Since it is the start of a new year, I thought it would be a good time to remember some exemplary behaviour by members of the Bitcointalk community throughout the years. The below examples show how some of our members acted when they received money that didn't belong to them. It shows how they performed in situations where they could have taken advantage of someone else's mistakes.
The list is not based on my personal ranking of best to worse, I just posted the examples as I came across them.
1.In April 2014, the user
johoe discovered a bug that allowed to expose private keys for specific addresses. He informed the community and blockchain.info about his findings and saved many users from losing money
You can get more info on this particular case here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=581411.0He made a list of addresses
here and
here that got exposed and asked the members who owned the coins on those addresses to prove their ownership so he could send them back.
Hello,
there were a large bunch of new broken addresses today (several 100s in one day). I took the liberty of saving some funds before they got swiped by others. If you can convince me that they belong to you (signing a message with the address is obviously not enough; the private key is already known), I will send the funds back.
Look into the file
http://johoe.mooo.com/bitcoin/broken.txt, to see whether your address was broken.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=581411.msg9774894#msg9774894johoe returned the 255 bitcoins he swept to blockchain.info. Their users were affected by the bug, and he instructed them to contact the platform for refunds.
The money has been returned to blockchain.info. Please write to blockchain support to claim refund.
![](https://ip.bitcointalk.org/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftalkimg.com%2Fimages%2F2023%2F11%2F12%2FzaUU9.jpeg&t=665&c=9WM5X3bQQ1A_mQ)
Source:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=581411.msg9791998#msg9791998In total, johoe posted that he swept over
870 bitcoins to his own wallet to save the funds from being stolen by someone else who discovered the same vulnerability.
I wanted to do a little after-math of how much money was moved by whom. It is hard to get exact numbers. Often I have no way to know whether a transaction is legitimate or if someone is stealing money from weak addresses. I think every item on the following list is correct but there may be more.
870.7 BTC saved by me (they went through 15tXHJCjehqCEL6zRCkGwvuDY6YzZV5sKP)
105.9 BTC stolen by 1M77fUCzQrmY8jHRRgpzDVPAK5eQ31bwxZ
53.0 BTC saved by Blockchain.info
36.2 BTC stolen by various 1xy and 1aa addresses.
3.7 BTC saved by bithernet (1PGfLgFtRHgdgvPNvmHMjtsWwF4fyG1jvh), not yet returned
0.24 + 0.084 + 0.016 BTC stolen by 1824bso2XgKTm7XThA75A2gdMpt3jSxW5M, 15hM4CMs7JZ3JjQHmvGhS4NKSsqhKMsQXu, and 1MKSWH9pShsLdV54cRLDQ9JKarsjXK4ms5
That's about 1070 BTC total.
Source:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=581411.msg9888800#msg9888800johoe deserves special recognition for his actions.
2.In December 2012, the user
TheButterZone, received almost
520 bitcoins in a few different transactions to one of his addresses by mistake. He made a thread on Bitcointalk to try and find who sent him the money. He even thought someone was trying to set him up for a crime. Even a collision was mentioned as a reason the bitcoins were accidentally sent to him.
TheButterZone moved some of his own bitcoins that he kept at the same address. The 520 accidentally received bitcoins were transferred to a paper wallet for added protection. In his post, he asks the sender(s) to prove ownership of the coins by signing a message, after which he will send them back to the original owner.
The whole story is available on the link below.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133122.0“…the 519.70399999 has been moved to the paper wallet
http://blockchain.info/address/1D58NtxrZF4iUnGAFojnqNpPuGi9rrcyVf . I am operating under the conclusion (even if mistaken) that 1TBZjmXho6mdGhoESaMV2svtqJXYtWfEp had a collision and somebody/some computer didn't realize (or care) that it was already in use. SO, if you also have the private key for 1TBZjmXho6mdGhoESaMV2svtqJXYtWfEp, sign with it and I will verify it matches mine, then send your BTC to the new address of your choosing.”
Source:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=133122.0I am not sure how this saga concluded, but his intention to inform the community and give back what doesn’t belong to him deserves every praise.
3.In June 2010,
Gavin Andreasen announced his bitcoin faucet on Bitcointalk. He was giving away 5 bitcoins per user to spread the word and give new users a chance to test out bitcoin.
It didn’t take long for someone to find a way to abuse the system. Luckily, it was
wobber who had no intentions of keeping the claimed coins and gave them back. He only wanted to test if it could be abused.
gavinandersen
I've been able to drawn 50 BTC in minutes using Tor. Please add some address filter too, so the same address can't be used twice. I'll also provide a Tor blacklist if you'd like.
PS: I've paid back those BTCs.
It's out job to disarm thieves so this currency won't be subjected to the same atrocities as in real world.
This currency shall not be used for one to be rich and in control and others poor and under control.
Source:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183.msg1533#msg1533He suggested that one address shouldn’t be able to claim coins more than once. Gavin took note of his proposal and changed the configuration so that an address can only use the faucet once.
I am going to add a one-donation-per-bitcoin address rule to make it a teeny-tiny bit harder to cheat.
Source:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183.msg1541#msg1541The amounts wobber claimed from the faucet, might not have been a lot at the time, but his actions reminded me of simpler times when people were decent. That’s why I think he deserves mention in this thread.
4.The next case doesn’t involve a user from Bitcointalk. It involves the companies Bitmain and BitGo. Due to a bug in BitGo’s recovery tool, a user ended up paying over
85 bitcoins in transaction fees for a 16 BTC transaction he sent in April 2015. You can view the transaction id
here.The user who was affected contacted BitGo and Bitmain and explained what happened. The transaction got mined by AntPool.
This is BitGo’s reply on the incident that led to these enormous fees:
We (BitGo) have investigated this issue and determined it to be a bug introduced over a year ago in our fork of bitcoinjs-lib. The exact line of the cause is here:
https://github.com/BitGo/bitcoinjs-lib/blob/744b0f76803b8fa233ee3b221364b42bdbf9b7f1/src/util.js#L142We had since fixed this bug in April 22, 2014 (a month later) here:
https://github.com/BitGo/bitcoinjs-lib/commit/fbc7377dbfb3da0fd911f2740c18cfcd41becc1b. However, we missed updating the reference to this fix in the legacy recovery tool.
The root cause of the problem occurred during the output value serialization step when the redeem transaction was constructed. During the process of converting the number into bytes for use in the transaction, bitwise operators were used in this old version of the code, which converted the output value (in satoshis) to a 32 bit int, causing an integer overflow and truncating the output of 10227087437 satoshis (102.27 btc) to 1637152845 satoshis (16.37 btc). Kudos to the other members of the public who discovered this as well.
We would like to thank rstn for his patience and we are in private communication with him to ensure he achieves full restitution of funds.
SourceAfter they realised what happened, the mining pool returned the entire sum to the original owner.
Hats off to Bitmain, AntPool, and BitGo for acting professionally. OP’s confirmation that he received a full refund and his comments can be seen on reddit
here.
5.The last case of exemplary community behaviour comes from
BitcoinFX in 2010. This is connected to Gavin’s faucet that I talked about in example #3. When BitcoinFX saw Gavin’s request for someone to refill the faucet, BitcoinFX made a donation of
500 bitcoins.
Here is that
post and
the hash of the transaction.
500 BTC Donation incoming to the Faucet !
~ Only original Bitcoin users will ever understand the true economic value of Pizzas and Haircuts. Bitcoin for ALL
Source:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=183.msg7536#msg7536
That’s all for today. I am sure there are many more examples where members did the right thing, but it’s hard to find. Feel free to share similar examples that you know of.
Happy New Year!