Topic: Was Autumn Radtke murdered due to something she knew about Brock Pierce, et al.? (Read 28825 times)

not buying, you or some news article isn't going to convince me that Autumn Radtke was unwittingly on the verge of being approached to make the greatest deal of all time. If you can buy off the Singaporean justice system, you can easily get Autumn Radtke arrested or imprisoned on some trumped up charge.

The only possible reason I can think of to fake-suicide someone is to keep their credible mouth shut. Maybe there's some other possibility, I'm all ears.

You may be underestimating the significance of the deal that was being discussed.

http://www.inquisitr.com/1160604/did-autumn-radtke-bitcoin-businesswoman-really-commit-suicide/

that does not sound even faintly plausible. There are far more ways to stymie a simple business deal than something as difficult to pull off as a murder faked as a suicide.

I think she was about to land a very large, significant deal on her exchange.  Someone did not want her to get that deal (she may not have been aware of it yet).

Here's a blast from the past.

She was building a company that instantly exchanged any currency for any currency, including digital.

Her design threatened the world's currency owners, because it gave people an escape from being locked into a single currency.  For example, it would allow a person in Singapore to live their life using the currency of their choice (gold, bitcoin, yen, usd, british pound, canadian dollar, etc.) without ever touching or holding a Singapore dollar, and having total freedom to transact with anyone and everyone.

That's why she was killed.

Two guys at MIT looked at the relevant logs and concluded that most attempts to exploit the "malelability bug" came only after Mark blamed it for the loss; and at most a couple hundred BTC could have been lost that way:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/526161/the-troubling-holes-in-mtgoxs-account-of-how-it-lost-600-million-in-bitcoins/


Like the malelability bug, the gag order may be only an excuse.  But he surely must have been advised by his lawyers to keep his mouth firmly shut.  That is standard legal advice for anyone in his situation.

If other people are involved, with or without his cumplicity, perhaps he is silent for fear of physical consequences.  Someone who steals such a large sum will have the motivation and the means to murder anyone who threatens his loot and freedom.  (Note, for example, that Ross Ulbricht is charged with trying to hire a hitman to take out someone who was blackmailing him; whether it is true or not, it is quite plausible.)

It is hard to understand how he could have, all alone, made the coins vanish so completely that the crowd detectives still cannot locate them in the blockchain, even with the help of the leaked database.  


As far as I know, there was no note or any other evidence clearly indicating a suicide, nor any specific cause.  Someone who was close to her implied that she was somewhat "down" on the previous day, but nothing specific.  Brock Pierce later called her friends for an evening of remembrance or something in Los Angeles.  I have not read anything coming from her family about possible reasons for her death.

I find it hard to believe that she would kill herself for advising someone to put money into MtGOX.  She was hardly alone in making that mistake, and every investment advice has at least 50% chance of being disastrous .  Although she was involved with virtual currencies in general, AFAIK she was not really a "bitcoin evangelist" that would push reluctant investors into bitcoin.  

Well, if you believe the published analysis, then this was decidedly NOT possible. I forget the number, but the total of transactions that might have been conceivably exposed to the transaction malleability exploit -- system wide, not just Gox's -- amounted to no more than a fraction of a percent of Gox's lost coins.

I suppose it's still a possibility, but I wouldn't consider it likely. It is possible that a transaction malleability bug with Gox was used very slowly with small amounts and massive numbers of accounts over time in order to avoid drawing any attention until it was too late. This could have been done by any one of maybe a few hundred Bitcoiners over the course of 2011-2013. However, the technical skill to do this wouldn't have been possessed by many people, let alone the hardware, so that's why I say maybe "a few hundred". It might have even required collusion with a major mining pool to pull off efficiently, assuming Gox knew what they were doing and making sure their transactions had wide network exposure.

Unfortunately, because of a likely gag order, Mark is unable to confirm or deny any of this, even though the gag order probably has more to do with money-laundering than a Gox heist itself.

I think it's more likely that mismanagement of the site and the government seizure of Gox coin and funds had more to do with its collapse. Either that or someone stole some private keys and Mark's not giving out the details intentionally. Suffice to say, someone got screwed over somewhere, and for whatever reason, it's not being talked about.

Autumn's death might have just been a result of her having put a client's funds too heavily into Gox. Something like one of these. Was there a note or anything? I guess I never heard if there was a note. While it might seem "fun" to speculate on this stuff, keep in mind that she did have family and friends that aren't likely to want to talk about it, let alone hear people debate about it.

Well, at this point he is just one of the 7 billion suspects -- all equally likely, IMHO. 

Right.... So again, what does this have to do with Yantis? Are we agreed that this speculation about Yantis helping Pearce to steal all the Gox coins makes exactly zero sense?

That 2010 bug was a trivial coding mistake.  If one issued a transaction request with two very large outputs, the sum would overflow the number of bits allocated for the total, yielding a negative value; and the software then would not realize that the total outputs exceeded (by a huge margin) the amount available in the address.   That bug was quickly fixed at the time, but required a rewind of the blockchain to remove the absurd transaction.

The bug that Mark blamed for the MtGOX loss was more complicated. The protocol itself was not broken, but allowed certain cosmetic changes to a trasaction request that would not invalidate its signature.  By manipulating those cosmetic details, the hacker could cause the MtGOX software to think that a client's withdrawal request did not go through, when in fact it had.  The software would then credit back the coins to the internal client account, and try to withdraw again.  This was possible only because the MtGOX software was carelessly coded and did not ignore changes in those those cosmetic details.

I do not think that this explanation makes sense.  Perhaps some hacker tried this attack, Mark noticed it, and  thought of blaming the entire loss on it, so that people would not look for the real cause.  Or perhaps he noticed the weak spot in the code, but, instead of fixing, it he decided to steal all the coins and then blame it on this bug.  Or someone else noticed the weak spot, and convinced or forced Mark to do that.

Touche'. Now what does this have to do with any exploit that Yantis might conceivably have used on MtGox?

Yes, once in August 2010:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/strange-block-74638-822

she killed herself because richard branson rebuffed her

?!?!?!? In what way was Yantis' exploit 'similar to the MtGox fiasco'?


Has there ever been a demonstrated hack that allowed the hacker to 'create currency' or 'duplicate an item', where the currency or item was BTC?

I don't know about Yantis's involvement, but the claim that the MtGOX hacker exploited the "transaction malelability bug" was dismissed by a group of MIT researchers:  


I do not find that likely, since the "transaction malelability" attack seems too specific to the bitcoin protocol.  In particular, it depends on the "best effort" propagation of the transaction requests, that allows the "malleated" requests to get ahead of the true ones; and on the faulty logic allegedly used by MtGOX to detect failed requests.  Computer games depend on centralized servers and more deterministic connections.  

However, it is possible that Yantis's exploit involved some synchronization bug too.

As for the death of Autumn Radtke, It is hard to dismiss the idea that it was somehow connected to the collapse of MtGOX. The coincidence of dates and business area, her close connection to key players in the digital currency world, the location near Japan, the apparent lack of motive for suicide, the absence of witnesses...

Whoever stole those half a billion dollars would surely murder anyone who threatened to expose the crime, if he had occasion and means to do so.

You are not the first to notice Yantis is probably involved. 

Mt Gox targeted by a hacker for "years" and somehow they never noticed until 97% of their reserves were stolen. Sure!



other bitcoin exchanges begin to get hacked in late feb. notice the timing, the hacker waited to attack the other ones because he knew they would notice very quickly and barely be able to get any money. so he waited to hack them until he had already drained Mt Gox. also notice that all of the other exchanges noticed the attack extremely quickly but for some odd reason. Mt Gox never noticed it for multiple years until 97% of their bitcoins were stolen.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/15/5414610/bitstamp-restores-service-after-targeted-attack%20

now here is the description of the hacker's technique:




seems to me that Yantis' technique for hacking currency in video games is eerily similar to the technique used by the bitcoin hacker. Yantis and Brock are or were partners. connections with mt gox, connections with autumn radke.... maybe autumn had evidence of who the hacker was.

So a it goes a little something like this:

 Brock Pierce and Alan Debboneville and Mark Rector and Shackley all join the same guild on some stupid online game.

All of them go into business together - IGE.com (video game currency exchange i believe)

competing with Jonathan Yantis (he was #1 in market, they were #2)

After some battles, they merge the 2 companies.

Brock buys Yantis out. Forces Debboneville out. Yantis gets brought back in by Brock. Debboneville sues.

in the lawsuit, Debboneville claims Yantis was brought back for this reason: