Live data from Hacker News

MtGox.com is offline

mtgox.com

211–220 of 553 posts

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#211
post #168

So 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.

You're forgetting the 3 trillion the US government stole from its citizens and gave to the banks.

TARP was only about 250 billion and it's been repaid with interest. It was neither stolen nor given.

If you're including various stabilization programs the Fed put into place, that money was neither stolen nor given either. It was created using sovereign authority that is granted to the Federal Reserve by law.

The citizens of the US would be immensely poorer today if the world financial system had collapsed into a second Great Depression.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#212
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 patie…

[deleted]

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#213
post #172

Will anyone be able to get their bitcoins from MtGox? They said the bitcoins were safe. What changed? Will they be transferred eventually? What are the chances?

Gox coins are gone,along with all the customer fiat.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeeaaahh regulated companies that handle vast amounts of money for their customers never get into any trouble.

If you're talking about banks, they're insured and if the bank fails you still get your money back though.

You mean with that $25B that FDIC has to insure $10T of deposits? That insurance? http://www.occ.gov/topics/capital-markets/financial-markets/...

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#215
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would any existing regulated system handle a similar situation to this? Or are you suggesting that bad things like this never happen in regulated systems?

Bailouts.

Bailouts, plus a regulatory apparatus making fraud and deception harder to get away with, plus criminal and civil liability for illegal financial activity.

But what's the state good for anyway?

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#216
post #186
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, sure. It would be pretty idiotic to suggest that every rule ever thought up was a good idea.

It sounds like you're saying that having rules (as opposed to having no rules) is a good idea, but only if there is some mechanism that makes good rules more likely than bad rules.

That mechanism is called "liberal democracy". It's been fairly effective so far.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#217
post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bailouts.

Bailouts, plus a regulatory apparatus making fraud and deception harder to get away with, plus criminal and civil liability for illegal financial activity. But what's the state good for anyway?

By "civil liability," do you mean fining a company $10M for stealing $100B? And let's not pretend that bankers go to jail often.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#218
The tendency of institutions to deny, cover up and conceal systems exploitation is one of the major failing of contemporary culture.

This is how we lied ourselves into thinking that the iOS SSL stack was trustworthy and it applies equally to the Mt. Gox situation.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#219
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this[0] the HyperVM guy may have had a family history of suicide. [0] http://www.itwire.com/business-it-news/security/25559-hyperv...

I'm having trouble understanding what you think the relevance of that might be. Obviously, when someone commits suicide, that decision ultimately rests on their shoulders and is borne of their experience/history/state/what-have-you. GP was trying to make a broader point about the difference in levels of significance between a catastrophic business fuck-up and the wasting of human life, a conflation that people withou…

On the general point my original parent was trying to make, I totally agree. People throwing away their lives over a business fuck-up is a waste.

I just wanted to search on the story and saw that point was made in the article I linked, and thought it was an interesting point to that specific case.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$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

Both were point mistakes, which I think anyone would agree are bad but just huge mistakes. Running what is effectively a bank that loses $400m over the course of a couple of years in a constant bleed is not a mistake, it is negligent.

The person I replied to suggested it wasn't negligence. Maybe you should argue about what words mean with him, first?
Post reply on HN