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MtGox.com is offline

mtgox.com

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Re: MtGox.com is offline

#531

Post by tlrobinson »

cmdkeen wrote: post #329
tlrobinson wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Transacting under the auspices of a neutral, trusted third party is what money means." Can you explain this a little more? How do I need to trust a 3rd party when I use, say, gold as money?

Are you a qualified assayer? You trust the other person is giving you gold, or you trust the individual who tests it. You trust the system that provides you with an understanding of the relative value of the gold you're holding so that you aren't massively overpaying. There's a reason Jesus through the money changers out of the temple - they were abusing that 3rd party trust.

Ok, this is one area where Bitcoin is demonstrably better than pretty much any other form of money: it's cryptographically impossible to counterfeit.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#532

Post by tlrobinson »

saalweachter wrote: post #444
tlrobinson wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Transacting under the auspices of a neutral, trusted third party is what money means." Can you explain this a little more? How do I need to trust a 3rd party when I use, say, gold as money?

You are relying on third parties to accept the gold you receive for approximately the same value you spent to obtain it. You have some apples, and Alice has some oranges. You would like some oranges, but Alice doesn't want any apples. So you go to Bob and sell Bob some apples for gold. You give Bob a bushel of apples, Bob gives you a bar of gold. Now you go take this bar of gold to Alice and try to trade it to Alice…

There's a big difference between trusting you'll be able to trade something which has historically been valued by a lot of people at a certain amount, and trusting someone won't steal your money, which is generally what people mean when referring to a "trusted third party".

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#533

Post by tlrobinson »

pjc50 wrote: post #302
tlrobinson wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Transacting under the auspices of a neutral, trusted third party is what money means." Can you explain this a little more? How do I need to trust a 3rd party when I use, say, gold as money?

If you do that, you need to store it on your own premises and hand-deliver it. You can't do internet transactions that way. Crucially you can't do credit, which is a practical requirement of most business.

My question wasn't suggesting gold was a good form of money, I was trying to understand why people believe all money requires a "trusted 3rd party".

Anyway, Bitcoin does not require a trusted 3rd party any more so than gold does.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#534

Post by kdragon »

saalweachter wrote: post #375
foxhill wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's this kind of thinking that really irks me. "Well, my $100 still adds up to $100, so it's all there."

Yeah, you money is there. Maybe it holds the same value as yesterday, or tomorrow. But over time, your taxes will go up, prices of things you buy will go up, inflation will rise, and the spending power of your $100 will become less and less.

Every bank failure, financial meltdown, and economic downturn robs your money of value. When a meltdown happens, and the FED has to prints more money to cover it up, your dollar loses value. When the price of merchandise goes up, because fees go up, because bank insurance premiums rise, because they keep losing your money, your dollar loses value.

It may happen slowly and indirectly, but make no mistake, you are losing you money. The best way to cook a frog is to do it slowly, so the frog doesn't jump out of the pot.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#535

Post by grey-area »

gwern wrote: post #512
grey-area wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are making the claim that they lacked the technical foundations to generate a major currency exchange, then I daresay you are correct. Yes. Is it Magic the Gathering specifically that you object to? Clearly not. People are only pointing to the likely incompetence of someone who starts off writing a card exchange (unimportant) and switches to a currency exchange (important and hard), says 'PHP can do anything',…

> People are only pointing to the likely incompetence of someone who starts off writing a card exchange (unimportant) and switches to a currency exchange (important and hard), says 'PHP can do anything', Mark Karpeles did not write Mtgox, Jed McCaleb (edonkey2000, Ripple) did. I've been emailing with McCaleb (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mt.Gox#Possible_citogenes... ) and so far my best reconstruction of th…

Thanks for the correction on the origins. Since MagicalTux has run the site for most of its existence though as CEO and it seems developer too, I think the criticism of his methods stands.

See this scary record of a response to issues from 2011 as an example:

I'm adding some code to avoid this from happening, but nobody in their right mind would do that

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1032/what-happene...

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#536

Post by VMG »

imperialdrive wrote: post #449
VMG wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been around. What is bitcoin? From https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf‎ : Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending. Of course, t…

I think you had the only decent reply. Thank you. I know bitcoin, and was really just fishing for others that may share my view on the current state of affairs for the digital crypto currency. Some of us have been around just long enough to be aware that the field of technology doesn't create a buffer from unclean people and business characters. Also, that just because a lot of smart/clever people made something that…

Currently, this event looks like about the third or fourth-largest crisis of the currency and has had very moderate on the valuation, although this might change in the coming weeks.

Many people in the field are very ethical and think that an improvement to the current financial system is of great benefit to humanity.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#537

Post by taejo »

EGreg wrote: post #519
taejo wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What happened to the hard drives with the wallet numbers and private keys? The hard drives are still there, but the wallets are empty. The coins were stolen.

Are you sure? I haven't heard of any coins being stolen. MtGox said the coins were safe and they just had trouble transferring them because of their client and malleable transactions!

Malleable transactions don't make it harder to transfer coins, they make it easier.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#538

Post by dnautics »

naiyt wrote: post #104
dnautics wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, anyone who didn't think that bitcoin is incredibly risky (with a high upside) was living under a rock, There are best practicies when dealing with a risky asset such as BTC, and they're really not that hard. Speaking of which, I should probably get around to implementing those best practices myself =D

Yeah...the only money I've personally put into any cryptocurrency has always been with the understanding that it may either be worth nothing tomorrow or could be lost in an instant. (But I also don't store my coins in an exchange, so that helps.)

I just set up a complex series of recurring draws to btc to reconcile being paid weekly with paying bills monthly. This could either be really awesome or really catastrophic!

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#539

Post by dfc »

meowface wrote: post #485
dfc wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this related to my comment?

Your advice for specifying that he give an explanation for his edit generally goes above what most people do when they edit posts. So I am assuming you are probably someone who applies that same sensitibility to writing descriptive commit messages, because similarly to people editing Internet posts/comments without specifying what they changed, many people leave very vague or meaningless commit messages.

Now I get it. I was not sure where you were going with this.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#540

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

deciplex wrote: post #521
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, thats what I thought too, until I read this little gem, suggesting that OpenSSL was written by monkeys: http://www.peereboom.us/assl/assl/html/openssl.html Its kinda hard to disagree with that conclusion.

OpenSSH is not OpenSSL.

Dang, guess that joke's on me. Wouldn't have realized it, thx for the correction.
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