Re: Mt.Gox technical autopsy

After browsing the threads about Mt.Gox and the malleability issue here are a couple of questions.

Q1. Is there any way to ascertain that the Mt.Gox bankrupcy was indeed induced by transaction malleability?

Let's say person X (attacker) withdrew e.g. BTC 666.696969 from Gox (or any other exchange). The same person X needed to claim exactly the same amount (BTC 666.696969) from Gox a week or two weeks later, right?

What could be done is to run a query on blockchain data to identify such transaction pairs, initiated from addresses that once had a fairly high value of ''total received'' (indicating they were exchange address) and sent the same amount (BTC 666.696969) twice within a certain period of time.

If someone identifies such pairs, then we might at least get the idea of the maximum possible malleability threshold that went on the Bitcoin network.

This assumes that they were replacing transactions, not balances. This assumption may not be valid.

Okay, this assumption may not be valid, but at least we might start to try assessing the damage done to exchanges from here.

I am not the expert on bitcoin. I think a geek should conduct a study on this subject to arrive at a methodology of assessing the scale of malleability exploit.

If a good methodology is devised and a proper study run, someone might at least be able to confirm or debunk claims that were written in the ''leaked'' ''document'' that says +700k coins are gone.