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MtGox.com is offline

mtgox.com

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Re: MtGox.com is offline

#411

Post by eli »

mrcwinn wrote: post #385
chii wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, is it better to have a hacked MVP released in production, or spend forever making it and never actually releasing it and then missing the window?

I can tell you absolutely, without question, that when it comes to security and people's funds, there is nothing courageous about a hacked MVP in production. There's a difference between someone's to-do app one weekend, and this case. If you are handling people's money directly or indirectly, you need to care about that and take it seriously. Or don't ship.

Well I would argue that the "M" in MVP would necessitate never losing anyone's money. If I were going to create a trading platform, I'd probably start with one that only accepted Play Money.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#412

Post by bakhy »

jfoster wrote: post #352
bakhy wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

organization is not a living being. it does not "die" like that, and any damages which it might have to pay, it might reduce by suing NDA violators. why not?

At this stage, sure. But unless MtGox gets revived, what about in 2 years from now? It doesn't seem likely unless the NDA is one of the assets they sell.

by that time i guess nobody would care if the NDA is violated..

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#413

Post by danielweber »

dobbsbob wrote: post #223
panarky wrote: post #115

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…

people who've been around bitcointalk and bitcoin-otc know not to use MtGox

There are a lot of forums on the Internet. It's not confidence-building, at all, to tell people "if you hang out on the right forum you know what's safe." Especially because "the right forum" is not written in stone.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#414

Post by ceejayoz »

coldtea wrote: post #326
waterlesscloud wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this mean we shouldn't trust "coldtea" to develop anything? I'm the last person to defend Karpeles' competency, but his internet alias has nothing to do with it.

> Does this mean we shouldn't trust "coldtea" to develop anything? Of course you shouldn't. If you were to here him (well, me) you'd ask for my CV -- if not an interview also. And if it was like "developed some random toy stuff" you wouldn't hire me to develop a money exchange playing with other people's millions of dollars. And if you were to assess if you will put $10,000 in a financial online service made by me, m…

> I mean, it might be prejudice, but "Ives, Rockefeller and Berstein" as a financial service just feels more secure than "$uper7eetMoneyMakah", "LuvFlamingoes" or "MagicalTux".

How do you feel about "Bear Stearns" or "Lehman Brothers"?

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#415

Post by haberman »

panarky wrote: post #206
haberman wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

People in 1989 didn't exhibit a nearly religious devotion to ARPANET as perfect in every way, going so far as to say things like "Bitcoin cannot fail, it can only be failed" (do people realize how absurd this sounds?)

When every one of Bitcoin's characteristics (deflationary money supply, irreversibility of transactions, completely public record) is touted as an unmitigated advantage, it is irritating to those of us who see it as an interesting idea and cool technology with both plusses and minuses.

ARPANET isn't superior to post offices in every way; for example you can't send a package through ARPANET. And in fact one of the Internet's biggest winners Amazon.com built its success largely on being really good at shipping.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#416

Post by o_nate »

goxxed wrote: post #346

Have anyone started analyzing the blockchain for these suspicious 'leaks' out of Gox? This might be one of the addresses: https://blockchain.info/address/1Drt3c8pSdrkyjuBiwVcSSixZwQt... You can see that over the past months there has been tons of large transfers out to addresses ( https://blockchain.info/address/1pnHxHzRQ1uE4rH9KtxYKhVDic2S... ) that end up splitting up into tons of small addresses, all of which has…

On the other thread there was some information suggesting this might be an internal account used by another exchange.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#417

Post by bunderbunder »

Crito wrote: post #360
bunderbunder wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does. . . but I think there's still plenty of room for Hanlon's Razor to remain in effect here.

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. That is to say, at the end of the day, does it really matter if this happened because Karpeles is an idiot or because Karpeles was malicious? No, the end result is the same, and possessing and wielding that shear amount of idiocy is no more excusable than just being malicious.

There's really one spot where it matters: I think that when we fail to distinguish adequately between idiocy and malice, we begin to fall into the trap of seeing all catastrophes like this as malicious in hindsight, and consequently lull ourselves into assuming that any future catastrophes must also stem from malice.

The end result being, we hinge huge decisions on the question, "Do I think this person might actually try to hurt me?" without giving adequate attention to the question, "Does this person possess sufficient competence to reliably avoid hurting me by accident?"

Not just in finance. The issue seems to come up in health care quite a bit, too. Do you really want someone who doesn't fully grasp the germ theory of disease sticking sharp objects into you after previously having stuck them into someone else? The occasional outbreaks of hepatitis associated with acupuncture suggest this is a question we might want to spend more time thinking about. Instead, we tend to not get past worries (including legitimate ones) about whether or not Big [insert_big_thing_here] is trying to hurt us.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#418

Post by danielweber »

wpietri wrote: post #264
dobbsbob wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 clicked through and thought you were being too harsh. I mean, it can be fun to make toy implementations of things as an exercise. Doing an SSH server in PHP would be entertaining if you liked PHP. You'd learn something. And then I read that his hacked-together-in-3-days ssh server was for use in production. In a hosting service. Wow. Just wow.

The part of "running a SSH server that you wrote in PHP in production" that is scary is not the "in PHP" part.

It's the "that you wrote" part.

No matter what language you write it in, you are going to mess something up. The OpenSSH guys have messed up working a lot smarter and more diligently and with more time than you have.

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#419

Post by wadetandy »

eli wrote: post #411
mrcwinn wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you absolutely, without question, that when it comes to security and people's funds, there is nothing courageous about a hacked MVP in production. There's a difference between someone's to-do app one weekend, and this case. If you are handling people's money directly or indirectly, you need to care about that and take it seriously. Or don't ship.

Well I would argue that the "M" in MVP would necessitate never losing anyone's money. If I were going to create a trading platform, I'd probably start with one that only accepted Play Money.

He did. It was called Bitcoin

Re: MtGox.com is offline

#420

Post by danielweber »

saalweachter wrote: post #376
Keyframe wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so where are people's bitcoins and cash then? Lost in void?

Taken by other people. That's the more interesting note, IMO. My understanding of the problem is that some people went to withdraw money and due to transaction malleability MtGox thought the transaction failed and resent repeatedly. But the first transaction didn't actually fail and they received their money multiple times. Whether this happened to a lot of people a little or a few people a lot, and whether they were…

This is basic failure of accounting. If you are running a bank, you need to get things to match up exactly.

In a lot of software engineering, Good Enough really is good enough. But a 5 cent discrepancy between what you actually have and what you thought you had need to be treated as seriously as a $5 million discrepancy.

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