Mt. Gox's Bitcoins are being sold on Bitstamp?
pastebin.com
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As I've mentioned before, this sort of thing is usually correct in that same way a broken clock is.
But if it all does condense down to one wallet, or a set of transactions that is suddenly happening on this one service... then it does smell funny.
If it should turn out that the owner of the account is someone affiliated with MTGox, then I can only imagine that shit will hit the fan.
While it's unclear precisely how that donation address is related to all of this, I assume that people traced money flowing out of it and into an Mt. Gox cold storage wallet, thus establishing that the person who controlled the donation address was involved with the people who control the cold storage addresses.
If so, then it's hard to see how to disagree with "If the Bitstamp address 1PAzo was funded with coins deposited by Jed McCaleb or one of his associates, and simultaneously two Mt. Gox cold storage wallets were depleted, and the chain of withdraws eventually lead from the cold storage wallets to 1PAzo, then it's extremely likely that Jed or an Mt. Gox owner is trading Mt. Gox cold storage coins on Bitstamp."
It sounds like you're worried that a chain of transfers doesn't prove ownership. For example, someone could randomly send all their bitcoin to someone else for no reason. But in practice, the only reason to give large amounts of BTC to someone else is either because you're buying something from them, repaying a debt, or you're cooperating with them. Regardless of which of those it turns out to be, the Mt. Gox cold storage wallets are the property of the Mt. Gox customers. Using them to buy something or repay a debt would be fraud. Transferring them to an associate with the intent of laundering them via Bitstamp would also be illegal, of course.
I can't think of any other explanations for why the BTC would change ownership except perhaps that they were stolen yet again. But theft can be ruled out if the identity of the Bitstamp account turns out to be a cohort of Mt. Gox.
(You mentioned that it could be a mixer, but that can be ruled out in this case because it'd make no sense for Mt. Gox to launder bitcoins and then deposit them into a bistamp account that has someone's real-world identity attached to it. Also, when bitcoins are being mixed using a mixer, it transfers the coins in a pretty distinctive way that indicates a mixer is being used, such as by randomizing the BTC amounts rather than always transferring e.g. 150BTC or 50BTC or some other nice-for-humans value. I assume that if a mixer is being used here, it'd be possible to show that the transfers are behaving in a way consistent with a particular bitcoin mixer implementation.)
Since there are no plausible explanations about how the bitcoins might change ownership, why would it be unreasonable to proceed with the assumption that the ownership hasn't changed, unless proven otherwise?
Or did these do it too directly?
edited to fix account/address mistake.
analysis that attributed large amounts of the initially mined coins to "Satoshi", when they were in fact core developer Gregory Maxwell's
You just reminded me of something cool (but totally offtopic): https://bitslog.wordpress.com/2013/04/17/the-well-deserved-f... Someone recently came up with a previously-unknown technique for mapping out Satoshi's fortune.
Citation or redaction, please.
If Gregory Maxwell owns a life-changing sum of early bitcoins, it is certainly news to me. If he does not, then you are making claims that could endanger the life and well being of someone who has worked very hard in service of the bitcoin community.
There have been a lot of very-wrong analyses of the blockchain which have gotten people riled up about one thing or another and then turned out to be bogus. The whole process has sometimes shown unsettling parallels with numerology. It's good that nwh is reminding everyone to try to be as skeptical as possible.
It'll be interesting to see whether the evidence turns out to match the story.
http://blog.dustintrammell.com/2013/11/26/i-am-not-satoshi/
I know of no other incident involving mis-identification of Satoshi's stash.
Basically people were going around claiming that _all_ the unspent coins during a particular time period were "satoshi's"— and this is a claim which is obviously untrue on its face, if nothing else because there are other people who mined blocks during time (and lost them), including myself. Thats all. Nothing especially interesting.
Reliably analysis from historical data is pretty lossy. Bitcoin exists in an odd equilibrium where speculative analysis from the chain alone is both enough to frequently break privacy but often not enough to make reliable inferences.
UK law prohibits handling stolen goods. http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1968/60/section/22
Bitstamp Limited is registered in the UK, but the trading address is a proxy run by UK PLC (http://www.ukplc.com/contact-us.html)
Bitstamp is owned by a couple of Slovenian chaps:
https://www.duedil.com/company/08157033/bitstamp-limited/peo...
I would argue that bitcoins are money, and not goods. Goods have use value, bitcoins do not - they only have exchange value. They have no use in and of themselves.
TL;DR: Even if you can prove that someone else holds a dollar bill that was stolen from you at some point, you do not necessarily have the right to get it back.
http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo...
tl;dr by sending bitcoins to an fake address, you can use put an ASCII Ben Bernanke in the Blockchain.
I mean, US dollar bills can also be stacked together and lit on fire, thereby having use value as firewood, or you can write notes on them, making them a notepad, but they are still money because their exchange value completely dwarfs their tiny use value (if one can quantify such things).
I'd argue bitcoin falls into the same category.
"is #bitstamp about to become another #mtgox ? Uk trader seeks high court injunction to cease Uk trading operations" https://twitter.com/frankieterrier/status/446638248761503744
"#bitstamp getting sued for $1.2m Uk trader seeks freezing of assets in high court action. #bitstamp not processing withdrawls." https://twitter.com/frankieterrier/status/446637903721287680
Now, if there is anything nefarious going on, the parties responsible probably know that others are watching.
Snake oil and charlatans? There's an app for that.
The cognitive dissonance is maddening. Something so esoteric and technical, which required great intelligence to even use, let alone build the cottage industry around... continues to make these intelligent young, white, libertarians look like simple con targets.
The shovel and panning sellers made loads (mining rigs and exchanges). Everyone else who hasn't exited is holding the bag.
If you lived through the dotcom bubble, this is a repeat in slowreck motion. People will lose 95-100% of their investments until the rest freak out and bolt.
Very smart, young, white guys built up expensive trading stations and lost their shirt daytrading on dotcoms. It's like buying a mining... nevermind - nobody's listening.
Have you seen the movie Dot-Con by Frontline?
Your bitter prognostications about "young white libertarians" says more about you than anything else, IMO. And invoking the dot com bubble doesn't help your point - the internet was, indeed, the next big thing, but the bubble was misinformed and 10 years too early. Long term, though, "dot com" was and is real, and many are hoping and working towards cryptocurrencies travelling the same path.
Do you feel special and useful guys? Or does it take $19B to be real special?
But still, HN kicks ass no matter what :)
But that's not why bitcoin is important. bitcoin uses cryptography and peer to peer technologies in a very clever way to create the first internet transferrable, widely accepted currency where you don't need to trust someone else like a government or a bank. It's a true peer to peer currency.
Who would declare them null and void? What's to stop any movement from declaring non-stolen bitcoin as null and void?
Now, what you propose though, is against the freedom bitcoins is assumed to stand for (on the ethics side).
On the technical side that's very possible, as of today, if everyone plays along and I mean literally everyone, especially mixers.
How could one track down bitcoins flushed into public mixers? I guess they could do this as well, if the BTC were tagged and thus refused by the mixers or even worst hold captives and resend them to original issuer. However, you only need 1 TOR hosted mixer to lose track of the wallets.
On the other side imagine the practical chaos: I make a huge transaction of non-tangible goods in a situation where you can't prove that the service/product was delivered. Then I just tag these bitcoin that once belonged to my wallet as stolen if the other party doesn't give them back :-) you see where this is going right? :-)
Actually, unlike any commodity or any currency with a physical representation. What makes other currency not traceable is the notes and coins, not the fact that they are fiat or not.
side note: has "fiat" now become synonymous with non-crypto currency the same way hacker has become a swear word ?
You can track dollar bills by their serial number. It's basically the same thing as what's going on here, except that few people record the serial numbers of their bills.
How many people/authorities can do that with FIAT? Not to count the impossibility of actually tracking down FIAT that has not been used by a bank or authority that CAN actually control the unique number :-)
So in case 1 it's very easy to do, in second case is almost impossible outside very well defined scenarios (police trying to frame drug dealers, etc.)
It's like adding a new rule to how a piece moves in chess. You could easily imagine some of the advantages caused by a change, but not all of the consequences.
The question is whether that's a meaningful thing to measure. If you have bitcoins that are more valuable than normal, because they're shares of stock, then you'll make sure they're not mixed with "normal" coins. That's the idea of the Coloured Coins project. But if you have bitcoins that are less valuable than normal, because they're stolen goods, then you'll try hard to disguise that fact. You'll immediately spend them on goods or currency, or deposit them into a Coinbase account and then withdraw them later (so you get different coins back), or just throw them into a mixer with the other coins that need to be laundered.
The person who ends up holding the tainted coins could be perfectly honest, and have acquired them from a perfectly honest source, who in turn acquired them from a perfectly honest source. Is it fair to tell them that their money is suddenly worthless, when they had no way of knowing anything was wrong?
What burden does this place on users to be certain that they're receiving "legitimate" coins?
At best you could flag wallets, and any wallets who've made transactions with those wallets, etc., etc. which is basically what the people on reddit are doing to "trace" the coins. But, as many have mentioned before, it is not a very accurate way to trace the transactions especially if a service like a tumbler is used.
If you want the BTC network itself to reject stolen bitcoins, there's no need to stop there: if you had community agreement, you could just as easily reverse thieving transactions and make the victims whole.
> What if there was a way to tag bitcoins as stolen and declare them null and void?
But I think this idea has many technical and psychological problems . You essentially need to fork the Blockchain and convince the “51%” to use the new fork where these Bitcoins are illegal.
Doge recently changed some details of the mining procedure using a hard fork, but they have a strong central organization and they pretend that Doge is not a serious coin. An equivalent change in Bitcoin would be much more difficult.
Of course, if you melt it in a top-notch facility, they'd probably be able to heat out the contaminants (or remove them chemically?), but people trading in stolen or otherwise "hot" gold probably don't have access to such facilities.
Let's suppose that this gold is Nazi gold, taken from Jews. You know that Nazi gold will be traced to you(because each gold atom has an address). Would you still accept that gold as payment?
I'm not an expert on bitcoin though, so my analoy could be way off.
It would both disincentivize thieves and honest users.
It was decided in a legal case over 300 years ago in Scotland that it would ruin the point of money if stolen money were - like all other goods - the property of their original owner: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2260952
I think it makes sense to apply the same principle to bitcoins.
https://blockchain.info/tags?form_type=1
Taint is viewable using "Related tags" and "Taint Analysis" on address pages.