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Why Mt. Gox, the World’s First Bitcoin Exchange, is Dying

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41–43 of 43 posts

Re: Why Mt. Gox, the World’s First Bitcoin Exchange, is Dying

#41

Dear god, I hope so. Mtgox is the giant raging zit on the face of Bitcoin. The software and service are so terribly, inexcusably bad, and they have always been that way. The market price on Mtgox has been artificially high ever since I can remember, because no one can withdraw their money. Users wait for their withdrawals for weeks, and sometimes months. As a result, a dollar in your Mtgox account is worth less than…

coinbase is just as bad

Re: Why Mt. Gox, the World’s First Bitcoin Exchange, is Dying

#42
I'm ignorant as to how BTC exchanges work. Is there a market maker providing liquidity or do the exchanges take inventory themselves? Any info for this would be appreciated. Insofar as uneducated guesses go, I suspect they are facing a "bank run" liquidity crisis based on them taking inventory and not having the capital to accommodate withdrawals.

Re: Why Mt. Gox, the World’s First Bitcoin Exchange, is Dying

#43
post #37
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said they were "OK" with anything? It's just information for understanding the situation. I'm unhappy when ATM outages or erroneous fraud alerts prevent me from using my cash or credit, but I understand that such situations are different from dishonesty or insolvency.

> Who said they were "OK" with anything? The casual tone by which people (including you) were discussing this. If a bank had even week long issues like that people would be frothing at the mouths (and rightly so). > It's just information for understanding the situation. Yes, it's the "understanding" part that I don't get (except if it's pure technical curiosity, but from the excuses people make in this thread it does…

> I wouldn't try to "understand" a restaurant that served my cochroaches in my pizza, I'd just avoid it and bad mouth it to everybody I know.

This is Hacker News, where we like to "understand" enormous failures, even if we don't have "patience and understanding" for them.

I think the point of the people talking about the technical glitch, is to counter everyone saying "BTC is perfectly frictionless, therefore if Gox can't give me BTC they must not have any!" nullc/gmaxwell gives credible technical explanations for why spending thousands of BTC in daily volume from various sources through a volume-necessitated custom implementation of Bitcoin, can actually be non-trivial. You're free to think Gox is incompetent, or that the pizzeria is unclean, but that doesn't mean you can't have interest in how they got that way.

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