Bitcoin Forum

Please feel free to add your own theories!

Too hard on Mt Gox, you say?  Well, consider this... If Mt Gox couldn't handle the influx of new users, why did they only experience problems when bitcoins were going down?  The volume didn't seem to bother the site one bit when bitcoin prices were skyrocketing.

Lying or not, it's time to dump them. 

That's one of the biggest barriers to Bitcoin being widely accepted.  Easy ways to change fiat into BTC and reliable exchanges to then handle transactions.

Getting all my funds out of the Gox and never using them again.

I really hope the rest of the BTC community follows this route.  At least until Gox handles very little of the Bitcoin market, and not more than all the rest combined.

yep, seems extremely suss to me too - when it was back up for a tiny while, the prices were flying up again, shut down again, prices plummet again. it would be an efficient way to make money; shut down, buy BTCs cheap from other exchanges, open up and sell at the high price again :/ even if they're just really completely incompetent - 2 days to deal with capacity problems?!?! don't they have a single person working for them that knew that you have to plan a public system to be scalable?! - they have definitely proven themselves (again) to be the achilles heel of bitcoin :/

what the ...?! back up and showing volumes for the entire day... while they were closed?!

Having 80% of he transactions volume is never a good thing. I hope some competition shows up pretty soon.

I think they are MOSTLY incompetent and SLIGHTLY lying  ;)

With the very high price of bitcoin last days, I suspect they have a problem when someone wants to cash in a larger BTC accounts. They just don't have that money. They force the price to drop... Happens ones, happens twice, it will happen again.

To me and I believe many of us here, bitcoin represents freedom and choices! Gox defiantly needs some competition and restructuring.

I %100 agree with you the btc community needs to find n start other exchanges so mt gox doesn't get away with this Anymore

well, the alternative exchange arent that much to shout about at this current point of time

campbx seems solid alternative to them

We need a decentralized exchange!

Mt. Gox is an exchange, if you want to sell your BTC for USD there must be a willing buyer available. Mt. Gox only role is to match buyers and sellers.

+1 , that has funding options for all people ( around the world )

mtgox have ddos :(

think so too bro

Sad that people will still use them out of greed to make "profit". I've read and seen what gox has done, has been doing. If gox supports litecoin, I won't use gox, I won't use btc-e. Don't know who to use or even have a little faith in. A lot bad shit going around about gox and btc-e.

I believe there was some form of ddos on mtgox and they didn't admit it directly.

Of course - exchange should be more diversified and I'm surprised it isn't already. I personally used Bitstamp.net to buy and they also seemed to be attacked in the last two days. So there is not only a problem of monopolisation of the exchange but it's vulnerability to those types of attacks.

And this is a huge problem of bitcoin at the moment. It's mainly a comodity to trade and make some money on, not use it practially to buy products. I know there are a few companies accepting btc, but they're few and far between.

Bitcoin is excellent idea for new type of currency but unfortunately it has to exist in degenrated system driven by Wall Street. It didn't have time to grow in strenght before people started manipulating it so it's going to be difficult to keep it growing. It can't just hang on one huge monoplised exchange as Mtgox. It's insane. Can someone imagine that value of the dollar dropped because someone closed down dollar exchange?

I'm going to try not to use them

Nice thought, but probably (near to) impossible. You would have to verify each user similarly like bitcoin does with transactions.

On the other hand: Bitcoin itself maybe has some options to make exchanges doable by scripting operations. But that would mean that each transaction will be delayed the same way as regular payments... And still there has to be a machanism to pair trades... and still it doesn't seem to be good to bloat the blockchain with all stock exchanges => maybe some merge-mined crypto just for this purpose?

They openly admitted to this two days ago to some online tech magazine. Sorry I do not remember exactly where I read this, but I did. This article also explained that these DDOS's for the last week or so are intentional towards the end goal of destabilizing the BTC. Seems to be working pretty good yeah ?  

what are the other competition, or is there none?

btc-e.com is doing well
there exists even other ones like vircurex.com...

Normally, every buy/sell order only happens in their system. Probably, the real money is invested somewhere, like every normal bank does (they want to make money, don't they?). If however, certain people with large BTC accounts are announcing that they will cash, Gox has to reclaim that money. Delaying trades (faking lag) and thus dropping the price redistributes the bitcoin to people who are not intending to cash on short term. The guys wanting to buy-out just get paid less...

There's so much unwarranted Mt.Gox-hate from folks who are, generally speaking, completely responsible for their market position in the first place.

Bitcoin is new, so major exchanges don't take it seriously. The only places that did were tiny folks that used to trade a virtual currency for cards from a nerd-game. The market grew faster than they were ready; it just happened that Mt.Gox actually tried to keep up with it--and did all right for some time.

These issues with Mt.Gox are growing pains. They're to be expected; the fact that so many folks seem to expect them to be able to handle this massive influx of interest without a hitch is pretty silly. There will be hiccups.

Where they go from here will depend entirely on their ability to cope with this most recent bout of malarkey. Either they'll lose market share and others will gain it... or they'll solidify their position even more.

The interesting thing about all of this is that trust becomes an issue.  In the regulated currency markets there is at least the illusion that regulators will catch out people doing the wrong thing or at least perhaps prosecute those if they 'get away with it.'  In a currency like BTC, where there is anonymity and little regulation, trust is harder to build up and unless there is a trusted whistle blower then much is conjecture, and the possibility that people will spread misinformation to further their own ends.  To educate yourself around all the issues to the extent that you can make an informed judgement is a time consuming thing; and even then we can get it wrong.  It seems to be the perennial issue where there is profit of any sort to be made - Who do you trust?

Gox isn't tiny.

Their previous business has nothing to do with their current incompetence.

Sure, the alleged 20,000 new users per day would have been a strain, but this could have been handled if they had the foresight to build a scalable system. Instead, they were lazy and cheap. There are other factors to the Gox lag that they are entirely able to mitigate. But again, they're lazy and cheap, and were making a shitton of profit from being that way.

Fuck them.

They most certainly are--in comparison to almost any "real" exchange, anyway.

Perhaps not, but given the small time-frame within which they have grown from that trading-card company to the largest bitcoin exchange, their current incompetence becomes, if not forgivable, then certainly somewhat understandable.


You're not really mad at them. You're mad at yourself. Anyone who bothered to do a bit of research and learn a little about their potential to suffer exactly these sorts of growing pains could have seen this coming five miles away. It wasn't like their problems just magically popped up suddenly without any indications whatsoever. Their failures here will serve to strengthen the bitcoin market as a whole in the long run.

Bashing Mt.Gox for the failure of the speculators to realize the potential of a relatively small exchange finding itself thrust into a rapidly growing market and being too unprepared, too incapable, or just too stupid to handle it is just crazy.

use bitstamp.net instead? :)

Yeah, except Gox isn't a "real" exchange. Compare apples to apples, please.

No. It's not forgivable at all. You're a Gox-apologist and it's really quite sad. The problems Gox is facing aren't new and they weren't unknown, and the solutions to such problems have been implemented before. It's not like Gox was suffering some unique, never-before-experienced technological issues.
You said so yourself:
Gox has failed to implement the necessary preventative measures that would have mitigated this mess. They sat on their arse and raked in the money. They're not just incompetent, they're irresponsible.

I don't use Gox. I didn't like Gox before and I don't like them now, but now I'm mad at them because they should have been able to do a better job. Their fuck up has adversely affected the entire economy. If it was isolated to Gox users then I would probably just laugh at them.

Mt Gox has been making money in transaction fees for literally years.  Their website says they have handled 80% of all btc transactions since at least 2011.  They have had YEARS to get their servers upgraded.  They chose to do the 12 hour job of upgrading them in the middle of a panic???  If they had researched what bitcoin was intended to become, maybe read their own statements about their belief it would become a relevant currency GLOBALLY, and paid attention to their own subscriber growth trending data, they probably would have expected the volume of transactions and users to explode any time starting back in 2011, citing previous outages and volume related failures in 2010, 2011, and 2012.  CNBC has articles dating back to 2010 citing trader interest in bitcoin, and boom/bust cycles amplified by exchange-failure fueled panics.  Mt Gox has experienced "growing pains" EVERY single time volume has increased over the years.  I only loosely follow bitcoin and I am aware of all this from snippets in the financial news!  I rant bc I see the day coming when Mt Gox is bought  by some filthy bank and we're right back where we started.

Whilst you raise a valid point, I believe the DDoS attack only started when the price dipped - perhaps as a trigger. For eg, cause the new traders to panic and sell because it looks like mtgox is getting hacked, which causes the price to plummet, which causes more panic selling.

Lying or not ... MtGox represents everything BTC is supposedly not - centralized.

A decentralized exchange wold be interesting.

Exchanges aren't a bad thing for bitcoin, having only a couple is.  The whole point is to be decentralized and with having mtgox handle 80% of all transfers it's assinine to the whole idea of bitcoin.  Create more exchanges so they all compete and share the load of infrastructure.

The day has come and gone when MtGox will be bought by a filthy bank. They are now basically run by Silicon Valley Bank, where do you think they got the cash for the upgrade? You didn't honestly think they saved up for the servers did you?

I am. I think that the bitcoin economy is a "real" economy, but agree that Mt.Gox is not a "real" exchange (yet). Mt.Gox is an apple trying to make it in an orange market--and having a difficult time of it.

So what? So what if they're greedy, incompetent, irresponsible f*cktards? Can the bitcoin economy not handle it? If the bitcoin economy is capable of allowing greedy, incompetent, irresponsible f*cktards to climb to a position in which they are capable of destroying said economy, then it deserves its fate... and somewhere, deep down... you know it.

You used bitcoin. You used bitcoin, yet claim you did so knowing that greedy, incompetent, irresponsible f*cktards were running the largest fiat-currency exchange. You claim you didn't like Gox and are mad at them because they "should have been able to do a better job," yet you still put yourself in a position in which you depended on the job they were doing. I'll say it again...

You aren't mad at them. You're mad at yourself, because you placed yourself in a position in which folks you've described as greedy, incompetent, and irresponsible had the ability to f*ck with your life.

"Lie to yourself, if you must, but not to me."

Are there any real alternatives to Gox? It seems like the most trustworthy place to send my friends interested in Bitcoins.

I want to see more competition. Not just one exchange running everything.

More competition would be for sure a good thing, but the market is still a small one. However, MTG suffered from the panic of a lot of people, one big player sold a big amount of coins and all followed and caused a DDOS of sellers.

We saw what happened to Gox with all the protection. Today, we have seen what happened to btc24... Lets wait and hope we can still prosper.

To be fair to MtGox, I think this is true for all tradings - have you not seen stocks in equities market drop just because some big shot sold their holdings and vice versa?

https://localbitcoins.com/

you know, ThePlanet was providing DDOS protection almost 10 years ago (probably 2004) - I have used it and it worked flawlessly. I didn't even have to pay extra for it. And yet, in 2013 a site that has to be making a killing on fees, can't do it?

And it is a bit shady that they only really had issues when the price was falling.

Quite right.  They are using AWS for hosting behind Prolexic for DDoS prevention.

I think their delays are due to them wanting to halt trading to preserve bitcoin value, which to me shows it is valuable only when compared to other currency.  Mtgox and the company they keep are the founders / early adopters of bitcoin and to me this is fishy.  Which sucks because I have invested a good deal of money in acquiring bitcoins.

DDOS is a lot more complex these days then 2004

I am eager for a dencentralized exchange.