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One Year Later, We're No Closer To Finding MtGox's Missing Millions
itwbennett writes: When Mt. Gox collapsed on Feb. 28, 2014, with liabilities of some ¥6.5 billion ($63.6 million), it said it was unable to account for some 850,000 bitcoins. Some 200,000 of them turned up in an old-format bitcoin wallet last March, bringing the tally of missing bitcoins to 650,000 (now worth about $180 million). In January, Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, citing sources close to a Tokyo police probe of the MtGox collapse, reported that only 7,000 of the coins appear to have been taken by hackers, with the remainder stolen through a series of fraudulent transactions. But there's still no explanation of what happened to them, and no clear record of what happened on the exchange.
Somebody buried it in Second Life.
Wasn't that the whole point behind Bitcoin? That you could fleece investors without leaving a paper trail?
RTFS. Note the S, not the A. If you had read the SUMMARY, let alone the article, you would see that 850,000 were missing, 200,000 were found in the wallet, leaving 650,000 unaccounted for.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
An anonymous currency, that allows you to set up an exchange in any country, and without any oversight whatsoever. The whole thing is trust based. Would you leave your cash with any random stranger in some Thai web cafe for safekeeping? Even if you see others do the same, seemingly without worry? Because leaving any significant amount of BTC in an exchange amounts to the same thing.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
$180M is a lot of Magic the Gathering cards.
Haven't they gone down significantly in value in recent years. That's probably enough to own all of them.
Is there anybody with real authority actually looking for this? As far as the government is concerned someone might as well have stolen all of the WoW Gold or Eve ISK. Pretty much everybody else doesn't have the means or expertise to actually do the real world search. Somebody has a huge fat wallet that they're going to tumble over the months and eventually cash out and unless they screw something up there's not much chance of being caught.
I read the internet for the articles.
people who seek to get a currency away from "evil" government control get exactly what they want: worse. no government, no accountability. no accountability, you get screwed, and the only answer you will ever get is "oh well"
you can't run from government regulation in hatred of it as a great evil, and then expect government to come to rescue you when you inevitably get fucked. you got fucked, because there's no regulations... which you *asked for* and were enthusiastic about, moron
all this episode boils down to is some economically clueless fanboys needed to learn the hard way what the rest of us already know: that a currency backed by a government is obviously better than "free" alternatives
all the evil shit a government can pull (and they do, i'm not defending government, i'm just noting there is far worse out there) is nothing compared to the evil that exists without a government backed currency and government oversight, accountability, and regulations of finance and banking. i'm not in love with government, i just recognize it as the *least worse* evil when it comes to currency mechanisms
you can petition and redress your grievances to government, and get a hearing, and maybe justice (if you actually understand right and wrong and you aren't some deranged crackpot out for "justice")
you can't do that against random assholes whom you trusted with your deposits for some ignorant reason that just basically boils down to uneducated enthusiasm
it's like the people who rant and complain about how evil the police are. and then their car gets broken into... and... drum roll please... they call the police. you want to reform the police, fix the police, fight corruption. not fight their existence. you need the police. without the police, civilization quickly falls. of course there are crooked cops and bad cops. so fight that, the bad apples in the system, rather than fight the entire system. which you need, and want, despite the fact you aren't educated enough to see or understand that far worse problems exist without them. the same with government regulation of finance and banking. it is warped and corrupt and crooked. so fight the corruption. don't fight the whole system. because without the system, far worse shit will befall you
people need to be educated enough on economics and history to know what kind of abuses exist out there without government oversight of banking
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Has no one noticed that the coins disappeared at almost the same time the FBI seized Silk Road's Assets?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
More than bitcoins are missing. If you sold bitcoins through Mt. Gox, back when they peaked at US$1200, Mt. Gox delayed depositing them into your bank account. And delayed. And delayed. And delayed. And eventually went belly up without every paying.
I had to deal with some of this, with an estate I was at the time administrator of.
I wonder if the point wasn't to steal the Mt. Gox Bitcoins, but just to delete them, forever removing them from the system, like the several million dollars worth on that hard drive buried in a landfill somewhere. By removing a bunch from the system, it reduces the supply and raises the price for those who are holding lots of them.
(Fans of 1960s James Bond movies might recall that this was Auric Goldfinger's reason for setting off a nuke in Fort Knox.)