And of course all that downtime for denial of service attacks which was their own fault. MagicalTux slammed BlackLotus, Prolexic and Cloudflare as garbage before somebody pointed out they left a bunch of open ports which is why they were still getting DDoS'd. That whole exchange is a joke from day 1.

The proper way to resend a transaction is to re-use an input which was used in the original transaction. It does not need to be all the same inputs, just at least one. This way it is not possible for the two transactions to both succeed. If the original transaction succeeds then the second will be rejected as a double spend.

In general Mt. Gox's software appears to not be paying attention to little details about inputs. For a while now if a miner sends the block find award to their Mt. Gox address then Mt. Gox will use the inputs resulting from that block find before the inputs are valid. This causes any transaction with said input to be ignored. The proper solution is to wait the ~100 confirms before using the new btc.

Note that this is a separate problem from the duplicated transactions. The point is: Mt. Gox is not tracking their bitcoin at the correct granularity. They appear to have written the software like we might use the bitcoin rpc api, without paying close attention to the details.

I'd say that malleable transactions are a bug in the protocol.

AKA a bug.

For those interested in finding out what transaction malleability is:

http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-bug-guide-transaction-mallea...

<quote> What is transaction malleability?

It’s an attack that lets someone change the unique ID of a bitcoin transaction before it is confirmed on the bitcoin network. The change makes it possible for someone to pretend that a transaction didn’t happen, if all the right conditions are in place. </quote>

This is a fatal design flaw in any TPS system. From any sound accounting principles point of view, no journal entry is to be manipulated after insertion - only through compensating transactions (referencing the original).

There are other ways to track transactions other than the txid, for example by tracking a unique output address. A normalized hash routine has been added recently: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/pull/3656#issuecomment-35...

Just a naive suggestion (will this work?):

Why not introduce some sort of a 2-phase commit with the original transaction and the newly inserted one on the block-chain? So, before the block-chain transaction is committed, check the two transaction id hashes, if they are different for the request, fail the transaction.

Edit: Of course, the eavesdropper could just as well pass the expected hash back to the originator anyways. :-( Hmmm

The biggest flaw here is probably the name "transaction id", because it suggests that a transaction can only have one valid id. The normalized id fixes this issue for most transaction types.

In fact, it's hard to even call this a flaw in design, because your intentions and hopes for Bitcoin might be very different than those of the Bitcoin developers.

Kind of reminds me of that online poker company that got in trouble with the law and people were trading "[name of company, I forgot] dollars" for below value in an attempt to recoup some of their funds.

Fun story: I was a professional online poker player when black friday happened. And I just happened to be in Guatemala, on my honeymoon. Prior to going on my honeymoon, I had experienced the worst downswing in my career and all we had left (about 20k) was now frozen in my Poker Stars account. When we returned home, we didn't have enough to make the next month's mortgage payment. What we did have was about 1k in cash from our wedding gifts. The night after we got back, I took that 1k to the local casino and played in the highest cash game I could buy into. It was high risk but I didn't have time to grind it out at lower stakes. Luckily I went on an amazing heater, ran the 1k up to 10k and that was enough to last us until Poker Stars unfroze my account.

That's a fantastic story my friend. It took some luck but also a lot of guts and self confidence to do that. Glad you managed it.

Story is fantastic, but I'm not glad he did it. I would like it much more if he understood that gambling is a zero sum game except for gambling companies, and stopped playing it after learning a lesson.

All that being said, the entire reason I was devoting time and effort to my side projects was the belief that I could derive more meaning from life doing something other than poker. I was already trying to transition to something new. Black Friday just gave me a giant kick in the ass.

Also, poker is not gambling, at least not the way I play.

What you did that night was definitely gambling (buying in with 100% of your bankroll). Glad it worked out for you though

Yes, it is. No matter how you play.

I question how "professional" you are if you don't even understand this basic concept of advantage gambling.

And about poker being not gambling, well I don't agree. However smart you play, as much as you count on the statistics, in the end of the day, there's still luck involved. Even if it were only pure skill game, you can't always know skill level of your opponents :)

I guess absolutely everything we do in life is gambling, then :)

As for whether poker is a game of chance, I would argue that the level of skill involved trumps the level of chance and thus doesn't qualify. A good poker player is much like a casino. On any given bet they could lose but in the long term they never do because they always have an edge on their opponents.

But more importantly, there's luck involved in almost everything you do, and you can almost never predict with certainty the outcome of your actions. Should we seek to avoid all luck in life, or perhaps only when money is involved? That would mean we could no longer make investments in anything. Even putting your money in a savings account has, perhaps not luck, but at least a degree of risk involved. There are some things I would never risk in life but money isn't one of those things. Money is just a means to an end.

You're not wrong to be critical of the OP for gambling with his lunch money, but at the same time, it's wrong to conflate statistics with luck. If "the way he plays" is "by the numbers", then luck really isn't a factor. Sure, it may bear on any given hand, but in a long enough game, luck is all but eliminated as being relevant.

I didn't say 'lunch money' as to imply something necessary. Rather, it was intended as something trivial.

Either way, kudos on the hot streak.

people who insist on saying 'zero-sum' is really just passive-aggressively saying that the person indulging on said activity should've spent their time on other non-zero sum activity.

It's still a hell of a lot of fun though.

There's something "romantic" about the whole thing. Sometimes we have to do things that are irrational to experience life. It's sort of like climbing Everest. It makes no sense and still quite dangerous but people do it to satisfy some irrational yearning.

The irrationality and the circumstances of his story are what makes it all so beautiful.

Not totally correct. As part of the deal, Pokerstars paid out balances for all non-U.S. Full Tilt players. Players from the U.S. are still waiting for their money, which will be in the form of remittance through the DOJ. The latest news is that those payments will begin soon (nearly 3 years after "Black Friday").

I was an online pro too. Taught myself to code since Black Friday.

0: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/15/fred-smith-blackjac...

banks take your money, and can then trade on a 1000:1 leverage, and when they lose all your money it's pretty much tough luck.

sure, mtgox sucks, but this is in no way something new.

There is some fear that funds may have been lost on a large scale, due to this bug, and that Mt Gox simply won't be able to make good on their accounts. Some have suggested that Gox is buying BTC at the current deflated price to try to cover the gap. All of this is hearsay, and I don't know how much of it I would believe. It's difficult to take the Gox folks at their word, however, given their reticence about providing details of what they're up to, and the slowness of a return to normalcy.

Alex has 10 GoxBTC and trades them to Bob for 1 BTC. If MtGox recovers, they give Bob 10 BTC and Alex 0. Their obligation remains unchanged.

(Granted, considering how much trouble they were having before with USD being frozen, I can't imagine that this is a feasible move for Gox at the moment.)

MtGox should be full reserve, that is, they should be holding 100% of all user's bitcoins and fiat deposits, only skimming off the exchange fees.

Looks like Gox bitcoins are currently available for roughly a 60% discount.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2014/02/bitcoin-ddos/