Gox's "lost" bitcoins

[vints998]

These 850K lost bitcoins, have they been stolen or do they no longer exist?
Or is it a mixture of both?

[cozytrade]

These 850K lost bitcoins, have they been stolen or do they no longer exist?
Or is it a mixture of both?

or missing private key

[thelema93]

or lying bastard?...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeuCuM9CkBc

[quone17]

I don't see how they could "no longer exist."  Or do you  mean they are somewhere that no one can access?

[vints998]

By "no longer exist", I mean the private keys have been lost and coins cannot be identified.

[tempestb]

Imagine you are a cashier and you have a drawer with ten $100 bills.

A customer comes in and says, "Here's $100 can I exchange that for your $100"   

You look at his bill, it looks the same as your bill.  So you give him $100 and put his bill on the bottom of your pile of $100.

This happens all day until all of your original $100 bills are gone, and have been replaced with the identical $100 bills.


You leave work with the handful of $100 bills, and you go to the bank.  You try to deposit the bills, but the bank says, "Sorry, these aren't real."


That's what Mt Gox has, basically...  A stack of worthless bitcoins that were already spent.

[shadyz]

Imagine you are a cashier and you have a drawer with ten $100 bills.

A customer comes in and says, "Here's $100 can I exchange that for your $100"   

You look at his bill, it looks the same as your bill.  So you give him $100 and put his bill on the bottom of your pile of $100.

This happens all day until all of your original $100 bills are gone, and have been replaced with the identical $100 bills.


You leave work with the handful of $100 bills, and you go to the bank.  You try to deposit the bills, but the bank says, "Sorry, these aren't real."


That's what Mt Gox has, basically...  A stack of worthless bitcoins that were already spent.

So they never checked if they had the correct private keys!?

[vayvanne]

or lying bastard?...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeuCuM9CkBc

This is it. Basing on unregulated nature of BTC he is trying to screw his customers. Just like Ukyo did with his weexchange. I guess this is a complex attack than simply a theft because of a large amount of sums. Karpeles is not an idiot who would go to that high a risk for himself without a cover. What cover is it we may see bit later.

[Bitnicity]

there is no fucking sense that you lost 800k btc without noticing it, just like JP Morgan lost 1.9 tri dollar out of their 2 tri dollar  asset without noticing, no fucking brain in the Universe will believe this theory. Mark took all the coins, period.

[leopard2]

MK claims he was the only one to have access to the cold storage; so all this does not make sense yet; there is no way he would manually access all the cold storage himself and never double-checking the withdrawals

there is a missing piece

where did his cold storage go?

[dynodog]

are they able to identify the addresses where the stolen bitcoin went?

[zvs]

there is no fucking sense that you lost 800k btc without noticing it, just like JP Morgan lost 1.9 tri dollar out of their 2 tri dollar  asset without noticing, no fucking brain in the Universe will believe this theory. Mark took all the coins, period.

[smoothie]

This entire debacle should teach those watching that COUNTER-PARTY risk is a much bigger issue than people consider it when sending funds or BTC to an exchange or another 3rd party site.

Once again history has repeated itself even after Bitcoinica, Bitfloor, PirateAt40, etc etc etc

[tempestb]

So they never checked if they had the correct private keys!?

From what I read, someone would send a coin and then change the transaction ID so it looked as though it didn't go through.  They'd contact Gox, and Gox would look and not find the transaction ID in the blockchain.  So they would send new coins.  Meanwhile, the coin they thought they didn't spend (But really did) went to the bottom of the coin pile.  

If we assume that whoever was doing this was moving large numbers of coins, it's possible Gox ran out of good coins.

Certainly they have some coins left that are good though.  Probably they cashed those out when they realized the majority of their money is gone.

I agree he probably had Cold Storage, but was his cold storage filled with bogus coins?  

Sounds like we could all speculate on this but until anyone performs a full investigation we won't ever know the truth.

[billotronic]

there is no fucking sense that you lost 800k btc without noticing it, just like JP Morgan lost 1.9 tri dollar out of their 2 tri dollar  asset without noticing, no fucking brain in the Universe will believe this theory. Mark took all the coins, period.

lol +100!

[Buffer Overflow]

there is no fucking sense that you lost 800k btc without noticing it, just like JP Morgan lost 1.9 tri dollar out of their 2 tri dollar  asset without noticing, no fucking brain in the Universe will believe this theory. Mark took all the coins, period.

My theory is they were stolen years ago. Gox has been running on deficit every since.

We'll all find out the truth in time, that's for sure.

[hvezdasmrti]

Bring mir Karpelein!, Karpelein!, Karpelein!