Topic: Peter R Rizun's theory on the collapse of MtGox and its effect on the price of bitcoin - page 4. (Read 77190 times)

If Willy buy bitcoin why mtgox only 2,000 BTC on feb?

Chapeau, Peter!

I am just going to add on to the speculation a bit here. There has been a confirmed leak of audio from January with Mark and a bank of theirs in Japan. This bank was going to shut them down. Without a bank mt gox would have to stop operations and there would be withdrawals in mass. The shit would hit the fan if they were operating under fractional reserve. Is it just a coincidence then that shortly after mark finds out his bank is shutting him down that they lose several hundred thousand bitcoins due to "malleability" ?  I don't think so. Mark is using the malleability as a scapegoat. I think he was operating under fractional reserve and I also think he tucked away many bitcoins for himself since his exchange was going down anyway.

Great article, now it's so clear and I begin to get everything what's happnening . Makes me think more about an effect on the price of btc

If I were the thief, I would try to transfer the money out very quickly, as I'd like to finish it before Mark discovered. Therefore, there must be a few very big transactions if you were correct.

There's no smoking gun, but there's enough output volume to conceal ~1,000,000 BTC.  Here's a graph of bitcoin transfers for June 2011 constructed from data I just pulled from blockchain.info.  Note that I'm not sure re time zones, so look at the 18, 19, and 20th when thinking about what happened at the time of the hack.  Also note this is a log scale so that both curves are readable.  



Remember that total output volume is 100% accurate, but blockchain.info's estimated transaction volume depends on an algorithm that attempts to identify change and may thus be unreliable.  

This explanation is simple plausible and practical. really great.

I like to say, never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity. This is one case.

If this theory is correct, there must be some significant transactions around that 2011 hack. Could you identify it on the blockchain?

Replied.  Not really a big deal, though, so don't worry too much about changing anything.  Just the fact that the name "Willy" stuck and spread through the community was enough to make my night!

this has been an awesome thread, thank you

Very interesting.  You wouldn't happen to have an IRC log or a link handy to a thread discussing this, would you?

Mark was in #bitcoin-dev at the time of the heist asking the bitcoin devs to roll back the blockchain, so that lines up with this theory.

Opet, I sent you a PM to clarify and will edit my article to give you priority for "Willy" once we clear up the dates. 

On another note, here's a thread I created on 25 January warning of the impending doom at MtGox: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/broken-btc-withdrawals-on-gox-2230-est-28-jan-1654-broken-tx-431117

The discovery of the bot actually happened in December, yes.  I had briefly described it during a live broadcast as a guest on Bonavest's trading show.  It was also during a later broadcast that I took suggestions for a name.  One of the other guests listed "Willy" as an option, so I later chose that one as the best of the bunch.  From that point on, the name stuck. (It's kinda cool that it spread to everyone, LOL)

Check out the reddit thread I linked and you'll also see that I'm the one who captured and shared the screenshots the night the trading API went down.  That was when I decided that it was highly likely that Willy was owned and operated by Gox itself.  (A fact that I also shared on another live Bonavest trading show, as well as other places like tradingview.com)

Interestingly enough, I confronted neotufur (sp?) in the #mtgox channel on IRC about the bot a few weeks later, and he (or she?) adamantly denied the fact that the bot belonged to Gox.  His explanation for how the bot could trade when nobody else could was something to the effect of: "if you have enough money, you can buy a direct privileged connection to our servers, so that's probably how the bot kept going when nobody else can trade."  He then called me crazy for believing it belonged to Gox and almost banned me from the channel!  (I'll try to dig up the IRC log for ya... it was amusing as hell!)

Whatever the case, I meant it when I said that it's no big deal.  I really do like how you summarized the role that Willy might have had in this mess, and it's definitely plausible!

Edit:  Here's some of my screenshots from when the trading API went down on January 7, 2013, but Willy was still making trades for the next 90 minutes while it was down for everyone else: http://imgur.com/Ub46sWE
and another: http://imgur.com/wyW1g4p