It’s possible MtGox didn’t fail over transaction malleability
By TIM WORSTALL at PandoDaily.
As we know, when MtGox fell over it insisted that it had been tricked by transaction malleability into shipping out off the exchange hundreds of thousands more Bitcoin than it actually had. Losing a few hundred million $ worth of something by paying it out twice or more might well have that effect of making an exchange fall over.
Then just this week we were told that MtGox had actually found 200,000 Bitcoin down the back of the digital couch. Just spare change that they’d forgotten about in an old wallet. Which rather disturbs their story about transaction malleability, for if they lost, as they now say they did, those 200,000 three years back then the alt-currency obviously wasn’t there for someone to steal just recently.
Now there’s another blow to their story. By monitoring the network a couple of researchers have tracked how much of that double demanding of coin was actually going on. Turns out the answer is very little — and pretty much none before MtGox went down:
In Bitcoin, transaction malleability describes the fact that the signatures that prove the ownership of bitcoins being transferred in a transaction do not provide any integrity guarantee for the signatures themselves. This allows an attacker to mount a malleability attack in which it intercepts, modifies, and rebroadcasts a transaction, causing the transaction issuer to believe that the original transaction was not confirmed. In February 2014 MtGox, once the largest Bitcoin exchange, closed and filed for bankruptcy claiming that attackers used malleability attacks to drain its accounts. In this work we use traces of the Bitcoin network for over a year preceding the filing to show that, while the problem is real, there was no widespread use of malleability attacks before the closure of MtGox.
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