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New message from Mt. Gox

mtgox.com

61–70 of 181 posts

Re: New message from Mt. Gox

#61
I don't understand why people put their money/BitCoins in MtGox, if you researched them (previous to this incident) you would find a large number of complaints and shady dealings.

Personally, I put my coins in BTC-e, Virtuex, and CoinBase (and thank god I did). Even though BTC-e and Virtuex seemed fairly sketchy they still allowed me to withdrawal my coins with no issue.

Re: New message from Mt. Gox

#62
Best case speculation: they really are being acquired by a more competent exchange, or consortium of competent exchanges, who decided to step in to prevent further harm to Bitcoin's reputation. Hence the hidden message in the html, the acquisition of the "gox.com" domain, and the suspending of all transactions until the official announcement.

Re: New message from Mt. Gox

#63
post #43

CONSPIRACY THEORY TIME. What if Mt. Gox didn't really lose a post-Panamax boatload of Bitcoin (just a small amount)? They're just manufacturing a panic so they can buy Bitcoins at fire-sale prices, declare "We have all the BitCoin we need after all, we fixed our bug, everything's fiiiine" and maybe even turn a cash profit on the upside?

They also mentioned buying back at low prices in one of those leaked documents. What I don't understand is why people would continue selling at any reasonable volumes at firesale prices when other exchanges are doing "fine" (Bitstamp down ~25% vs 2 months ago). Unless I misunderstand it, the malleability bug won't prevent sending btc to other wallets. Is mtgox going to block their users from sending btc and only allo…

I think you do misunderstand it -- no one has been able to transfer bitcoin out of MtGox for weeks now.

Re: New message from Mt. Gox

#64
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was any evidence of that they'd go to jail for a long time - even if bitcoin is not directly regulated, I'm sure there are still some anti-fraud regulations that would kick in...

Yeah, regulated or not, that would almost certainly qualify as wire fraud, at the very least.

Does "wire fraud" even exist anywhere else in the world besides the good old USofA?

Re: New message from Mt. Gox

#65
post #55

www.gox.com is now redirecting to mtgox.com. For an organisation which is insolvent they must have invested a fairly significant sum on a 3 letter .com domain. This happened yesterday! What's going on here?

Insolvent != no money in the bank

Re: New message from Mt. Gox

#66
post #42

I'm one of those who lost a good amount on MtGox. It wasn't in there because I thought they are a bank, I put it there because I like to speculate from time to time. As such I was prepared to lose most if not all of it anyway. I didn't expect things to go wrong so thoroughly, but still that was the premise of my deposits there. So from that perspective, I'm not really mad about them losing the money. It's unfortunate…

> or at the very least they don't give a crap about anything at all

They were the market leader, with substantial revenue and lots of cash flow.

Why they didn't prioritize hiring some people and securing their platform is still beyond my understanding. It's up there with the $100+ billion in cash Apple is evidently not using to hire enough code reviewers or implement adequate security processes for their most important and sensitive code that supports their entire (massively profitable) business.

I really wonder where people's priorities are. They're not total morons; it must be an interesting reason why these circumstances happen. It's not hard to solve these problems with money - so there has to be a neat (if utterly dysfunctional) story behind it.

Seriously, guys. Spend $20 on a flu shot for your golden goose.

Re: New message from Mt. Gox

#67
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also mentioned buying back at low prices in one of those leaked documents. What I don't understand is why people would continue selling at any reasonable volumes at firesale prices when other exchanges are doing "fine" (Bitstamp down ~25% vs 2 months ago). Unless I misunderstand it, the malleability bug won't prevent sending btc to other wallets. Is mtgox going to block their users from sending btc and only allo…

Presumably when Mt Gox's bank accounts get seized, whatever money in them will be used to pay off accounts with real currency balances. The people holding bitcoins will get nothing.

That brings up a point of confusion for me. As understand the news, Mt Gox didn't lose a single dollar. They lost 700K BTC. It is neither being pedantic, nor beside the point that this is not the same as $400M. It is the point.

Re: New message from Mt. Gox

#68
post #10

I would not like to be in the shoes of mtgox CEO... He lost about 400M USD, some of them probably belonging to shady peoples (drug dealer, mobs, etc.)

Given their physical office location I wonder if any Yakuza have(had) any BTC in MtGOX. That could get interesting.

Those kinds of guys don't seem like the type to trade cash, which they know well, for magical internet money that they know nothing about.

Re: New message from Mt. Gox

#69

Are you kidding me? This message is likely worse than staying silent.

Silent would be worse. At least we know that the site is deliberately disabled by its owners, as opposed to a host of other hypotheticals we'd be discussing otherwise.

No. Because this shows that they aren't using some sort of professional crisis management team and are trying to handle it in house. That's ridiculous. They keep showing themselves incapable of handling such a high profile company.

Re: New message from Mt. Gox

#70
post #66
post #42

I'm one of those who lost a good amount on MtGox. It wasn't in there because I thought they are a bank, I put it there because I like to speculate from time to time. As such I was prepared to lose most if not all of it anyway. I didn't expect things to go wrong so thoroughly, but still that was the premise of my deposits there. So from that perspective, I'm not really mad about them losing the money. It's unfortunate…

> or at the very least they don't give a crap about anything at all They were the market leader, with substantial revenue and lots of cash flow. Why they didn't prioritize hiring some people and securing their platform is still beyond my understanding. It's up there with the $100+ billion in cash Apple is evidently not using to hire enough code reviewers or implement adequate security processes for their most importa…

I couldn't agree with this more. It's human nature not to prepare for a theoretical risk. But once it's happened to you, and to many others in the same industry, it's just foolishness not to invest in prevention.

I imagine there's also a bit of outsider-preference going on here. There's no lack of people who could have been hired to implement controls and audits that would have easily caught a slow leak of coins, but they're part of the Obsolete Fiat Economy and thus irrelevant. "Dunning-Krugerrands", indeed.

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