Hacker News Reader

Comment by oznathan | Hacker News Reader

Check the bitcoin reddit. Everybody knows about that 200k btc for weeks. There is evidence they have about 300k more.

Remember that Reddit is frequently completely wrong with it's guesswork, only a fool would rely on that communities information when preparing for a witch hunt.

For what it's worth (which isn't necessarily very much, since I've been very wrong about bitcoin before) I've been monitoring the situation pretty closely, and the Redditors have been doing a thorough and fairly scientific job of concluding what is or isn't possible. There are some crazies in the threads of course, but they get downvoted or called out on their speculation. Since there's no concrete evidence, what rises to the top of the threads are statements like "Here's what we know. Here are possible theories as to why these facts are present." It feels very much like the opposite of a witch hunt.

The "analysis" is frequently totally incorrect, I've looked at it before and I wasn't impressed. They mostly hinge on the assumption that if 1x sends to 1y then 1y is owned by 1x, which is obviously complete nonsense. Once you get past a single hop there's usually no way of knowing if the transaction is an internal move or one to an external party. Unless there is cryptographic evidence in chains of transactions that prove ownership, nobody can really claim Gox owns anything past what they have just announced.

Someone transferring huge sums of money right before they shut down and claim the money is missing is pretty suspicious.

Until otherwise proven, it's coincidence. Assuming just complicates things.

People "assumed" about that 200k wallet over a month ago. "Proven" is subjective and a rhetoric that has agenda on its own.

Perhaps but the 200k in question was last transferred in 2011 (until they found it and moved it very recently).

At least the reddit discussions I've been directed to have been very unscientific— more pseudo-scientific in that they dump a bunch of data and throw around some technical terms. Though there may be some selection bias since people are probably more likely to ask me for my opinion on the more questionable work.

Ah. Thank you for correcting me. For what it's worth, your explanations are what I had in mind when talking about the scientificness of the investigations. I probably should have said "nullc has been doing a great job of making sure people don't get carried away with unfounded speculation" and left it at that though.

My education was in math, and in general I find being wrong helps me get to the truth a lot quicker than not moving forward until it's 100%. None of us knows the truth yet, but slowly we're knocking out things that aren't.

Honestly, same goes for HN. It's just that it has more stricter laws once you are ghost-banned you would never know why. Basically both the communities are full of bs, HN does it with suave and accepted sophistication.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com