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MtGox.com is offline

mtgox.com

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Re: MtGox.com is offline

#111

Post by fragsworth »

colinbartlett wrote: post #64
dmm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Businesses fail all the time. Most startups fail. Should we have more startup regulation? Failure is a normal part of the market. What's really scary are the businesses that are never allowed to fail.

There is a reason the SEC mandates you be an "accredited" investor with at least $200k income in the last 2 years or $1M in assets, excluding your house. How many customers ("investors") would Mt. Gox have if that same regulation was applied to them?

This is totally different from an accredited investment.

People using Mt.Gox were not investing in Mt.Gox, they were investing in USD and BTC, and allowing Mt.Gox to hold it for them.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#113

Post by carbocation »

aegiso wrote: post #99
blhack wrote: post #68

It's really easy in all of this to pile a bunch of hatred on Mark Karpeles, but please, everybody remember that he is a human being, with real human emotions, and that those things really do hurt. -- MtGox was (past tense is probably appropriate here, but for the sake of anybody who had coins there, I hope not) a startup that failed spectacularly , and publicly, and took a TON of peoples' money with it. The transacti…

If the rumors are true and Gox is tanking, I don't think Karpeles can ever adequately feel the aggregate pain that his incompetence in his role has caused MtGox customers. He deserves much worse than nasty internet comments. There are plenty of entrepreneurs on HN alone who given the resources Gox had could manage to not (unknowingly) lose half a billion dollars due to broken programming in the timespan that Gox did.…

That's too outcome oriented. Probably a less useful train of thought than focusing on the motivations, victories, and failures along the way to the outcome.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#114

Post by jamesaguilar »

blhack wrote: post #68

It's really easy in all of this to pile a bunch of hatred on Mark Karpeles, but please, everybody remember that he is a human being, with real human emotions, and that those things really do hurt. -- MtGox was (past tense is probably appropriate here, but for the sake of anybody who had coins there, I hope not) a startup that failed spectacularly , and publicly, and took a TON of peoples' money with it. The transacti…

On some level, if you lose many life savings worth of wealth through what I can only assume was gross negligence and incompetence, you should expect the hatred. It's not like you can lose hundreds of millions of dollars -- or even tens, for the pedants who want us to take the integral of the value through the buy side of the order book -- through an honest mistake. He deserves the infamy he's getting.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#115

Post by panarky »

blhack wrote: post #68

It's really easy in all of this to pile a bunch of hatred on Mark Karpeles, but please, everybody remember that he is a human being, with real human emotions, and that those things really do hurt. -- MtGox was (past tense is probably appropriate here, but for the sake of anybody who had coins there, I hope not) a startup that failed spectacularly , and publicly, and took a TON of peoples' money with it. The transacti…

There is no fucking way 700,000 BTC disappears with nobody noticing. This must have been building for a long time.

Was there never any attempt to compare BTC in wallets to customer balances?

Or did MtGox know about this problem, and hope to cover it up over time?

Either case is at least gross negligence if not criminal fraud.

Yes, we all fuck up at some point. But I don't pretend to be a surgeon and perforate a patient's aorta. Pretending to be competent to gain people's trust is fraud.

I sympathize with those who lost money in this clusterfuck.

No sympathy for Karpeles.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#116

Post by cjbarber »

OP here.

http://www.meetup.com/Bitcoin-Engineers/

This is a meetup group I created. We had our first meeting last friday. Would love to have another one this Friday - will hold it at a casual restaurant/bar on campus at Stanford.

(Disclosure - although I'm a cofounder of the Stanford Bitcoin Group this group is by me and NOT the SBG).

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#117

Post by kevinthew »

blhack wrote: post #68

It's really easy in all of this to pile a bunch of hatred on Mark Karpeles, but please, everybody remember that he is a human being, with real human emotions, and that those things really do hurt. -- MtGox was (past tense is probably appropriate here, but for the sake of anybody who had coins there, I hope not) a startup that failed spectacularly , and publicly, and took a TON of peoples' money with it. The transacti…

This is whitewashing because this isn't the same thing as a company failing. They (likely) stole millions of dollars (equivalent) from a huge base of customers. That's not the same thing as losing money for your investors, which is effectively what happens when a business actually fails.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#119

Post by nknighthb »

bdc wrote: post #77
blhack wrote: post #68

It's really easy in all of this to pile a bunch of hatred on Mark Karpeles, but please, everybody remember that he is a human being, with real human emotions, and that those things really do hurt. -- MtGox was (past tense is probably appropriate here, but for the sake of anybody who had coins there, I hope not) a startup that failed spectacularly , and publicly, and took a TON of peoples' money with it. The transacti…

No, at some point between $0 and $400,000,000[1], negligence is no longer an acceptable excuse. [1] The current market value of the claimed 700k BTC loss in USD.

$460 million vanished in minutes when Knight Capital Group deployed code to the wrong servers in 2012.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Capital_Group

Mizuho Securities lost around $400 million when a Tokyo Stock Exchange trader fat-fingered an order in 2005.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizuho_Securities

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#120

Post by jamesaguilar »

Klinky wrote: post #95
jmomo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not aware of any indication that this was a ponzi scheme. Saying that it was, without evidence, is misinformation. The loss of coins was unintentional on the behalf of MtGox. It may have been stupid that basic abc123 auditing would have probably revealed that there was a problem months/years ago, but evil has not been shown at this point in time.

An exchange that manipulates it's market to hide away losses and try to shore up it's balances starts to look a lot like a ponzi scheme after awhile.

Only given an unacceptably broad interpretation of the word "Ponzi." Fraud is the one you're looking for.
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