Free Republic

A new report by researchers at ETH Zurich University in Switzerland has concluded that the now-bankrupt Japan-based bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox may have lost only 386 bitcoins ($203,000) due to issues stemming from transaction malleability. The finding provides new evidence that Mt. Gox’s continued claims that issues with the Bitcoin protocol were the primary reason for its insolvency are perhaps misleading or untrue. Released on 26th March, the report was authored by Christian Decker and Professor Roger Wattenhofer, both of the university’s Distributed Computing Group (DCG). Overall, the authors found that only 302,000 bitcoins could have ever been involved in...

Mizuho Bank, one of Japan's largest lenders, has became ensnared in North American legal fallout from Mt. Gox, once the world's biggest bitcoin exchange, which collapsed last month after losing nearly half a billion dollars worth of customers' digital currency. Lawsuits in the United States and Canada represent a new legal front - and a deep-pocketed defendant - in the battle over Mt. Gox, which claims hackers stole huge amounts of its own and its customers' assets. Mizuho, the core unit of Mizuho Financial Group Inc, Japan's second-biggest "megabank" by assets, was added as a defendant on Friday to an...

A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday temporarily froze the U.S. assets of Mt. Gox chief Mark Karpeles and allowed alleged victims of the shuttered bitcoin exchange to demand evidence of what they claim is a massive fraud. The market for the digital currency was rocked last month when Mt. Gox, once the world's largest bitcoin exchange, ceased operations, and soon after filed for bankruptcy. Mt. Gox said it may have lost 750,000 bitcoins, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, in a hacking attack. The freeze on Karpeles' assets, issued by Judge Gary Feinerman in Chicago, also applies to Mt. Gox's...

Hackers (or disgruntled insiders) claim to have released a 700+MB file of Mt. Gox operational information and transaction data, including one sheet claiming the exchange could still have a balance of over 951,116 BTC. One of the hackers managed to post the data on Gox CEO Mark Karpeles’ own blog, then announced the feat on Reddit. Karpeles’ site has since gone completely offline and Reddit moderators deleted the original post. At press time the mods were engaged in a cat and mouse game with other community members who re-posted the original quote and several links claiming to be mirrors of...