In a strange way, I feel this merits the HN black bar treatment if only because of its historical import.
What is the "black bar" treatment
MtGox.com is offline
141–150 of 553 posts
Re: MtGox.com is offline
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plumbing my memory, I can add another: Brazil The cruzeiro was replaced by the "cruzeiro real" literally "real cruzeiro", as a hack to recover from poor fiscal policy resulting in hyperinflation. The cruzeiro real was then replaced by the 'real'. Imagine things getting so bad that the government decides to rebrand its old currency as 'fake'.
But that's another example of a currency collapsing as a result of external (political) pressures. This was something that Bitcoin did all by itself.
The failure of one exchange is not a currency collapse.
Re: MtGox.com is offline
#143It'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…
A couple of years ago a server management application called HyperVM had a 0day due to some questionable programming, hundreds of thousands of websites were lost along with a lot of money... the next day the creator took his own life. A lot of people are going to be in a very bad position right now (both customers and people inside mtgox), let's hope it doesn't come to that.
October 19, 1987 was "Black Monday" as US equity markets crashed. A number of Wall Street bankers defenestrated themselves because they lost so much money.
I hope that customers of MtGox don't do the same thing when they realize how much they've lost.
I also hope Karpeles doesn't harm himself, though we should have at least as much concern for the customers as we have for the proprietor.
Re: MtGox.com is offline
#144Pretty good Ponzi. Not as impressive as Bernie Maddof's, but extra points for the tech angle.
I don't think you understand what a Ponzi scheme is.
Re: MtGox.com is offline
#145With credit to /r/bitcoin, I got a chuckle out of this one: Sorry, due to a major bug in the WWW protocol, our website is temporarily unavailable. Thank you for your patience while we await Al Gore's instruction!
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Re: MtGox.com is offline
#146So Mt. Gox has defrauded its users of half a BILLION dollars in value. And, they've put out enough misinformation that those users believe "it wuz a hax0r that did it". So no cops, no jail sentences. I believe this will go down in history as the largest fraud ever committed. If you've been following this closely and you aren't writing the book already, you're missing out.
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Re: MtGox.com is offline
#147So Mt. Gox has defrauded its users of half a BILLION dollars in value. And, they've put out enough misinformation that those users believe "it wuz a hax0r that did it". So no cops, no jail sentences. I believe this will go down in history as the largest fraud ever committed. If you've been following this closely and you aren't writing the book already, you're missing out.
> I believe this will go down in history as the largest fraud ever committed.
Not even close. Madoff's fraud was in the tens of billions.
Re: MtGox.com is offline
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
The website and the company are not the same thing.
They are both dead. See the statements.
Uh, it doesn't work that way.
A competitor does not get to put out a statement and declare a company dead. That's laughable.
The company itself can't even do that, it needs to unwind positions first at a minimum. It can take years to shut down a "dead" company, and until then all NDA's and contracts remain valid (although potentially unenforceable).
Re: MtGox.com is offline
#149Did I just loose all my coins I had with them?
Yes, but in return you are learning a valuable lesson, which is that "loose" spells the word that means the opposite of tight and the word you were looking for is "lose", which is the opposite of win or gain.
I'm impressed, how did you manage to understand what he meant?
Re: MtGox.com is offline
#150It'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 patie…
> There is no fucking way 700,000 BTC disappears with nobody noticing.
The history of Barings Bank is interesting, primarily because the main trader Nick Leeson was in the position to mask hundreds of millions of pounds of losses. In that case, no one noticed the roughly $1.3B loss because he was in a position where the internal controls didn't apply