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."

Comments

Smelling more fishy every day.

[RobertM1968]

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.

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[B33rNinj4]

All we need is for MtGox to "disappear" after a tragic fall off a sailboat...only to return with amnesia later on...and begin a romantic relationship with his nighbor who actually turns out to be his unknown sister.

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[mysidia]

Probably... they were 'magically discovered' when it became clear to Mark that the authorities might be contemplating criminal charges against him.

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's autobiographical.

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[hawkinspeter]

...aaand it's gone!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DT7bX-B1Mg/

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Every single soap opera ever written.

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[Marginal Coward]

Darn, I thought it was as an episode of "Arrested Development" I hadn't seen yet. Maebe not.

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[Mr0bvious]

No, no, popular cultures also grow in basements..

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[Richard_at_work]

The first half is strikingly close to what happened recently in the UK - John Darwin went missing while canoeing in the North Sea during 2002. His canoe was found, but his body was never recovered and he was declared dead in 2003.

In 2007 he returned to life, having lived in the intermediate years as John Jones, firstly in the UK (living in a bedsit next door to his old home, then living with his supposed widow wife, before they moved overseas, eventually ending up in Panama. The catalyst for his return was a change in Panamanian visa law, which required British police confirmation of his identity.

So he came back to the UK, claimed he had amnesia and didn't know what had happened after his disappearance, and his widow wife and children played their part in the fantastic return - but it soon all unravelled when it was discovered that his wife knew all along and had lived with him in Panama for several years.

They are both now serving jail sentences for insurance fraud.

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[Michalson]

While the MtGox situation is very, very suspicious the way Bitcoin works it makes the stealing and 'finding' of bitcoins very strange compared to traditional currency. Imagine a dollar bill. Much like a Bitcoin it has a unique serial number at the bottom. You can deposit it in a bank where they will keep a ledger so they know how much money anyone can withdraw from the teller while keeping most of it in the vault. If the vault is robbed it will quickly be discovered when they open it up in the morning and find it empty.

But Bitcoin differs in that last part. When you spend or transfer a bitcoin you aren't handing over the original, you're making a copy and the person receiving it is adding an extra digit to the serial number. Even though you still have it your copy of the coin is no longer legal tender and if you go to a store and try to spend it the cashier will tell you the serial number is too short and someone else owns the legitimate digital copy of that coin. If a thief gets into the bitcoin vault he doesn't need to remove or change anything, he just copies all the serial numbers and immediately 'pays' it into wallets he owns or controls, making his copy the legitimate article and the coins in the vault useless bits of data. The owners of the vault don't know this - the contents of the vault have not been changed in any way and it's only when they remove some of the money from the vault and try to spend it that they'll discover they've got worthless old copies.

While less likely it is also possible, with ledgers being moved around and even manipulated by thieves, that bitcoins that where assumed withdrawn are in fact still legal tender - if the bank made a copy of a one of their coins to service an apparent withdrawal, but that copy was never 'spent' then the original is still good. This is one of the difficulties of Bitcoin, unlike physical currency or even centrally managed digital currency (what a lot of your money basically is) you can't determine if each coin is worth something or just a bunch of worthless numbers without asking for the opinion of a bunch of other people. The extra layer of security of a vault actually makes it harder, since you are trying to keep that data out of the wrong hands, not share it with others to get their daily opinion (imagine if a bank removed every bill from the vault daily to check them with those counterfeit pens - how many opportunities to steal the money would that add).

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[Richard_at_work]

Sorry, I left a parentheses open in my last post and its bugging the hell out of me. So heres the closing one. )

I apologise whole heartedly for all of the teeth-nashing this has caused.

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[Anonymous Coward]

In that same spirit, here's the g you missed out of 'gnashing' ;)

g

Re:Smelling more fishy every day.

[Richard_at_work]

Maxwell had lots of companies, several of which had irregularities.

It helps to not be arrogant in your attempts to "correct" people.

Learn this.

Reminds me of the time...

[jittles]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Thieves often place stolen goods nearby so they can retrieve them later

Possible

[GoCrazy]

While it's seems convenient and sketchy to magically find money after it was stolen, is it possible that MtGox is just that incompetent?

Check behind the fridge

[Hognoxious]

I'm going to check behind the fridge and under the couch.

I hear someone's lost an airliner.

As Falkvinge says

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:While I expect foul play...

[Charliemopps]

Actually, I think there might be merit in your idea. We had a similar thing happen with one of our ticketing systems. Thousands of vanished tickets... They weren't even on the tables anymore! Oh no! Then we found them on some random table (there are thousands in the DB) and apparently, over 10 years ago, someone had conceived of the idea that something could go wrong, and instead of strait up deleting rows the system was throwing the deleted rows onto this "archive" table. The code that broke it was someone on another teams fault, but whomever wrote this way back in the day saved us a hell of a lot of trouble.

Of course, MtGox could just be a bunch of thieves as well.

More likely duplicates

[goombah99]

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.

Re:Ooooohhhh theeeeere's your money!

[citylivin]

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.