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MtGox.com is offline

mtgox.com

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Re: MtGox.com is offline

#371

Post by SimHacker »

imperialdrive wrote: post #236
dobbsbob wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people who've been around bitcointalk and bitcoin-otc know not to use MtGox since circa 2011 when their stunning incompetence was at it's height. Sadly there were plenty of media shill articles when Btc skyrocketed to $1,000 last year who were promoting them as the "Biggest Bitcoin exchange" without pointing people to relevant bitcointalk threads on what a nightmare that site has been over the years. If you read…

I've been around. What is bitcoin?, and who cares about whatever the hell 'Mount Gox' is?? Can we all get back to work on something meaningful to the future, family, or nature... someone we don't know about made up a currency, and some other company we also don't know about made up an 'exchange' of this 'currency' and now we still don't know what's going on and some 'bitcoins' are missing... the most it's all worth i…

Maybe you should go back around to wherever you've been around, and not be around here, where you have nothing of value to contribute and no interest in the discussion at hand. The way things work, in case you didn't learn that by being around, is that you don't post messages complaining you're not interested in a topic to discussions about that topic. So stop being around here.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#372

Post by pessimizer »

djur wrote: post #211
jmpeax wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 se…

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

If the only alternative to bailing out the banks was sitting on our hands, then yes. That's like arguing that if the fire department hadn't put the house fire out with Gatorade, the entire block would have burned.

>If you're including various stabilization programs the Fed put into place, that money was neither stolen nor given either.

Loans with below market-rate interest are giveaways. If you don't believe me, just loan me two trillion at 1% for five years. Or rather, just buy two trillion worth of treasuries for me, and send me the interest in excess of 1%.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#373

Post by pessimizer »

nerfhammer wrote: post #189
jmpeax wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And then paid it back with interest

But not market rate interest, which was about infinity for the banks that accepted loans, because they were completely insolvent. And do we get to include the spread between the actual worth of all of those shit bonds we have been purchasing from them and the par prices we have been paying?

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#375

Post by saalweachter »

foxhill wrote: post #361
ceol wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be a good analogy if we couldn't transfer money online. But, you know, we can. The whole point of Bitcoin that's been touted in pretty much every thread, hoisted up by Libertarians like a giant flag, is that it's unregulated. And now, they're all discovering why we regulated in the first place.

yes, and regulated banks/exchanges have never been the centre of financial disasters.

Not that there haven't been failures, but in the US, bank customers -- as opposed to bank shareholders or investors -- are a fairly protected class.

In 2008(?), Lehman investors were fucked, WaMu shareholders were fucked, but as a WaMu customer I was not inconvenienced in the slightest. My money was safe and I was able to freely access it every day during the transition to Chase ownership.

Now, I don't think that it is fair to compare MtGox to a bank. It was really an exchange for investors to speculate on fluctuations in exchange rates, so in the regulated financial industry you'd probably be just as fucked.

I think the take-home message from the failure of MtGox is that your risks don't just come from the volatility of the market you are investing in. You could lose your money through a crash in the market, yes, but you could also lose your money through the incompetence or malfeasance of your investment partners, through having your password stolen and your account hacked, through losing your private keys, ... If you only consider one type of risk, you will understate your total risk, and not hedge against it effectively.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#376

Post by saalweachter »

Keyframe wrote: post #331
Noxchi wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MtGox had to code custom software to interact with the bitcoin network because of their size. They coded it wrong and allowed a bug that could (and did) wipe them of their money. How is it the bitcoin network's fault?

Wait, so where are people's bitcoins and cash then? Lost in void?

Taken by other people. That's the more interesting note, IMO.

My understanding of the problem is that some people went to withdraw money and due to transaction malleability MtGox thought the transaction failed and resent repeatedly. But the first transaction didn't actually fail and they received their money multiple times.

Whether this happened to a lot of people a little or a few people a lot, and whether they were accidental beneficiaries or intentional instigators will probably never be known. But some number of people received a share of that missing 750k BTC, and I don't recall a one of them posting a "Hey, MtGox just sent me more BTC than it should have" blogpost that ended up here, so that's pretty interesting.

So the BTC aren't missing so much as illicitly redistributed.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#377

Post by saalweachter »

Lerc wrote: post #121
moultano wrote: post #86

I remember people getting angry whenever anyone pointed out that they were trusting a whole lot of their money to the Magic The Gathering Online Exchange.

And even now, that is not a valid criticism. There are many successful businesses who have started in fields only tangentially related to their final form. There will undoubtedly be many postmortems on what happened, but card trading will have very little impact on what happened.

I really, really think this is a Silicon Valley bias. You all have had pivot! pivot! pivot! Nokia used to make tires! drilled into your heads to the point that the very idea of questioning whether a team is up to a challenge has been driven out.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#378

Post by driverdan »

vesinisa wrote: post #205
driverdan wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand what a Ponzi scheme is.

If MtGox actually had much none of the BTC they showed on their clients accounts, it was exactly that – a Ponzi scheme. Not sure if it changes the matter whether they did it intentionally or not.

No, that's a different type of fraud or downright incompetence. A Ponzi is when investors who are expecting positive returns are intentionally paid with other investors' money. That's not what happened here. Exchanges don't offer investments.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#379

Post by chii »

wpietri wrote: post #264
dobbsbob wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people who've been around bitcointalk and bitcoin-otc know not to use MtGox since circa 2011 when their stunning incompetence was at it's height. Sadly there were plenty of media shill articles when Btc skyrocketed to $1,000 last year who were promoting them as the "Biggest Bitcoin exchange" without pointing people to relevant bitcointalk threads on what a nightmare that site has been over the years. If you read…

I clicked through and thought you were being too harsh. I mean, it can be fun to make toy implementations of things as an exercise. Doing an SSH server in PHP would be entertaining if you liked PHP. You'd learn something. And then I read that his hacked-together-in-3-days ssh server was for use in production. In a hosting service. Wow. Just wow.

well, is it better to have a hacked MVP released in production, or spend forever making it and never actually releasing it and then missing the window?

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#380

Post by moe »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #308
Noxchi wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MtGox had to code custom software to interact with the bitcoin network because of their size. They coded it wrong and allowed a bug that could (and did) wipe them of their money. How is it the bitcoin network's fault?

> How is it the bitcoin network's fault? Because the protocol is broken with regards to tracking transactions and that has been acknowledged. Even the official implementation got it wrong. It needs to be fixed because the workaround just does not scale.

the workaround just does not scale.

That is nonsense.

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