Bitcoin Forum

Statement Regarding BTC Withdrawal Delays

Tokyo - JAPAN - February 07, 2014

Dear MtGox Customers,

During our efforts to resolve the issue being encountered by some bitcoin withdrawals it was determined that the increase in withdrawal traffic is hindering our efforts on a technical level. As to get a better look at the process the system needs to be in a static state.

In order for our team to resolve the withdrawal issue it is necessary to temporarily pause all withdrawal traffic to obtain a clear technical view of the current processes.

We apologize for the extremely short notice, but as of now all bitcoin withdrawals will be paused, and withdrawals in the queue will returned to your MtGox wallet and can be re-intiated once the issue is resolved. Customers can still use the trading platform as usual.

Our team will be working hard through the weekend and will provide an update on Monday, February 10, 2014 (JST).

Again, we apologize for the inconvenience, and ask for your continued patience and support while we work to resolve this issue.

Best regards,

The MtGox Team

is it a relief and hopefully this is indication that it is indeed technical issue not a bank run or theft, i suspect that if they steal the coins, they shouldn't bother to clarify. 

I'm leaning towards the "stupid" version, but hey! The best trick the devil pulled... whatever, I'm not religious.

TACTIC/GOAL: To buy more time.

Buy more time to do what exactly?

after reviewing below analysis, I felt more assured now this is more likely technical glitch  not insolvency issue, load up your gun guys, buy at the grand dip:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1x93tf/some_irc_chatter_about_what_is_going_on_at_mtgox/

Remember Mt Gox's previous "temporary pause"?

Statement Regarding Temporary Hiatus on U.S. Dollar Withdrawals (https://www.mtgox.com/press_release_20130620.html)

TOKYO - JAPAN - June 20th, 2013
      
Over the past weeks Mt. Gox has experienced rising volumes of deposits and withdrawals from established and upcoming markets interested in Bitcoin. This increased volume has made it difficult for our bank to process the transactions smoothly and within a timely manner, which has created unnecessary delays for our global customers. This is especially so for those in the United States who are requesting wire transfer withdrawals from their accounts.
      
We are currently making improvements to process withdrawals of United States Dollar (USD) denominations, and as a result are temporarily suspending cash withdrawals of USD for the next two weeks.

Please be reassured that USD deposits and transfers to Mt. Gox will remain unaffected, as will deposits and withdrawals in other currencies, and we will be resuming USD withdrawals once the process is completed.

We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our U.S. customers in the meantime, and look forward to resuming withdrawal service as well as debuting a dramatically improved trading engine which will be launching very soon.

Regards
Mt.Gox Co. Ltd Team.

Mt.Gox Contact press@mtgox.com

It's really not the same thing at all. Bitcoin withdrawals are a technical problem. USD withdrawals a banking problem. Stop confusing everything.

Actually I worry that it is a bigger problem or something other than technical because the BTC network seems to be able to handle large numbers of transactions without issue.  While I appreciated the IRC information it doesn't really give a lot of comfort.  I don't think this is a bank run type situation because unless someone embezzled the coins Gox should have them.  While the USD issue was a banking issue and this has been put forth as a technical issue, their track record for veracity is not good.  Obviously, I hope everyone with coins in Gox and BTC as a whole comes out okay, but this is clearly bad.

There were a lot of issues with Gox BTC withdrawals in the recent past, where their withdrawal software tried to doublespend coins causing withdrawals to fail. Gox may be using custom software for BTC withdrawals that is not handling large numbers of withdrawals very well, causing locking issues.

below is the most sensible and logical explanation i came across regarding  of the "stuck" drama:

------Quote
[–]nullc 14 Punkte 3 Stunden zuvor
Because the quotes are irreparably messed up I'll write up a long form explanation:
Some background: MtGox runs custom wallet software.
This is a reasonable and common practice for a service of its size and nature.
Getting a wallet implementing right isn't easy as there is very little room for error, much like the rest of the Bitcoin system.
Some have criticized their use of custom software here but it is a reasonable and common practice for a service of its size and nature. The reference client's wallet is basically suitable for small scale single party use. I would not recommend something like MtGox use the reference node wallet, at least not without a healthy layer of abstraction on top of it— relieving it of duties harder than key management and chain monitoring— or otherwise improving it greatly.
(For that matter, MtGox's wallet software has caused them fewer concerning problems than some other companies. (E.g. some have completely re-implemented the Bitcoin protocol, incorrectly, and exposed it to the outside world and suffered numerous local blockchain rejecting glitches). Though its certainly taken Gox a fair amount of time to sort things out.)
I first heard people reporting stuck transactions back in ~September. I looked into it and determined that Mtgox was spending immature coins. Freshly generated Bitcoins (from mining) can not be spend until they are at least 100 blocks deep in the blockchain. This prevents the funds from vanishing forever if the chain reorgs. I pinged magicaltux and after a couple tries got ahold of him. I think they also wasted some time on dead ends trying to resolve this before the actual nature of the problem was brought to their attention, e.g. raising their transaction fees with a mistaken belief that their fees weren't high enough.
Mtgox wasn't tracking if the coins were freshly generated or what their height was in their software. Including this data would apparently be a non-trivial change, and for high risk finance software even a trivial change takes a lot of work. I suggested a workaround (basically, just try to spend the oldest coins), and as far as I know they implemented it and it was effective.
They continued to have problems with stuck transactions after, and further analysis revealed that they were producing transactions with excessively padded signatures. A minor tangent is required here:
There is a design flaw in the Bitcoin protocol where its possible for a third party to take a valid transaction of yours and mutate it in a way which leaves it valid and functionally identical but with a different transaction ID. This greatly complicates writing correct wallet software, and it can be used abusively to invalidate long chains of unconfirmed transactions that depend on the non-mutant transaction (since transactions refer to each other by txid).
This issue arises from several sources, one of them being OpenSSL's willingness to accept and make sense of signatures with invalid encodings. A normal ECDSA signature encodes two large integers, the encoding isn't constant length— if there are leading zeros you are supposed to drop them.
It's easy to write software that assumes the signature will be a constant length and then leave extra leading zeros in them.
In order to eventually remove this malleability flaw we've been gradually tightening the rules that govern what transactions nodes in the network will consider valid when they relay them or mine them. In Bitcoin 0.8— after months of work chasing down software authors to get them to fix their bugs transactions with these invalid encodings were no longer relayed.
This caused some problems for a few things.. For example bc.i's iphone app— BC.i itself had been fixed long before but they couldn't update the Iphone app without fear of triggering another review by Apple. Eventually this was just worked around on the server side by mutating the transactions produced by the iphone wallets. (And is moot now, I guess!).
MtGox also had problems with occasionally producing invalid signatures. This would normally be a simple fix. E.g. here is an example where I fixed this type of issue in some python wallet code I've never used (but saw a lot of people were copying): https://github.com/jgarzik/python-bitcoinlib/commit/4c64603ab60b0fa23c51090b3112be2f163aeeac
But as I said before, in high value systems like Mtgox, even simple fixes aren't simple and it took them quite some time to deploy a fix. However, I believe that it is actually fixed now.
My current understanding and inference is that the remaining issues are because while MtGox was producing transactions of the bad form that the network won't relay anymore— some people decided to help out by 'fixing' these transactions like BC.i did for iphone users— making the signatures normal and broadcasting them. Of course, the new transactions— while functionally identical— have different TXIDs.
The difference here is that the MtGox wallet software appears to have not handled this case gracefully at all, and apparently simply wouldn't notice transactions that it "didn't make" spending its own coins.
As a result the Mtgox wallet believed some coins were available for spending which really had already been spent and it began double spending those inputs. This may have interacted particularly poorly with the earlier workaround I mentioned— trying to always use the oldest available coins— if they did implement that workaround.
Worse, some of this may have resulted in users getting paid multiple times and could have been intentionally triggered with that end in mind if someone helpfully fixed some transactions and then noticed they got paid twice. (I think this is unlikely to have caused large losses, before people run off worrying about that, both because of the reuse of the oldest inputs and because of the hot wallet/cold wallet split).
At this point they likely have an accounting mess to clean up— figuring out who did and didn't get paid now with none of the txids matching. Cleaning that up will be somewhat tricky E.g. say there were three payments of MtGox coins to 1Apple in the block chain... and three users that attempted to pay 1Apple, and MtGox's records thinks that only one went through.. etc. So software will have to be written that matches up transactions with their mutants in order to figure out what went where.
I am not personally concerned— at least not by any of the details here. MtGox's slow speed at resolving these sorts of issues and poor communications are not terribly inspiring. They seem to be horribly short staffed— but competent and trustworthy people in this space may be hard to find: The regulatory morass of that business is sure to make many steer clear.
The claims that the delays indicate insolvency strike me as just hysteria: the technical background doesn't support this conclusion, and there may be a bit of opportunism at play from people who want to manipulate the market too. Don't get me wrong: I have not seen their books: Gox may well have financial problems— though with their income its hard for me to see how— but if any problems like that exist they're not being indicated here.
Of course, none of this suggests anyone should be happy with the service MtGox has been providing, but our anger should at least be well informed.

This guy is mtgox's smurf account btw. Look at his post history and it's very apparent.

I normally don't quote something this long, but it's just in case it gets deleted or changed.

This sounds absolutely reasonable. It appears that the community is spreading panic, harming BTC price along the way. Some do it without thinking, others on purpose.

Mtgox is in deep dodo at the moment but spreading panic and rumors is not helping.

this is a bloodshed slaughter for those selling at shit discount today at Gox, sorry, you are goxed yet again.

I think if they had their communication in order from the start this wouldn't be causing a market panic right now, they basically ignored us for a full week and now that every user is affected it suddenly catches others by surprise. Then we see it hitting the likes of CNBC. It just wasn't necessary.

if you read the reddit post (lots of words I know) you will find that they did not understand the underlying issue in the beginning so they kept on making it worse

"I think they also wasted some time on dead ends trying to resolve this before the actual nature of the problem was brought to their attention, e.g. raising their transaction fees with a mistaken belief that their fees weren't high enough. "

but yes they have a terrible communications deficit...and bad track record...like the withdrawal  delays, that are certainly not a technical issue

it is only the frontier nature of BTC that this company could become so big and survive so long. And US regulations. Without those, dozens of entrepreneurs around the world could run better exchanges than that. But no one dares, no one wants get burned by US regulations and be kidnapped.

So Goxes credibility was already low when this started.

can you believe the market cap that was destroyed because of this?  :-[

the market cap will recover soon, eventually, Gox is not gonna change the direction of the coin.

Gox is unbelievably stupid, or scammers.  I'm not surprised but why would ANYONE be depositing there?  I have only been into BTC for like 6 months but I knew quickly they were to be avoided.

How can they halt withdrawals, obviously creating panic, but continue to allow trading?  What a bunch of fools.  Should have halted trading too.

I can't understand why gox is even still in business. Surely this has to be the deathblow for them now.

I don't think they're scammers, but they're not running a very good business.


Well that's what I thought would happen after their previous fuckups, but they're still going. Absolutely nobody should be using them now.

"temporarily suspending cash withdrawals of USD for the next two weeks."
lol  :D

Bloomberg has a good writeup on the Mt Gox debacle. (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-07/bitcoin-price-falls-as-mt-gox-exchange-halts-activity.html) They look at this as they would look at a broker in trouble: "Bitcoin Price Plunges as Mt. Gox Exchange Halts Activity". "Mt. Gox ... promised an “update” -- not a reopening -- on Monday, Feb. 10, Japan time." "Trouble at Mt. Gox demonstrates “a clear need for a U.S.-based, regulated, compliant and trustworthy Bitcoin exchange."

In the real financial world, vague "technical difficulties" don't cut it as an excuse. The only justification for a shutdown is something like 9/11 or lower Manhattan being flooded. Even in both of those cases, everything was up and running within days, and customers could still get money out of brokerage accounts.

I will give 60% on the dollar up to 100 BTC. For every 1 Gox BTC and I will give you .6 non-Gox BTC.

Willing to use escrow.

i wll offer to buy at 80% of gox btc for real btc, pm me

Gox is still in business because their business is EXTREMELY PROFITABLE. I don't know why anyone has sent fiat to Gox in the last 6 months but they have. Gox takes about %1 of each trade (when both sides are counted), so they've made about $250k in fees in the last 24 hours already. Makes sense that they don't halt trading when their other systems are down and traders panic.

Even if we account for their (likely high) legal costs and all the seized funds, they probably have more than enough to pay everyone back in full.

If they manage to solve their BTC withdrawal issues, they'll probably regain some of their lost market share and a lot of trust.

But how do you transfer ownership of a "Gox BTC?"

Even if they fix the BTC withdrawals before I hit Post they still have not been processing cash withdrawals in any reasonable manner for months. The only people that could still be trusting them are those willing to take the risk to profit on arbitrage and newbies who don't know better.

Was kinda wondering the same thing

Internal Goxcoin transfer are not routed to blockchain

Gox has not other choice then to fix the issue. Now their compnence are one the line, this is not some ddos attack.
I think they will fix it, dont forget that many users agree with suspending withdraw as stuck coin was even worse then not and to able to exchange in fiat and wait for market to settle.

Guys I'm willing to take on the risk for 20%.

In other words, for every coin you send to a designated MtGox account, you will receive 80% at your designated address.

Of course we'd need to agree on a suitable escrow and larger transactions might need to be broken into smaller chunks.

PM to discuss more.

I think it's just been newbs who have propped them up for so long. Gox still seems to have a big name despite its shitty service.

Since it looks like gox needs new deposits to process withdrawals, i would not be surprised if gox starts offering some sort of bonus for new deposits. Like get 0.25 btc free for each 10btc deposited. Or some sort of trap like that.

I'm offering 1.5 realBTC for 2 GoxBTC. PM me if you're interested. This price will likely go down after today's announcement if there is one (I don't believe withdrawals will be enabled today).

and how do you plan to execute this if lets say I sell you my coins from MtGox?

I forget where I read this, but Gox internal private key transfers (customer to customer) aren't shut down, as they don't occur on the blockchain.

Has anyone successfully done an internal Gox transfer?  If so, can you describe what the exact procedure is?  There doesn't appear to be a way to do this through the web interface, so... what... email support and say I want to transfer all the coins from account XXX to account YYY?

Withdrawals sent to a Gox deposit address don't go through the Blockchain - they are done as internal transfers.

After Mondays announcement I am no longer interested in buying GoxBTC. I don't expect them to be enabling BTC withdrawals any time soon. I would consider taking a gamble if the rate were particularly good, say 25%.

I am fairly convinced after that deliberate attempt to crash the BTC price with their outright inaccurate and FUDdy announcement that they definitely lacked the BTC to pay everyone out. My only question now is whether the crash they caused was enough for them to buy back what they lack. I personally doubt it, and expect to see further weaking in BTC price on Gox as people realise they cannot get their BTC out. Gox is actually emphasizing this with comments about how people can still withdraw cash (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-10/bitcoin-exchange-mt-gox-says-users-can-withdraw-cash-as-normal.html).