Bitcoin Forum

WTF. Just tried to place a bid in and:

Trade engine cooldown (lag too high), order placing suspended until 2013-04-13 21:00:00 UTC

trading resumes in 3 minutes....

lag was 50+ minutes before

Worked well last time, gonna crash again at least temporarily.

The fact that they just did this was a very good thing. It is a temporary solution to a very real problem until they vastly improve their entire trading engine. We could have seen 1.5 hours of lag or more if they didn't do this. It would be stupid not to.

But after 10 minutes all the lag was gone and trading resumes in 1 minute anyway. I can totally live with brief cooldowns.

Didn't know that. Hadn't been paying attention. I always have http://bitcoinity.org/markets/mtgox/USD sitting up in a window. But I noticed that recently it no longer has the lag information posted on it like it did a day or two ago.

12 hours is different from 20 minutes. Could still go down though. They should have done this when it was at 10-15 minutes. Not 50 minutes of lag after 2.5-3 hours of horror blind trading.

2 trades in and already over 1 min lag  ::)

Trading resumes, and so does the lag

Let the price go down ::)

HAHAH what a mess!!!!

This isn't to stop the price moving... or at least it shouldn't be... it should be to stop an entire market from trading BLINDLY and a momentum of panic building that will push things far more then it would have happened naturally.

I'm stupid...where are you monitoring lag at?

You can see it on most live charts like ClarkMoody's or Bitcoinity.
In addition, this is the call to check it yourself: https://data.mtgox.com/api/1/generic/order/lag

Thank you! Bookmarking that!

Yeah just got on and noticed this.  Good that they're trying to manage the lag but of course we can hope they'll fix the engine sooner rather than later.

Edit - Lag's already up to 10 minutes again.

what a joke!!  :-\

Nice to see they are making up fake lasts during the cooldown. Real last was 89 and they are reporting 95 to try to boost price lol

That is nothing new, all kinds of criss cross info off of gox for years.

Some observations on the recent lag situation.

After ten minutes of trading since they dropped pending orders at UTC 21.00
(that's when lag went from 50 minutes to zero), lag was back up to 8 minutes 47 seconds.

From this, we can estimate that they are recieving around like 800% to 900% more orders than they can execute.

MtGox's trading engine is congested.

(This is a separate problem from the recent, ongoing DDOS attacks.)

Meanwhile, the surplus, "pending" orders get placed in a buffer.

This buffer has some finite capacity.

As long as incoming orders > 100% capacity, lag will increase without bound, tending to infinity.

http://crowdcentric.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Drivers-Stuck-in-Traffic-Jam-for-9-Days-in-China1.jpg

This is what traffic congestion looks like, MtGox's current situation is somwhat similar.

They will have to clear the "pending orders" buffer periodically until things cool down.

Pending orders will get wiped.

Mt Gox is currently situated on the fourteenth floor of an office building, IIRC.

They need the entire building. They need something like this:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/facebook-faq-470-new.jpg

You cannot put MtGox in the cloud, for obvious reasons.

So, in a sense they're right. This "success" is killing them.

There are no easy solutions.

The situation is well and truly fucked up.

Sucks for the people who fell for the bull trap and bought in at 110+. It's not like I didn't warn them...

way too easy to influence the market if yopu have a lot of coin you can drive down the market just to acquire more coin.

I think they should turn off the trading api or at least limit it.

Personally I think the actual valuation of 1 btc = $150. I know I could easily offload in person in cash at that price. greed is what will destroy bitcoin. people will hoover up more and more and eventually people will just move on.

Actually I think there are easy solutions:

Gox has no shortage of cash - just look at their daily trading volume * Bitcoin price * 1% (trade has 2 sides).

In fact they have fucking truckloads of cash.

Um buy more fucking servers perhaps?

Pay someone good to set it up right?

Am I stating the fucking obvious here??

Yeah, the Bitcoin price needs to stagnate and thus by necessity, trend downwards for an extended period of time.

Nobody who has the best interests of Bitcoin at heart (not many) as opposed to the best interests of their own personal wealth at heart (almost everyone), could disagree with this statement. At the moment, Bitcoin has a very unappealing and suspicious smell about it and the only people who want Bitcoin to shoot back up are speculators and people who have been financially crippled through conducting real economic business using Bitcoin when the crash occurred. For Bitcoin to grow into what it is meant to be, infinitely more newcomers need to get involved in Bitcoin, preferably newcomers who intend to actually use Bitcoin to conduct business as opposed to hoard it waiting for the next bubble to be manipulated into existence.

If Bitcoin rediscovers its previous highs anytime soon, then I don't trust it and wouldn't touch it with a ten foot long shitty bargepole.

If Bitcoin stagnates and stabilises in price over an extended period, due to its previous history, I still don't trust it but would feel a lot more comfortable about putting wealth into it and using it as a medium for economic exchange.

How the heck can the engine be so slow? There is less than 11000 orders in the book! Do they match orders by hand?

also:

How to reduce the number of Gox orders by 29% in the blink of an eye? I took a look at the depth.

https://data.mtgox.com/api/1/BTCUSD/depth/full

Won't you please shut up or consider buying some cheap puts from me?? You could make a killing while Mt.Gox kills itself :)

110 is a very good price.
in long/medium perspective will bring good profit

Yes, processing more than 1 order per second on an orderbook of 11k is truly beyond our technological limits.

/sarcasm off

it's not a bulltrap until the downtrend resumes. this is just trading between a range (support at high 90s, resistance at 120).

in other words, you're not right. yet.

The lag info is lagging:
https://i.imgur.com/tsqGa5T.png

If he isn't right, then Bitcoin is destined to go up in a mushroom cloud.

why?

Bitcoiners tend to be enthusiasts who forget what a minority fringe phenomena that Bitcoin still is and tend to over estimate the present day significance of the coin. This is why so much drivel about the fundamentals pushing up the price during the recent bull run was disseminated and widely consumed on this forum and no doubt across the Bitcoin world.

Relatively few could recognise that a classic speculative bubble was what was actually happening, and quite probably, a bubble that was being manipulated into existence.

Yet that is what it was. If that is all that Bitcoin is to be in the future then Bitcoin will never develop any substance and will sooner rather than later, fail.

Mass investment psychology will ultimately be the kiss of death on any stock or intangible asset that isn't based on anything or forcibly held in place by some powerful third party.

Bitcoin needs real businesses and real people en masse, trading goods and services, and transferring wealth to each other, using Bitcoin. In recent times, Bitcoin couldnt be less appealing to anyone with anything other in mind than pure profit seeking speculation.

Too much speculation on any asset is a parasite on the organism which will ultimately kill it.

It's funny how when anyone calls bitcoin a bubble, they all forgot about the 2011 'bubble' and the bubbles before it. In the media June 2011 became nothing more than a little speed bump and meant nothing to them. This correction to the trend line and eventuall higher prices will probably end up being treated the same in the future.

All the wishful thinking around here is proclaiming Bitcoin to find new highs tomorrow.

In 2011, it actually took quite a bit of time after the initial crash before Bitcoin bottomed in earnest. Since the bottom, Bitcoin took 18 months of mostly steadily (and then not so steadily) rising valuations before it hit the July 2011 high. If you are using history as your metric, then Bitcoin needs to drop to at least $20 and take at least 18 months to 'recover'. This is not what people here want to hear and so it is not going to form part of their beliefs.

I don't understand why Gox does not take any action on this; it would be so easy to temporarily block orders under .1BTC and it would pretty much solve all problems until they change their trading engine.

Why do they continue to allow these thousands of bot micro trades all the time?

if only it were so easy to predict the future simply by looking at what happened last time . . .

I really hope the April 17th change will make this better (https://mtgox.com/press_release_20130409.html). Question is how much of the lag that will go away.

True, but speculative bubbles do to some degree, adhere to certain characteristic phases, whether it be a protracted bubble or a flash bubble as Bitcoin was, twice!

And extrapolating shaky predictions from a single data point isn't wishful thinking perhaps?

Bear in mind that the processing complexity goes up pretty much with the square of the new order volume, as for each buy/sell you scan through the others looking for matches.

Then for each match, you have to start a transaction, move balances, update the order book etc, before closing the transaction. It's quite hard (but not impossible) to parallelise this.

While gox figure out how to parallelise that though... We can help... Use other exchanges to spread the load.

Seriously, what will it take before we stop looking to MtGox to "determine" the price??

I was there in 2011, I made a ton of bitcoin at $2, it took 4-5 months to hit bottom and has been climbing ever since, with a lull in early 2012 for a couple months. I was also there in the crash August 2012 when hit rocked bottom hovered around and gradually started climbing almost immediately. People were shouting doom and gloom in both situations. Both times it climbed out of the dirt. In this instance we have a long term trend line supporting us. This latest crash/correction/whatever fell straight to it and bounced off it hard, just like all the flash crashes of the last few months. No one knows the future, and I never proclaimed new highs tomorrow, but right now we have the trend on our side.

It will probably take an alternative exchange that is at least as large as gox.

Look, buddy, I appreciate a good truism as much as the next person, but incompetent sophistry is SOO ancient greece...

What I mean by that, is, we have too many idiots making grand stereotypes and assumptions about what everybody else thinks, what everybody else does with their bitcoins, and how much everybody else "cares about bitcoin." Basically you're sitting around wanking and nobody else really cares what Random Dude #2819875432 On Internet Forum thinks they do with their coins, how much he thinks they care about bitcoin, etc. etc.

How is it that I put $50,000 in a USD savings account for a "Rainy day" (while also spending USD normally) and I am a "responsible saver," but if I put $5,000 (equiv) in a Bitcoin wallet (while also spending BTC normally) I am all of a sudden a greedy speculator who doesn't care about bitcoin? If the stereotypers had their way, everyone would buy just enough bitcoin to buy shit and not save any of it.  If your position is based on truisms and stereotypes you should perhaps spend some time alone, reflecting the kind of person you have become  ;)

A+

Name a single person other than you saying that.  I'll wait.  Just a single quote of anyone even a 1 post noob predicting (prior to your post) a $261 exchange rate tomorrow.

the bulltrap hasn't even yet begun. first, we break $90, then we break $50.

Wow, so we really are in the denial stage yet....  We haven't even hit despair which is where I thought we would be by now.  lol.  I love how people think bitcoin doesn't conform to other markets... We are watching it happen right now.

This bubble is massive.

Ah, please.

This is the best post I've read in many days.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c7ahh/we_are_mt_gox_ama/c9dqxr9 (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1c7ahh/we_are_mt_gox_ama/c9dqxr9)

And it's crashing down hard again.  You were saying?

I am so tempted to start a big FKn

!!TOLD YA SO!!

thread, as my views on Bitcoin have been like prophecy since I came on this forum. Not that any mystic talents were required other than having a modicum of common sense, but it seems that would be a modicum more common sense than the majority on here.