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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be funny if malleability has confused MtGox about its own hot->cold->hot wallet transactions, and it really has way more coins than it knows?

Then, when MtGox finally has someone with half a clue patch things & rescan, 700K BTC reappear, and they post on their homepage, "Nevvvvvermind – it was all a bad dream."

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Interesting hypothesis. It reminds me of my childhood:

When I was a teenager, like many teenagers, I liked to drink. Unfortunately for me, my father disapproved of teenagers drinking; perhaps once every week or two he would count all of his beer bottles to ensure that I was not sneaking any. There were gaps in his accounting, but I never knew exactly when he would account for them.

What was I to do? I devised a simple scheme:

1) Steal a bottle of beer.

2) Drink i^W^W no no, hide it. Hide it in the back of the fridge, or in the pantry.

3) Wait two weeks. [If during step 3 the absence of the beer was discovered, goto step 3a. Otherwise goto step 4]

3a) "What are you talking about Pops, your beer is right here behind the radishes." [goto step 1]

4) Glug glug glug.

have you seen the irc chat log with Mark Karpeles? it almost seems possible that that is exactly what has happened:

[12:02] <JonWickedFire> How much did you lose yourself?

[12:04] <MagicalTux> Well, technically speaking it's not "lost" just yet, just temporarily unavailable

[12:05] <JonWickedFire> Well, how much is unavail for you?

[12:06] <MagicalTux> I'm not even sure

http://www.wickedfire.com/shooting-shit/179038-my-conversati...

What does that even mean, Karpeles isn't making any sense.

Pretty sure he's not referring to the possibility of recovering any of the lost bitcoins, but to the plans from the crisis strategy doc to freeze all accounts, then start a new business at Gox.com and make it all back in profits over time. Not that those plans make any sense either.

Closing the conversation with a 9gag link. How professional.

If you read the context, it's quite clear that he's only referencing his own bitcoins.

    [12:02] <JonWickedFire> How much did you lose yourself?
    [12:04] <MagicalTux> Well, technically speaking it's not "lost" just yet, just temporarily unavailable
    [12:05] <JonWickedFire> Well, how much is unavail for you?
    [12:06] <MagicalTux> I'm not even sure
    [12:06] <MagicalTux> didn't check my wallet before pushing the site offline

That final line makes it very clear that he meant he didn't know how many BTC he had in MtGox and thus "lost". How you clipped it, it makes it sound like he might mean he doesn't know how many are temporarily unavailable on mtgox as a whole.

i don't follow your reasoning. the final line tells us that he doesn't know how many btc he personally was credited with in the mtgox wallet.

what he says before that tells us that

a.) his btc are in the same "situation" as those of regular mtgox users,

b.) he believes his btc and thus everyone else's are "just temporarily unavailable"

That'd be some confusion. They just need to look at their cold wallet addresses to see the balance, right?

Old wallets can be huge, tens of thousands of receiving addresses large. Most aren't even displayed to the client (change addresses).

And maybe if they'd tried to be clever, with custom "high-security" key-generation/key-splitting tricks, but actually wound up being stupid, without good records of public-addresses... then reconstructing the public-addresses for lookup could be just as hard as reconstructing the private-keys.

Of course we're in wild-speculation territory but it's an interesting creative extreme-scenario exercise.

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