Japanese Police Suspect 99% of Mt. Gox Bitcoins Missing Due to Fraud, Not Transaction Malleability Hack
The joint Japanese and American government investigation into the whereabouts of supposedly stolen Mt. Gox bitcoins has announced a key discovery. The Japan News, Japan's largest English language newspaper, is reporting that fraud is the cause of the "disappearance of 99% of Mt. Gox bitcoins." According to sources in the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD), only about 7,000 Gox bitcoins were lost due to cyber-attacks. The remaining 99% of the missing 650,000 bitcoins is "highly suspected" of disappearing during a period when Mt. Gox was being fraudulently run by an unknown party. Also....
Related News
Chris Odom of the Swiss firm Monetas recently wrote an article in the Montes blog about the rise of a new kind of inflation that has to be dealt with, and he used the case of Mt. Gox and what happened there as an example. Read also: Japanese Police Suspect 99% of Mt. Gox Bitcoins Missing Due to Fraud, Not Transaction Malleability Hack. There were strong indications in the Willy report several months ago that the bots that increased the price of Bitcoin using money that did not exist were owned by someone at Mt. Gox itself. In the article, Odom insinuates that if this were the case, the....
Japanese newspaper readers began the year with bitcoin as front-page news. The disappearance of 99% of the bitcoins missing from Mt Gox can be blamed on internal system manipulation and not any external attack, a major Japanese newspaper has claimed. Citing an unnamed source connected to the ongoing police investigation, Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper led with the story on the front page of its New Year's Day edition. Only 7,000 BTC, or 1% of the total 650,000 missing, could be attributed to hacking attacks from outside the company, it said. Yomiuri did not elaborate further on the....
Japan’s leading English newspaper, The Japan News, is reporting that their sources in Metropolitan Police Department say only 1% of the 650,000 Mt.Gox bitcoins were lost to hacking and that the remaining 99% were lost due to fraud. Former Mt.Gox CEO and only employee, Mark Karpeles, has kept up the story that the coins were stolen because of a bug in the bitcoin’s code called transaction malleability. The bug allowed attackers to change the transaction ID and act as if they never received the transaction. Karpeles has maintain that attackers used this temporary flaw to drain the exchange....
Was a transaction malleability flaw the true cause of over 750,000 BTC belong to Mt. Gox customers going missing? According to a study conducted by Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer of ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology), transaction malleability accounted for significantly less loss than Mt. Gox declared - as little as 386 bitcoins. ...while MtGox claimed to have lost 850,000 bitcoins due to malleability attacks, we merely observed a total of 302,000 bitcoins ever being involved in malleability attacks. Of these, only 1,811 bitcoins were in attacks before MtGox stopped....
Mark Karpeles pulling a Cassious Coin from behind the photographer's ear. Solid research has proven what many bitcoiners have long suspected; transaction malleability did not play a significant, if any, role in the disappearance of 850,000 BTC from Japanese exchange Mt. Gox. Christian Decker and Roger Wattenhofer of ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, combed through the blockchain to tally each instance of a potential transaction malleability attack in order to figure out exactly how much Bitcoin was put at risk by the alleged attacks. Their research concludes: The transaction malleability problem....