed by both parties.  Many feel that level of trust is forever broken with Mt Gox and will no longer use it as a exchange, that is perfectly fine by me.  Mt Gox could easily go out of business from this fiasco and other exchanges will have to learn from the mistakes made to avoid a similar fate.  That in no way means Mt. Gox has any responsibility to allow transactions made during the duration of the hack and subsequent flash crash, which is unfortunate for people like Kevin here.

[Gandlaf]

Does anyone still remember how MtGox handled the last situation where there was a large amount at stake for MtGox?

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=3712.0

That guy explained himself, was hounded by the community, MtGox barely bothered to respond, made some outlandish claims, froze funds and rapidly moved the whole operation to a different jurisdiction (Japan) after the guy finaly decided to get lawyers involved.

MtGox promised to inform the community! No news yet, and it´s been 6 months!

Really hate quoting myself, but I do believe this is important!

I´ve seen this kind of thing before (see the forum link), Kevin has put himself out there, has posted his side has explained in detail and has been answering questions, MtGox, not so much.

Hell Kevin has even been on http://onlyonetv.com/ , answering questions for about 2 hours. Mark(MagicalTux) not so much, he was supposed to be on but weaseled out, explaining that his English wasn´t good enough(http://onlyonetv.com/?p=203) and sending an employee(no video mind you).

That´s not my idea of transparency.

So how about this as an idea: Let the two of them find a solution to the whole mess on http://onlyonetv.com/ in a live discussion. And if Mark Kerpel´s command of the English language really is all that bad, let him bring a translator(easily covered by about an hour of MtGox fees).
I don´t get why the guy that has shown transparency up to now is villified whilst the one who has been sorely lacking in transparency is being celebrated. (Especially given the track record [see forum link above])

[TiagoTiago]

If i was in position of snatching the booty out of a thieves hand i would, and would hold onto it until i was sure the safe where it was taken from was secured again (or the police instructed me to hand it back to the original owner even though he was likely to loose it again). But i admit the temptation of charging a "finder's fee" to compensate myself for the trouble would be significant, not sure how i would decide on that...

[MyFarm]

Kevin, after what Mt Gox did in the "their side" thread to try and CONNECT YOU with the hacker, I sure as hell hope you file that injunction.

[MagicalTux]

Kevin, after what Mt Gox did in the "their side" thread to try and CONNECT YOU with the hacker, I sure as hell hope you file that injunction.

I sure hope too, will make it easier for us.