Live data from Hacker News

MtGox.com is offline

mtgox.com

231–240 of 553 posts

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#231

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.

The point is that these people are people - have some compassion. I failed in my last startup, fairly publicly, and got a fair amount of internet hatred, and suffice to say I was not a happy bunny. But I didnt fail with remotely the publicity this got - I can't even imagine what the mtgox people must be feeling.

If you misled people into thinking you were solvent and kept taking their money when you knew you wouldn't be able to pay it back, or if you took grossly unacceptable risks with that same money, I'm glad you were unhappy. I doubt that's what you actually did though, and you are reacting to this story out of a kind, admirable, but entirely misplaced sense of compassion for someone whose wrongs are entirely unlike your own.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#232
post #121

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 think the point is that a card game has nothing to do with a currency exchange and the same sort of skills you would need for one don't translate into another. We're talking about software we want to deal with a lot of people's money, the impact of a trading card game platform making a big mistake vs a currency exchange is much much different. I think the very real criticism is you might be willing to risk having a business that isn't necessarily super organized or secure deal with trading cards but not with your money.

The talent and quality I would want to hold each to are on completely different levels, and seeing someone pivot so frivolously from one to the other should really give you pause. A pivot rarely involves completely changing the type of business you're dealing with in the first place, the product might be completely different or the customers you're going after might change, but it usually is on some level related to what you started out doing. Because theoretically you're drawing on some experience or insight into the general sector you start a business in, not choosing something that you think might be cool but are not qualified to run or manage and potentially loose people (investors and consumers) a ton of money.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#233
post #16

So, who the other day said they would be buying if BTC felt bellow 500$? Now seems to be the time if they still believe that arbitrary value still makes sense.

I planned to and actually tried today, but... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7294217

Coinbase.com ran out of coins to sell. I gotta wait until Friday and hope the price is still sub 500.

EDIT: Whoa! Coinbase.com allowed me do it just now! http://i.imgur.com/VKvNRhN.png ...I hope this actually works.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#234
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the "black bar" treatment

When someone prominent in the hacking community dies HN puts a black bar at the top of the page as a memorial. It's not appropriate here. A human life and money are not comparable no matter how much money.

this isn't true, it is worth about 7 millions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life)

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#235
post #99
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.…

... they didn't lose half a billion dollars.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no fucking way 700,000 BTC disappears with nobody noticing. This must have been building for a long time. Was there never any attempt to compare BTC in wallets to customer balances? Or did MtGox know about this problem, and hope to cover it up over time? Either case is at least gross negligence if not criminal fraud. Yes, we all fuck up at some point. But I don't pretend to be a surgeon and perforate a patie…

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 is a laugh

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#237
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…

There is no fucking way 700,000 BTC disappears with nobody noticing. This must have been building for a long time. Was there never any attempt to compare BTC in wallets to customer balances? Or did MtGox know about this problem, and hope to cover it up over time? Either case is at least gross negligence if not criminal fraud. Yes, we all fuck up at some point. But I don't pretend to be a surgeon and perforate a patie…

if there is no fucking way, then where is the news

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#238
post #213
post #172

Will anyone be able to get their bitcoins from MtGox? They said the bitcoins were safe. What changed? Will they be transferred eventually? What are the chances?

Gox coins are gone,along with all the customer fiat.

What do you mean gone? What happened to the hard drives with the wallet numbers and private keys? How hard is it to transfer them via the blockchain transactions to their owners?

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#239

Hmm... It seems I was wrong. Well, damn. Oh well.

I'm sorry this didn't work out. I want to hope that they'll at least try to pay people back, but I can't bring myself to believe there's any funds to fill what they've lost.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#240

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…

An exchange shouldn't be able to have a run, unless their assets are less than their deposits. They don't give you BTC or USD at the spot price. You buy the one you want from another person, and then you withdraw it from the exchange.
Post reply on HN