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Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows

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Re: Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows

#61

Post by my_username_is_ »

pmorici wrote: post #45
dsjoerg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anyplace I can go to get the summary of advice from the Sage Old Veteran Bitcoin Graybeards?

bitcointalk.org or the bitcoin subredit has this info plastered all over the place. Also before you do business with any BTC company you should probably search Google and Pacer for pending lawsuits. BFL has had lawsuits pending against it in state and federal court alleging fraud since at least late Nov. 2013 but no one noticed until yesterday because they named BFL as "BF Labs" which is an uncommon way of referring…

I'd steer clear of /r/bitcoin. It's been declining in quality consistently over the several months. bitcointalk or /r/bitcoinserious or even /r/bitcoinbeginners should give you better advice

Re: Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows

#62

Post by yebyen »

popctrl wrote: post #47
plg wrote: post #8

I'm not bitter that when bitcoin was ~ $1/btc I almost bought 1,000 btc ... no not bitter at all :|

I'm not bitter that I got rid of a hard drive with 20 $1 bitcoins that I got for free...No not bitter at all

I GPU-mined that much and spent it on BFL hardware at $12 :)

In US-dollars, over time, I profited, but there were no US dollars involved in any of those transactions, except what BFL surely got from BitPay for my orders. I traded basically 22 Bitcoins for a decent shot at about 12 Bitcoins.

So it goes with the preorder game!

Re: Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows

#63

Post by unclebucknasty »

if_by_whisky wrote: post #30
hnnewguy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I almost bought 1,000 btc Are you just as bitter that you missed Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Priceline, Intuitive Surgical or CNR? Point being, these opportunities are everywhere, always. You're surrounded by them right now, they're just not obvious. But neither was BitCoin. And with the above you're actually buying into a real company, rather than speculating on a price change.

Buying into a real company is not speculating on a price change?

Of course, all investments involve some degree of speculation.

But, to be fair I think your question is a bit pedantic. I think your parent is saying that with those companies, there is some way to impute value vis-a-vis products, management, history, etc. That calculus would then inform opinions on resulting price movements.

OTOH, when Bitcoin was at $1, forming an opinion on its price movement was almost pure speculation.

Re: Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows

#64

Post by RyanZAG »

Stubb wrote: post #51
koliber wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I am in no position to predict the future of bitcoins, all new markets have these problems. At an early point in their history, stocks also had low liquidity and crappy technology. Both of these conditions will improve as an asset becomes more popular. It is a chicken-and-egg problem.

There's also the question of where the money will come from to improve the technology. One of the benefits of BTC is the low transaction cost. But it might be that those transaction costs are exactly what's needed to fund exchange development.

I think you've hit the nail on the head here - scaling up a real exchange is incredibly difficult and the kind of talent you need to hire probably has a price tag hugely in excess of the revenue of all BTC exchanges combined. These guys are probably struggling to even understand the problems they're experiencing, so it should come as no surprise that they're having technical difficulties.

I bet they're having even more legal difficulties though, as just running a regular share exchange requires a team of top notch lawyers to keep abreast of the huge volume of exchange laws. I doubt poor MtGox even has 1 full time qualified lawyer and they're dealing with entirely new legal ground.

Re: Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows

#65

Post by patrickk »

pmorici wrote: post #49
hnnewguy wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I almost bought 1,000 btc Are you just as bitter that you missed Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, Priceline, Intuitive Surgical or CNR? Point being, these opportunities are everywhere, always. You're surrounded by them right now, they're just not obvious. But neither was BitCoin. And with the above you're actually buying into a real company, rather than speculating on a price change.

It's a bit harder to get in on those opportunities at a good price since to get in before the IPO you have to be an accredited investor. Bitcoin has no such restriction and in that way really was/is a one of a kind opportunity.

> "to get in before the IPO you have to be an accredited investor."

Exactly, or a company insider with options, preferably an early-stage employee. Being an accredited investor or early employee in a successful company dramatically lowers the pool of potential candidates to strike it rich.

You could still make a really nice return post-IPO, but it means you need a certain minimum amount of wealth you can risk investing to begin with (i.e. being able to access say, $100k or $1m and hope for a 10x return. This implies you are already upper-middle class or wealthier). I made up figures here so that the return would be life changing for most people. You could hope to turn $1000 into $10k but it wouldn't be that life changing for many people. Again, being able to access, say, $100k in liquid assets would dramatically lower the pool of candidates. Bitcoin was likely a one off like you say.

Re: Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows

#66

Post by nwh »

icoder wrote: post #54
nwh wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BFL gear is cute and all, but there's a simple fact with selling Bitcoin mining hardware that is probably never going to be overcome. Why would you sell something you could make profit on if you kept it for yourself? This is pretty much the reason why we have ASICminer, KNCminer and Bitfury all either running or building mammoth sized facilities of their own. I particularly liked this juxtaposition on their store…

Well, just as with disk storage, scaling up doesn't mean things get cheaper per unit, because you'll have to pay for infrastructure that you take for granted at low scale (cooling, storage, security, power, network, etc). Many customers mining at different locations could therefore be more profitable as a whole than one company doing all the mining, especially since many hobbyists don't count their hours like a compa…

Completely different situations. Actually building an ASIC design is expensive, has a lot of cost in research and development, and the batch sizes are in the millions of dollars. You do benefit from scale of supply in the chips themselves, and you don't need to worry about pretty consumer cases and electrical safety certifications. Once you've paid off the R&D cost you're basically in the green (bitfury sold his up until this point, then abruptly stopped).

Re: Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows

#67

Post by unclebucknasty »

weavie wrote: post #25
plg wrote: post #8

I'm not bitter that when bitcoin was ~ $1/btc I almost bought 1,000 btc ... no not bitter at all :|

You would probably have sold when they got to $5.

That's a very good point. We have a tendency to think we would have gotten out at the highest price, with perfect foresight. In truth, a 5x increase would have felt like a huge, nearly irresistible payday. Even a 2x increase would.

Re: Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows

#68

Post by nullc »

vtempest wrote: post #32
kirk21 wrote: post #18

Ok, time to find another exchange. Considering http://www.coinnext.com and https://localbitcoins.com Other suggestions?

Coinbase.com is a great one, and they recently received venture funding

Coinbase recently imposed a kind of ludicrous $3000 a day outbound limit on accounts that had previously been limited to 50 BTC/day.

Removing the limit involves buying coin from them, waiting 30 days, and solving some seemingly impossible credit report based identity quiz (some people report passing after 10 tries, you're limited to one try per 24 hours).

Re: Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows

#69

Post by jessedhillon »

minimax wrote: post #37

Consider this a reminder that while Bitcoin may be an interesting technological achievement, as a tradable asset it is still basically a toy. Crappy exchange technology combined with low liquidity is a perfect recipe for this kind of volatility.

I'd sooner consider your comment a reminder that people will apply whatever possible interpretation to the facts is necessary in order to appear right. It's hard to even understand what it is you think you're contributing to the conversation. A dad-from-Growing-Pains-style chat on where to put our money? Reminding us that Mtgox -- which has a story on HN about them every other day -- is a clunky Rube Goldberg machine?

This comment really seems like poorly disguised crowing and nothing more. Not a reminder, certainly. Maybe a reminder of your great prognosticatory abilities -- you took the default position on 99% of new technologies, products and innovations. Where do you find the courage?

Re: Mt. Gox Halts Bitcoin Withdrawals, Price Drop Follows

#70

Post by davedx »

Interesting comment on Reddit:

"I had a job interview with MtGox a couple of weeks ago for a frontend developer position. After talking about their technical environment I declined the position. Contemplated publicizing my story, but I have zero proof that the interview took place. But fuck me is their environment fucked up. Either way, I have been recommending to my friends to move any BTC away from Gox as soon as possible, and regret not bringing this advice into the open. I'm a Tokyoite, so if you want to talk to me about the job Interview, or just drink a beer, send me a DM."

"I was told that up until a few weeks [at time of the interview] ago, there was hardly any development environment to test changes. Most changes were done straight on the production environment. Typing this made me throw up in my mouth. The guy who interviewed me was very friendly, but I felt like a psychiatrist more than a job candidate. The dude went on about how shitty the atmosphere is at the offices, and what he told me about Mark seems to be spot on from what OP has said. Interview guy, if you read this, sorry yo."

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