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MtGox Finds 200,000 Bitcoins In Old Wallet
thesandbender writes: "Today brings news that MtGox has 'found' 200,000 Bitcoins in a 'forgotten' wallet that they thought was empty (PDF). The value of the coins is estimated to be $116 million USD, which happens to cover their $64 million USD in outstanding debts nicely and might offer them the chance to emerge from bankruptcy. There is no explanation yet of why the sneaky thieves that 'stole' the bitcoins used a MtGox wallet to hide them."
It's amazing how they "found" these... I would have thought that computers would make it impossible to "lose" such funds - even with the most simplistic of accounting programs. The more I hear, the more it sounds like something else is going on (like the principles of Mt Gox trying to run off with as many BitCoins as they can). It's like watching a soap opera.
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
Oh I know how that is. The other day I put on one of my old winter coats from years ago and found 500,000 bitcoins in the pocket. It was completely unexpected. I used it to buy a pizza.
Thieves often place stolen goods nearby so they can retrieve them later
I could argue that the system probably was setup to save lost bitcoins into a wallet.
The CEO may not have known about it, as the programmers, probably felt that such an error could happen, so there was a mechanism to deal with it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
While it's seems convenient and sketchy to magically find money after it was stolen, is it possible that MtGox is just that incompetent?
No beer and no TV make Homer something something
I'm going to check behind the fridge and under the couch.
I hear someone's lost an airliner.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As Falkvinge says, this looks like a copycat fraud.
In one of the first major bitcoin scams, mybitcoin com in 2011, the owner also said hackers took everything and "luckily" recovered a percentage of the funds some weeks later. This is a classic con man move, called cooling the mark out. You're supposed to accept that you were stupid, take your losses and go home, rather than pursue the scammers for the rest.
Consider, What does it mean for a bitcoin to be lost or to be found or to exist. To be "lost" it means no one no longer knows the bitcoin's key. Yet you can also have more than one copy of the key. For example MagicTux might have "stolen" the coin (that is, transfered a coin to a key, deleted that key from the mtGox data base ("oopsie") but secretly kept a copy of the key somewhere else. But then suppose that not all copies of the key were deleted. Both the "found" key and the one lurking in MagicTux's hideout are the same valid key. Either one can spend the coin.
Thus there is not one copy of the coin to be found. there could be many.
If you give someone control of your wallet, so that they know your keys, you can never get back that control. They can always keep copies of it and have the authrority to spend. THe only way to recover control is to make a new key and transfer the coins to that. Thus these exchanges that manage your coins are scary.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They have the lying skills of a twelve year old.
Do not underestimate the lying skills of children!
At 10 years old I realised that if I wanted to lie to my mum the best way was to first offer an obvious lie which she would detect and demand 'the truth'. I'd then, unwillingly, offer a more plausible lie. She'd accept the more plausible lie as the truth; she felt like she'd won a victory over me, that she was so much smarter than me and that I was obviously ashamed at having been caught and had admitted the truth.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
So let me see if I get this right: If MtGox hadn't been hacked, and if they hadn't found this old wallet, then these guys would have lost $116 million out of sheer incompetence? Can you imagine Bezos saying to Amazon shareholders: "Sorry guys, we lost $116 million. The money must be somewhere in the building, but we can't find it. " Or Tim Cook. Or Eric Schmidt. Or Ballmer.
She was just being nice. As the parent of an 11 year old, they make very bad liars. I just take everything my children say with a grain of salt. The thing with lies is if you understand peoples motivations in life, what they are interested in, what they desire. Then you can easily see when they are lying, withholding information or distorting their own memories to match with a current assumed reality.
I find that it's good practice to firstly identify peoples motivations and character and then look at everything they say through that prism.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy