271–280 of 319 posts
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There are 21 million bitcoins and they divide down to 8dp, so you need 16 decimal digits to represent them exactly. Coincidentally (?) double precision floating point is capable of precisely representing exactly 16 decimal digits. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_precision So using double is in fact perfectly OK in this case.
16 digits of precision != 16 digits of accuracy.
This guy doesn't really have a leg to stand on. Just like when the flash crash happened on the real stock market, transactions are going to be rolled back. One thing that has become abundantly clear from reading all of the comments on the Bitcoin forums is that the investing knowledge of most BTC traders is much less than your average equities, fixed income, or ForEx trader. MtGox is a pretty low budget operation, bu…
A regional bank in New England recently prevailed with exactly that argument in court.
In regards to this MtGox issue using the same argument, if it is known that an attack did happen, an that attack was directed at MtGox directly, then yes, they should roll back that trade because someone is out money/BTC due to an attack that could not have been prevented by that account holder. The only way to legitimately know who is responsible for the sell off is to be transparent, however, it seems that MtGox hasn't fully released details of the incident and we are all speculating on what exactly happened.
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Heh. Do you think your banking institution is better?
Absolutely. For every person who wants to get into Mt Gox there's likely a thousand who'd love to do the same to Citibank et al.
http://consumerist.com/2011/06/how-hackers-stole-200000-citi...
The community that for months has been preaching the virtues of the currency nobody can control is suddenly arguing that a middleman should roll back a bunch of free-market transactions. I decided a while ago that arguing against the "bitcoin has no problems" crowd was futile: people are too enamored with the idea to see problems like this until they happen.
This would make no sense if you supported a decentralized cryptocurrency, but would make perfect sense if you were worried about losing the ability to cash out of your penny stock of choice when, due to freak coincidence, a separate scam targeting the same stock imploded prior to you being able to unload the shares you had acquired for fractions of a cent at $17+ each. The Bitcoin "community" is an emergent, distribu…
If you want to view BTC as a currency, it doesn't look that way... IMO.
The poster makes some good points about the inconsistencies in Mt. Gox's handling of things, but it seems to me that he's ascribing to malice what is well explained by incompetence on the part of the person or people running the site. The security practices are appalling, and their lack of clarity on the counter-party issue is damning. If I were Kevin---or, indeed, any customer of that exchange---I'd take my money an…
>fault of the Mt Gox admins Mt Gox is run in such amateurish way, it's appalling. In real life, with many brokers you trade doesn't close in 3 days and as such you can't withdraw proceeds from the trade for 3 days (but you can use the proceeds to continue trading). In this situation Mt Gox is effectively both exchange and the broker. Not to have rule in place to block funds from recent transactions is like people who…
I blame hubris. Bitcoin is an enterprise where tech-focused people think they have a better (or at least equivalent) solution than what decades or centuries of economics and finance or whatever have come up with. An over-focus on its legitimate advantages and their own abilities ends up blinding people like this to the lessons of experience from the old model and from domain experts. In a very real sense, because they're convinced it's better and that they know what they need to know from economics and finance and banking, they're going to keep making the mistakes that the people they're replacing solved long ago.
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This would make no sense if you supported a decentralized cryptocurrency, but would make perfect sense if you were worried about losing the ability to cash out of your penny stock of choice when, due to freak coincidence, a separate scam targeting the same stock imploded prior to you being able to unload the shares you had acquired for fractions of a cent at $17+ each. The Bitcoin "community" is an emergent, distribu…
If you want to view BTC as a commodity, it does look very boiler-room-y. If you want to view BTC as a currency, it doesn't look that way... IMO.
BTC appears entirely dysfunctional as currency.
"currency refers to a generally accepted medium of exchange." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency
BTC is neither generally accepted nor does it have the STABLE VALUE needed to become more accepted as a medium of exchange. And last element is something the Bitcommunists just utterly miss. Because a currency is medium, just a means, it will not function unless its value is stable. Not decreasing OR increasing.
Whenever the BTC shills tout the increasing value, they've accomplished the old "switch-a-roo" from currency to speculative commodity.
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I'm not really sure I agree with this. The right to sell something is predicated on owning the item in question. A buyer of stolen goods is unable to take legal ownership, it doesn't matter if he doesn't know the item is stolen. (i.e. I steal a car, and sell it to you, you don't own the car even though you gave me money and you didn't know the car was stolen) It does matter that the coins were not put up for sale by…
So, would you say the same if I placed a standing buy order two weeks ago, and it was automatically executed? How is a buyer supposed to know if the seller is making a bona fide offer, esp. where the buyer may place its buy order in advance of the sell order? I stand by my position that it's up to the exchange and the seller to protect against unauthorized sell orders. Of course, under extreme circumstances, the buye…
The buyer isn't liable as he didn't know the property was stolen, but he don't get to keep the property. Typically in this case he would need to seek damages from the exchange to recover his assets (the dollars used in the trade)
IANAL but I have first hand seen this type of stuff on various exchanges. (i.e. stock gets fraudulently wired out one account, and sold. Trades get busted)
It sucks all around, but the fact of the matter is the great deal the buyer was getting never would have existed if somebody didn't steal from someone else. If I stole your life savings and sold it to your neighbor for a dollar, you don't really think your neighbor should be able to keep it do you?
Buying stolen goods on an exchange doesn't make it ok. It sounds to me that you'd like it to be - but that isn't how it works.
The poster makes some good points about the inconsistencies in Mt. Gox's handling of things, but it seems to me that he's ascribing to malice what is well explained by incompetence on the part of the person or people running the site. The security practices are appalling, and their lack of clarity on the counter-party issue is damning. If I were Kevin---or, indeed, any customer of that exchange---I'd take my money an…
>fault of the Mt Gox admins Mt Gox is run in such amateurish way, it's appalling. In real life, with many brokers you trade doesn't close in 3 days and as such you can't withdraw proceeds from the trade for 3 days (but you can use the proceeds to continue trading). In this situation Mt Gox is effectively both exchange and the broker. Not to have rule in place to block funds from recent transactions is like people who…
The problem is that the entire Bitcoin model has the same weakness. There's no rule for rolling back a bitcoin transaction because there couldn't be such a single authority because bitcoin is merely a "decentralized" algorithm.
This illustrate one of the inherent problems of Bitcoin. Any currency system today must be based not on simple transfers but on valid transactions. Valid transactions require that there exists an authority to validate those transactions.
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It's not a BitCoin problem, this entire episode revolves around one exchange (MtGox) and its security problems. Mt Gox Exchange =/= BTC Currency Nasdaq Exchange =/= USD Currency
The market intervention that people are demanding is only possible because Mt Gox is a centralized exchange. Had this been a hack of a pure BitCoin client, it would have been even worse, because the theft would have been irreversible. If the community wants rollbacks when transactions aren't "fair," what's the point of BitCoin again?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>fault of the Mt Gox admins Mt Gox is run in such amateurish way, it's appalling. In real life, with many brokers you trade doesn't close in 3 days and as such you can't withdraw proceeds from the trade for 3 days (but you can use the proceeds to continue trading). In this situation Mt Gox is effectively both exchange and the broker. Not to have rule in place to block funds from recent transactions is like people who…
The three day settlement rule applies to the NY equity markets. Other markets, including NY fixed income products, run under different rules, including same day settlement. And this isn't a fraud prevention measure, it's a legacy of the days when settlement included someone carting a stack of stock certificates from one bank's vault to another. Lastly, most traders trade on a contractual basis, not a settlement basis…
1. In the US, most exchange operators are the counter-parties to all trades. They also interact with settlement and clearing services that ensure the verification of proper ownership and conveyance of securities. In the old days, something like a third of all trades failed to meet the three-day window because some part of this process would fail.
2. There are very very specific rules regarding how the orders are crossed (buy and sell side) and which orders take precedence in the (limit order) book. It looks like the MtGox guys didn't think this through and the trader in question took advantage of this naivete on the part of MtGox.
3. Most exchanges are "brokered" to facilitate trades while MtGox is more like a swap-meet. Brokered exchanges are more expensive to trade in but they have the advantage that brokers can "know" how to get price-improvement based on market conditions. In short, they are "informed traders" vs the "uninformed traders" you see in most post/notice markets. When the informed meet the uninformed, you see situations like this where someone takes the whole shebang home.
Personally, I find it amusing that the Bitcoin fanboys are clamoring for intervention here. It's almost like they are getting to the idea that a strong regulatory environment is a /good/ thing for the free market. If this were the cryptopunk/libertarian paradise that everyone dreams of for Bitcoin, there would be /no/ recourse.