Bitcoin Forum

Mtgox's failure today is shameful. I have an account there for 2 years.
If they don't want to lose the trust of the community they must explain in full disclosure of what happened today.

(up 4 me)

Everyone rushed to sell their coins around 7-9 hours ago. They're probably getting DDoS'd right now; it isn't their fault. Even paypal went down when they were getting DDoS'd enough (let's face it, paypal is way bigger).

Probably too much people trying to connect at the same time yea

day trading has been stressful the past day or two, 40-120s lag times and uncancellable orders. Sheesh.

They had all the time to prepare themselves for that. People pay between 0.6-0.5% for every trade. This is a lot of money given the daily  every trade is paid both by the seller and the buyer, so mtgox makes more then 1% for every trade. It is more than $100,000 per day (recently).
For that amount of money they make form us, they should provide a reliable service.

What Reliable said...

Anyone else still having trouble logging in? The log in button does nothing for me.

The whole day. Add to that that order to sell and buy gets lost? Or appear after an hour. I guess I have lost quite a lot of money today due to this continuos malfunction.

MtGox manipulates the price this way

It's the same as a bank closing on a bank run

Please read what they have said --

https://twitter.com/MtGox

It's affecting the credibility of the service and the trust in bitcoins. Some people will say, if one site is down I loose my bitcoins, the value of my bitcoins, too risky to invest in bitcons etc

I can login by clicking the verify link a the bottom of the page and then logging on there.

Has Mtgox EVER been a good company? Its given me nothing but trouble from the start. It seems to me that the first Bitcoin exchanges have all been very unimpressive.

It's normal to have growing pains. They've handled things pretty well if you ask me.

The Hamster Union went on strike today... they where short handed. :)

Many sites/startups/internet ventures experiencing exponential growth are not ready for it.

When you build an IT system (vide NASDAQ OMX), it usually is ready to handle 100x larger load than current.

Exponential growth means, that every now and then, the venture experiences DOUBLING of user base and/or user activity.

How many doublings you need to beat that 100x safety margin? Less than 7. It can take a month, but it can also take a week depending on the media hype.



Only companies aiming high (vide LMAX exchange) have safety margins in the sky - the price they pay for it is simple - they employ the best developers on the market. They aim to beat the state of the art solutions, and while being ready for exp growth - they gain nothing if the growth doesn't happen.

As a Forex IT developer a bit on both sides - trying to find balance between a large performance margin, and keeping the costs reasonable - I think we should not be outraged.

MtGox could either serve us what they have - and fix current problems (although I am pretty sure they are trying to prevent forward crashes NOW), or they could raise the fees, introduce minimum deposit & piss off all the small users who generate least significant traffic with most actions. With increasing fees, they could buy a proprietary matching engine. Those cost anywhere from $200 000 to $3 MIL+.


That's the only explanation you might get anyway. Remember there are other sites similar to MtGox. Remember you can make your own. It's not that complicated.


Regarding those stating how much MtGox earns:
Yes that's true, but they probably just throw more people at the problem. People to watch if the system's working, people to answer support calls, people to do manual backups & restarts, people to process registration submissions. They wouldn't need all those people if they had a proper IT core in the first place. But now they must continue increasing the manual labor --- just to make the site work today. And tomorrow. If they crashed for 2 weeks, that would not be awesome for them.

So they just put in more people doing no major changes. That's just my guess, maybe they'll roll in with a new core nonetheless.


Kind regards.

I thought they already said that they were getting DDOSed?