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MtGox.com is offline

mtgox.com

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Re: MtGox.com is offline

#201

Post by Klinky »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #120
Klinky wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An exchange that manipulates it's market to hide away losses and try to shore up it's balances starts to look a lot like a ponzi scheme after awhile.

Only given an unacceptably broad interpretation of the word "Ponzi." Fraud is the one you're looking for.

Halting withdrawals while still allowing deposits in an attempt to gain enough capital to payout those who were poised to withdraw sounds very ponzi-ish.

The low BTC exchange rates were both indicative of the risk, but also enticing to new exchange customers trying to strike it rich off a sinking ship.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#202

Post by A_COMPUTER »

erichurkman wrote: post #187
jamesaguilar wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On some level, if you lose many life savings worth of wealth through what I can only assume was gross negligence and incompetence, you should expect the hatred. It's not like you can lose hundreds of millions of dollars -- or even tens, for the pedants who want us to take the integral of the value through the buy side of the order book -- through an honest mistake. He deserves the infamy he's getting.

I dearly hope no one invested their life savings into Bitcoin. That said, I'm sure many did, as they tend to do into any investment that has potentially huge upswings.

https://falkvinge.net/2011/05/29/why-im-putting-all-my-savin...

You mean like Rick Falkvinge founder of the Pirate Party?

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#203

Post by crucifiction »

nknighthb wrote: post #119
bdc wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, at some point between $0 and $400,000,000[1], negligence is no longer an acceptable excuse. [1] The current market value of the claimed 700k BTC loss in USD.

$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.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#204

Post by plaguuuuuu »

colept wrote: post #166
untog wrote: post #5

Hello, downsides of unregulated currency. Some of the rules are there for a reason.

This is the very reason why Bitcoin needs to policed from a decentralized standpoint. I don't know much about the logistics of crypto-currencies but from my understanding there are public/private keys involved. It should be possible that one can blacklist their own bitcoin address by using the private key. This way at least crooks cannot make off or use the stolen coins. Do any more technical Bitcoin fanatics have an…

First, it would be pretty disastrous being able to blacklist money after spending it (by giving it to someone else)

Second, AFAIK crooks need the private key to steal it, so wouldn't work anyway.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#205

Post by vesinisa »

driverdan wrote: post #144
guelo wrote: post #36

Pretty good Ponzi. Not as impressive as Bernie Maddof's, but extra points for the tech angle.

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.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#206

Post by panarky »

haberman wrote: post #139
panarky wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't equate Bitcoin the protocol with dodgy websites. Unlike cash, radical transparency is entirely possible with Bitcoin. Bitcoin the protocol is as strong as ever, but customers of other sites should demand proof that their exchanges and online wallets actually control 100% of the BTC they claim to have in their custody.

Yes, I think my schadenfreude is for you.

Were you that guy in 1989?

"My schadenfreude is for all of the people who smugly told us for years that ARPANET is superior to our 'legacy' post office and ham radio in every way"

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#208

Post by smellelderberry »

aegiso wrote: post #99
blhack wrote: 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…

If the rumors are true and Gox is tanking, I don't think Karpeles can ever adequately feel the aggregate pain that his incompetence in his role has caused MtGox customers. He deserves much worse than nasty internet comments. There are plenty of entrepreneurs on HN alone who given the resources Gox had could manage to not (unknowingly) lose half a billion dollars due to broken programming in the timespan that Gox did.…

> He deserves much worse than nasty internet comments.

Yeah, thanks for fanning the flames of a vigilante lynching in the making.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#209

Post by plaguuuuuu »

ryanobjc wrote: post #161
dnautics wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) unlikely, since cascading bank runs are usually a result of fractional reserve banking. Depositors in a collapsed bank are unable to pay off loans in another bank, causing collateral damage to this other bank. 2) do other exchanges have security issues? Yes. Are they vulnerable? Only time will tell. I would take Mandelbrot's modeling of insurers (banks are "insurers" of sorts) in "the (Mis)behaviour of markets[0]"…

Bitcoin exchanges will have a run - they resemble fractional reserve banking, because all exchanges dont have enough USD (or other currency) to cover every bitcoin that people might want to trade thru the exchanges (that could be every single bitcoin in existence). This obviously results in the crash of the exchange rates, and probably a reduction in the usage of the currency as well. Getting paid in something that h…

I thought that the bids/asks were all from individual people

Unless the exchange is taking btc/money from users and investing it somewhere then every btc/$ should be totally within the system, yes?

so you can either withdraw your btc or your $ as the case may be.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#210

Post by [deleted] »

panarky wrote: post #165
sheetjs wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no fucking way 700,000 BTC disappears with nobody noticing. The history of Barings Bank is interesting, primarily because the main trader Nick Leeson was in the position to mask hundreds of millions of pounds of losses. In that case, no one noticed the roughly $1.3B loss because he was in a position where the internal controls didn't apply

At Barings, Leeson was trading futures contracts and he was also responsible for accounting for his own positions. There was no segregation of duties, no mark-to-market. At MtGox, it should be much simpler to (1) add up all customer balances, (2) add up all BTC in hot and cold wallets, and (3) compare those two numbers. If the numbers differ by more than timing differences, shut it down, debug it, and prevent a small…

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