Kim Nilsson - Cracking MtGox
TheBitcoinArmy5 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2017–2021
talk · intermediate · evergreen · 2017–2021 on HN
Kim Nilsson presents his investigation into how Mt. Gox was hacked and mismanaged, tracing the finances and the missing bitcoins. It was given at the 2017 Breaking Bitcoin meetup.
HN commenters call it one of the best, most unbiased explanations of what actually happened to Mt. Gox and its missing coins.
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7 comments from Hacker News
Kim Nilsson's work is as good and unbiased as it comes and it pretty much explains everything you need to know about the missing coins: ▶ this video link Btw, with your 350 coins, I hope you've already submitted a claim and are planning to vote on the upcoming Civil Rehabilitation plan.
Kim Nilsson's group have been investigating the Mt Gox incident for years and he gave a presentation some time ago that summarized some of their findings ( ▶ this video ). One of the best summaries of the Mt Gox incident, as well as the fallout and subsequent investigations that I've watched.
If anybody wants the full sordid history from an investigative standpoint, check out Kim Nilsson's great writeups[1][2] and presentation[3]. [1] link [2] link [3] ▶ this video
There's also this entertaining presentation from an outside researcher (tracing down the missing money) from 3 years ago (I don't know what's up with the framerate, but really, it's worth watching): ▶ this video It's quite a rollercoaster of failures.
It is not unfair to say that the majority of Bitcoin exchanges to date have been either intentionally fraudulant or incompetently run. This includes MtGox. Here's a talk that discusses the financial situation at MtGox and the raging dumpster fire that its security system was when Mark Karpeles bought it. ▶ this video It's hard to say if the poor security was due to a staggering level of inexperience and thoughtlessness, or if the previous owners had left it open so they could pilfer money as easily as possible before the whole house of cards collapsed. It's hard to imagine a financial services administrator leaving an unsecured Windows file share open to the Internet with all of the private keys on it, but somehow this was considered to be not a problem at MtGox.
Nobody knows for sure, but the postmortem suggests that it might have been straight up incompetence. However, it's certainly possible to consider that the "incompetence" was on purpose to hide the fact that he was stealing from the company. ▶ this video
>Is anyone seriously tracking where these "stolen" coins from these past several hacks are going? Yeah ▶ this video