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Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy Protection

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Re: Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy Protection

#181

Post by mcdougle »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #146
mtgoxloser wrote: post #37

In this incident I lost a bit more than $500,000 USD that was in my MtGox account. I sold my Bitcoins a few months back, but the USD have been sitting in my account waiting to be withdrawn. This was a massive fuck up by MtGox, but I really do feel sorry for Mark Karpeles. He seemed really enthusiastic about Bitcoin. Right by MtGox's offices in Japan was a Bitcoin Cafe being built. You can [see here]( http://si.wsj.ne…

Did you try to get your money out of MtGox? A friend of mine has been trying to get his money (CAD) out of MtGox for 2 months. He received his money yesterday.

Where is he? I've read about a few people getting their money, but they were all in Japan moving $ into Japanese bank accounts.

I tried to withdraw a couple hundred at the start of January into a US bank account and I'm curious if I'll ever get it. It's a very small amount of money (and I paid even less to get the BTC originally), so it's not a big deal at all if I lose it all but I'd still like to get it.

Re: Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy Protection

#182

Post by aragot »

enscr wrote: post #129
aragot wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like customers should have judged by themselves it wasnt a safe van to put your valuable antiques in.

Hindsight is 20/20

Foresight too, e.g. I didn't do it. Because hosting BitCoins in an online wallet looks like a scam from a hundred miles. In a foreign country. On a website.

Hosting my emails in Gmail doesn't look safe either, to be honest, but at least it's not plain money and Google still needs to keep their reputation. For now.

Re: Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy Protection

#183

Post by [deleted] »

lmm wrote: post #114
icebraining wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a failure of a single financial institution proves the currency is a completely failure. I mean, it's not like the USD and EUR markets had any institutions that failed or needed bailouts - well, except for Northern Rock, IndyMac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, Citigroup, and AIG.

Those failures proved that USD and EUR have a system that works the way most civilized people want it to - individual investors were covered, losses were spread out, no individuals suffered catastrophe. Whereas most of the bitcoin "community" seems to take an ideological position of "everyone for himself".

[deleted]

Re: Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy Protection

#184

Post by drcode »

steven2012 wrote: post #179
drcode wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately there's ways of proving available deposits when using bitcoin. In theory at least, this can address the issue of counterparty risk. Hopefully all the exchanges will start adopting this.

Not really. If the exchange says "We have 500,000 BTC" and they publish their wallet, but their actual customer liabilities are 2M BTC, everyone can still lose a lot of money. What they really need is to be externally audited and undergo consistent regulation.

I'm talking about a more sophisticated solution that addresses this- See https://github.com/olalonde/blind-solvency-proof

Re: Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy Protection

#185

Post by wisty »

eterm wrote: post #166
ryanjshaw wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pity your post isn't at the top of the thread. It is sound advice. I find it fascinating that there are (apparently) people in this thread who lost $500k at MtGox and despite the loss would still have no problem paying $250k in taxes on it if they were required to do so. I would hope if you're making that kind of money you'd either have a sound sense of financial risk management, or the wisdom to hire somebody…

I find it fascinating that people take at face value the words of a throwaway account who is quite likely making the whole thing up, given that you'd want wealth of 100m to just shrug off 250k like that. (Based on the fact that someone worth 100k can just about shrug off 250 like its nothing).

They claim to be a miner. If I made (say) 1m, then lost 250k of it (due to risks which I was aware of when I started playing the game), I'd still be pretty happy.

I think they are just chalking it up to a cost of doing business.

If they lost 250k which they'd made from a different source, they'd be more upset. As no doubt may people are right now.

I'm not sure if it's rational. But ... that's the way people often respond.

Re: Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy Protection

#187

Post by MartinCron »

smtddr wrote: post #66
mtgoxloser wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the writing was on the wall for a long time I wish I had hindsight like you. It was only up until these few months that Bitstamp became of any competition to MtGox. Its liquidity sucked, which was why many early adopters like me stayed.

>> hindsight I'm only making this comment because you used the term "hindsight". Let me first start off by saying I feel very, very sorry for all the people who lost funds in MtGox. It'll take awhile before you get over the pain of losing a life-changing amount of money. But let's be very clear about this; hindsight wasn't needed here. The warning signs that MtGox was a house of cards became visible a long time ago.…

You also don't need hindsight to know that investing/trading/speculating in a brand new type of asset in a space with nearly zero regulatory controls is not for the faint of heart.

Just like the handful of people who realized that the Bernie Madoff claims were too good to possibly be true, they didn't need hindsight. There's a great This American Life story about one such person: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/376/w...

Re: Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy Protection

#188

Post by eterm »

wisty wrote: post #185
eterm wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it fascinating that people take at face value the words of a throwaway account who is quite likely making the whole thing up, given that you'd want wealth of 100m to just shrug off 250k like that. (Based on the fact that someone worth 100k can just about shrug off 250 like its nothing).

They claim to be a miner. If I made (say) 1m, then lost 250k of it (due to risks which I was aware of when I started playing the game), I'd still be pretty happy. I think they are just chalking it up to a cost of doing business. If they lost 250k which they'd made from a different source, they'd be more upset. As no doubt may people are right now. I'm not sure if it's rational. But ... that's the way people often res…

Given that most miners have been operating at a loss (after power, space, hardware, etc) for quite some time, I'd also take that statement with a pinch of salt.

Re: Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy Protection

#189

Post by outworlder »

smtddr wrote: post #135
mtgoxloser wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say that the article you linked is almost garbage. It glances over the "clues" very quickly which I will assume due to lack of knowledge. The complaint that passwords were displayed in plain text is not anywhere near recent. Even in 2011 when I started using MtGox, passwords were hashed. Granted, early on the passwords were only hashed with 1 pass of SHA256, but later on passwords were stored to much better st…

I can't really say anything you're saying here is false, but I still hope the lesson has been learned by most people affected. This wasn't 100% unavoidable bad luck and this kind of thing shouldn't happen to MtGox's victims twice. But perhaps I'm taking for granted my tech-knowledge(or bias opinion). Let me say some things that jumped out at me immediately as mistakes that should have never happened to begin with whe…

About the SQL injection thing: you do not need to use stored procedures, just parametrized queries. And do not 'sanitize' input text to prevent SQL injections, ever. It will bite you in the future.

Re: Mt. Gox Files for Bankruptcy Protection

#190

Post by DCoder »

smtddr wrote: post #135
mtgoxloser wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say that the article you linked is almost garbage. It glances over the "clues" very quickly which I will assume due to lack of knowledge. The complaint that passwords were displayed in plain text is not anywhere near recent. Even in 2011 when I started using MtGox, passwords were hashed. Granted, early on the passwords were only hashed with 1 pass of SHA256, but later on passwords were stored to much better st…

I can't really say anything you're saying here is false, but I still hope the lesson has been learned by most people affected. This wasn't 100% unavoidable bad luck and this kind of thing shouldn't happen to MtGox's victims twice. But perhaps I'm taking for granted my tech-knowledge(or bias opinion). Let me say some things that jumped out at me immediately as mistakes that should have never happened to begin with whe…

> I also believe there are some nice SQL sanitation libraries out there. This is not the right approach. Separating the query structure from the data is the right way to go - parametrized queries are much safer than sanitization, which is subject to all sorts of encoding headaches.
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