AGD Charlie Manson, how many time are you gonna lay in your extremely pithy "nuff said" into this thread? Between your "nuff saids" and Phinnaeus' Bob Marley Caribbean rastaman quotes, it's a sociological mess-- like The Kwa!
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Article of Nov. 19th, 2018:
...Mt. Gox lost about
740,000 bitcoins (6% of all bitcoin in existence at the time), valued at the equivalent of €460 million at the time and over $3 billion at October 2017 prices.
... Rather bizarrely the name Mt Gox stood for “Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange”.
... it would appear that it was stolen via a copied wallet.dat file, either by hacking
or perhaps through an insider.
Subsequent investigations have shown that the massive hack of Mt. Gox had begun as early as September 2011. As a result, Mt. Gox was operating while technically insolvent for almost two years and had practically lost all of its bitcoins by mid-2013. Additional evidence has suggested that Mt. Gox was already missing up to 80,000 bitcoins from its exchange even before Mark Karpelés purchased the exchange in 2011.
Since its collapse, a number of Mt. Gox employees have spoken about how Mt. Gox was operating, with a picture being painted of a disorganized and discordant organization, with poor security procedures,
serious issues relating to the source code of the website......In addition, the US Department of Homeland Security was investigating claims that a subsidiary of Mt. Gox operating in the US was not licensed and was therefore operating as an unregistered money transmitter.
https://blockonomi.com/mt-gox-hack/============================
Article from Nov. 12th, 2018:
Apparently, no kinds of controls were used at the company,
meaning that bugs and errors could be easily introduced by new work. Moreover, the sole authority for approving changes was Karpelés himself, meaning critical security fixes could be put on hold for weeks at a time until he had a spare moment to look at the code himself.
Mark Karpelés was a busy man and it seems that he had a nagging attention problem. Perhaps he was unable to handle the pressures of a management role. Or perhaps he was just unwilling to do so.
Mr Karpelés was also well known for squandering his time – and the company’s money – on useless vanity projects.
...He treated everything as a technical problem, solvable by throwing enough software and hardware at it
(not that he was particularly good at the technical problems either).
... The duration between 2013 and early 2014, to be precise, culminating with the infamous ‘hack’....
Unlike the popular perception, the bitcoins weren’t stolen in one fell swoop. The hack was subtle and sneaky, gradually draining away the exchange’s coffers....
The entire reserve of Mt Gox had been emptied by mid 2013.
That is eight months before the fact was made public knowledge.... The Willy Bot was responsible in a great part for the Bitcoin bubble of 2013-14. Karpelés had designed the program to systematically buy batches of Bitcoin in short intervals. To hide its operations, the bot spread its operations across a variety of accounts.
It dipped into the company’s coffers to purchase a whopping 250,000 Bitcoin. This unprecedented buying spree pushed the prices to new highs, taking the crypto beyond the triple digit territory for the first time. This sparked a renewed interest in Bitcoin, and by extension, it elevated awareness of Mt Gox, which at that time was the premier Bitcoin exchange.
The Willy bot was long suspected by trading veterans on the platform. Its existence – and affiliation with the exchange itself – was all but confirmed on 7th January, 2014. On that day, the Gox trading API was suspended for a short window of close to 90 minutes.
No one throughout the world was able to execute trades during the period – except for our very own Willy bot.The program continued to buy increments of Bitcoin,
faithfully sticking to its algorithm even through the downtime.
An Engineered Bubble
This incident proved Mt Gox’s guilt in the scheme, and
gave investigators tell-tale clues to what was really going on. One of these investigators was WizSec, a private blockchain firm consisting of the one-man-army of Kim Nilsson.
...
The company claimed to have found some vulnerabilities in the Bitcoin protocol itself, stating that it was pausing withdrawals “
to obtain a clear technical view”https://totalcrypto.io/mt-gox/