Hacker News Reader

Comment by bertil | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure I understand the difference between the green Selling BitCoins (to get Dollars, presumably) and Buying Dollars (by selling BitCoins, also presumably).

I’m even more puzzled by the rates out of trade: did MtGox allowed traders to agree one-on-one on their own rates? That would allow a lot more laundering than any theft.

Missing too are relative size of the traders.

View on HN

Yes, you used to be able to trade via dark pool in large amounts (at the time, that would be 5+ kbtc) to avoid upsetting the market price. Not sure if they still supported it at time of closure.

This is actually rather scary. Enough people have logged data that these can be dereferenced despite the feeble attempt at depersonalization, but I guess the names will come out in the legal proceedings anyway, depending on jurisdiction.

Then we'll have Newsweek writers at our houses asking how we feel about "losing millions" when our cost basis was really around $10. :-)

To head that off: "Umm, now I don't have to worry about how to declare this on my taxes? 'Miscellaneous Income' was making me nervous."

I don't think the (publicly) leaked database contained any usernames/emails.

You're right, it didn't. All of the trades data included internal User IDs. More recent data (as of April 2012) included User ID hashes, which Gox users have access to (from their password recovery emails for example).

> depersonalization

I think you're maybe looking for bowlderization or anonymization or something similar?

The problem I had with both those terms is that they're not anonymized (and unless the usernames are obscene, bowdlerization isn't really a good fit). With the other leaks, at least for the older accounts, a name can be associated with these charts. For the newer accounts or those that lay dormant for a few years before trading, I suspect those who have been logging the web socket and IRC traffic could create a correlation with an individual.

Anonymize is probably fine, but I want "reversible anonymization". :)

Green -> Buying bitcoin with any currency

Red -> Selling bitcoin for USD

Blue -> Selling bitcoin for any non-USD currency

Reply on news.ycombinator.com