why MtGox (in)solvency cannot be calculated from the blockchain?

[chriwi]

Wouldn't it be interesting to know at first how Mt.Gox dealt with malicious transactions that went in the blockchain?

The 2 possibilities I can think of are:

1. they send the bitcoins a 2nd time because they belive the transaction didnt take place. (bad)

2. they do nothing unless they are asked for the money by the reciever, but keep in their accounting that the money was not spent. (not really a problem as long as they don't use the money they already sent but still belive to have otherwise)

They really lost money only in case 1 or if they sent again after being asked for it in case 2.

Malicious transactions can be spotted in the Blockchain and it should be also possible to find the ones where the same transactin was done a 2nd time after a malicious one.

What about finding all theese cases in the blockchain and adding up the number of bitcoins that were actually sent twice because of malleability. This should give the amount of bitcoins that were sent unitentionally to persons who didnt deserve them and thereby the muximum loss that might have been caused by malleability.

It looks very interesting to me to compare this result with the number of bitcoins that Mt.Gox claims to have lost because of malleability.
 

[1715119974]

1715119974

[1715119974]

1715119974

[zhangweiwu]

It looks very interesting to me to compare this result with the number of bitcoins that Mt.Gox claims to have lost because of malleability.
 

Although not every MtGox addresses are known, we can still more or less calculate the total amount lost to all wallets bugged by transaction malleability (not any wallet except MtGox's has been reported bugged by MT). At least we can calculate the upper-limit (i.e. repeated transaction look-alike MT-affected are counted in). and if the upper limit is less than 770k, it will be a news headline. (of course if that number is more than 770k it doesn't proove leaked 'draft' is honest.) Who is in the mood of doing the math?

[jedisurfer]

there is no way they double sent coins to the tune of  ~740,000 bitcoins.   Once Customer Service  gets a few thousand emails about resending coins they'd sure check to see what is up.  Why would a company allow deposits and not withdrawals in it's waning hours, they knew the ship was sinking and they kept taking more passengers.  It's exactly how Full Tilt, Ultimate Bet, and 50 other online sites did in their last hours.  The thing is these other companies used those deposits and user balances to pay themselves hefty salaries and operational expenses.  740,000 bitcoins is a ridiculous amount of money, if they were shady they'd only need a fraction of that for salaries or operational expenses.  

It's speculation but to me one of the ways someone can lose that much is if they are some how gambling/trading with user balances.  Once he/they got in a hole and tried to gamble/trade himself out of it he couldn't stop.      

[chriwi]

@jedisurfer

I asume that if the loss of Mt. Gox is really caused by  "transaction malleability" then the resending was not doen after e-mails to Mt. Gox support, but the bug in the Mt. Gox system was rather that such resending was triggered automatically whenever an automatic check in the blockchain for a transaction-ID still failed after a certain maximum time.
 

[chriwi]

If it is true that like stated on mtgox.com not only Bitcoins, but also fiat-money was stolen by hackers, taking the possibility that Mt. Gox is not lieing here,

then I start asking my selfe if this is not likely a job done by the same professionals who already finished up Sadam Hussein and Mohamal Gadafi only because they saw them as a thread for the dollar as world currency.
 

[McKinley]

If it is true that like stated on mtgox.com not only Bitcoins, but also fiat-money was stolen by hackers, taking the possibility that Mt. Gox is not lieing here,

then I start asking my selfe if this is not likely a job done by the same professionals who already finished up Sadam Hussein and Mohamal Gadafi only because they saw them as a thread for the dollar as world currency.
 

I'm sure, stolen fiat money can be traced more easily. I just asume you will find it somewhere in MTGOX management's pockets - and they will claim it was their salary.