Repost for visibility:
Today on #bitcoin
gmaxwell: wumpus: yea, I understand they had timed automatic reissues...
this was also something I didn't know prior to monday before last and is one of the other reasons my "they couldn't have lost much!" position softened to "I have no freeking clue."
alpha125: gmaxwell: where did you find out abotu the automatic reissues?
gmaxwell: alpha125: from mtgox staff and magicaltux ... I had assumed previously that any reissues were manual via customer support but apparently it was just timed.
gmaxwell: you'll also note that they've kept increasing their fees and then even mad paying fees mandatory.
gmaxwell: This suggested to me that they totally misunderstood their problems. (and— I reported that I believed this months ago too)
gmaxwell: e.g. they noticed lots of txn getting stuck, they didn't understand it was because they were producing invalid txn (even though it was reported to them) and so they thought it was just 'full blocks'
gmaxwell: and they increased their fees from 0.0001 to 0.0005 — which was enough to may more than virtually every txn— and then later to 0.001 which is basically astronomic. And then they made it mandatory.
gmaxwell: of course their stalled txn had nothing to do with fees.
Edit: Just to clarify, only quoted relevant parts (maybe I should have inserted "[...]" where applicable). Full text here: http://pastebin.com/DaSph9uT
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg5278421#msg5278421gmaxwell: wumpus: yea, I understand they had timed automatic reissues...
this was also something I didn't know prior to monday before last and is one of the other reasons my "they couldn't have lost much!" position softened to "I have no freeking clue."alpha125: gmaxwell: where did you find out abotu the automatic reissues?
gmaxwell: alpha125: from mtgox staff and magicaltux ... I had assumed previously that any reissues were manual via customer support but apparently it was just timed.
gmaxwell: you'll also note that they've kept increasing their fees and then even mad paying fees mandatory.
gmaxwell: This suggested to me that they totally misunderstood their problems. (and— I reported that I believed this months ago too)
gmaxwell: e.g. they noticed lots of txn getting stuck, they didn't understand it was because they were producing invalid txn (even though it was reported to them) and so they thought it was just 'full blocks'
gmaxwell: and they increased their fees from 0.0001 to 0.0005 — which was enough to may more than virtually every txn— and then later to 0.001 which is basically astronomic. And then they made it mandatory.
gmaxwell: of course their stalled txn had nothing to do with fees.
Edit: Just to clarify, only quoted relevant parts (maybe I should have inserted "[...]" where applicable). Full text here: http://pastebin.com/DaSph9uT
If this automatic resend is really true, mtgox could have lost HUGE amounts of money in a short period of time:
A thief could have simply withdrawn his btc from his goxwallet to an external btc wallet, they would be resend automatically (or even two or three or four times) due to the malleability without even the need to contact customer support, and then he could redeposit these external bitcoins (now much more) back into his mtgox btc account. Then he could start this cycle again. Because this cycle does not involve any fiat withdrawals or fiat deposits at all, the cycle could have been done very fast and a lot of times with exponentially more bitcoins each time.
This would be really disastreous to mtgox.