Hi all,
I've been a long time lurker. I have been obsessed with Bitcoin and most recently the whole Bruce Wagner thing.
I was really curious to see if we could find any direct connection of mybitcoin.com to bruce. I decided to check into the transaction history of Bitcoin to see if there were any transactions of half his account: 12,500 BTC (+/- 500 BTC to play it safe; as long as the numbers hadn't changed much from when we learned about them, etc) in the 49% payback window of mybitcoin.com. I'd read that Bruce was reluctant to give up any details of this transaction, so I wanted to see if it actually happened.
I tweaked Gavin's bitcointools to grab data and double checked some stuff with blockexplorer.
Here is what I found:
On 8/8 there is a transaction for 12,598 BTC (
http://blockexplorer.com/tx/6529b1242456358bc0b87fe5b4894be1ea406b1e5047a397be817da6b9e112d9)
On 8/15 there is a transaction for 12,246 BTC (
http://blockexplorer.com/tx/7f3898c96d6d9c3333173468dbac1f2e55032b455090e5fd28bf621d210f4a98)
On 8/16 there is a transaction for 12,901 BTC
(
http://blockexplorer.com/tx/7088196e0d495ef74979a131e8a28859af0d412cf674312530b54fe02bdb9d48)
Bruce was tweeting about the 49% payback beginning 8/8 and mentioned that it seemed to be down for people on 8/15. I think it would be most probable (almost assuradely) that Bruce would have attempted to get his 49% on 8/8, and thus I think the first transaction above could be Bruce's payback.
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I was hoping that I'd find nothing, as I figured that would spell out a very clear picture about Bruce's involvement, but that did not happen. It looks like on the surface there is an "alibi" for Bruce and his mybitcoin.com payback.
I'm thinking though that we can delve deeper. I figured that if we look into this transaction we may be able to confirm that A) it came from mybitcoin.com, and/or B) it went to Bruce.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around some stuff written here
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=31662.0;all and I figured that with the approaches fergalr discusses in that thread and paper we could see how "close" the addresses/links between Bruce and mybitcoin.com are (if this 8/8 transaction can be tied to Bruce). Of course, if it cannot be tied to Bruce or can be shown to not be Bruce (or not likely to be him) it could suggest that he was involved directly with the mybitcoin.com scam.
I encourage anyone/everyone to double check all this. Tell me if I'm being stupid with any assumptions, etc. I'm still piecing this stuff together.