Bitcoin Forum

I've been "goxed" enough times by my own haste to come to the conclusion that at least some portion of Bitcoin's volatility is due to Mt.Gox not requiring confirmation before placing orders.

Show of hands: How many times have you mis-entered an order only to realize your error moments after you see a dramatic change in your account balances? Instead of buying 200 BTC for $25, you buy 25BTC for $200 or in your haste you forget to change window panes and rather then selling 2000 BTC at $35 you place an order to buy 2000BTC at $35? (Okay, I'm not working in numbers that large, but you get the point) .

I'm seriously tempted to think that some of these crazy break out asks/bids sells might be due to simple human error. Lord knows how Gox freezes up in the most inopportune of moments. If Gox were to hold all orders until "released" I think some of these crazy up/down spikes would go away, and we would have a more stable, predictable, market.

lol no.

Gox does not show you the order your about to place and make you confirm? really??

It does not, you are kind of responsible for your actions. I've never made an error because of a (useful in many ways) habit of considering an order several times before clicking submit, but I agree it can be easy to do the wrong deed if you are in a hurry.

I've done it too. Then again, I've made worse mistakes because I was drunk. So until they introduce three-factor authentication with a breathalizer, no confirmation box will save me.

I tried to cancel an upcoming buy order on MtGOX yesterday as the price was going too low too fast and I figured I'd change my order on a new lower price by cancelling the old buy and replacing it with a new one with a lower price.

I tried cancelling it for a couple of minutes and every attempt failed.

I was too late as it was completely unresponsive.

By some twist of fate this helped me in a way as it bottomed out just below my sell price so I got a bargain of something like $25.3 which quickly rose again into high $26.xx

Perhaps a raw command line interface could be added in addition to the 'user friendly' mode that they use. Something that gives instant feedback or displays a timeout error.

The buy / sell areas could be designed significantly different in case people accidentally use the wrong one. Defaulting to buy isn't a good idea. After clicking 'trade' only two buttons should appear - BUY and SELL, only after clicking one of these should quantity and pricing information be entered.

Just my thoughts....

Don't use Gox until they fix the many obvious problems with their site.  It really is easy these days to set up other means of exchange, so the only excuses to keep using Gox for existing users are laziness or liquidity.  For new users, there is no reason to use Gox unless they really need to move $10k at a time.

You could also easily write a service that handles your MtGox orders. And in this service you could add verification before an order is placed. If you'd like help with such a service you can send me a PM.

https://classic.mtgox.com/

Thanks for this!