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MtGox's "Transaction Malleability" Claim Dismissed By Researchers
Martin S. (98249) writes "The Register reports on a paper at the arXiv (abstract below) by Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer analyzing a year's worth of Bitcoin activity to reach the conclusion that MtGox's claims of losing their bitcoins because of the transaction malleability bug are untrue. The Abstract claims: 'In Bitcoin, transaction malleability describes the fact that the signatures that prove the ownership of bitcoins being transferred in a transaction do not provide any integrity guarantee for the signatures themselves. ... In this work we use traces of the Bitcoin network for over a year preceding the filing to show that, while the problem is real, there was no widespread use of malleability attacks before the closure of MtGox.'"
Quoting El Reg: "By extracting transaction keys from the transaction set, the researchers say, they were able to identify more than 35,000 transaction conflicts and more than 29,000 “confirmed attacks” covering more than 300,000 Bitcoins." And less than 6000 were actually successful.
The MtGox guys better get on a plane and head for their secret island.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
A bank run by drug dealers and drug addicts won't keep your money safe, period.
I mean, if you lost 64,564 bitcoins from a known and easy to research flaw....
then I'm VERY sure that you had a LOT of other security flaws unpatched on your servers.
I know that even on my home servers I try and do "enough" diligence to ensure all know flaws are patched.. And on work related boxes, we ALL verify constantly all known vectors are closed...
The fact that they found 10% of the "lost" coins with publicly available information and widely known bugs, lets me know that there are SURE to be a LOT more hidden flaws bleeding bitcoins like crazy...
(and I'm sure some employees stole some coins to buy private islands)
I am 31337 or something.
This paper has already been widely dismissed by the bitcoin community. Not that we necessarily think that Mtgox was actually hit by a malleability attack. Just that this paper is nonsense.
The very short version is that what these "researchers" were looking at isn't actually how the alleged bug would have worked.
See that "Preview" button?
This is all to be expected isn't it? It seems like when there is opportunity to scam people out of money, someone will set up an operation to exploit it. Every natural disaster results in hundreds of fake charities being set up to collect donations. And digital currency saw all manner of opportunists attempting to participate at every level from bitcoin mining viruses to setting up exchanges with disappearing money "bugs."
Anyone who didn't expect it was born yesterday under a rock.
Yeah, but it is still kinda cool to see people dissect exactly how it happens or how claims are untrue. Suspecting and knowing are two very different things.
No argument that BTC is less widely accepted than most other currencies, but don’t conflate wide acceptance of a currency with it having an intrinsic value. At the end of the day, one dollar bill is worth exactly what I can exchange it for, no more (with the possible exception of it having some *limited* intrinsic value in terms of heating/energy should it prove more valuable to simply set fire to it rather than exchange it for some other fuel source). I could if I so wished exchange BTC for pizza or a car, so that’s value in my book.
Granted, BTC’s volatility in terms of value makes it a risky choice as “money,” but it isn’t worthless.
Karpeles IS unusually stupid (OK, let's say arrogant and naive). He claimed to have lost 2,000,000 bitcoins until people looked at the PUBLIC blockchain and found that he had previously had access to accounts where some of the "missing" bitcoins were still sitting. Then, all of a sudden, when the Japanese court threatened him with arrest, he was suddenly able to "find" and produce them.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I don't know what prompted the Red Cross comment, but is is easy enough to check through Charity Navigator. The Red Cross spends 4% on administration and 5.1% on fund raising; the rest goes to programs.