Topic: Calling Gavin Andresen and others, possibility of restoring MtGox's coins. - page 2. (Read 7888 times)

Ok, this makes perfect sense to me. Thanks.
So then I don't understand how to make a computation feasible.
If I am calculating right, when we use the whole network hashrate for one year we would have only 2^80.

PS: Just to recreate the lost coins with a hard fork would be like a reinventing of the current banking system. So I hope there will be never any significant majority for that.. (but I think this is hiiiighly unlikely)

A great series of posts there Biomech, well said.

In my opinion people need to take responsibility for their own actions. You deposited with Gox? You lose when they go under.

Anytime I send funds to an exchange, I understand that these are not dollars and are not backed or protected by anything or anyone.

It is a trust arrangement between me and the exchange, and we both serve to benefit from this relationship. But if I lose my coins, thats on me.

It called being a grown up, and not acting like a baby. I feel bad for those who lost on Gox, but its insane to argue they should have their coins restored because of their bad choices.

I made (what now look like) good choices, and didnt put any coins on Gox. If people who lost on Gox had their coins "reissued" that would radically devalue all existing coins and I would probably leave Bitcoin.

I'm gonna run with this, speaking for myself rather than the OP. I think that investors should be more sophisticated. I am not good at exchange games, therefore I play them very cautiously with a goal to learning. And I EXPECT to lose, thus I do not lose that which I cannot afford. I don't INTEND to lose, but I am a novice and I know it and act accordingly.

I think the moral hazard inherent in the funny money that has been foisted upon us since the early 20th century has made most of us complacent and unsophisticated in a manner that would perplex our ancestors to no end. I guarantee that when money was still golden, people were MUCH more circumspect with whom they trusted. And those so trusted earned it. Those who didn't quite often ended up on the wrong end of a rope or a gun. Hard consequence? Yes. Effective? Yes. It was and remains a good model. The fact that bitcoin functions on that same model is a STRENGTH of the concept, not a weakness. There is little moral hazard involved in the circulation of bitcoin, as it IS scarce, it IS irreversable, and it DOES require the individual actor to have a brain. I think this makes it superior to most other currencies. I don't think it superior to gold, but it does have some advantages even there. Mainly easy portability.

If you look at it from a market point of view, this is a good thing in the long run. It's a wake up call for the complacent, a loss of malinvestment, and a good chance for all bitcoiners to clean their own house. Exchanges are necessary, but they are now going to be under far more scrutiny FROM US than they were previously. Those who prove themselves will do well for us and for themselves. Those who try to cheat will have a much harder time of it, and the incompetent will either shape up or fail.

Bitcoin is not harmed by this event. Mtgox is slain and a lot of individuals are harmed. Bitcoin is strengthened, and the harm done to the poor bastards who lost their coin is not permanent. They made the money in the first place, and if they are competent they will overcome the setback. Doesn't make what Mtgox did right, but it does set a perspective.

Don't harm the blockchain to bail out a bad actor. It killed the dollar, and it will kill bitcoin.

Or c) Holding people accountable for their actions, and requiring a high level of thought, diligence, and TRANSPARENCY from those we choose to be custodians of our treasure. Prior to being owned by governments (or the reverse, if we're to be honest) banks were beholden to their customers FIRST. Those who failed in that ceased to exist.

Those of you seeing this as a failure of a free market system need to educate yourselves on how the "invisible hand" actually works. This is a failure of a sub par company, which is a SUCCESS for the free market. A bad actor has been removed. Not bailed out. Not being "too big to fail".

If their intent was good, they were too incompetent to be in the business they were in. If they were fraudulent, then they deserve to be caught, fleeced as much as possible, hung out to dry, and consigned to the dustbin of history as a fine example of how not to run a business. Free markets are self correcting, and as in the case of most things in life, Stupidity on any actor's part is often painful and frequently fatal. The lesson to be learned from that is not to be stupid.

Perhaps I'm just inherently paranoid, but I have never kept coins online since my beginning with bitcoin. They are stored in my wallet, on my computer, a couple CD's, some flash drives, etc. I hold the keys, and my password is ridiculously random and highly encrypted.

I have used online wallets as a temporary measure, such as exchanging them for fiat or 1 day portability, but never more than 24 hours and never my whole wad. I use banks in the fiat world because I have little choice, but in Bitcoin, what's the point?

This seemed obvious to me even before I looked into Mtgox. What I saw there, two years ago, was a company that was either no good with money or deliberately fraudulent. People tend to forgive the former, but frankly I have less contempt for the fraudulent! Being stupid at your PRIMARY business is just inexcusable. In either case, they deserved to fail. Their customers did not deserve to be bankrupted along with them, though they should have exercised better diligence given Gox's history.

Edit. Former for latter. Oops.

Believers in Bitcoin were not burnt.

Believers in MtGox were burnt.  The warnings were obvious to me 2 years ago.  By 6 months ago even a gadfly like the Winkelevii knew to get out of the way.

MPOE-PR said it best over a year ago.  MtGox must die for Bitcoin to move forward.

Many people believed in bitcoin and got badly burnt. If you are suggesting that only sophisticated investors should use bitcoin, so be it.

Anyways, regulation can be enforced only by governments and in ways that they see fit. If regulation comes into the bitcoin world, I expect it to be intrusive and impose rules on the way bitcoin works. NB When I refer to the bitcoin model I don't mean just the intellectual and technical marvels of the bitcoin protocol, but to the way bitcoin plays out in the practice of people's lives, which IMO is what matters.

or

c) Better software

All this talk about regulation is a smokescreen for convincing the community to surrender to the vampire squid. Everybody pushing this line of shit can fuck off.

Many people have withdrawn their money since last June. The red flag was there for months. People staying there were either playing with fire, lazy, or simply ignorant.

Although that might be a good idea to regulate bitcoin exchange, that is irrelevant to the bitcoin as a currency or protocol. You don't need an exchange to spend or receive bitcoin.

I agree. However it's a fact that an inordinately large number of people chose to entrust their bitcoins to an unreliable third party such as Mt.Gox. The resulting disaster and those that may follow along the same lines can be tackled either

a) by pointing out , not without reason, that this is a non-issue, since in the bitcoin world it's every man for himself. That's fine , but it may scare off the naive adopter, i.e. the vast majority of people, compromising bitcoin's success.

or

b)  by introducing regulation for exchanges, i.e. turning them into banks, transforming the current bitcoin model into something quite different.

Bitcoin works perfectly without a trusted third party.  People chose to ignore that bitcoin does not need a trusted third party, and put their trust in a untrustworthy third party - MtGox. 

It has been said many, many times, but if you do not have your private keys, you do not own bitcoin. At best you have a ledger entry on someone's books saying that they owe you X BTC.  It is the difference between owning gold or owning GLD; or holding cash in your hand or holding an IOU for cash from someone.  This is not a bitcoin protocol problem, but a problem with an exchanges interface with bitcoin which they eff'd up royally.

Bitcoin does work without the need for a trusted third party.   That being said you can't by technology prohibit people from using a third party.  Satoshi never outlined a system which would prohibit voluntary association.  Sadly many people opts out of the trusted third party model by using MtGox.  Not just using them as a temporary exchange service (and yes even in a model which has no trusted third party there is a level of trust needed between consumer and merchant/service provider), but using them as a long term storage of coins.  In essence using them as a bank without insurance or oversight.   

MtGox is dead.  Bitcoin still functions.  I made transactions all week long and none of them failed or were delayed because of MtGox.  Bitcoin is a revolutionary technology and for many concepts like


until now have seemed like quaint phrases.  Many people will never see the risk until after the catastrophic event.   It has now happened.  Hopefully people (collectively) will learn from this and use Bitcoin as Satoshi intended.  Keep control of your own wealth and don't hand that responsibility over to an untrusted third party.

Bitcoin works fine without a trusted third party.

Bitcoin users who refrained from trusting any third parties lost exactly zero bitcoins.

Bitcoin promises to let your "be your own bank". If you decide to be your own daytrader then you're on your own.

Haha. Very funny.

"With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party. What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party."

Bitcoin is supposed to work without the need for a trusted third party. If that were true, we wouldn't be here discussing MK's evil deeds.

In such case one can also rob Satoshi's coins. Yes, you will get your bitcoins back, but they will be totally worthless.

If the current fiat currency model allows you to destroy money by burning banknotes, then there's something wrong in the current fiat currency model. 

I'm sorry about your loss, but the only owners of those BTC are the ones who presently hold them. There is not a shred of evidence that those coins are "lost", meaning those private keys are destroyed by MtGox. I know this sounds harsh, but any attempt to try to return those coins to previous owners by some technical method would totally destroy Bitcoin. It's the exact opposite of everything Bitcoin stands for. There are legal paths that affected people can turn to, trying to use any other means would bring the end of Bitcoin. It's not fair (as life often isn't), but those coins are someone else's now.

Speaking of legal means, it's unclear to me that it's so hard to find people who allegedly stole them through malleability. There are server logs with IP addresses, there are ton of personal data including email accounts, all those data can be accessed with court orders in almost any country of the world. I don't believe those criminals were that good they didn't leave a single piece of evidence behind them. That's your biggest hope to return those coins IMHO. I refuse to believe that all of them were stolen, someone calculated that in order to steal 750.000 BTC from june 2011 till now you have to steal them at a rate of 1000 BTC a day. There's almost 0 chance fraud of that size can possibly go unnoticed.

See this post on ways for tracking who has the coins.
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/gox-tracing-the-money-494761

That subject is an easy one: Whomever cracks them, gets them. It couldnt be any other way, unless we start talking about "tainted coins" again.