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From the forum:

Eligius already will accept any transaction, "standard" or not, without bias.

...

Indeed, and Eligius' willingness to do so indirectly cost MTGOX many thousands of bitcoins when a software bug caused them to send some weird transactions that Eligius mined.

Can anyone provide a reference that explain this incident? When did it occur?

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    Good heavens, this is like blaming Linus Torvalds because you deleted all the data on your Linux machine with "rm -rf". Have you no clue how bitcoin works?
    – eldentyrell
    Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 5:31
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    Yeah, Mt Gox lost the Bitcoins because they issued transactions that spent the Bitcoins but had outputs nobody could claim. The spec is clear that a miner's sole responsibility is to make sure the transactions properly claim their inputs. In general, there is no way to tell if the outputs are claimable.
    – David Schwartz
    Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 6:06
  • @eldentyrell - the title is a direct quote that I'm inquiring about. A legitimate answer would be "it is Mt. Gox's fault, not Eligius'". I have reverted your edit, please don't redo it.
    – ripper234
    Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 7:06
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    And there he goes trying to revert my revert, claiming that his original edit was an "admin-approved edit". Lovely.
    – ripper234
    Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 8:03
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    @eldentyrell - thanks for putting this on Meta and not linking to it from here. Luckily I picked today to open Meta. meta.bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/228/…
    – ripper234
    Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 9:10

1 Answer 1

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It refers to an occurrence in October 2011 when someone sent a lot of bitcoins to an incorrect public address: someone fucked up and lost ALOT of money . Casascius stated that he thinks it was done by Luke-Jr's Eligius mining pool: Re: someone fucked up and lost ALOT of money

The way I understand it, these transactions were nonstandard enough that normal miners and clients would already refuse to relay or process them (but will accept them in a mined block). And that the only way these got into a block was that he teamed up with Luke-Jr's Eligius mining pool which has been modified to explicitly allow these nonstandard transactions for a fee (or other negotiated arrangement).

Earlier from the same thread, Re: someone fucked up and lost ALOT of money:

Maybe this helps. It seems MtGox made a mistake somewhere.

MagicalTux: that's a problem, but not the worst problem we ever faced

MagicalTux: all the broken withdraws have been re-issued

MagicalTux: just spent one week of BTC-only income

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    Since only MtGox holds the private keys for their wallets, it is impossible for it to have been "done" by Eligius. MtGox admits to having formed the erroneous transaction themselves. Eligius cannot mine a transaction unless it was formed by the person holding the private keys for the outputs involved.
    – eldentyrell
    Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 5:29
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    @eldentyrell: Of course mtgox messed up. But this mess up resulted in nonstandard transactions, and if Eligius (or whoever included them in a block) had rejected them (which may or may not have been the right thing to do), mtgox wouldn't have lost the coins.
    – Meni Rosenfeld
    Commented Jan 16, 2012 at 6:22

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